Tag: commented

Crony Beliefs | Melting Asphalt, by Kevin Simler

Source: Crony Beliefs | Melting Asphalt, by Kevin Simler

One of my main goals for writing this essay has been to introduce two new concepts — merit beliefs and crony beliefs — that I hope make it easier to talk and reason about epistemic problems. … it’s important to remember that merit beliefs aren’t necessarily true, nor are crony beliefs necessarily false. What distinguishes the two concepts is how we’re rewarded for them: via effective actions or via social impressions.

 

I found Kevin’s introduction of his concepts of merit and crony beliefs to be interesting and potentially useful, and I recommend reading the rest of his post. However, I complain that his “Identifying Crony Beliefs” and “J’accuse” sections sometimes confuse his merit/crony beliefs concept(s) with the immediacy and severity of potential consequences:

I disagree that “perhaps the biggest hallmark of epistemic cronyism is exhibiting strong emotions … These emotions have no business being within 1000ft of a meritocratic belief system”. For example, if I am with another person in a vehicle (as driver or passenger) approaching an intersection at speed, I probably have a strong opinion about whether or not my vehicle should be breaking to stop at the intersection or not; I will also have strong emotions if the other person is insisting that I am wrong. Similarly, I have no strong feelings about whether or not X, but the only conceivable value to believing that would be social, not practical, so it must be a crony belief.

Strong feelings are indicative of a belief’s high consequential value (positive or negative, social or practical), not of a belief’s social-ness.

The 3 Levels of Wealth | A Wealth of Common Sense

Source: The 3 Levels of Wealth | A Wealth of Common Sense, by Ben Carlson

On a recent episode of How I Built This with Guy Raz, Butterfield was asked how this enormous wealth has impacted his life. He told Raz, “beyond a certain level of wealth it doesn’t make your life any better.”

He went on to list what he considers to be the three levels of wealth:

  1. Level 1. I’m not stressed out about debt: People who no longer have to worry about their credit card debt or student loans.
  2. Level 2. I don’t care what stuff costs in restaurants: How much you spend on a particular meal isn’t impacted by your finances.
  3. Level 3. I don’t care what a vacation costs: People who don’t care how expensive the hotel is or which flight they go on.

This was a new way of looking at this and it got me thinking about where most Americans find themselves on this scale.

 

How might you list wealth classes based on lifestyle and quality-of-life features?

Here’s How America Uses Its Land | Bloomberg

Source: Here’s How America Uses Its Land | Bloomberg, by Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby

The 1.9 billion acres of the lower 48 U.S. states categorized into pasture, forest, cropland, special use (including wilderness, parks, and military bases), miscellaneous (including rural residential, wetlands, deserts, and golf courses), and urban areas, at 250,000 acres per square.

 

What would this map infographic look like if the U.S. produced its power entirely from renewable energy sources?

What is Wilderness?

RE: Most Remote Spots in USA Wilderness Complexes | Peakbagger

18.76 miles. You can drive this distance in 15 minutes on a freeway. But it is also the furthest away you can get in the “Lower 48” US states from roads, machines, and motors.

 

How much uninhabited space do you need before it counts as “wilderness“, and what counts as “uninhabited“? Does the backyard of a 0.1-acre property have several square feet of wilderness? Is an undeveloped 0.25-acre plot a quarter-acre of wilderness? If highway traffic can be heard constantly throughout a 1000-acre wetland, or if a 1000-acre woodland has a walking trail, then is that area wilderness? If a particular area of 1000 square kilometers is logged or fished only once a decade, is it wilderness? Is even 100,000 square miles still wilderness if it is filled with radio waves, its skies are routinely flown over, its waters are downstream from the effluent of civilization, its animals are harvested should they ever wander or migrate outside its borders, or microscopic synthetics (e.g. plastics) can be found in every specimen of its ecosystem?

The team that took us to Pluto briefly spotted their next target at the edge of the Solar System – The Verge

Source: The team that took us to Pluto briefly spotted their next target at the edge of the Solar System – The Verge

The object in question is called 2014 MU69, and it’s thought to be an incredibly old space rock that’s remained relatively unchanged since the Solar System first formed 4.6 billion years ago. But tracking 2014 MU69 has been pretty tough. It’s only about 30 miles wide, and it orbits over 4 billion miles from Earth. … Using the Hubble data, along with precise star positions measured by Europe’s Gaia satellite, the team predicted various times when 2014 MU69 might pass directly in front of a star. … However, the first two times the scientists tried to see the occultation, they didn’t see the object’s shadow. The first attempt was on June 3rd, with two separate teams looking in Argentina and South Africa, and the scientists tried again on July 10th with NASA’s SOFIA airplane — a flying observatory — as it flew over the Pacific Ocean. It wasn’t until this weekend, just before midnight Eastern Time on Sunday, that the mission team finally caught the occultation while huddled around telescopes in Chubut and Santa Cruz, Argentina.

 

This is why science is amazing. It is not always correct. It has to be updated constantly with new information in order to perform even the most trivially different task (e.g. track a new star or a different space rock). But the cumulative knowledge gained thereby let’s us do incredible things, like predict when an object only about 30 miles wide and more than 4 billion miles away will pass between a particular place on Earth and a star that is light years away correctly enough to put a telescope at that place and watch it happen.