Working on a new venture, an op-ed about the hypocrisy of the NASA safety culture, renovating the house, and a long essay on the potential for private robotic planetary exploration.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Trump And The Crisis Of Meritocracy
Thoughts from Glenn Reynolds:
“The warning lights have been flashing, and the klaxons sounding, for more than a decade and a half. But our pundits and prognosticators and professors and policymakers, ensconced as they generally are deep within the bubble, were for the most part too distant from the distress of the general population to see or hear it.”
Well, now they’ve heard it, and they’ve also heard that a lot of Americans resent the meritocrats’ insulation from what’s happening elsewhere, especially as America’s unfortunate record over the past couple of decades, whether in economics, in politics, or in foreign policy, doesn’t suggest that the “meritocracy” is overflowing with, you know, actual merit.
In the United States, the result has been Trump. In Britain, the result was Brexit. In both cases, the allegedly elite — who are supposed to be cool, considered, and above the vulgar passions of the masses — went more or less crazy. From conspiracy theories (it was the Russians!) to bizarre escape fantasies (A Brexit vote redo! A military coup to oust Trump!) the cognitive elite suddenly didn’t seem especially elite, or for that matter particularly cognitive.
In fact, while America was losing wars abroad and jobs at home, elites seemed focused on things that were, well, faintly ridiculous. As Richard Fernandez tweeted: “The elites lost their mojo by becoming absurd. It happened on the road between cultural appropriation and transgender bathrooms.” It was fatal: “People believe from instinct. The Roman gods became ridiculous when the Roman emperors did. PC is the equivalent of Caligula’s horse.”
There’s nothing “elite” or even educated about them. They’re just credentialed.
Self-Driving Cars
People are not rational about risk.
“Alt-Right”
No, libertarians are not:
Spencer has attempted to wring as much publicity from the incident as possible—he tweeted about it no fewer than 40 times, by my count. In his mind, libertarians are “lolbertarians” who need to “accept the reality of race” and get serious about “white replacement.” To the extent that his only goal in life is to garner more attention for his fringe worldview, I suppose the stunt was a success—here I am writing about it. Congrats to you, guy who thinks “the United States is a European country.”
In any case, the incident should make abundantly clear that the alt-right’s racism is incompatible with the principles of a free society. Libertarianism is an individualist philosophy that considers all people deserving of equal rights. In contrast, Spencer is a tribalist and collectivist whose personal commitment to identity politics vastly exceeds the left’s.
Yes. “Alt-Right” is just another variation on Left.
This Morning’s Historic Launch (And Landing)
Tim Fernholz provides some perpsective.
Perverse Incentives In Academia
This is sort of a disaster, particularly in the context of the student-loan mess.
Here's the horrifying key table from the paper Siddhartha Roy co-authored on perverse incentives in academia. #AAASmtg pic.twitter.com/sdrUlPmXs7
— Mike 48% Tⓐylor (@MikeTaylor) February 18, 2017
Mattis “Alone”
It seems pretty clear that we need a thorough house cleaning at the Pentagon after the disaster of the past eight years. And probably every other agency and department as well. The civil service system has resulted in a permanent government, that tends to itself rather than the nation and people.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: EPA workers fight to prevent the nomination of Pruitt. That is not part of their job description. Can them.
To people opposing Pruitt, is there a single thing that the EPA does that you think it shouldn't be? Serious question.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) February 17, 2017
[Saturday-morning update]
Who “rules” the United States?
These days an architect of the overreaching and antidemocratic Waters of the U.S. regulation worries that her work will be overturned so she undertakes extraordinary means to defeat her potential boss. But a change in policy is a risk of democratic politics. Nowhere does it say in the Constitution that the decisions of government employees are to be unquestioned and preserved forever. Yet that is precisely the implication of this unprecedented protest. “I can’t think of any other time when people in the bureaucracy have done this,” a professor of government tells the paper. That sentence does not leave me feeling reassured.
Opposition to this president takes many forms. Senate Democrats have slowed confirmations to the most sluggish pace since George Washington. Much of the New York and Beltway media does really function as a sort of opposition party, to the degree that reporters celebrated the sacking of Flynn as a partisan victory for journalism. Discontent manifests itself in direct actions such as the Women’s March.
But here’s the difference. Legislative roadblocks, adversarial journalists, and public marches are typical of a constitutional democracy. They are spelled out in our founding documents: the Senate and its rules, and the rights to speech, a free press, and assembly. Where in those documents is it written that regulators have the right not to be questioned, opposed, overturned, or indeed fired, that intelligence analysts can just call up David Ignatius and spill the beans whenever they feel like it?
Hey, give the little tyrants a break; they’re trying to save the planet.
[Bumped]
Trust Of The Voters
They trust Trump more than the media. I agree with them, but that says more about the media than Trump’s trustworthiness.
The Rocket Scientists On The Hill
Eric Berger reports on yesterday’s fossilized discussion of human spaceflight, that included no discussion whatsoever of commercial capabilities.
Age aside, no one has ever adequately explained to me why Tom Young, who has no experience with human spaceflight, is always invited to these things.
Commercial Crew And Re-Enacting Apollo 8
Bob Zimmerman has been reading the GAO report (as have I), and has some thoughts:
…my impression here is that NASA is trying to impose its will for political reasons, not safety, in order to make the commercial program as ineffective as SLS/Orion has been. And the proof of this is NASA’s decision this week to consider flying humans on the very first test flight of SLS. If NASA as an agency really cared about safety like it claims in this GAO report, it wouldn’t dream of flying an untested SLS manned. While the GAO report can only point to some specific and somewhat limited issues faced by Boeing and SpaceX, SLS remains completely unknown. Unlike Atlas 5 and Falcon 9, it has not flown once. None of its components have been tested in flight, and to ignore this basic fact and fly it manned [sic] the first time is absurd.
No, it appears to me that NASA and certain members of Congress are trying to manipulate things to save SLS. Their problem is that SLS simply stinks. It has cost too much to build, it is taking too long to get built, and it remains an untested design that has a very limited value. Even if this political maneuvering gets SLS up first with people on board, and that flight does not fail, SLS will still stink. Its second flight will still be years away, while the commercial capsules will be able to fly numerous times in the interim, and they will be able to do it for a quarter of the price.
The worst aspect of this political maneuvering is that it is harming the American effort to fly in space, for no good reason, and might very well cause the death of Americans. Instead of getting Americans launched quickly on American-built spacecraft, these political games are forcing us once again to consider depending on the Russians for an additional few more years. Considering the serious corruption and quality control problems revealed recently in Russia’s aerospace industry, we should not feel save launching Americans on their spacecraft. And we certainly shouldn’t feel safe launching them on SLS during that first test flight.
It’s a political stunt. Instead of trying to win a race with the Soviets, they’re trying to win a race with private industry, while handicapping the competition. There is only one realistic “back up plan” for ending out dependence on Russia. Start flying without “certification,” while making clear the risk.
[Late-afternoon update]
Gwynn Shotwell: “The [heck] we won’t fly before 2019!”
I’m guessing that Marcia bowdlerized her, and she used some other word starting with “He.” And it’s not “helium.”