botwerks

i had this in my instapaper favorites from my reading queue a few months back. with the recent santorumism in the news as of late, this popped back into my noggin.

• Rightist extremism: My right to say abhorrent things | The Economist.

the real nuggets here are in the linked research and the robin hanson posting which is referenced in the body of the article. both are worth the read. in short, hanson surmises that you have a lot fewer opinions than you think and that a lot of shit is just made up on the fly.

personally, this reinforces the notion that you have to work really hard to avoid confirmation bias. the knee jerk reaction being to simply ack what you’re surrounded with or you’re brought up with or what you surmise is the right solution. subjecting information to scrutiny, and your opinions as well, is hard. further, it’s consistently uncomfortable.

perhaps a better (but psychologically more difficult) response is to just say, “i don’t know.”

i wonder how much better off we’d be if we just copped to our individual and collective ignorance and thought really hard about stuff before opening our word holes.

somehow, i ran across this – the original New York Times review of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four.  every few years i reread 1984 just to see how it measures up against life many years later.

orwell was an optimist.

about a year ago we were in new zealand and we were surprised by how much emphasis they placed on environmental protections and labor management.  it’s an impressively progressive country on an amazing array of topics, from civil liberties, environmentalism and nuclear non-proliferation (i suppose having U.S. atomic testing fallout impacting you will tend to color your perspective on a number of these topics.)  that said, for all of their regulation they’re apparently outranking the U.S. when it comes to ease of doing business.

here’s a remarkably detailed breakdown of the elements contributing to this ranking.  i suspect that rick perry for all of his regulation hatin’ might do well to rip a page or two from the kiwis.

as an aside – on the international economic statistics front, you would do well to download the OECD’s iPhone Fact Book app.  there’s a crapload of interesting stuff in there and the next time you’re wondering where a country sits economically or in the development curve you can do so from the comfort of your couch.

here’s an interesting little nugget as I catch up on a backlog of reading from the past month’s worth of travel and work.

from Melvyn Leffler’s recent essay in foreign affairs, 9/11 in retrospect:

Rather than thwarting proliferation, U.S. interventions on behalf of regime change provided additional incentives for rogue nations to pursue WMD. Iranian and North Korean leaders seem to have calculated that, more than ever before, their countries’ survival depended on possessing a WMD deterrent (a message that has probably been reinforced by the Obama administration’s decision to intervene in Libya in 2011 following Libya’s renunciation of its nuclear capability several years earlier).

this little bit about the interventionist (albeit limited in scope) activity wrt to Libya poses an interesting dilemma for U.S. foreign policy. there’s a populist moral perspective that assisting uprisings which lead to the establishment of democratic governments is a good thing and on the whole this is likely the direction that we’d like to see our government take. but the secondary signals that emerge from this are more than a little thorny and certainly have the potential to encourage less than peaceful behaviors of governments which are at risk of populist rebellion and with nuclear ambitions.

what a total PITA.