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"Myth of the Rational Voter" as applied to the current situation

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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...
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An easier way to think about the Raven Paradox?

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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...
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Finally some real competition for SpaceX?

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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 ...
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DRACO rides again?

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A decade ago a scientist named Dr. Todd Rider had a clever idea for an anti-viral drug.  In normal eukaryotic cells you have DNA that spends most of its time as a double strand except when being copied or transcribed to an RNA message.  That RNA message is single stranded as is the rest of the RNA in your cells except for the occasional short length in some cell processes.  But generally a big length of double stranded RNA in a cell means that a cell was infected with a virus.  Either a virus that naturally transmits itself with double stranded RNA or one engaged in copying itself within a cell.  DNA viruses generally don't make this and some RNA viruses such as AIDS use DNA to copy themselves but most viruses we worry about involve double stranded RNA.  And DR. Rider's drug uses this as its point of attack. Now, evolution is quite aware that double stranded RNA is bad news and your innate immune system already has weapons against it.  We all have barr...
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Hume's "Of Money"

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On the long flight to China I tried to do as much sleeping as I could manage, but besides that I did some reading and one book that I was reading was Scott Sumner's  The Money Illusion .  I confess I haven't gotten around to finishing that book yet, but it had so many references to a much shorter work that I did manage to go out and read that.  This was David Hume's  Of Money , an essay that seems remarkably ahead of its time. Economists these days basically all accept the  neutrality of money , that how much money a country has doesn't matter in the long run since prices will eventually rise or fall to correspond to the amount of money.  Hume believed the same thing in contrast with the  mercantilism  common in his day. [M]oney is nothing but the representation of labour and commodities, and serves only as a method of rating or estimating them. Where coin is in greater plenty; as a greater quantity of it is required to represent the same quantity...
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A trip to China

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 Hello, it's been a while since I've written anything and I'll try to do more going forward.  I've had an eventful year, I got engaged shortly after the ball dropped in Times Square, bough a house with my fiance, commenced renovations of the house, got married, and went on a honeymoon in China.  And I thought some of the stuff I saw in China would make a good topic to write about.  There were a bunch of little things about the physical environment that were different, and not just stuff like architectural style. One thing that was present on all the sidewalks and a lot of public buildings was the tactile paving .  It's there to let blind people navigate around by the feel of the ground underneath.  There are lines to show direction of travel and dots for changes in direction, cross walks, and other things to be aware of.  This one was yellow but mostly they're the same color as the rest of the sidewalk. Another thing on the ground where these green arr...
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Book Review: Power, Sex, Suicide

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  Introducing the Mitochondria “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” - Variously attributed Everybody learns something about Mitochondria in grade school.  That they are an organelle inside your cells.  That they let your body break down sugar and create ATP using oxygen in a way that’s far more efficient than fermentation without oxygen.  That’s clearly an important role, when we’re drowning, say, and can’t get the oxygen needed for aerobic respiration we die.  However, they’re a lot more than that too.  Mitochondria used to have independent bacterial lives charting their own fates.  That their existence came to be so enmeshed with their hosts is arguably the most unlikely but important event in the history of life on Earth and has some implications. Pump and Dump Aerobic Respiration Essentially all life lives by extracting energy from a difference in the concentration of hydrogen across a lipid membrane.  Let’s say you’re a mitoch...
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