Category: Miscellaneous

Source: Is the World Slouching Toward a Grave Systemic Crisis? – The Atlantic, by Philip Zelikow

keynote address at the annual meeting of the Aspen Strategy Group … In this speech he reflects on the much-discussed concept of “world order,” interrogates the claim that a “more open” world is really better for Americans, and issues a warning about America’s world leadership.

History is punctuated by catalytic episodes—events that can become guideposts toward a more open and civilized world.

Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.

The so-called “world order” is really the accumulation of local problem-solving.

James Burnham’s The Managerial State vs. George Orwell’s “open and civilized societies”.

State the questions another way: Do open societies really work better than closed ones? Is a more open and civilized world really safer and better for Americans? If we think yes, then what is the best way to prove that point?

Source: Most US tap water has unhealthy levels of cancer-causing pollutants and other contaminants — Quartz

A new database compiled by the Environmental Working Group shows that the tap water of millions of Americans is unhealthy.

An analysis of 28 million water records from nearly 50,000 American water utilities published as a searchable database Wednesday (July 26) found dozens of contaminants in tap water at levels that get a passing grade from the government, but that toxicology research says pose a risk to human health.

I worry that people don’t adequately separate two kinds of caution. Call them local caution and global caution. Suppose some new spacecraft is about to be launched. A hundred experts have evaluated it and determined that it’s safe. But some low-ranking engineer at NASA who happens to have some personal familiarity with the components involved looks at the schematics and just has a really bad feeling. It’s not that there’s any specific glaring flaw. It’s not any of the known problems that have ever led to spacecraft failure before. Just that a lot of the parts weren’t quite designed to go together in exactly that way, and that without being entirely able to explain his reasoning, he would not be the least bit surprised if that spacecraft exploded.

What is the cautious thing to do? The locally cautious response is for the engineer to accept that a hundred experts probably know better than he does. To cautiously remind himself that it’s unlikely he would discover a new spacecraft failure mode unlike any before. To cautiously admit that grounding a spacecraft on an intuition would be crazy. But the globally cautious response is to run screaming into the NASA director’s office, demanding that he stop the launch immediately until there can be a full review of everything. There’s a sense in which this is rash and ignores all sorts of generally wise and time-tested heuristics like the ones above. But if by “caution” you mean you want as few astronauts as possible to end up as smithereens, it’s the way to go.

Source: Two Kinds Of Caution | Slate Star Codex

US Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts gave a surprising and wise commencement speech recently.

Source: John Roberts’s speech at the Cardigan Mountain School’s commencement wished graduates bad luck and trouble — Quartz

More: Chief Justice John Roberts Bucks Tradition In Graduation Speech

Video: on Vimeo

 

From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either.

Looking at numerous recent disasters, we found that there was frequently an expert who had valid data and who warned about the impending calamity in advance. In each case, that expert’s warnings went unheeded.

What do these experts and their warnings have in common?

First, the warning is often about something that had never happened before. And so decision makers exhibit “First Occurrence Syndrome,” the failure to take seriously a warning about a possibility with which they had no prior experience.

The second factor we have repeatedly found is that the person giving an accurate warning is often an expert armed with data, but who is also an outlier in their field. Other experts were not giving the same warning. What we found in most of the disasters we reviewed was that the expert exhibited “Sentinel Intelligence,” meaning that they had a unique ability to spot an approaching problem well before others.

The third factor is that the disaster being foretold sounds “outlandish,” more like the plot for a Hollywood movie than something that would happen in the real world.

Fourth, the Cassandra is often assailing a highly respected person or who may have the presumption of being reputable.

Source: Richard Clarke: Why the journalists, spies, and politicians warned about Trump’s Russia ties couldn’t believe their eyes — Quartz

by Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy, authors of Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes