Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Science And Policy

3 Comments

Words of wisdom from Daniel Sarewitz:

Whatever science you’re doing on a post-normal problem, it is always going to be incomplete, and it is always going to be subject to revision, and highly uncertain. It can be viewed from numerous scientific perspectives. So multiple scientific studies can come up with multiple results, so it leads to a profusion of truths that can be mobilized on behalf of different sets of values. Values and facts can pair up with each other in different ways.

One example I love is how everyone talks about how there’s a consensus on GMOs. Well there is consensus around a narrow part of the GMO issue, like there is a consensus around a narrow part of climate change. But the real problems have to do with the ‚what could be done?‘ questions. So for GMOs for example, when people say there is a consensus, what they mean is ‚we know they’re not a health risk‘. So I’ll accept it on health risk, I don’t have a problem with it. But then you say, ‚and we know that they’ll be an essential part of the economic future of Africa‘. Well, maybe that’s true — whose model are you using? What kind of data have you used to generate that? What are your assumptions? I mean anything dealing with projections of the future and claims about how the world is going to look, in a multi-variate, open system, are going to be subject to different people coming up with different claims and conclusions. And that’s exactly what happens.

And when you bring science into the political debate, you have to pick and choose which science you want to use. You have to match that with particular priorities about what policy problems you want to solve. I think science is really important, I think we want to be factual, I think we want to have a grip on reality and I think science can help us do that. But for problems where there are so many paths forward, so many competing values, the systems themselves are so complicated, I don’t think science is a privileged part of the solution.

…The post-normal science idea really does challenge the notion of science as a unitary thing that tells us what to do, PNS really says that we have to think of science in a different way in these contested contexts, and I don’t think most scientists want to go there. The deficit model puts them in charge: “we communicate the facts, you listen and take action.” So if the problem isn’t solved it’s not science’s problem. This is a self-serving superstition that the scientific community generally holds. And superstitions are hard to destabilize.

Over on Twitter, I’ve been having arguments with people about the proposed cut at the EPA, in which the budget for “protecting the climate,” is reduced to “only” $29M.

What in the hell does “protecting the climate” even mean?

Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

Blue Moon

23 Comments

The private sector continues to seize the initiative in space:

Blue Origin could perform the first lunar mission as early as July 2020, Bezos wrote, but stressed that it could “only be done in partnership with NASA. Our liquid hydrogen expertise and experience with precision vertical landing offer the fastest path to a lunar lander mission. I’m excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen.”

Last year, Blue Origin successfully launched and landed its suborbital rocket, the New Shepard, five times within less than a year, flying just past the 62-mile edge of space and then landing vertically on a landing pad at the company’s West Texas facility.

That same technology could be used to land the Blue Moon vehicle on the lunar surface, the company said. Its white paper shows what looks like a modified New Shepard rocket, standing on the moon with an American flag, a NASA logo and Blue Origin’s feather symbol.

The company said it plans to land its Blue Moon lunar lander at Shackleton Crater on the moon’s south pole. The site has nearly continuous sunlight to provide power through the spacecraft’s solar arrays. The company also chose to land there because of the “water ice in the perpetual shadow of the crater’s deep crevices.”

Water is vital not just for human survival, but also because hydrogen and oxygen in water could be transformed into rocket fuel. The moon, then, is seen as a massive gas station in space.

If this happens, SLS/Orion are dead programs walking. This is the 21st century I’ve been waiting for. We’re finally putting a stake through the heart of the Apollo Cargo Cult.

Note (as usual with such pieces in such venues) the stupidity and ignorance of the comments.

[Update a few minutes later]

Eric Berger thinks this is a big deal. So do I. I think that people are going to be very surprised at how quickly things start happening. And I suspect that 2017 will be viewed as a very important year in space history.

[Update late morning]

Miri Kramer thinks it’s “unhinged sounding.” I think that applies better to NASA sending crew to the moon on the very first flight of SLS. Even in Apollo they had test flights of the launch system.

[Update early afternoon]

Let the space tycoons lead the way. I think the transcontinental railroad analogy is very apt. NASA’s (and the National Research Council’s) “vision,” such as it is, is indeed paltry, as I wrote last year.

Business, Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The American “Elite”

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Are they really elite?

No:

Elitism sometimes seems predicated on being branded with the proper degrees. But when universities embrace a therapeutic curriculum and politically correct indoctrination, how can a costly university degree guarantee knowledge or inductive thinking?

Is elitism defined by an array of brilliant and proven theories?

Not really. University-sired identity politics has not led to racial and ethnic harmony.

Is there free speech or diversity of thought on campuses? Did progressive government save the inner cities? Are elites at least better-spoken and more knowledgeable than the rest of us?

Long before Trump’s monotonous repetition of “tremendous” and “great,” Barack Obama thought “corpsmen” was pronounced “corpse-men,” and that Austrians spoke “Austrian” rather than German.

Not long ago, Representative Hank Johnson (D., Ga.) warned that if Guam became too populated it might just tip over and sink.

They’re just credentialed. Elite people are actually educated, knowledgable and competent.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

President Narcissist

11 Comments

Surprisingly, Trump referenced himself much less in his joint-session speech than Obama typically did.

There’s a long piece to be written about all of the media criticism of Trump for things that Obama in fact did much more. But he was the Lightworker, so it was OK.

[Update a few minutes later]

Was last night the night the Democrat Party died?

We are in a new era. I’m 95% excited but 5% blue about what is happening — not because I have even an iota of regret about leaving liberalism, especially now. But because, as Trump himself said the other day, we need a two-party system and I strongly suspect, even with the unlimited pockets of George Soros, the Democratic Party, at least as we know it, is dying. All those crazy protests at town halls and the mass demonstrations of women racing around in vagina hats are the death throes of a movement with nothing to say.

It would be nice, but I doubt it.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The “new” Democrats’ coming-out party bombed last night:

Perhaps they felt the scene was exploitative, as several news personalities pointed out on Twitter, which is fine, but this was the party that rolled out Gold Star family members Khizr Muazzam Khan and Ghazala Khan during the Democrat National Convention and paraded them around cable news for a week in response to Trump’s flippant comments. Maybe, just maybe, both families, Khan and Owens are deserving of ovations. If the reason Democrats can’t rise and applaud the widow of a fallen service member, or victims of violent crime, or American companies based in the heartland of the country is fear of a backlash from their base, maybe the base they are catering to is the problem.

May be.

What a concept.

[Thursday-morning update]

“The compassionate soul of the Democrat Party died at 9:50 PM Tuesday night.”

That would be the “compassionate” Democrat Party that fought to preserve slavery, and Jim Crow, and now fights against quality education for black kids to preserve cushy teachers’ jobs, right?

Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Reforming Milspace

9 Comments

Coyote Smith is recently retired from the Air Force, and is apparently free to be much less circumspect about his thoughts on the Air Force:

It is easy to understand why the advancement of American space power has stalled under the Air Force. For very reasonable organizational and bureaucratic reasons, space power simply cannot receive the priority it deserves inside the Air Force.

Everything else will be sacrificed for the air power mission. As a matter of culture, this is the right thing to do. Carl Builder, a RAND analyst working a project for the Air Force Chief of Staff, pointed out in the The Icarus Syndrome that space power is a competing faction that air power advocates must hold at bay. The lesson being, no matter how vital space power becomes to the nation, if it is assigned to the Air Force, or any other service or agency, it will always receive short shrift.

It’s not a new problem. We were talking about it in the eighties. But we may finally be approaching a time in which we can finally fix it. I’ll be on a panel in DC on Monday with Coyote to talk about the U. S. Space Guard.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Sort of related: The coming warbot revolution.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!