…assuming that things will continue to behave as they have always done — particularly after hundreds or thousands or millions of observations have failed to find an exception to that behavior — does not constitute or require a leap of faith. Faith is not belief despite the absence of proof but belief despite the absence of evidence.
Every once in a while a study is released comparing health care in the United States to health care in other countries. Despite the fact that we are the wealthiest nation in the world, and that we have one of the most technologically advanced health care systems in the world, there are inevitably some measures by which we lag other developed nations. We have come to expect that: no one denies that our health care system has problems with cost and access; and no one denies that there are certain groups within our society – bounded by poverty and self-destructive lifestyles – for whom our health care system is woefully inadequate. Those are problems we need to address – and solutions upon which so far we cannot agree.
But when by some measure our health care system trails the undeveloped world that attracts attention.
A recent report ranked the United States behind Cuba in infant mortality. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times used that fact as a springboard for a broad and derisive critique of our market-based system. I agree with much of his diagnosis (and disagree with much of his prescription), but oddities in the way infant mortality is calculated in various countries makes it a dubious and slippery statistic upon which to hang a robust assessment of our current performance.
Ref: Mr. Baylis’ critique of the extraction of energy from moving vehicles using magnets and a street wire grid.
Mr. Baylis’ critique, while valid in every respect, was primarily economic and will therefore leave some readers (particularly those whose belief in the laws of supply and demand and pricing are ephemeral, and those who believe that moral righteousness is reason enough to ignore any and all economic considerations) thinking that overcoming those merely economic obstacles should be a high priority if the result is “free” energy.
However, there is a more fundamental matter of physics with which any such scheme must contend: the energy is not free.
Yet another story (from The Boston Globe) in which some mathematical or statistical analysis is reported with no critical evaluation. And yet again I register my protest…
Oh the delicious irony of modern politics. In 2001, after deciding that it’s previous attempt to comply with an EPA dictate for cleaning the air by oxygenating gasoline had resulted mainly in dirtier water, the state of California banned the oxygenating compound MBTE and requested a waiver from the EPA regulation to avoid a mandated switch to ethanol. The state’s argument that there were other ways to achieve the objective may or may not have merit – it’s not clear how much of the dispute over that is science and how much is politics. But when, in the past, has that argument even mattered to Democrats – and the California government is pretty much entirely composed of Democrats – when an environmental regulation was at stake?
In a world of boundless resources, where no worthwhile project went undone for lack of funding or attention, we could eliminate arsenic and a host of other environmental poisons to arbitrarily small tolerances with impunity. In the world outside of utopian fiction, however, limited resources must be allocated, and what is used for one thing is unavailable for another….It may be that as a society we conclude that reducing arsenic levels is the best use for those resources, but that conclusion is neither obvious nor unanimous and has nothing to do with science.
Every day print and television news organizations bombard us with the results of studies purporting to prove something profound about the effects of public policy, most contradicting some other studies reported last week. The election we just endured brought us a blizzard of conflicting statistics and analyses presented by the candidates and repeated by the media. Almost every advocacy organization now solicits and publishes studies showing – surprise surprise – that their particular policy agenda would be the best thing ever if only we would allow them to implement it. How are we to sort out the good from the bad in this barrage if your reporters will not present us with enough of the underlying information to make an informed evaluation?
The partisan wrangling over whether or not to allow the census bureau to supplement the traditional head-count method (’actual enumeration’) with statistically-derived estimates for the expected under-count in the 2000 census was enlightening only in the way it illustrated our leaders’ ability to miss the point.
The general state of race-relations in America has recently been highlighted nationally by President Clinton’s “Dialogue on Race”, and in California by ballot propositions like 187 (limiting government benefits to illegal immigrants) and 209 (eliminating state-sponsored affirmative-action). The desire for an unemotional and realistic conversation on race — where we stand, where we are headed, and where we want to be — is noble and desirable. It seems, however, that our initial attempts have been thwarted as much by the terms of the conversation as by the subject itself: just as the underlying context, assumptions, and forms of historical discrimination were largely defined by its beneficiaries (to whom ‘race-relations’ were a closed issue), the underlying context, assumptions, and forms of the fight against discrimination — and, more generally, of our discussions about race — have been largely defined by those to whom ‘race-relations’ have historically meant ‘race-based oppression’ — to whom ‘race-relations’ were very much an open issue and a dominant factor of their lives. While this is understandable, and perhaps even just, it almost ensures that racial difference is viewed and debated as a chasm to be crossed — or into which to fall — rather than as a boundary to be transcended.
Adair Lara is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. In January of 1997 she wrote a piece about math, in which she implied that the study of math was a tortuous, pointless exercise. The column was lighthearted, and left room for a dissenting view, but for me it dredged up ugly high-school memories of the self-righteous pomposity with which the ‘liberal arts’ clique derogated the ‘math rocks’ and ’science rocks’ as some inferior type of creature. There is a general attitude in our culture that to be mathematically illiterate is not only acceptable, but perhaps a source of pride — proof that you are a broad and open-minded thinker, not constrained to the ‘linear’ and ‘mechanical’ modes of thought required for mathematical rigor. As you might surmise, I disagree.