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LZ Granderson believes that the present government is so bad because of uninformed voters. His basic point is right, though he puts this idea across in harsh terms–the real problem is not that voters are “stupid” or “lazy”, but that they haven’t the time to thoroughly research and consider the relevant issues. Even experts in one particular area will have, at best, a passing knowledge of the others.

Theoretically, you can get around this by having experts from all fields tell people what to do, but that won’t work if different experts give different answers, or if people are led to believe, rightly or no, that experts are unreliable.

It is true, as J.E. Sawyer has observed on his blog, that the problem of political ignorance is at its most curable in history, and yet many people still do not avail themselves of this cure. This is understandable. Do you want to research whether we ought to have an ethanol tariff or watch football when you come home from work?

So, how to fix this problem?

One way is to radically increase the difficulty of voting. Make it so that people must pass tests in order to register. The problem with this system is that it will almost certainly be systematically biased in favor of some groups and against other groups. Whoever is put in charge of creating the test would see to it.

Any other solutions?

UPDATE: Thingy says in the comments:

“Wow, really? Make it so hard that the poor schlub who never caught a break, never finished school for whatever reason, but loves his country as much as the educated elite, they should have to prove themselves? I think it should be made easier.”

My fault. I think I phrased it poorly, because my intent was to convey exactly this; that if such a system were implemented it would be unfair towards some people, which defeats the original  purpose of Democracy. The idea I am getting at is that you are damned if you do allow easy voting, because then even the idiots who support insane policies can vote, or else you are damned if you restrict voting, because then whole groups of unfortunate people, as described by Thingy, cannot vote.

Well, clearly, the best answer is giving all adults the right to vote combined with a good education. But is that possible? I would certainly like to think so, but my fear is that it might not always be, not at all because they are “stupid”, as Granderson thinks, but because of the lack of time.

I mean, take me for instance. I know so little about foreign policy that I have no business whatsoever voting for who ought to be the Commander-in-Chief. Now, I hold very strong opinions on these matters, but I can’t claim to be anywhere close to an expert, and while I’m just one voter, I fear that I am not too far below average. But, naturally, I would be quite upset if I were barred from voting.

But, to return to the original point, my proposed “solution” above was more sarcasm than anything else. I didn’t mean to suggest it is a better system at all.

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I was thinking about fractals today, or more particularly, about the concept of a structure made up of similar structures. What really interests me about this is that fractals are frequently used in art, some examples of which you can see here.

What’s interesting to me is that the concept of self-similarity appears in written as well as in visual works. By that I mean that it is often the way that one minor incident in a story serves to illustrate the same overall theme conveyed by the story’s main plot. When symbolism is used, or when one minor event in a story foreshadows the larger plot, this may be thought of as a kind of self-similarity. And these are common literary techniques.

I don’t mean to say that this is “fractal literature”, since fractals are visual things, but these two concepts are, forgive me, similar, and it makes me wonder if there is something intuitively pleasing to our minds about the concept of self-similarity.

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With its last two DLC packs releasing today, it seems that this is a good time for me to reflect on Bethesda and Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas. 

I have already said I liked the core game after its release last year, but the four downloadable add-ons really push it to another level. The dark, intense Dead Money and the hilarious Old World Blues are the best, but all four are excellent additions to the game, and these add-ons seemed to require a re-evaluation of the game. Once you factor them in, the quality of the game goes up dramatically. For instance, the disappointment I felt over its lack of deep dialogues disappeared completely after Dead Money.

Having said that, it still has some issues. The story, while a huge improvement over Fallout 3‘s, still seemed a little lacking. There isn’t really any “theme” to New Vegas, as far as I can tell; and the add-ons, while all individually good, are all so different from one another they almost don’t really feel like the same game, although valiant efforts were made to tie them all together.

It’s also true that the game has its share of glitches, but I felt it wasn’t too bad when the size of the world Obsidian created is taken into account. Overall, these flaws aside, it’s one of the best games to be released in years, and I have to say it was almost everything I hoped for.

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Michael Kazin has a piece in the New York Times describing the rise and fall of the “American Left”, as he calls it. It’s the old story: a rise in the late 1800s and early 1900s, tremendous success in the ’30s through the ’60s and a decline and shift to the right in the ’70s and ’80s which persists to this day. He concludes with the same concept Democrats have been working with for some time:

“A reconnection with ordinary Americans is vital not just to defeating conservatives in 2012 and in elections to come. Without it, the left will remain unable to state clearly and passionately what a better country would look like and what it will take to get there. To paraphrase the labor martyr Joe Hill, the left should stop mourning its recent past and start organizing to change the future.”

Let’s call that piece “exhibit A”. “Exhibit B” is the following by the very conservative British blogger Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s lesser-known brother):

“[In 1948] Labour was still a working class British party, and had yet to be taken over by modish cultural revolutionaries… With facts such as these in mind (not to mention R.H.Tawney’s support for Grammar Schools, and the Christian self-discipline of so many Labour people when our country was going through very hard times) I feel that social conservatives should never entirely rule out the possibility that salvation may come from the left as well as the right.” 

Exhibit A is about the American Left by an American Liberal. Exhibit B is about the British Left by a British Conservative. What have they got to do with each other? Well, here’s “what”, in my opinion.

To begin with, Hitchens pretty much says that he’s willing to be anti-laissez-faire for the needs of social conservatism. Hitchens appears willing to accept a thoroughly socialist government so long as that socialism does not promote the ideas of feminism, multiculturalism, atheism or any non-Christian religion. And it has to ban drugs and keep a watchful eye on alcohol.

In short, Hitchens has astutely noticed that free market, small-government ideas are not only unrelated to his “social conservatism”, but in some ways actively harmful to it.

What does this have to do with Kazin’s article? Well, as he states, once the Liberals in the U.S. had successfully implemented their economic program in the 1930s and ’40s, which consisted largely of remedying the great inequalities of wealth and aiding the poor workers, they began to turn their attention to the treatment of women, of blacks and other minority ethnic groups, and later to societal norms about culture and sexuality. And about the time they did this, they suffered a massive decrease in their popularity.

The big-money types, who had been subdued in the ’30s and ’40s, used the resentment of the Liberal social programs to take back power and undo the Liberal economic policy, as thoroughly documented by Thomas Frank in his wonderful book What’s The Matter With Kansas?

The Conservatives, in America at least, are people who want to drastically reduce the government’s power. But they key is that some of them want to do it because they can become fabulously rich that way, and others want to because they see the government as controlled by, as Hitchens would say, “modish cultural revolutionaries”. 

So what? It’s all quite obvious, so far. And frankly, most political observers understand the situation. They just don’t know what to do about it. What I want to point out here, however, is only this: When Kazin says:  “a reconnection with ordinary Americans”, I have this dreadful feeling what that would actually entail is the abandonment of the Liberal social agenda, in order to woo the American equivalents of Peter Hitchens.

I don’t mean that all “ordinary Americans”–a hideously condescending phrase, I think–are Nationalistic, zealously Christian, anti-Feminist, and all the rest that “social conservatism” stands for. But I mean, the ones who are not like that are already voting Democratic. 

Well, maybe I’m wrong. I hope so. But the Liberals should think very carefully about the lengths they are prepared to go to gain back their New Deal-era success.

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According to this article, party balloon suppliers are facing a shortage of the key input helium.

I have only an amateurish understanding of anything related to science, but I do remember learning that helium is the second most common element in the universe. So, if we’re really running out of it, and this shortage is not merely an artificial one, it seems to me that the remedy would involve travel to other parts of the universe–maybe just within the solar system, but it would still mean quite a bit of work. On the other hand, it might spur on the creation of an interstellar economy. That would be cool. Although I doubt party balloons will sufficiently justify the costs of it.

(Also, the word shortage is confusing because it has two meanings: the everyday usage of “not much of the stuff”, and the economist’s usage, which means a failure of supply and demand to equilibrate properly, usually due to some issue with the price mechanism. The point is, in the economic sense, you could have almost zero quantity of the good and high demand and still not have a shortage, if the market is operating efficiently.)

And once again, I remind you that my knowledge of science is purely from things I happen to read and things I vaguely recall from school. If anyone with actual knowledge in relevant fields reads this, feel free to comment.

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Thirteen vessels met out in the ocean;
One Russian; the rest flew Stars and Stripes unfurled.
Aboard the sub, three Russians brought a motion
To decide if they were now to end the world.
Two of the men had decided to
Send forth with haste their lethal cargo.
Perhaps they thought “we’ll bury you”,
Or else, instead, of the U.S. embargo.
The other man, called Arkhipov,
Faced Apocalypse with equanimity.
He dared to hold the others off,
And kept the three from unanimity.
People may cite the leadership of
Kruschev and Dobrynin; of R and JFK.
But there are those who say ‘twas Arkhipov
Whose levelheaded thinking saved the day.

Well, that’s one version of the history, at any rate. Perhaps I have romanticized the story of Vasili Arkhipov too much. Few know the truth of the matter, but I follow a proud tradition and claim poetic license as a cover for my inaccuracies. But it’s a very interesting event and I encourage you to read about it and make of it what you will. 

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It appears that everything we know is wrong. The speed of light can be broken. The New York Times reports:

“According to scientists familiar with the paper, the neutrinos raced from a particle accelerator at CERN outside Geneva, where they were created, to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy, a distance of about 450 miles, about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam.”

Probably, it will turn out to be a mismeasurement. But it just might mean that the speed of light isn’t the ultimate limit scientists thought, which would have major implications for physics. Although, I guess it might also be the case that the hard-and-fast limit is just c + 60 ns, which wouldn’t buy us much.

But for now, allow me a few minutes of pretending that Star Wars-like light-speed space travel is possible.

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I’m sure most of you have heard about the execution of Troy Davis. It’s a terribly sad and disturbing case, and I understand why it has caused international outrage.

I’m not against the death penalty in general. I believe that if the crime is heinous enough, and the evidence clear enough, it is justified. But in this case, the latter condition was not satisfied.

It’s baffling to me how this could ever have gone through. If Davis did not commit the atrocious crime, then this outcome means, among other things, that a guilty man walks free. I don’t see how anybody could have supported this action. It’s not at all a question of being “tough on crime”, it’s a question of whether our justice system functions properly.

P.S. The title of this post is in quotes, because I’m pretty certain I’ve read or heard it somewhere. However, I cannot recall the source, and searching did not yield the answer. If anyone knows, please tell me in the comments and I will add a citation.

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Scott Adams makes some astute observations regarding creativity. An excerpt:

“The media has often noted the correlation between genius and insanity. My hypothesis is that insanity, or insecurity of any sort, puts an individual in a continuous state of feeling threatened. For those folks, the creativity gene – if they are lucky enough to have it – is locked in the ON position as they reflexively search for an escape from discomfort.”

I agree. I’ve done some of what I consider my best blogging when I’m having a bad day. This may not be true for everyone, but I think Adams is on the right track here.

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Freddie deBoer and Matthew Yglesias offer contrasting viewpoints on the business model of universities. DeBoer states that:

“[T]he purpose of the university has never been solely, or even primarily, or even largely to deliver information, that this is not why they are funded, and that this is not why students attend them.”

Well, I think he’s right. But given that, what is their purpose? As best I can tell, it is to offer people a way to prove they have information. The degree which a university sells you is a certificate that verifies the nature and extent of the information you possess. (Yes, this is a way of looking at it which ignores sentimental and intangible effects, but I’m just thinking about the business model here.)

So what this makes me wonder is:

  1. Is there anything that competes against them already? 
  2. Is there any alternative way of providing the same service more cheaply? 
  3. Are there other “goods”  like academic degrees?