Hopefully Interesting

It might not seem likely from the title, but Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies is an effective defense of democracy (previously reviewed by me here ).  It's easy to come up with cases where most voters naturally favor policy proposals that experts in the matter think are crazy.  The author of the book is an economist and it's easy to come up with lists of things economists agree on but which voters are skeptical of.  But you can find examples from plenty of other disciplines, for instance in toxicology where you would find that a large majority of voters would agree that our tap water should not contain any arsenic at all, but experts typically think our current limit of 10 parts per billion is fine.  Even in cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing where a stray atom of arsenic in the wrong place can ruin a chip they're only able to reduce contamination to 1 part per billion or so. In ancient Athens they didn't jus...

There's a famous logical paradox put forward by Carl Gustav Hempel regarding observations and logical inference.  Lets say we have some statement we're interested in like "all raven's are black".  In logical terms you could write that as "if something is a raven, then that thing is black" or "Raven → Black".  And by formal logic this is equivalent to the contrapositive statement that "if something isn't black, it's not a raven" or "not Black → not Raven".  So far so good. But if we were to go out looking for evidence that the original statement was true then most people would readily accept that looking at a raven and finding that it's black is evidence towards the idea that all ravens are black.  But looking at instances of the contrapositive, say a white object that happens to be a rabbit it seems a bit odd to count that as evidence towards the proposition that all ravens are black, even if it's an instance...

Amid all the excitement of the last while I wanted to highlight one bit of good news.  Last week a bunch of stuff happened with regard to space launches.  Some bad as well with SpaceX's Starship exploded spectacularly  (seriously watch if you haven't seen it).   They're still sort of supposed to be exploding at this point in testing but it exploded much earlier than expected and the danger of debris meant some flights had to be diverted.  But we had a c ouple more landers heading off to the Moon.  We had a fun r e-entry science mission .  And we had Blue Origin's long awaited New Glenn launched for the first time and get right to its target orbit. Blue Origin is a company that actually started slightly earlier than SpaceX but never had the other's sense of urgency.  Instead its motto has been “Gradatim ferociter” or "step by step, ferociously" with turtles reaching towards space on the original logo.  The company had spent a ...