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  #41  
Old August 11th 19, 09:48 PM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
[email protected]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 824
Default Andrew

On Sunday, August 11, 2019 at 7:10:27 PM UTC+2, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 10:48:39 PM UTC-7, wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 11:02:20 PM UTC+2, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 12:08:11 PM UTC-7, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:45:45 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:01:33 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 4:16:53 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 7:21:12 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:41:31 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 9:21 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 1:23:24 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 6:10 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
Andre Jute
Economics isn't difficult: it is the commonsense activities of individuals considered in aggregate.


???

If the query is about the tagline to my sig, many economists with real life experience in business are moving away from the first two great commandments of classical economics, viz that all individuals in every market are fully informed and fully rational in every decision. That is clearly not so. We don't need to go further afield than RBT for an example.

Of course we don't go as far as Krugman, who is so Post-Modern, he's totally unmoored from reality, indeed he's unattached to anything he said yesterday or the day before, though in a few days he'll probably spout the same weirdness as he did a couple of weeks ago. In fact, he's so cyclically insane, we should make him an honorary member of RBT.

Andre Jute
Sane since I was 13. I wonder how I managed that.


Krugman is indeed unhinged and he was even before Trump
Derangement Syndrome.


I must quibble that although many individual investors are
frequently wrong, and provably so, the wisdom of crowds is a
real thing and an amazingly reliable economic indicator. Nor
infallible, but amazingly prescient usually.

I agree. However, the mob is never right. The trick is to distinguish the mob from the crowd.



Andre Jute
I can't believe the foolishness of historians who equate the French and American Revolutions. The French wanted to raise a ravening mob of murderers, the American Founding Fathers created the Electoral College and other enduring institutions specifically to defend minorities against the mob.


No one understood it better than Burke:

https://www.alibris.com/Reflections-...77?matches=601

An excellent short read and starting at just 99 cents.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Thanks, Andrew. I know it, and in fact have it (free from Project Gutenberg) on iBooks to read on my treadmill, but first I want to read Thomas Carlyle History of the French Revolution again, to which Burke makes a suitable coda. At the moment I'm working my way through Stephen Meyers Darwin's Doubt, which may be the most important book of the century so far, and Carlyle is next. He's an agreeable stylist and a meticulous historian, so I won't be rushing the pleasure.


Pffff (blowing out coffee). Darwin's Doubt the most important book of the century so far?

The only thing more important than where we came from is where we're going. Any ideas?

Yikes, an ID book?

Have you actually read it? I haven't finished it but I'm far enough to know that his dissection of all the other theories is fair-minded and persausive.

No, I've only read the reviews -- and I will admit my prejudices, which a (1) whenever I finish a book that involves religion or philosophy chasing science, or vice versa, I feel like I've wasted my time. The book may illuminate some current controversy, but that controversy is usually gone in ten years or has mutated like a virus into a different controversy.. It started out as creationism, mutated into intelligent design and will be something different in five years -- maybe go back to ancient astronauts or the Illuminati. Meanwhile, the actual scientific community plods along with evolution. One hopes for primary work that really proves something rather than a curated, retrospective review of prior research with a new gloss. (2) I'm not against God or intelligent design, but really, if you were an all-powerful God, would you create a Trilobite? Why not a dog or a Swedish bikini model. The God envisioned by these people is so lame.

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay, I don't think that you realize the problems with Darwin. While improvement of the species certainly is possible in the time since Darwin we have never witnessed speciation due to evolution.

Just the human genome itself would require about several thousand mutations per second since life first appeared on Earth to have reached the present point of development. The numbers are simply far too large for Darwin's theories to ever work on the large scale necessary.

So you can either believe that the impossible happened or that there was intelligent design behind it.

I totally agree! And the intelligent designer is the Hindu god Ganesha, who sort of looks like a Trilobite, if a Trilobite were a human-elephant hybrid. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/54/22...b54aed3427.jpg

I actually think we were designed by a committee, and the temp-guy who came on at the last minute did Australia. That place is filled with natures out-takes, most of them poisonous. The temp-guy sketched out a duck-billed platypus on the back of a napkin as a joke and then sent it down to production on the day he was fired as a FU to the big boss. "Meh, put it in Australia" -- God.

-- Jay Beattie.


;-) thanks for the laugh Jay. There are actual people that believe everyting is created by some sort of higher power? In that case he or she made a lot of mistakes. I'm out of this discussion.

Lou


You were never IN this discussion.


You are right.

Lou
Ads
  #42  
Old August 12th 19, 12:58 AM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
news18
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,131
Default Andrew

On Sun, 11 Aug 2019 10:09:24 -0700, Tom Kunich wrote:

That gives me the distinct impression that you've never worked in
science nor even around scientists.

So exactly what were your scientists doing in their "science" work.

  #43  
Old August 12th 19, 01:01 AM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
news18
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,131
Default Andrew

On Sun, 11 Aug 2019 10:03:31 -0700, Tom Kunich wrote:



I gave you the numbers - mutations would have to occur thousands per
second. And yet since the time of Darwin not a single new species has
arisen.


But we are doing out best by flooding the world with radiation and toxic
chemicals. Good work takes time. BTW, they have actually identified
1,000s of new species since Darwin first wrtote.
It takes time Or you can agree with others that the minute change in an
insect

  #44  
Old August 12th 19, 01:03 AM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
news18
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,131
Default Andrew

On Sun, 11 Aug 2019 06:37:24 -0700, Andre Jute wrote:


Andre Jute This worthless little man is so anxious to prove me wrong,
he's sputtering insensately.


That sums you up nicely.

  #45  
Old August 12th 19, 01:04 AM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
news18
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,131
Default Andrew

On Sun, 11 Aug 2019 08:58:52 -0500, AMuzi wrote:


He actually did. Or at l;east everything worth knowing:

https://www.alibris.com/Gibbons-Decl...-Roman-Empire-

Edward-Gibbon/book/2606438?matches=65

Shame is is almost totally wrong.

  #46  
Old August 12th 19, 02:02 AM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
James[_8_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6,153
Default Andrew

On 12/8/19 3:03 am, Tom Kunich wrote:


I gave you the numbers - mutations would have to occur thousands per second. And yet since the time of Darwin not a single new species has arisen.


As we are still finding "new species" at an alarming rate, I'm not sure
anyone can proclaim what you just did.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...pecies-748819/

--
JS
  #47  
Old August 12th 19, 04:36 PM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
Andre Jute[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 10,422
Default Andrew

Here's the text News18 aka the thief Peter Howard cut to spare himself the embarrassment of seeing the error of his ways:

Andre Jute The cutting edge


From the man who thinks that giddens wrote the history of the world.


I'm giddy with excitement. Who or what is this "giddens" that you think wrote a history of the world?

And show us where I said that "giddens wrote the history of the world".

Andre Jute
This worthless little man is so anxious to prove me wrong, he's sputtering insensately.


[This is the worthless little man's reply:]

On Monday, August 12, 2019 at 1:03:25 AM UTC+1, news18 wrote:
On Sun, 11 Aug 2019 06:37:24 -0700, Andre Jute wrote:

Andre Jute This worthless little man is so anxious to prove me wrong,
he's sputtering insensately.


That sums you up nicely.


Nah, I always make sense to those I want to make sense to. I'm not responsible for the mental shortfalls of the rest, or their inadequacy in their mother tongue.

BTW, you still haven't showed us where I said that "giddens wrote the history of the world".

Andre Jute
Charisma is the art of infuriating losers by merely lounging elegantly
  #48  
Old August 12th 19, 05:47 PM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
Andre Jute[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 10,422
Default Andrew

On Sunday, August 11, 2019 at 2:58:53 PM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/10/2019 10:39 PM, news18 wrote:
On Sat, 10 Aug 2019 14:55:26 -0700, Andre Jute wrote:

On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 8:08:11 PM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:45:45 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:01:33 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 4:16:53 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 7:21:12 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute
wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:41:31 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 9:21 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 1:23:24 AM UTC+1, AMuzi
wrote:
On 8/9/2019 6:10 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
Andre Jute Economics isn't difficult: it is the
commonsense activities of individuals considered in
aggregate.


???

If the query is about the tagline to my sig, many
economists with real life experience in business are
moving away from the first two great commandments of
classical economics, viz that all individuals in every
market are fully informed and fully rational in every
decision. That is clearly not so. We don't need to go
further afield than RBT for an example.

Of course we don't go as far as Krugman, who is so
Post-Modern, he's totally unmoored from reality, indeed
he's unattached to anything he said yesterday or the day
before, though in a few days he'll probably spout the
same weirdness as he did a couple of weeks ago. In fact,
he's so cyclically insane, we should make him an honorary
member of RBT.

Andre Jute Sane since I was 13. I wonder how I managed
that.


Krugman is indeed unhinged and he was even before Trump
Derangement Syndrome.


I must quibble that although many individual investors are
frequently wrong, and provably so, the wisdom of crowds is
a real thing and an amazingly reliable economic indicator.
Nor infallible, but amazingly prescient usually.

I agree. However, the mob is never right. The trick is to
distinguish the mob from the crowd.



Andre Jute I can't believe the foolishness of historians
who equate the French and American Revolutions. The French
wanted to raise a ravening mob of murderers, the American
Founding Fathers created the Electoral College and other
enduring institutions specifically to defend minorities
against the mob.


No one understood it better than Burke:

https://www.alibris.com/Reflections-...Revolution-in-

France-Edmund-Burke/book/5612177?matches=601

An excellent short read and starting at just 99 cents.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Thanks, Andrew. I know it, and in fact have it (free from
Project Gutenberg) on iBooks to read on my treadmill, but first
I want to read Thomas Carlyle History of the French Revolution
again, to which Burke makes a suitable coda. At the moment I'm
working my way through Stephen Meyers Darwin's Doubt, which may
be the most important book of the century so far, and Carlyle
is next. He's an agreeable stylist and a meticulous historian,
so I won't be rushing the pleasure.


Pffff (blowing out coffee). Darwin's Doubt the most important
book of the century so far?

The only thing more important than where we came from is where
we're going. Any ideas?

Yikes, an ID book?

Have you actually read it? I haven't finished it but I'm far enough
to know that his dissection of all the other theories is
fair-minded and persausive.

No, I've only read the reviews -- and I will admit my prejudices,
which a (1) whenever I finish a book that involves religion or
philosophy chasing science, or vice versa, I feel like I've wasted my
time. The book may illuminate some current controversy, but that
controversy is usually gone in ten years or has mutated like a virus
into a different controversy. It started out as creationism, mutated
into intelligent design and will be something different in five years
-- maybe go back to ancient astronauts or the Illuminati. Meanwhile,
the actual scientific community plods along with evolution. One hopes
for primary work that really proves something rather than a curated,
retrospective review of prior research with a new gloss. (2) I'm not
against God or intelligent design, but really, if you were an
all-powerful God, would you create a Trilobite? Why not a dog or a
Swedish bikini model. The God envisioned by these people is so lame..

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay, I don't think that you realize the problems with Darwin. While
improvement of the species certainly is possible in the time since
Darwin we have never witnessed speciation due to evolution.

Just the human genome itself would require about several thousand
mutations per second since life first appeared on Earth to have reached
the present point of development. The numbers are simply far too large
for Darwin's theories to ever work on the large scale necessary.

The probabilistic difficulty is worse even than that, Tom. Forget
humans, which are a large, complex afterthought to upright apes which
are already impossible to explain, and let's just stick to the large
animals in the Cambrian Era. It turns out, if you work the numbers, that
protein A seeking protein B will have to do it blindfold in a genetic
space larger than all the atoms in the cosmos, littered with ineffectual
rubbish proteins, and that's just to make one cell. It will take more
than all the time since the Earth was created (about 3.8bn years).


That concept is more akin to the evolution of human knowledge, much of
which can be shown to have independently evolved in different places.
There is no evidence to support that there was ever one protein A seeking
one protein B.


Andre Jute The cutting edge


From the man who thinks that giddens wrote the history of the world.


He actually did. Or at l;east everything worth knowing:

https://www.alibris.com/Gibbons-Decl...438?matches=65

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971


And the rest is iteration of history's failures by those who didn't read Gibbon, an awful lesson? Actually the Middle Ages were a time of peace and plenty for most people as the Roman Church spread agricultural best practice through the Christian world, which for a good long time was nearly co-terminous with the Roman Empire, and presumably at least a bit beyond its borders, and there was global warming which also lifted everyone's spirits and standard of living. But that's at least partly a lesson in the power of communication, belonging to economic history, while Gibbon's main theme is arguably one of morality, duty and sacrifice; those old Romans who built the upstanding republic and later the decadent empire were pretty grim, not a giggle* among the lot of them.

In one school vacation I led a blind lawyer around and in the evenings read to him. He was a fast listener, so I read at a fast clip, and finished the libretto of Da Ponte's Don Giovanni in an evening with time to spare before his bedtime, so, after a few valuable tips on my Italian pronunciation (blind people listen better!), he told me I could choose the next volume from his shelf. Not wanting to be obvious and choose my own fave, Shakespeare, I chose Gibbon. "No, no," he said, "that bloody man is a moralist. Choose a realist. Goethe! Let's have Faustus." By the time I'd read aloud through most of Goethe in gloomy German, I was absolutely convinced that the only thing worse than a moralist is a romantic.

Andre Jute
No lace curtains to twitch

*Robert Graves presents Tiberius as amused by his nephew Caligula's viciousness but Tiberius was such a self-centred sourpuss, one has to wonder if this is literary latitude or lasitude on the part of Graves.
  #49  
Old August 12th 19, 06:02 PM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
AMuzi
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 13,447
Default Andrew

On 8/12/2019 11:47 AM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Sunday, August 11, 2019 at 2:58:53 PM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/10/2019 10:39 PM, news18 wrote:
On Sat, 10 Aug 2019 14:55:26 -0700, Andre Jute wrote:

On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 8:08:11 PM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:45:45 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:01:33 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 4:16:53 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 7:21:12 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute
wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:41:31 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 9:21 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 1:23:24 AM UTC+1, AMuzi
wrote:
On 8/9/2019 6:10 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
Andre Jute Economics isn't difficult: it is the
commonsense activities of individuals considered in
aggregate.


???

If the query is about the tagline to my sig, many
economists with real life experience in business are
moving away from the first two great commandments of
classical economics, viz that all individuals in every
market are fully informed and fully rational in every
decision. That is clearly not so. We don't need to go
further afield than RBT for an example.

Of course we don't go as far as Krugman, who is so
Post-Modern, he's totally unmoored from reality, indeed
he's unattached to anything he said yesterday or the day
before, though in a few days he'll probably spout the
same weirdness as he did a couple of weeks ago. In fact,
he's so cyclically insane, we should make him an honorary
member of RBT.

Andre Jute Sane since I was 13. I wonder how I managed
that.


Krugman is indeed unhinged and he was even before Trump
Derangement Syndrome.


I must quibble that although many individual investors are
frequently wrong, and provably so, the wisdom of crowds is
a real thing and an amazingly reliable economic indicator.
Nor infallible, but amazingly prescient usually.

I agree. However, the mob is never right. The trick is to
distinguish the mob from the crowd.



Andre Jute I can't believe the foolishness of historians
who equate the French and American Revolutions. The French
wanted to raise a ravening mob of murderers, the American
Founding Fathers created the Electoral College and other
enduring institutions specifically to defend minorities
against the mob.


No one understood it better than Burke:

https://www.alibris.com/Reflections-...Revolution-in-
France-Edmund-Burke/book/5612177?matches=601

An excellent short read and starting at just 99 cents.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Thanks, Andrew. I know it, and in fact have it (free from
Project Gutenberg) on iBooks to read on my treadmill, but first
I want to read Thomas Carlyle History of the French Revolution
again, to which Burke makes a suitable coda. At the moment I'm
working my way through Stephen Meyers Darwin's Doubt, which may
be the most important book of the century so far, and Carlyle
is next. He's an agreeable stylist and a meticulous historian,
so I won't be rushing the pleasure.


Pffff (blowing out coffee). Darwin's Doubt the most important
book of the century so far?

The only thing more important than where we came from is where
we're going. Any ideas?

Yikes, an ID book?

Have you actually read it? I haven't finished it but I'm far enough
to know that his dissection of all the other theories is
fair-minded and persausive.

No, I've only read the reviews -- and I will admit my prejudices,
which a (1) whenever I finish a book that involves religion or
philosophy chasing science, or vice versa, I feel like I've wasted my
time. The book may illuminate some current controversy, but that
controversy is usually gone in ten years or has mutated like a virus
into a different controversy. It started out as creationism, mutated
into intelligent design and will be something different in five years
-- maybe go back to ancient astronauts or the Illuminati. Meanwhile,
the actual scientific community plods along with evolution. One hopes
for primary work that really proves something rather than a curated,
retrospective review of prior research with a new gloss. (2) I'm not
against God or intelligent design, but really, if you were an
all-powerful God, would you create a Trilobite? Why not a dog or a
Swedish bikini model. The God envisioned by these people is so lame.

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay, I don't think that you realize the problems with Darwin. While
improvement of the species certainly is possible in the time since
Darwin we have never witnessed speciation due to evolution.

Just the human genome itself would require about several thousand
mutations per second since life first appeared on Earth to have reached
the present point of development. The numbers are simply far too large
for Darwin's theories to ever work on the large scale necessary.

The probabilistic difficulty is worse even than that, Tom. Forget
humans, which are a large, complex afterthought to upright apes which
are already impossible to explain, and let's just stick to the large
animals in the Cambrian Era. It turns out, if you work the numbers, that
protein A seeking protein B will have to do it blindfold in a genetic
space larger than all the atoms in the cosmos, littered with ineffectual
rubbish proteins, and that's just to make one cell. It will take more
than all the time since the Earth was created (about 3.8bn years).

That concept is more akin to the evolution of human knowledge, much of
which can be shown to have independently evolved in different places.
There is no evidence to support that there was ever one protein A seeking
one protein B.


Andre Jute The cutting edge

From the man who thinks that giddens wrote the history of the world.


He actually did. Or at l;east everything worth knowing:

https://www.alibris.com/Gibbons-Decl...438?matches=65

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971


And the rest is iteration of history's failures by those who didn't read Gibbon, an awful lesson? Actually the Middle Ages were a time of peace and plenty for most people as the Roman Church spread agricultural best practice through the Christian world, which for a good long time was nearly co-terminous with the Roman Empire, and presumably at least a bit beyond its borders, and there was global warming which also lifted everyone's spirits and standard of living. But that's at least partly a lesson in the power of communication, belonging to economic history, while Gibbon's main theme is arguably one of morality, duty and sacrifice; those old Romans who built the upstanding republic and later the decadent empire were pretty grim, not a giggle* among the lot of them.

In one school vacation I led a blind lawyer around and in the evenings read to him. He was a fast listener, so I read at a fast clip, and finished the libretto of Da Ponte's Don Giovanni in an evening with time to spare before his bedtime, so, after a few valuable tips on my Italian pronunciation (blind people listen better!), he told me I could choose the next volume from his shelf. Not wanting to be obvious and choose my own fave, Shakespeare, I chose Gibbon. "No, no," he said, "that bloody man is a moralist. Choose a realist. Goethe! Let's have Faustus." By the time I'd read aloud through most of Goethe in gloomy German, I was absolutely convinced that the only thing worse than a moralist is a romantic.

Andre Jute
No lace curtains to twitch

*Robert Graves presents Tiberius as amused by his nephew Caligula's viciousness but Tiberius was such a self-centred sourpuss, one has to wonder if this is literary latitude or lasitude on the part of Graves.



What I meant by that is the history of my people is
endlessly fascinating; the history of the rest of you not so
much.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971


  #50  
Old August 12th 19, 06:45 PM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
JBeattie
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 5,870
Default Andrew

On Monday, August 12, 2019 at 9:47:25 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Sunday, August 11, 2019 at 2:58:53 PM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/10/2019 10:39 PM, news18 wrote:
On Sat, 10 Aug 2019 14:55:26 -0700, Andre Jute wrote:

On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 8:08:11 PM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:45:45 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:01:33 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 4:16:53 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 7:21:12 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute
wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:41:31 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 9:21 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 1:23:24 AM UTC+1, AMuzi
wrote:
On 8/9/2019 6:10 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
Andre Jute Economics isn't difficult: it is the
commonsense activities of individuals considered in
aggregate.


???

If the query is about the tagline to my sig, many
economists with real life experience in business are
moving away from the first two great commandments of
classical economics, viz that all individuals in every
market are fully informed and fully rational in every
decision. That is clearly not so. We don't need to go
further afield than RBT for an example.

Of course we don't go as far as Krugman, who is so
Post-Modern, he's totally unmoored from reality, indeed
he's unattached to anything he said yesterday or the day
before, though in a few days he'll probably spout the
same weirdness as he did a couple of weeks ago. In fact,
he's so cyclically insane, we should make him an honorary
member of RBT.

Andre Jute Sane since I was 13. I wonder how I managed
that.


Krugman is indeed unhinged and he was even before Trump
Derangement Syndrome.


I must quibble that although many individual investors are
frequently wrong, and provably so, the wisdom of crowds is
a real thing and an amazingly reliable economic indicator.
Nor infallible, but amazingly prescient usually.

I agree. However, the mob is never right. The trick is to
distinguish the mob from the crowd.



Andre Jute I can't believe the foolishness of historians
who equate the French and American Revolutions. The French
wanted to raise a ravening mob of murderers, the American
Founding Fathers created the Electoral College and other
enduring institutions specifically to defend minorities
against the mob.


No one understood it better than Burke:

https://www.alibris.com/Reflections-...Revolution-in-
France-Edmund-Burke/book/5612177?matches=601

An excellent short read and starting at just 99 cents.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Thanks, Andrew. I know it, and in fact have it (free from
Project Gutenberg) on iBooks to read on my treadmill, but first
I want to read Thomas Carlyle History of the French Revolution
again, to which Burke makes a suitable coda. At the moment I'm
working my way through Stephen Meyers Darwin's Doubt, which may
be the most important book of the century so far, and Carlyle
is next. He's an agreeable stylist and a meticulous historian,
so I won't be rushing the pleasure.


Pffff (blowing out coffee). Darwin's Doubt the most important
book of the century so far?

The only thing more important than where we came from is where
we're going. Any ideas?

Yikes, an ID book?

Have you actually read it? I haven't finished it but I'm far enough
to know that his dissection of all the other theories is
fair-minded and persausive.

No, I've only read the reviews -- and I will admit my prejudices,
which a (1) whenever I finish a book that involves religion or
philosophy chasing science, or vice versa, I feel like I've wasted my
time. The book may illuminate some current controversy, but that
controversy is usually gone in ten years or has mutated like a virus
into a different controversy. It started out as creationism, mutated
into intelligent design and will be something different in five years
-- maybe go back to ancient astronauts or the Illuminati. Meanwhile,
the actual scientific community plods along with evolution. One hopes
for primary work that really proves something rather than a curated,
retrospective review of prior research with a new gloss. (2) I'm not
against God or intelligent design, but really, if you were an
all-powerful God, would you create a Trilobite? Why not a dog or a
Swedish bikini model. The God envisioned by these people is so lame.

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay, I don't think that you realize the problems with Darwin. While
improvement of the species certainly is possible in the time since
Darwin we have never witnessed speciation due to evolution.

Just the human genome itself would require about several thousand
mutations per second since life first appeared on Earth to have reached
the present point of development. The numbers are simply far too large
for Darwin's theories to ever work on the large scale necessary.

The probabilistic difficulty is worse even than that, Tom. Forget
humans, which are a large, complex afterthought to upright apes which
are already impossible to explain, and let's just stick to the large
animals in the Cambrian Era. It turns out, if you work the numbers, that
protein A seeking protein B will have to do it blindfold in a genetic
space larger than all the atoms in the cosmos, littered with ineffectual
rubbish proteins, and that's just to make one cell. It will take more
than all the time since the Earth was created (about 3.8bn years).

That concept is more akin to the evolution of human knowledge, much of
which can be shown to have independently evolved in different places.
There is no evidence to support that there was ever one protein A seeking
one protein B.


Andre Jute The cutting edge

From the man who thinks that giddens wrote the history of the world.


He actually did. Or at l;east everything worth knowing:

https://www.alibris.com/Gibbons-Decl...438?matches=65

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971


And the rest is iteration of history's failures by those who didn't read Gibbon, an awful lesson? Actually the Middle Ages were a time of peace and plenty for most people as the Roman Church spread agricultural best practice through the Christian world, which for a good long time was nearly co-terminous with the Roman Empire, and presumably at least a bit beyond its borders, and there was global warming which also lifted everyone's spirits and standard of living. But that's at least partly a lesson in the power of communication, belonging to economic history, while Gibbon's main theme is arguably one of morality, duty and sacrifice; those old Romans who built the upstanding republic and later the decadent empire were pretty grim, not a giggle* among the lot of them.

In one school vacation I led a blind lawyer around and in the evenings read to him. He was a fast listener, so I read at a fast clip, and finished the libretto of Da Ponte's Don Giovanni in an evening with time to spare before his bedtime, so, after a few valuable tips on my Italian pronunciation (blind people listen better!), he told me I could choose the next volume from his shelf. Not wanting to be obvious and choose my own fave, Shakespeare, I chose Gibbon. "No, no," he said, "that bloody man is a moralist. Choose a realist. Goethe! Let's have Faustus." By the time I'd read aloud through most of Goethe in gloomy German, I was absolutely convinced that the only thing worse than a moralist is a romantic.


Hey, if I go blind, remind me not to call you. I think they were forcing confessions from the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay by reading them opera librettos. By scene two, the prisoners were requesting water-boarding. And your blind buddy hates moralists, and you read him Don Juan/Giovani? Okey-dokey.. You should have taken him down to the pub to play darts.

-- Jay Beattie.
 




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