Science vs Faith

Science wants to know how something works.
Faith is content in the belief that it does work.
There is no conflict.

Science goes beyond Faith in an effort to understand. It takes Faith as a starting base, then uses observation and analysis to reach a greater understanding of what is.

These efforts may take years, and may never succeed. But even True Believers will (or should) acknowledge that we have the mental capacity as well as the moral obligation to try.

We are given these abilities. We should use them.

Lost Privacy

The Orwellian Age is here, and we have willingly and eagerly signed on.

People are giving up their sense of privacy. Posting details of their daily lives on Internet social media sites and shouting into their mobile phones in public places are symptoms of a major change in society. Then there are those who record their actions on video and post the pictures on Web social media sites. For example: Teenagers who recorded their beating of a homeless man, posted the video on the Web, and were soon arrested.  What a surprise.

Lesson for the Day: There is no privacy on the Internet. Ever. Computers never forget. Anything. Ever.

Deleting something only moves it to a different file, which may (or may not) be overwritten with new material. Someday. Eventually. Perhaps. Maybe. Or not.

Rule Number One: If you don't want the world to know, don't put it into the computer.

Thus spake Pogo, the Okefenokee Sage:  "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Moral Economy

A society's cultural values show up in many ways; in fact, its values are expressed in every aspect of any social group, no matter its size.

Concepts of morality, politics, government,  business, economics and religion are all intertwined. And within each concept, there are opposites, always in conflict.

Thus, in morality, there are those who do evil. In politics, there is debate about the "right" policy. In government, there is conflict over how to carry out policy. In business, there is competition for customers. In economics, there is, in Joseph Schumpeter's phrase, the "creative destruction" inherent in capitalism, and Karl Marx's belief that capitalism will destroy itself completely. And in religion there is not only its opposite -- atheism -- but debate over which spiritual path is the most "righteous."

In short, what works for one society may not work for another. A hunter-gatherer tribal society does what it does because it works. Giving a mechanical harvester combine to a people with no experience in large-scale agriculture is an extreme example, but the principle remains.

In many ways, then, morality is culturally defined. What is acceptable behavior in one social group may not be in another. Even so, there may be a core set of beliefs that could be termed a "univeral morality" that is shared by all humans. Perhaps science can find out whether such a morality is "hard wired" in the human brain.

Word Breaks

The rules for hyphenating a word at the end of a typewritten line are simple. Any computer can be, and all have been, fed these rules. But there also many times where these rules do not apply, such as in compound words. It takes an understanding of the meaning to know when to ignore the rule. For example, one rule is to hyphenate a word between syllables; another is to break up the word between a vowel and a consonant, which is where most syllable breaks occur. But what is a syllable? Until computers can be taught semantics -- the meanings of words and syllables -- they will continue to blindly follow the rules.

Why is this a problem? Consider compound words, where a two-word verb phrase becomes a one-word noun. Computers at the New York Times missed out with the noun "tradeoff." It starts life as a verb, "to trade off," and becomes a single word when used as a noun. But the hyphenation rule says to break up the word between a vowel and a consonant when it reaches the end of a line in type. Thus, the NYT computer perpetrated "tra-deoff."

The solution has been available for decades. Computers have, in addition to the set of rules, a lexicon of words and their preferred hyphenation. But it takes human intervention to add words to the list.

Let's hope newspapers (and magazines) assign someone to add words to the list whenever a sharp-eyed copy editor catches a misplaced hyphen.

SPELLCHECK CHECKUP -- There is a province in France called Provence. Don't mess with it. The Oxford University Press, of any house, should know better, but somehow in a caption the name of a town came out as Aix-en-Province, while the text had it, properly, as Aix-en-Provence.

Cultural Economics

For decades, Western Economics has emphasized the financial aspects of the field almost to the exclusion of all else. More recently, practitioners have expanded their studies to include Behavioral Economics, which takes into account the fact that people do not always behave rationally. Economists have begun to study the non-rational part of human behavior, but so far it is limited to Western economies.

To the extent that it helps to explain what Alan Greenspan called "irrational exuberance," this is good. But Greenspan's remark dealt only with financial markets.

It may be time to incorporate Anthropology and Sociology into the the study of Economics, especially when dealing with aid programs to developing countries. Why? It's not only unfair, but it's also unrealistic to attempt to superimpose Western economic principles onto the cultural practices of other nations.

In part, it's an example of the Fallacy of Composition: It works for me, therefor it will work for everyone else -- a common error found in "true believers" of any stripe.

In the early years of Economic study, the field was known as Political Economy, and took into account human behavior. It's time to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, and expand the field to consider the cultural practices of societies as well as the financial. Especially since many developing countries do not have a financial structure as complex as many Western nations.

The High Cost of Cheating

Cheating on tests has long been a problem in education. In the past, the issue was limited to students attempting to get higher grades. In recent months, however, news stories have exposed a new wrinkle in cheating scandals: Teachers and administrators changing test answer sheets to justify performance bonuses and to meet federal mandates to improve education levels.

From Philadelphia to Atlanta to California, school staffers have been caught changing student answer sheets to yield higher test scores, so that the school system would show better performance, thus justifying federal aid as well as bonus payments to the educators in charge.

The short run benefit is easy to identify: More money for the schools and for the administrators. But in the long run, grade inflation erodes economic performance as surely as monetary inflation erodes purchasing power. Teachers forging answer sheets and granting high grades to students who don't deserve them is like the Federal Reserve pumping up the money supply. The end result is higher wages and prices, but with no guarantee of better quality. Graduates with high grades may get more pay, but their ignorance soon shows. (For some not-so-funny examples keep in mind some of the comments by current presidential candidates.)

As for monetary inflation, as any tourist knows, prices rise to absorb the amount of money available.

Economic aliens

Classical economics -- the theories of the 18th and 19th centuries --were all products of a social system that prevailed in Britain. Even the 20th Century theories of John Maynard Keynes reflected his own British background. But to superimpose these theories and practices on American society and customs presupposes that the two nations are identical in culture and economics. This is not a valid assumption. There are similarities, of course; language being the least important -- but as Winston Churchill put it, we are "two nations separated by a common language."
American economist John Kenneth Galbraith called classical (British) economic theory "an alien doctrine," maintaining that transporting 19th Century British economic theory onto American capitalism is a mistake. Any system or perception of class in America is based on money or education, not on blood line or heritage.
Designing a program for economic analysis or recovery should take into account the customs and culture of a society, and should not inflict or superimpose the theories that apply to one culture onto another. The same can be said for economic theories propounded by German- or French-trained economists.
The so-called WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) is and always has been a minority in America. Therefore, to base economic policy solely on WASP values is not only unfair to the rest of the nation, it is foolish.

Experts

The conventional wisdom of the economic "experts" of the 1930s -- business executives, bankers, politicians and academics -- held that the cure for the ills of the Great Depression was a balanced budget, reduced spending and lower taxes. This, they said, was not only the right, rational thing to do; it was the only thing that would work. As the downturn accelerated, however, these measures not only failed, but exacerbated the problem, plunging the nation into the worst economic malaise in the nation's history. The motto then was, "let nature take its course, and the economic body will heal itself."

We hear similar chanting today, as conservatives sing a song of "hands off" by government, and in the long run, all will be well.

It wasn't. In the mid-1930s, government took some strong measures, including a ban on financial institutions acting as both bankers and brokerage houses. That ban was lifted during the Reagan years, and what happened? A rerun of the chaos of 1929.

When will they ever learn?