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The latest computer security threats to you are “Spectre” and “Meltdown”, according to Nicholas Weaver on Lawfare. What to do?
Lawfare readers should respond in two ways: keep their operating systems up to date and, critically, install an ad-blocker for your web browser. (Here are guides on how to do so in Chrome and Firefox.) In fact, a proper response to Spectre should involve ad-blocking on allgovernment computers. Other than that, don’t worry.
I really should try that, since I use Firefox and Vivaldi, the latter of which is a Chrome-derived browser.
So what’s going on?
Modern computers are incredibly complicated but almost all the performance comes from attempting to exploit two concepts: caches and parallelism. And modern computer security often rests on a principle of isolation, blocking the ability of one program to learn or affect what else is happening on the computer. Spectre and Meltdown exploit breaches of isolation due to the interaction of caches and some parallelism features.
And then some high-level technical stuff.
Back when I was studying and working with Mythryl, the person leading that work was the late Cynbe ru Taren. I recall his analysis of how functional programming’s treatment of data would affect performance in a program designed to take advantage of multiple CPUs (cores) in a computer: because the data was not variable, it did not have to be copied to each core that might access it every time it changed. He felt that would be a tremendous boost to performance. I don’t believe he ever sat down and proved it, but it seemed quite reasonable to me, although my thread programming, which can involve the implicit use of available CPUs, has been very limited.
Which leaves me to wonder: if we changed common programming practice to move to functional languages that, by and large, don’t use variables, could we dispense with hardware optimizations which lead to security holes?
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Steve Benen worries about the long-term consequences of the Trump Presidency for the American reputation:
As we discussed last summer, after Trump announced his rejection of the Paris climate accords, this presidency will end, perhaps in three years, at which point many Americans and their new president will turn to the world and declare with pride, “Don’t worry, Trump is gone. The fluke is over. You can trust us again. The United States is back and the American president can lead the free world anew.”
But at that point, many around the world will probably choose not to listen. They’ll realize that the United States is capable of electing someone like Trump to the nation’s highest office, and there’s no guarantee that Americans won’t make a similar decision again in the future. People around the globe will have no way of knowing when the electorate might elect someone else of Trump’s ilk.
And with that lack of confidence comes consequences.
When Trump’s successors, for example, try to reach international agreements, and make promises to our partners about the United States honoring its commitments, foreign officials will know that a Trump-like figure might come along, take office, and decide to betray those commitments.
And I think it’s true, but I don’t necessarily agree that this is a real problem for the world. From that perspective, having a single nation wielding that much influence is not necessarily a good thing, because, of course, it will order things behind the scenes to enhance its prosperity, and that can unduly impact other nations.
My real concern, as I may have mentioned elsewhere, is the blot the Trump Presidency leaves on the concept and theory of liberal democracy. For nations of any size greater than a few villages, finding a way to govern everyone in a stable manner without violence is a major challenge, and if the lesson drawn from Trump is that liberal democracies can elect freaking nut-cases that can severely damage a country in terms of domestic and foreign policy, well, that’s not good.
Will countries choose to return to the “strong man” model of government, as has Russia?
Mentioned by my Arts Editor when I asked whether or not prosecutor Hamilton Burger ever considered just pulling a gun out and shooting Perry Mason. She suggested they’d go at it with glaives.
Chris Simms tells the story of how a plant louse nearly wiped out the French wine – and affected levels of crime – in NewScientist (23 December 2017, paywall). This was back in the late 19th century. Because of meticulous French record-keeping, this little bit of surprise popped up:
But when poverty and crime rise in lockstep, is poverty causing crime or crime poverty? “When there is a lot of crime, businesses can suffer, influencing income,” says Bignon. Disentangling what is cause and what is effect can often be difficult. …
As expected, as the blight spread to new areas, instances of property crimes such as theft, counterfeiting and pillaging rose. On average, these crimes were 22 per cent higher in districts affected by the bugs. The rise couldn’t be explained by other factors such as demographic changes caused by patterns of migration.
But there was a twist. While property crime ballooned, violent crime in the worst affected areas slumped, by about 13 per cent on average.
This doesn’t surprise Christian Traxler, an economist at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. In 2010, he showed a similar relationship between a decreased supply of rye and crime in Prussia between 1882 and 1912. “Bad weather increased rye prices, which induced more property crime and fewer violent crimes,” he says.
Rye was used to make bread, but bad weather for rye also meant bad weather for barley, which is used to make beer. In both the French and the Prussian instances, Traxler thinks lack of booze explains the drop in violent crime. “Shock to wine production isn’t just a shock to income, but also to wine consumption,” he says. With less alcohol to drink, people are less inclined to fight. In England and Wales today, for instance, alcohol consumptionis thought to contribute to 1.2 million violent incidents a year. “Alcohol consumption makes people more impulsive, less restrained,” says Bignon.
An interesting natural experiment, once again raising the question of just what are we to do about alcohol. Just put up with the accompanying violence?
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While looking over Daniel Byman’s overview of Iran on Lawfare in light of the protests currently going on in various Iranian cities, I ran across this thought-provoking passage:
In addition to uncertainty at the top, Iran’s economy remains vulnerable. The latest protests began over economic issues before turning political. The economy was shrinking before the lifting of sanctions, but sanctions relief—including additional export opportunities and the unfreezing of assets—have improved the economic situation, with the growth rate at roughly 7 percent in recent years and inflation stabilizing. However, Iran’s economy is plagued with corruption, and mismanagement is rife. The IRGC and various religious foundations control much of the economy, stifling competition and making reform far more difficult. Private investment remains skittish, especially outside the energy sector. The low price of oil makes these structural problems all the more painful.
In addition to these problems, popular expectations of prosperity are higher than they have been for many years. The lifting of sanctions fostered hope that incomes would rise and economic problems would diminish—the regime now has less ability to blame the United States or other enemies for its problems. Protests are a fact of life in Iran—few are massive, sustained, or tied to a broader political cause, but all show at least some level of dissatisfaction with the regime. Indeed, Hassan Rouhani’s election and those of his political allies was in part because of his promises to improve Iran’s economy due to sanctions relief.
And that made me think. For all the public screaming from both sides’ hardliners about the evils of interfacing with the enemies (the Axis of Evil, the Great Satan), I didn’t see anyone ever talk about how the sanctions relief might actually work against the Iranians – or how President Obama and his team may have truly taken President Rouhani, Supreme Leader Khamenei, and their team for all they got. How so?
With the utmost gravitas, which may have obscured his true intentions, Obama’s team removed the best excuse the Iranian leadership had for an economy inadequate to the needs of the Iranian citizenry. Once that excuse was removed and the inadequacy continued, the citizens can see more clearly where the problems may clearly lie within Iran.
And their conclusion appears to be that it lies with the leadership, at least so far.
They may go farther and blame the very structure of the Islamic Republic of Iran. For the leadership of Iran, the position of Supreme Leader of all he holds sway over – and that’s a lot – constitutes permanent power and privilege for those he favors. For those who fear anything from simple discomfort to lack of power, that’s gotta be comforting, unless you’re not favored by the Supreme Leader and his underlings. And during moments of transition, when the Supreme Leader is replaced?
Those are very shaky moments.
OK, all that said, do I really believe that President Obama and his team were that subtle in their strategizing? Maybe so. Although then we might even consider that notorious letter from the United States Senators to Iran, warning that the JCPOA would be abrogated as soon as a Republican President took office, to simply be part of a strategy put together by Obama in conjunction with the GOP, and, given the behavior of the GOP over the last year or so, I just can’t believe.
The answer to whether or not Obama’s goal was the upsetting of Iran’s government by ripping away a veil may rest somewhere in the locked files of the United States.
But the fact remains that by stripping away the biggest excuse the Iranian leadership had for its inadequate economy, the United States may have done more damage to Iran than the straightforward sanctions approach.
Hopefully, Trump and his team, as laughable as they mostly seem to be, can find a way to take advantage of the protests. Although, honestly, I’m at a bit of a loss as to a desirable outcome. Democracy? Are they ready for that? Monarchy? Because that worked so well last time?
Time will tell.
Meanwhile, authorities in Iran claim the protests are over, according to CNN:
The head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Wednesday that a string of anti-government protests were over after six days of unrest.
In comments to the semiofficial Fars news agency, Mohammad Ali Jafari said that only 15,000 people had turned out at the height of the rallies and that the main “troublemakers” have been arrested. CNN has not been able to verify the claim on the amount of protesters.
“Today, we can say it is the end of ‘sedition 1396,’ ” Jafari said, using the year in the Iranian calendar.
“With the help of God, their defeat is definite,” he said.
Even if it’s true, they did happen. That will shake up the leadership a bit. Who knows, they may even make an effort to fix things.
More formally, the glop in your ears is called cerumen, and it is made up of the secretions of the ceruminous glands – specialised sweat glands – and sebaceous glands in the outer ear canal. Most of these are waxy compounds, which clean the ear canal and protect it from drying out, as well as killing bacteria and trapping foreign bodies like dust and fungal spores. Mixed into that wax are bodily cast-offs like shed skin cells and hair, alongside potent antimicrobials and other chemicals. [“The secrets of your past that lurk inside your ears“, Christie Wilcox, NewScientist (23 December 2017, paywall)]
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On Lawfare, Michael Sulmeyer likes the new bill that will help protect elections from foreign meddling. He particularly likes the bounty program:
Only in the final two pages of the bill are readers presented with one of the most innovative moves in election cybersecurity: a volunteer bug bounty program called Hack the Election. (This portion of the bill seems to take its inspiration from a piece of previously-introduced legislation by Heinrich and Collins called the Securing America’s Voting Equipment (SAFE) Act of 2017.) Bug bounties are not new, as companies have often sought the assistance of white-hat hackers to find and fix potential cybersecurity flaws before malicious hackers can exploit them. …
Bug bounties don’t solve everything, but they offer institutions an avenue to receive cybersecurity advice about where to focus limited resources. If the military’s bureaucracy could find a way to let hackers on to their networks to search for vulnerabilities, election officials should be able to do the same. There will be those who point to the risks of authorizing hackers to hack, but that’s why DoD created a process to screen those who would participate in the bounty first.
The hope is that a program like Hack the Election can offer states yet another way to improve their insight into the potential cybersecurity risks that they need to mitigate. Jurisdictions and administrators still must address whatever vulnerabilities the hackers discover. But the ability to take advantage of the collective experience of a vetted set of hackers is one that shouldn’t be passed up, so I am pleased to see that the Election Security Act creates a way forward for states to do so.
I wonder what level of expertise will be required to be an effective hacker. My late friend Nancy used to delight in knocking over the old BBS software for which I was responsible, and I’ll bet she would loved to take a shot at this, too.
I like this movie. I love the music, so there’s that, but the variety of approaches in the short films is what kept me going, even if a few of the shorts might be too long or too non-narrative for some. I just didn’t try to think too hard about any of it — the music was what made me really like the more abstract parts.
And that variety of approaches, since at least some worked off of Gould’s own words, lent some more insight into this baffling character. I think the piece we liked least was the McLaren contribution.
Although at some point, I don’t recall where, my Arts Editor said something about one piano piece being ham-handed.
I think the problem with Mom (1991) is that it couldn’t quite decide on its desired identity. It’s a movie about your typical grandmother being bitten by a werewolf. Is it about the horror of your mother, the grandmother of your child, becoming a ravening beast every night?
Or should the movie try to emphasize the comedic bits of a grandmother whose hunger pangs are truly embarrassing, who is herself quite embarrassed at this turn of events. There’s some amusement, for example, when she suggests that eating a homeless bum is far more acceptable than, say, a police officer.
But neither effort is pursued relentlessly, and so the movie wanders from the agony of the son, Clay, over his mother’s nightly deadly dementia, as it were, to the sight of grandma pursuing her snack of the night, an undercover cop horrified that he must shoot grandma, and frustrated that the holes he puts in her have little effect. Clay’s increasingly useless efforts to restrain his mother come to a climax when Mom eats his sister and threatens his unborn child, and so Mom must be … ah … put down.
It’ll be interesting to see how President Trump’s strategy of withholding military aid from Pakistan will work out, as reported by CNN this morning:
The White House said Monday that it would continue to withhold $255 million in military aid to Pakistan out of frustration over what it has characterized as Islamabad’s obstinance in confronting terrorist networks.
The Pakistani government has yet to issue a formal response, though on Monday, US Ambassador David Hale was summoned to the foreign ministry to meet with senior foreign office officials, a US Embassy spokesman confirmed.
It’s long been rumored that that the Pakistani intelligence services are not fully cooperative with the various governments of Pakistan, both democratic and, perhaps, military, the rumors centering around sheltering certain radical anti-Western Islamic groups from attack.
The problem, of course, is how do you prove such contentions? Westerners find it difficult to infiltrate such societies successfully, so we have to work from electronic intercept and second-hand reports.
A complicating factor is the Pakistani nuclear weapons program, developed in response to the India nuclear weapons program. I know very little about this program, such as the capability of its delivery systems, but diplomacy with our ally India certainly makes responses to Pakistan quite the little dance.
But maybe it’s time for a bull in the china shop approach, although I suspect it’ll end with Pakistan sacrificing some mid-level intelligence officer and everyone making up.
Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has decided to retire at the end of his term, as the home paper urged, opening the door for Mitt Romney to run for his seat in this year’s midterms, according to CNN:
Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch announced Tuesday that he won’t seek re-election this year, clearing the way for Mitt Romney to return to the national stage by running for his seat.
He said in a social media message, “after much prayer and discussion with family and friends I’ve decided to retire at the end of this term.”
Which is quite interesting, since Mitt Romney was a leading and brutal critic of Trump during the Presidential campaign of 2016.
A mature politician would have recognized the probability of the elderly Hatch retiring, or even dying suddenly, as he’s 83 now, and begun a process of reconciling with a potentially powerful Party member that might succeed Hatch.
But Trump doesn’t appear to have that capacity. For him, the world is black or white, and nothing in between, so when Romney came out against him, Trump simply labeled him as an enemy, and then humiliated him with some empty gestures suggesting Romney might be nominated as Secretary of State, before handing that post to Tillerson, leaving Romney high and dry.
That may have been a mistake.
While Romney has a few burdens to bear, as being a member of the super-rich leaves many voters with feelings of suspicion, his burden is trivial next to the public pecadilloes of Trump, and while Trump’s base may not care about those pecadilloes, his base is not big enough to carry him in the next presidential election – or even through the various legislative challenges Trump may encounter post mid-terms. Having lost another Senatorial seat (after Sessions, for which he’s twice responsible, having selected Sessions to head the DoJ, and then backing losing candidates for the special election), Trump is looking like a loser, yet again.
Hell, Romney might even honestly reach across the aisle to work with the Democrats on major legislation. That would gall many of his GOP colleagues as well, but Romney has the wealth to push ahead and … act like an adult politician.
Gould forgot his ice house and had to go back for it. He hoped to catch eelpout, but it was an unlucky day.
Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould(1993) provoked two salient comments from my Arts Editor as we watched. First, she was intrigued. Second, the What The Fuck factor was through the roof.
This is an obtuse look at the reclusive star pianist Glenn Gould, through 32 (I didn’t actually count) pieces chronicling his life from his introduction to music while still in the womb, to an interview with a cousin with whom he suddenly discussed death and death rituals shortly before dying of a stroke at age 50. The forms vary. There are several short interviews; there are recreations, perhaps fanciful, of various incidents; there are speculations, perhaps, on what he might have said; there is even investigations of his short and illuminating, if only in metaphorical black light, mini-plays.
It’s a presentation conducive to speculation, because, in a way, when it’s not being directly informative, it’s a bit of a Rorschach test. If you want to see a mentally ill performer, you can. If you prefer to see a neurally atypical person, that’s there. Someone who was never subjected to a normal childhood, someone who saw music as a world unto itself, deserving of a perfection he forever pursued and forever failed to completely deliver.
Have at it.
And that’s not a bad thing, especially if you’re able to speculate over two or more domains, although I suspect a fictional interview section, labeled as having the text supplied by Gould himself, might be a subtle joke about just such speculation, as the more obscure the speculation, the more the real center of the discussion is the leader of the discussion itself, rather than the subject.
Ahem.
I know very little about music, but I enjoyed it. My Arts Editor, a singer and artist, enjoyed it moreso. If you have a taste for something besides the latest Stan Lee-derived creation, you may enjoy this.
Part of the reason sloths are such extreme energy savers is their diet. They are arboreal folivores, meaning they live in trees and eat leaves. It is a deeply unpopular lifestyle choice, occurring in just 0.2 per cent of mammal species, and for good reason: leaves tend to be rather difficult to digest and contain few nutrients. Some tree-living leaf-eaters, such as howler monkeys, get around this by gorging on massive quantities of the stuff.
Sloths have adopted a different strategy: they nibble a bit here and there, making sure to keep their stomachs full. And they don’t rush digestion. It can take anywhere from two days to nearly two months before swallowed food emerges again as dung, which makes this the longest digestive process on record for a plant-eating mammal. That’s particularly weird when you consider that among mammals, the digestion rate typically depends on body size, with big animals taking longer to digest their food.
Retraction Watchnotes how unethically using a paper mill can hang the same picture around a lot of people’s necks:
A cancer journal has retracted a 2014 paper after discovering one image had been duplicated in seven other papers. That’s right—the same image appeared in a total of eight papers.
For some of the papers, the issues went beyond the single image. According to the retraction notice, several papers contained other duplicated images, as well as “overlapping text.” The notice, published in October 2017 in Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention (APJCP), is essentially a letter PLOS ONE wrote to several journals, informing them of the issues in the eight papers, all published between 2014 and 2016. The letter mentions that one of the papers—a 2016 analysis in Korean Journal of Physiology (KJPP)—had already been retracted earlier this year. One author of the retracted KJPP paper confessed to using a company to prepare and submit the manuscript.
Of course, it may not be so much an ethical lapse as too much pressure on researchers to publish, publish, publish. But in the end it’s the same thing – using an unethical service to meet your goals.
On the fourth day of the largest protests since an uprising over disputed election results in 2009, Iranian protesters chanted “Death to the dictator!” as they tore down posters of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who holds absolute authority in Iran. Public criticism of Khamenei is generally taboo.
That’s the sort of thing I’d expect would draw significant attention. Is someone operating under the cover of the protests to push their own agenda? Or is this an upheaval? And this is a little hard to believe:
Allies of Rouhani, including Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri, initially suggested that his political opponents had orchestrated the demonstrations. But as they escalated and many chanted for the return of Iran’s monarchy, several conservatives disavowed the protesters and called for a tougher response.
Return of the monarchy? Yeow. Meanwhile, according to AL Monitor the Iranian conservatives continue to blame the protests on economic issues:
Some of the most interesting comments have been made by conservative officials and pundits who have all previously condemned protests, especially the 2009 Green Movement protests. Ahmad Tavakoli, a former parliamentarian and member of the Expediency Council, called the street protests “predictable” due to the administration’s economic policies. He compared the policies to those of Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s presidency in the 1990s; Tavakoli called them “harsh policies,” presumably referring to neoliberal economic measures to cut subsidies.
Addressing the protests that started in Mashhad, former hard-line parliament member Hamid Rasaei accused media linked to Rouhani of censoring those who are “protesting the current situation.” Mehdi Mohammadi, the former adviser to Saeed Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wrote that “protesting against economic difficulties is the right of the people.” Conservative analyst Vahid Yaminpour tweeted, “It has been reported that the president has called an emergency meeting. I hope that before the security and intelligence ministers give their reports on how to quiet the protesters, the economic ministers will think about how to improve the current situation.”
Special consultant and voodoo huntress. Does more work than all the soldiers combined.
It’s a little like constructing a train engine without designing in the wheels: why bother? Lost Brigade (1993, aka The Grey Knight, The Ghost Brigade, The Killing Box) has many of the accoutrements of good movie, but in the end the plot does it in.
Captain Harling, aching to be dismissed from the Union Army, is assigned as a tracker for an assignment involving the apparent survival of a group of Confederate soldiers thought massacred early in the Civil War. His commanding officer permits him to interview the captive Colonel and only known survivor of the Alabama 51st, Colonel Strayn, and Harling persuades Strayn to accompany the mission.
Behind enemy lines, they come to the area of the massacre, where Strayn disappears into the creek and, impossibly, discovers his young nephew, the drummer boy of the 51st, alive in an underwater cave. The boy won’t leave and gives Strayn a dire warning and a bite on the hand. Returning to the mission, Strayn falls ill and is nursed by a young former slave who happens to be a mute. His former object of disdain becomes his best friend as the healing commences.
Soon, the detachment commander, Colonel Thalman, thinks they’ve discovered the location of the survivors of the 51st, and the he leaves to break through the lines and bring the Union forces in to finish the job. Strange incidents occur and then Thalman returns in the night … changed. He attacks the Union forces and seems invulnerable to their weapons, but they luck into disabling him. As he lays dying, he reveals all: the 51st, and in fact other dead soldiers of both sides, have been raised from the dead by African voodoo powers inadvertently transported to America by slavers. They are invulnerable to most weapons, but “pale metal” is deadly. The Union detachment arms itself appropriately with some stolen silver and awaits the 51st’s attack.
The attack comes, and it’s appalling, but the Union wins the day.
The movie seems well-made technically speaking, showing acceptable special effects when necessary, and well-chosen occlusion when possible. The acting is acceptable, cinematography is fine.
But … why? If there is interesting thematic material here, I don’t see it. Maybe it ended up on the cutting room floor. Characters run through actions that are logical, yet fairly lifeless. The supernatural pokes in, but for no particular reason.
My Arts Editor said she didn’t care about any of the characters, and, in the end, we shrugged and moved on.
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In the continuing drive to stop the development of autonomous weapons, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots (which I’ll just call “the Campaign” in this post) has released a video which is a bit of fake reality. It explores the spectrum of results, none exclusive of the other, that they believe would come with the development of autonomous weapons combined with swarming drone technology. It’s effectively done, and finishes with a note from Professor Stuart Russell, University of California-Berkeley, Computer Science, which is a plea that this is a road we shouldn’t walk down. Here’s the video:
The one avenue they didn’t really explore was counter-measures, which is understandable in that counter-measures are often hard to predict. In this scenario, many counter-measures would take a toll on those so-defended, such as an electronic counter-measure that not only disables the drones, but everyone’s smart devices (communications, medical, etc) as well, to physical defenses which may result in collateral damage, as they called it in Vietnam.
I think it communicates its message quite well.
But do you know what brought this to my attention? I received an MP4 in my email, which unfortunately WordPress doesn’t let me usefully embed in a post. (Mail me if you want a copy, using the mail link up on the right.)
If you’ve already viewed the first video, you know it starts with a faux-TED talk, and follows it with realistic fake news coverage of attacks on various institutions, and finally the cautionary message from Professor Russell. The second video consists only of the faux-TED talk, and thus no real context. It’s distributed without explanation or commentary.
Why and who? Viral marketing by the Campaign? Someone just decided to edit and distribute this for their own reasons? It’s quite curious.
Moving onwards, it strikes me that this is a vivid example of how the cost of goods continues to drop, with the usual hard to predict consequences. The drop in the price of computer power, once only within the grasp of the United States government and certain very large corporations following the end of World War II, and now so cheap that smartphones sit in your pocket, has been bloody well huge, if you think about it, and has enabled personal power and autonomy to a degree unseen in human history. This has also been true of powerful weapons, by which I mean weapons for which counter-measures are difficult. Anyone can pick up a rock and pitch at someone. A machine-gun is a lot harder to evade. Not coincidentally, the United States bans the individual’s ownership of machine guns, which is generally the goal of the Campain.
But now we may be on the cusp of a magnitude jump in individual firepower, and a concomitant increase in difficulty of counter-measures. Because software is trivial to reproduce once it is developed, drones are consumer-level cheap, and development continues with few, if any, legal constraints in the areas of drones or Artificial Intelligence, once someone (singular or plural) actually develops the software that can do these sorts of things, and (if necessary) it leaks out, then we may see personal or small group firepower leap to an entirely new level.
Perhaps the NRA will be foolish enough to argue that everyone should have these killer drones and then everyone will be safe, but I think that’s both naive and shallow thinking. A first strike may be undetectable and completely effective, thus making your ownership of a retaliatory force useless. And such a technology would render guns refreshingly … quaint.
But more importantly is the hidden assumption that we are a rational species. As science has discovered, this is not true. We are a species that is capable of being rational, it’s true, but we often are not rational. We formulate rules which help us survive, and then rely on them without applying our intellects. An innocuous example is the rustling in the bushes. It might seem most rational to investigate to see if it’s a tiger or not, thus permitting you to expend precious calories in running away only when necessary, but the general rule is just run. You can see this in many things we do, from driving cars to our voting habits. Some of us examine the issues and the candidates and make a decision based on what we perceive – and some of us are dyed in the wool Democrats. Maybe it’ll be rational to simply vote Democrat next time around – but how about the time after that? Or will you just vote Democrat, because you perceive that as the safe default choice, and you can now spend your time and precious intellectual bandwidth on subjects that truly interest you?
Rather than continue down the prose path of this discussion, let me toss this in your lap.
Oh, Lord, thank you, Lord, for this gift of power, that blesses us to smite our enemies and bring them low, all in Your Name, oh Lord, for you are the Creator, and we are the Chosen, who thank you now for your blessed weapon and child, the Drone of Death!
Yeah. Generally, the irrationality of religion can be seen to have a certain survival utility, but there’s little to keep its adherents from wandering into the territory of xenophobia, backed with the arrogant belief that the Divine is in their corner. Can you imagine Jim Jones equipped with this technology? Or David Koresh?
One sect against another. Perhaps that’s how we’ll de-populate the world. I wonder how the elephants are betting tonight.
I’ve been meaning to mention this important article in The New York Times from a few weeks ago by Aaron E. Carroll regarding the use of private sector mechanisms to protect the future profits of private sector corporations from the findings of science sector entities.
That is, corporations whose products are found to be ineffective – or worse – suing scientific researchers for publishing findings that negatively impact the prospects of corporations’ products:
We have a dispiriting shortage of high-quality health research for many reasons, including the fact that it’s expensive, difficult and time-intensive. But one reason is more insidious: Sometimes groups seek to intimidate and threaten scientists, scaring them off promising work.
By the time I wrote about the health effects of lead almost two years ago, few were questioning the science on this issue. But that has not always been the case. In the 1980s, various interests tried to suppress the work of Dr. Herbert Needleman and his colleagues on the effects of lead exposure. Not happy with Dr. Needleman’s findings, the lead industry got both the federal Office for Scientific Integrity and the University of Pittsburgh to conduct intrusive investigations into his work and character. He was eventually vindicated — and his discoveries would go on to improve the lives of children all over the country — but it was a terrible experience for him.
I often complain about a lack of solid evidence on guns’ relationship to public health. There’s a reason for that deficiency. In the 1990s, when health services researchers produced work on the dangers posed by firearms, those who disagreed with the results tried to have the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control shut down. They failed, but getting such work funded became nearly impossible after that.
In case it’s not apparent, the problem here is that the goal of the researchers is knowledge, while the goal of the corporations is profit. These goals need not always clash, but they often do, and when the morality of the corporation – to the extent that it can have a morality – conforms to the popular, if incorrect, idea that profits are all, then there’s going to be problems.
I view it as a problem of making truth a secondary item, which is always disappointing for me, and I think is a primary cause of many problems American society experiences.
So what to do about it? Aaron mentions anti-SLAPP laws, but in at least one case …
But in Dr. Cohen’s case, the court refused to give full weight to Massachusetts’ anti-Slapp statute on the ground that dismissing the case would undermine the supplement company’s constitutional right to a jury trial.
Perhaps rather than preventing lawsuits, they should impose a penalty on the entity bringing the lawsuit if it’s found to be specious, or if the entity does not show a sufficient loyalty to the idea of a proper scientific conclusion and its willingness to abandon a product which is ineffectual or may even result in harm to the consumer.
I dunno. I can’t imagine that an effective law could really be constructed around such an idea, to be honest. It’s one thing to have an intuitive notion of a good law, and quite another to construct such a law that would withstand constitutional challenge. Part of the problem is the difficulty of constructing an objective definition of the various concepts involved, and along with that is the problem that society doesn’t really recognize our various sectors very well. You can see it a little bit, such as the tax-sheltered status of non-profit organizations, but it’s not well developed, and I have no idea how to develop it more thoroughly, even if I was in a position to do so.
