Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Monday, 29th August 2011 at 8:10 pm
I spent my Saturday afternoon at a public viewing of Jack Layton’s funeral. I expected it to be good, I was particularly looking forward to hearing Stephen Lewis who is always a well-spoken and rousing speaker. But I also expected some less interesting parts where I would be looking outside wondering what I was doing watching a funeral of someone I’d never met on television.
I was blown away. Not only did I not long to be outdoors, at times I forgot that I wasn’t actually in Toronto at the funeral. Lewis’ eulogy was incredibly inspiring as was the eulogy of the Reverend Brent Hawkes. Martin Deschamps, Steven Page and Lorraine each perfectly reflected the mood of the funeral when it came their turns to sing. Below I’ll post Lewis’ and Hawkes’ eulogies.
Lewis’ closing was particularly stirring. He quoted from Arundhati Roy:
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Friday, 26th August 2011 at 3:29 pm
Gorgeous Georgie–Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks
Sam Harris is nothing if not direct when speaking his mind. While I agree with a lot of what he says, I would have thought that, by now, he would have said everything he could have said that would have offended his fans and readers. But he apparently just hit the jackpot of offensiveness recently when he suggested that billionaires–yes billionaires–should pay higher taxes:
You can declare the world’s religions to be cesspools of confusion and bigotry, you can argue that all drugs should be made legal and that free will is an illusion. You can even write in defense of torture. But I assure you that nothing will rile and winnow your audience like the suggestion that billionaires should contribute more of their wealth to the good of society.
His post clarifies his position without going back on what he originally said and contains one gem of a paragraph:
And lurking at the bottom of this morass one finds flagrantly irrational ideas about the human condition. Many of my critics pretend that they have been entirely self-made. They seem to feel responsible for their intellectual gifts, for their freedom from injury and disease, and for the fact that they were born at a specific moment in history. Many appear to have absolutely no awareness of how lucky one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, to not have cerebral palsy, or to not have been bankrupted in middle age by the mortal illness of a spouse.
Many of us have been extraordinarily lucky—and we did not earn it. Many good people have been extraordinarily unlucky—and they did not deserve it. And yet I get the distinct sense that if I asked some of my readers why they weren’t born with club feet, or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments. There is a stunning lack of insight into the unfolding of human events that passes for moral and economic wisdom in some circles. And it is pernicious. Followers of Rand, in particular, believe that only a blind reliance on market forces and the narrowest conception of self interest can steer us collectively toward the best civilization possible and that any attempt to impose wisdom or compassion from the top—no matter who is at the top and no matter what the need—is necessarily corrupting of the whole enterprise. This conviction is, at the very least, unproven. And there are many reasons to believe that it is dangerously wrong.
I know, I know, I’ll get back to talking about science and health soon but sometimes I like to reflect on the goals I think science and health should be serving.
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Thursday, 25th August 2011 at 9:45 am
Why is science such a powerful tool? If we lived in a world where our senses never deceived us and we had the superhuman ability to look at thing objectively, we probably wouldn’t–well, no, we’d still need science but it would just have a different role. But part of science’s role is to try and eliminate our biases and faults in our perception. That’s why I love learning about new ways that our brain deceives us. The Guardian had this article about how images held in your memory can influence your visual perception. That means that, in some contexts at least, what you see isn’t just a product of what you’re looking at, but what you looked at before. That’s weird.
The shade illusion is another example of our perception run amok and his video is the best example of it I’ve ever seen (there will likely be an ad before the video):
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Tuesday, 23rd August 2011 at 9:27 pm
I’m in a period where I’m straddling the vibrant optimism of being young and the cynicism that comes all too often with age. As my friends, family, co-workers, everyone I meet, get older, it seems that the passion behind certain ideals wanes–and understandably so. Party time is over. It’s all punch in, punch out, bring the car to the mechanic, do we have enough diapers or should I pick some up? Ok, those came out completely at random but you get the point. There are plenty of reasons to start thinking more about the technicalities of life rather than the bigger picture.
And that’s why I get it when people’s eyes start glaze over when I start talking about how the exorbitant profits pharmaceutical companies make isn’t ethical and increases differential access to health care. Hey–did I just see your eyes glaze over? I get it. There are enough things to think about without worrying about other people’s problems. That’s fine. But please, please don’t confuse that feeling with the feeling that tells you that optimism or being idealistic is a product of naivete and not the product of personal convictions based on sound ethics and principles.
I think, at some point, I started down that road toward cynicism. I started being convinced that I was being naive. That, yeah, it’d be nice if life were more fair–that people were rewarded for working hard but also that the opportunities to work hard were available to all–but can that ever really be achieved? Layton’s charisma was a reminder that–and I can’t think of a non-cliched way of saying this though I’m sure Jack would–we shouldn’t underestimate ourselves or our country. For a man who believed in justice and equality and who was all too aware of the injustices and inequalities some Canadians face, he remained forever optimistic that, if there is a place in the world that can achieve the kind of goals he had in mind, it was Canada. He embodied the fact that optimism isn’t naivete, quite the opposite, optimism is hope. It’s cynicism that is giving up.
And for that reason, it’s all to appropriate that Jack Layton’s letter to Canadians ended with a paragraph that I feel should be printed on our money or incorporated in our national anthem because they represent the best in Canadians:
My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Monday, 22nd August 2011 at 9:41 am
I was listening to CBC radio this morning when there was an interruption for a special update. I thought for sure it was going to be the announcement of the capture of Gaddafi. Sadly, the news wasn’t good, it announced the loss of the NDP’s leader Jack Layton. In my opinion, he was the only politician, in my lifetime, who I could take at his word. This is a sad day for Canada.
My enduring memory of Jack Layton, the leader of Canada’s left-wing New Democratic Party, who died this morning, was that time Miranda saw him at Idée Fixe. Idée Fixe is a dive bar, my favourite. Jack was there with his Montreal team, swigging a big bottle of 50 and playing pool. It wasn’t that he was “like us” – of course he wasn’t, he was a lifetime politician, moustached and jolly, chronically un-hip, so clearly a dad who tells lame jokes and waits in the car with his hands on the steering wheel, for no matter how long. But Jack was there, at our dive bar, when he could have gone to any other bar. He came because it was the closest one, quiet, with a free jukebox. Idée Fixe is dingy, a little sad, full of sketchy characters. But who gives a shit, right? I could imagine Jack grinning his grin and asking, “Is the beer cold?”
It really resonates with me because I go to Idee Fixe quite often and can picture him fitting right in at the pool table…or selecting Phil Collins at the jukebox. I’m super devastated today.
OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.
These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.
And Sam Harris from blog post How Rich is Too Rich asks if, in theory, there could be such a things as too rich (and he seems to be getting a lot of flack about it):
But even in the ideal case, where obvious value has been created, how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep? A trillion dollars? Ten trillion? (Fifty trillion is the current GDP of Earth.) Granted, there will be some limit to how fully wealth can concentrate in any society, for the richest possible person must still spend money on something, thereby spreading wealth to others. But there is nothing to prevent the ultra rich from cooking all their meals at home, using vegetables grown in their own gardens, and investing the majority of their assets in China.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, the two richest men in the United States, each have around $50 billion. Let’s put this number in perspective: They each have a thousand times the amount of money you would have if you were a movie star who had managed to save $50 million over the course of a very successful career. Think of every actor you can name or even dimly recognize, including the rare few who have banked hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years, and run this highlight reel back half a century. Gates and Buffet each have more personal wealth than all of these glamorous men and women—from Bogart and Bacall to Pitt and Jolie—combined.
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Wednesday, 17th August 2011 at 1:30 pm
I think I’ve posted about this Dan Ariely study before but this is a great video that explains it clearly and adds some analysis. It’s also only the first part of a series of videos from PBS on wealth inequality in the U.S.? It’s nice to know that topic isn’t completely taboo.
“Accompaniment” is an elastic term. It has a basic, everyday meaning. To accompany someone is to go somewhere with him or her, to break bread together, to be present on a journey with a beginning and an end. There’s an element of mystery, of openness, of trust, in accompaniment. The companion, the accompagnateur, says: “I’ll go with you and support you on your journey wherever it leads; I’ll share your fate for a while. And by ‘a while,’ I don’t mean a little while.” Accompaniment is about sticking with a task until it’s deemed completed, not by the accompagnateur but by the person being accompanied.
2) The Rationally Speaking podcast interviews Holden Karnofsky, former hedge fund manager who quit his job to start his nonprofit Give Well which evaluates charities. Surprisingly, or maybe unsurprisingly, only 2% of the charities they evaluate meet their standards on evidence of effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, transparency, funding gap and monitoring and evaluation. I discovered that two organizations I give to regularly, Partners in Health and Medecins Sans Frontieres don’t get Give Well’s top ranking although they do appear in the notable charities category for strength in one of the categories in which they were evaluated. Something I really admire is that Give Well has a Mistakes category right on their front page which lists all the shortcomings and mistakes they’ve made since their inception. That takes guts and shows that their emphasis on transparency isn’t just lip service.
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Monday, 15th August 2011 at 9:03 am
I love big questions and big ideas. Here are 70 academics talking about one of the biggest questions and one of the biggest ideas in human history: is there a god? The first video has 50 atheists and the second video has 20 believers. I love listening to brilliant minds contemplate this type of question. (In case these two videos aren’t enough for you, there’s now a part II to the atheist point of view with an additional 50 academics.) (via: Open Culture)
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Thursday, 11th August 2011 at 9:04 am
Itchy Fingers–Junior Boys
Yesterday, while putting together my data set for my thesis, I realized that if the Canadian long-form census had always been voluntary, my research would have been severely compromised. And it set my off.
Most of you will probably remember the controversy recently over replacing the mandatory long-form census with a voluntary one. There was a strong push to keep the long form mandatory (for the randomly selected 20% of Canadians who receive it) but, despite the head of Statistics Canada resigning over it, the long-form census will still be voluntary for the 2016 census.
This sounds boring but it’s important. I’m sure most people already know this with all the press coverage it got but the difference between a mandatory and voluntary census isn’t trivial. It’s the difference between having a random sample of 20% of Canadians which represent 100% Canadians, to getting a hodge-podge of Canadians who definitely don’t accurately represent the rest Canada. People who, if given the choice, will fill out the long form census are very different from those that won’t which will bias the results towards the people who fill out the form (who tend to be richer). The information the will result from a voluntary long form census will be unfit for research. You’ll get by fine without my research (although it could impact the well-being of some chronic disease suffers), but the sum total of research that will be affected by this, health research, economics research, sociological research, political research, will be huge. It’s one of those things that makes you question, “do these government guys actually have any clue about what they’re doing?” and in this case the answer is no (unless you think about it in terms of them pandering to their base, then the answer is yes but it’s still no to impact this will have on the country).
And all for what? Privacy? Are you kidding me? Click here and enter your postal code. That is the most detailed publicly available census data there is. Can you find yourself in there? I know everything there is to know about myself, I know where I fit in each and every category and there is no way I can pick myself out. There is no privacy issue.
What if? [Big Think]: Let’s dream for a minute. What if we lived in a world in which students and educators…
The Lo-Fi Legacy of Indonesia [NPR]: “Relentless fuzz. Over-the-top, politically charged lyrics. Cranky lo-fi music as close to Rare Earth protégé Power of Zeus as to that of South Korean psych-god Shin Jung Hyun.”
What was the hipster? [HiLoBrow]: “Revivalists don’t have an ironic take on bygone cultural forms; instead, they reboot them, like old videogames”
