What, Why & How do we Know ?
Little did I know when I made a passing reference to the Beard vs Taleb spat on Twitter in my previous post (the one before that actually) that it would turn into a full international incident. Nassim Nicholas Taleb holding-up Mary Beard – and her baying mob of PC-supporters – as all that is wrong with … Continue reading “More Heat Than Light”
Tiffany Jenkins writing in The Scotsman reviews the Edinburgh Fringe production of “HeLa“ by IronOxide. The controversy looks set to fester long after the Festival, with developments in genetic research and Opera Winfrey and HBO making a movie of Lack’s life story. The dominant narrative is of a poor black woman who was exploited by science, … Continue reading “Race for Science @tiffanyjenkins @LKrauss1”
It’s difficult enough trying to find balanced scepticism when it comes to anthropogenic global warming claims, but this stuff takes the biscuit. [via email from someone who should know better] Contrails from aircraft vapour are indeed an indication that air travel dumps a lot of low grade heat, CO2 and water vapour into our atmospheric … Continue reading “Conspiracy Theory Crap”
Financial markets, their regulation and the politics around them are so complex, that changes of regulatory input produce practically indeterminate, unpredictable outcomes. The most complex system of systems that humans have ever engineered. More misguided regulation can make the system more fragile, not less. Less is in fact more. More local failures – bonfires – … Continue reading “Financial Complexity”
I’ve just thoroughly read and re-read a piece by Slavoj Zizek in The Cabinet entitled “From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism“. Zizek is on my “must read” list for various reasons, so this was a good start, and I quoted briefly from this particuar piece in responding to Chris Locke’s reference to it in his … Continue reading “Authentic Radical Fundamentalism ?”