What Your Sons and Daughters Will Learn at University

From Minding the Campus.org (Sept. 4, 2018):

Universities in the 20^th century were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. Scholarship and research were pursued, and diverse opinions were exchanged and argued in the “marketplace of ideas.”

This is no longer the case. Particularly in the social sciences, humanities, education, social work, and law, a single political ideology has replaced scholarship and research, because the ideology presents fixed answers to all questions. And, although the most important thing in universities today is the diversity of race, gender, sexual practice, ethnicity, economic class, and physical and mental capability, there is no longer diversity of opinion. Only those committed to the ideology are admitted to academic staff or administration.

Universities have been transformed by the near-universal adoption of three interrelated theories: postmodernism, postcolonialism, and social justice. These theories and their implications will be explored here.

There Is No Truth; Nothing Is Good or Bad

Postmodernism: In the past, academics were trained to seek truth. Today, academics deny that there is such a thing as objective Truth. Instead, they argue that no one can be objective, that everyone is inevitably subjective, and consequently everyone has their own truth. The correct point of view, they urge, is relativism. This means not only that truth is relative to the subjectivity of each individual, but also that ethics and morality are relative to the individual and the culture, so there is no such thing as Good and Evil, or even Right and Wrong. So too with the ways of knowing; your children will learn that there is no objective basis for preferring chemistry over alchemy, astronomy over astrology, or medical doctors over witch doctors. They will learn that facts do not exist; only interpretations do.

All Cultures Are Equally Good; Diversity Is Our Strength

Our social understanding has also been transformed by postmodern relativism. Because moral and ethical principles are deemed to be no more than the collective subjectivity of our culture, it is now regarded as inappropriate to judge the principles and actions of other cultures. This doctrine is called “cultural relativism.” For example, while racism is held to be the highest sin in the West, and slavery the greatest of our historical sins, your children will learn that we are not allowed to criticize contemporary racism and slavery in Africa, the Middle East, and the equivalents in South Asia.

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The West Is Evil; The Rest Are Virtuous

Postcolonialism, the dominant theory in the social sciences today, is inspired by the Marxist-Leninist theory of imperialism, in which the conflict between the capitalist and proletariat classes is allegedly exported to the exploitation of colonized countries. By this means, the theory goes, oppression and poverty take place in colonies instead of in relation to the metropolitan working class. Postcolonialism posits that all of the problems in societies around the world today are the result of the relatively short Western imperial dominance and colonization. For example, British imperialism is blamed for what are in fact indigenous cultures, such as the South Asian caste system and the African tribal system. So too, problems of backwardness and corruption in countries once, decades ago, colonies continue to be blamed on past Western imperialism. The West is thus the continuing focus on anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist sentiment. Your children will learn that our society is evil, and the cause of all the evil in the wider world.

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White Men Are Evil; Women of Color Are Virtuous

Social justice theory teaches that the world is divided between oppressors and victims. Some categories of people are oppressors and other are victims: males are oppressors, and females are victims; whites are oppressors, and people of color are victims; heterosexuals are oppressors, and gays, lesbians, bisexual, etc. are victims; Christians and Jews are oppressors, and Muslims are victims. Your sons will learn that they are stigmatized by their toxic masculinity.

Individuals Are Not Important; Only Category Membership Is

Social justice theory has taken university life by storm. It is the result of the relentless working of Marxist theory, adopted by youngsters during the American cultural revolution of the 1960s, then brought to universities as many of those youngsters became college professors. Marxism as an academic theory was explicitly followed by some in the 1970s and 1980s, but it did not sweep everything else away, because the idea economic class conflict was not popular in the prosperous general North American population. The cultural Marxist innovation that brought social justice theory to dominance was the extension of class conflict from economics to gender, race, sexual practice, ethnicity, religion, and other mass categories. We see this in sociology, which is no longer defined as the study of society but has for decades been defined as the study of inequality. For social justice theory, equality is not the equality of opportunity that is the partner of merit, but rather equality of result, which ensures the members of each category at equality of representation irrespective of merit. Your sons will learn that they should “step aside” to give more space and power to females. Your daughters, if white, will learn that they must defer to members of racial minorities.  [read more]

This is why the Left is insane and why they want to indoctrinate college students—insanity loves company. Also, why the far-Left wants free education.

The rise of robot authors: is the writing on the wall for human novelists?

From The Guardian (Mar. 25):

Will androids write novels about electric sheep? The dream, or nightmare, of totally machine-generated prose seemed to have come one step closer with the recent announcement of an artificial intelligence that could produce, all by itself, plausible news stories or fiction. It was the brainchild of OpenAI – a nonprofit lab backed by Elon Musk and other tech entrepreneurs – which slyly alarmed the literati by announcing that the AI (called GPT2) was too dangerous for them to release into the wild, because it could be employed to create “deepfakes for text”. “Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology,” they said, “we are not releasing the trained model.” Are machine-learning entities going to be the new weapons of information terrorism, or will they just put humble midlist novelists out of business?

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Right now, novelists don’t seem to have much to fear. Fed the opening line of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” – the machine continued the narrative as follows: “I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China. I started with Chinese history and history of science.”

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Is there greater cause to worry further down the literary food chain? There have for a while already been “AI bots” that can, we hear, “write” news stories. All these are, though, are giant automated plagiarism machines that mash together bits of news stories written by human beings. As so often, what is promoted as a magical technological advance depends on appropriating the labour of humans, rendered invisible by AI rhetoric. When a human writer commits plagiarism, that is a serious matter. But when humans get together and write a computer program that commits plagiarism, that is progress.  [read more]

What would be eerie if robot writers could write like dead authors.

No One Is Coming to Rescue You—Especially Not a Presidential Candidate

From FEE.org:

Nearly every single person has an opinion about who this country should be supporting. And nearly every single one of them believes that their lives will be significantly better, or worse, based on who occupies the White House. But this gives politicians far too much power.

In order to truly better our lives, we need to rely less on political talking heads and more on ourselves. Only then can we begin to make a bigger difference and change the world.

Politicians Can’t Save You

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From a policy front, our lives change very little depending on who is the president. But there is a deeper issue here than one of just policy. In fact, it’s almost as if we view politicians as our personal saviors.

In Utah, when Mitt Romney was a 2012 Presidential candidate, many Utahns referred to him as the “white knight,” who had come to save our country and our Constitution. While this is the extreme of the cult of personality worship, it highlights the seriousness of the problem. The “white knight” reference implies that we need someone to come save us instead of realizing that we are capable of saving ourselves.

A politician cannot save us, not in the policy realm or our personal lives. But as individuals, we have nearly unlimited power to do this for ourselves.

We’ve Got to Save Ourselves

Objectivist and renowned American psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden cautions against waiting on someone else to come rescue you from your problems. In his book The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Branden writes:

No one is coming to save me; no one is coming to make life right for me; no one is coming to solve my problems. If I don’t do something, nothing is going to get better.

At first glance, this might seem like a bleak statement. But in these words rests the immense personal power we need to transform our lives. No politician can save you, just like no parent or friend can save you. If you really want to fix your life and be a tool for change on a grander scale, you’re going to have to learn how to save yourself.

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During an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson spoke of the importance of fixing your own life before you try to take on bigger tasks. He said:

…don’t be fixing up the economy, 18-year-olds. You don’t know anything about the economy. It’s a massive complex machine beyond anyone’s understanding and you mess with that your peril. So can you even clean up your own room? No. Well you think about that. You should think about that, because if you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?

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Peterson’s sentiment actually echoes similar words written by Plato in a passage from The Republic, in which he writes:

But in truth justice was, as it seems, something of this sort; however, not with respect to a man’s minding his external business, but with respect to what is within, with respect to what truly concerns him and his own. He doesn’t let each part in him mind other people’s business or the three classes in the soul meddle with each other, but really sets his own house in good order and rules himself.

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All You Can Do Is Start With Yourself

We would each do well to remind ourselves that an election season will not make or break us as individuals. Unless you are willing to take the steps needed to clean your room and be your own savior, you cannot expect someone else to do it for you. So instead of arguing back and forth on social media in favor of this or that candidate, do something that will help you change your own life and, thus, better prepare you to make bigger changes.

As Confucius says:

To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

No one is coming to help you, so you might as well stop waiting and start fixing your own life today. [read more]

Good advice. I like the Confucius quote. So, true.

EXCLUSIVE: Who’s Bankrolling the National Popular Vote Movement

From The Daily Signal.com (Mar. 25):

The nonprofit organization building a coalition of states that favor choosing the president by popular vote promotes itself as nonpartisan, but is financed by millions of dollars from left-leaning groups.

Some of the leaders of the movement are prominent Republicans, and most of the funding for the nonprofit, National Popular Vote Inc., has come from a wealthy Democrat and a billionaire independent.

However, many large, liberal organizations back the movement, according to the Capital Research Center, a conservative investigative think tank that monitors nonprofits. It gathered donor information on National Popular Vote Inc. using a commercial database.

The Jennifer and Jonathan Allan Soros Foundation, for example, gave $1 million to the nonprofit in 2011.

Jonathan Soros, 49, heads an investment firm and is the son of George Soros, a hedge fund manager known for financing left-leaning causes around the world. Although the Soros Foundation does not publicly list contact information, The Daily Signal sought comment through the George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations. 

The Stephen M. Silberstein Foundation made donations totaling $1 million to National Popular Vote Inc. from 2008 to 2012, according to the most recent data. The Silberstein Foundation gave $350,000 in 2008, $250,000 in 2009, $250,000 in 2010, and $150,000 in 2012. The Daily Signal unsuccessfully sought comment from the Silberstein Foundation.  [read more]

Well, Soros is at it again. Doesn’t surprise me.

A Glimpse of What the Green New Deal Would Cost Taxpayers

From The Daily Signal.com (Mar. 25):

Implementing the Green New Deal resolution would place significant though hard-to-quantify costs on Americans, according to a preliminary analysis by The Heritage Foundation that hints at the total burden.

Granted, generating a cost estimate for a plan that is nebulously defined and lacks specificity is a challenge, especially when technologies to achieve those goals simply do not exist.

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It’s technically feasible to ground airplanes, close factories, and shut down oil pipelines. But that doesn’t mean an energy model can account for such a fantastical green dream.

Instead, to provide a broad estimate of just a fraction of what the Green New Deal would cost, Heritage analysts modeled implementation of a $54 carbon tax, phased in by 2021.

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To provide a glimpse into the broad costs on these industries, Heritage analysts implement an economy-wide carbon tax. In future analyses, we aim to implement higher carbon taxes to realize greater emissions reductions to the extent that the model recognizes such changes as technologically feasible.

1.4 Million Jobs Lost, $3.9 Trillion Hit to Economy

As mentioned in a FAQ sheet attributed to Ocasio-Cortez’s office, “a carbon tax would be a tiny part of a Green New Deal.” Nevertheless, modeling a “tiny part” and showing the high costs of that “tiny part” demonstrate just how economically devastating the Green New Deal would be.

Our tax begins in 2020 at $27 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions, increases to $54 the following year, and subsequently increases annually by 2.5 percent. In our simulations, we rebate the revenue collected from the tax back to consumers.

In addition, we included carbon-based regulations on the manufacturing industry as well as mandates requiring the country to use significantly more renewable forms of energy than current projections. To quantify the economic impact of the Green New Deal, we used the Heritage Energy Model, a derivative of the Energy Information Administration’s National Energy Modeling System.

According to the Heritage Energy Model, as a result of the taxes and carbon-based regulations, by 2040 one can expect: 

• A peak employment shortfall of over 1.4 million jobs.
• A total income loss of more than $40,000 for a family of four.
• An aggregate gross domestic product loss of over $3.9 trillion.
• Increases in household electricity expenditures averaging approximately 12 to 14 percent.

Unquestionably, these projections from the Heritage Energy Model significantly underestimate the costs of the Green New Deal’s energy components. As Ocasio-Cortez’s Frequently Asked Questions sheet notes, the carbon tax is only one of many policy tools Green New Deal advocates hope to implement.

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Green New Deal Barely Would Affect Climate

Proponents of a carbon tax and the Green New Deal argue that these policies are a form of insurance against a changing climate. The cost of inaction, they purport, is much greater than any policies that drive energy prices higher.

However, the reality is these policies do not actually provide any “climate insurance.” No matter where one stands on the urgency to combat climate change, the Green New Deal policies would be ineffective in abating temperature increases and slowing the rise of sea levels. In fact, the U.S. could cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 100 percent and it would not make a difference in global warming. [read more]

Yes, just another gov’t take over of the economy.

More articles about the green new deal:

• Democrats Refuse to Vote for Green New Deal They Endorsed  Hypocrites!
• Green New Deal Would Reward Rich, Hurt Poor
• Puerto Rico Has Just Passed Its Own Green New Deal
• The Jevons Paradox and the Green New Deal
• Green Dreams

Were the Nazis Really Socialists? It Depends on How You Define Socialism

From FEE.org:

The Nazis didn’t call their ideology “national socialism” because they thought it sounded good. They were fervently opposed to capitalism. The Nazi Party’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, even once remarked that he’d sooner live under Bolshevism than capitalism. The Nazis instituted major public works projects such as the Autobahn, promised full employment, and dramatically increased government spending.

On the other hand, the Nazis were virulently anti-communist. That sentiment, along with German nationalism and anti-Semitism, was one of the main pillars of Nazism outlined by Hitler in Mein Kampf. Once in power, the Nazis supported and were supported by big business, and they even privatized a few government-operated services—all things that would make Karl Marx roll in his grave.

Evolving Definitions

So why, then, would the Nazis call themselves “socialists"? In part, it’s because the term “socialism” has been constantly evolving and changing since its inception. Some varieties of socialism bear no resemblance to the works of Karl Marx. According to The Counter-Revolution of Science, by Friedrich von Hayek, the term “socialism” was coined in the 1800s by French philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon, who believed that industrialization and the Scientific Revolution called for a complete rearrangement of government and society.

Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, Saint-Simon envisioned a totalitarian society ruled by a technocratic elite made up of industrialists, academics, businessmen, and scientists. Early socialists were primarily concerned with improving society through central organization and scientific discovery, and it wasn’t until Marx that socialism became associated with class struggle.

Marx derided these early socialists as “utopian socialists,” and, along with Friedrich Engels, he developed his own “scientific socialism.” Marx saw classes locked in a perpetual struggle for material resources and believed that capitalism would inevitably lead to a global revolution of workers against the bourgeoisie. The victorious proletariat would then establish a communist society where there were no classes and communal ownership of the means of production. Marxist-Leninists came to more narrowly define “socialism” to mean the intermediary period between capitalism and communism where the state owned the means of production and centrally managed the economy.

In establishing national socialism, the Nazis sought to redefine socialism yet again. National socialism began as a fusion of socialist ideas of a technocratically-managed economy with Völkisch nationalism, a deeply anti-Semitic form of German nationalism. In their burgeoning ideology, the Nazis saw both capitalism and communism as unhealthily materialistic and based in selfishness rather than national unity, traits they negatively associated with Judaism. Oswald Spengler, one of the main intellectual influences of Nazism, went so far as to call Marxism “the capitalism of the working class.” The Nazis’ redefinition of socialism was realized through the Völksgemeinschaft, which served as a means of connecting the individual to the state.

The Nazis Weren't Strictly Socialist

While the Nazis were disdainful of capitalism, this disdain did not extend to capitalists themselves. Class conflict figured little into the Nazi conception of socialism, with the exception of the party’s Strasserist faction, which was purged during the Night of the Long Knives. Instead, Nazis considered both capitalists and workers necessary, occupying their own important roles within the Völksgemeinschaft. The Nazis also distinguished themselves from Marxists in their support for private property, although this came with some caveats.

The Nazi government did not own the means of production in Germany, but they certainly controlled them. They set up control boards, cartels, and state-sponsored monopolies and konzerns, which they then carefully planned and regulated. Industrial leaders hardly objected. In surrendering control of their enterprises to the state, they insulated themselves from market forces, ensuring they’d remain at the top of their respective industries.

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Unlike Marxists, democratic socialists don’t believe in total government ownership of the means of production, nor do they wish to technocratically manage the economy as the Nazis did. Instead, according to the Democratic Socialists of America, they “believe that workers and consumers who are affected by economic institutions should own and control them.”

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Solutions

The wide variance between utopian socialism, communism, national socialism, and democratic socialism makes it remarkably easy for members of each ideology to wag their fingers at the others and say, “That wasn’t real socialism.” However, there is one common thread in each of these definitions of socialism. From Saint-Simon to AOC, all self-described socialists have shared the belief that top-down answers to society’s problems are superior to the bottom-up answers created by the free market. [read more]

   

The differences in socialisms is like the differences in poisons. Different poisons have different chemical compositions, and different symptoms. Some may kill you quicker. But the end result is the same: Death. To paraphrase Shakespeare, socialism by any other name is still socialism.

It’s all about power—how to hold on to it and increase it.

The Reality Of Mind-Reading: Neuroscientists Can Predict Your Choices 11 Seconds Before You Make Them

From Zero Hedge.com (Mar. 19):

Researchers at the Future Minds Lab at UNSW School of Psychology in Australia were able to predict basic choices participants made BEFORE they consciously declared their decisions. Their findings were published last week in the journal Scientific Reports.

For the experiment, the researchers asked 14 participants to freely choose between two visual patterns – one of red horizontal stripes and one of green vertical stripes –  before consciously imagining them while being observed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI).

They were given a maximum of 20 seconds to choose between the patterns. Once they’d made a decision, they pressed a button and had 10 seconds to visualize the pattern as hard as they could. Next, they were asked “what did you imagine?” and “how vivid was it?” They answered these questions by pressing buttons.

The results were unsettling.

Scientists were able to predict which pattern people would choose before their thoughts even became conscious.

Here is an explanation of the results, from the UNSW press release:

Not only could the researchers predict which pattern they would choose, they could also predict how strongly the participants were to rate their visualizations. With the assistance of machine learning, the researchers were successful at making above-chance predictions of the participants’ volitional choices at an average of 11 seconds before the thoughts became conscious.

The brain areas that revealed information about the future choices were located in executive areas of the brain – where our conscious decision-making is made – as well as visual and subcortical structures, suggesting an extended network of areas responsible for the birth of thoughts. (source)

Professor Joel Pearson said we may have thoughts on ‘standby’ based on previous brain activity, which then influences our final decisions without us being aware:

“We believe that when we are faced with the choice between two or more options of what to think about, non-conscious traces of the thoughts are there already, a bit like unconscious hallucinations.

As the decision of what to think about is made, executive areas of the brain choose the thought-trace which is stronger. In, other words, if any pre-existing brain activity matches one of your choices, then your brain will be more likely to pick that option as it gets boosted by the pre-existing brain activity.

This would explain, for example, why thinking over and over about something leads to ever more thoughts about it, as it occurs in a positive feedback loop.” (source)

The subjective strength of future thoughts was also dependent on activity housed in the early visual cortex, an area in the brain that receives visual information from the outside world. This suggests that the current state of activity in perceptual areas (which are believed to change randomly) has an influence on how strongly we think about things, the researchers explained. [read more]

Interesting but kind of unsettling.

Ben Carson’s 3 Ambitious Agenda Items for Reforming Public Housing

From The Daily Signal.com (Mar. 18):

Here are three agenda items the HUD secretary says he is working on during 2019:

1. Work Requirements for Rental Assistance

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Under Trump’s budget proposal for HUD, able-bodied adults getting rental assistance would be required to work at least 20 hours per week or attend job training or education classes. The requirement doesn’t include the elderly or disabled.

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2. Private-Sector Help to Rehabilitate Public Housing

Under Carson, a public-private partnership program to get private funds to renovate dilapidated public housing structures has reached more than 100,000 units and drew $5.8 billion in private investment.

Carson said that HUD has accelerated the Rental Assistance Demonstration program, begun in the Obama administration, because it has been a good deal for taxpayers while increasing affordable housing for the needy.

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3. Deregulating a Path to Affordable Housing

Carson has been talking to local government leaders about scaling back land-use regulations that drive up housing costs. He said HUD has been looking at tying federal grants to local governments with deregulation.

That includes zoning regulation, rent control, and environmental rules.

“In terms of what we’re talking about, regulatory and zoning restrictions for single-family homes, you’re adding 25 [percent to] 27 percent to the cost,” Carson said. “So, that’s huge. For multifamily, you’re talking 32.1 percent on average; in a quarter of cases, up to 42 percent. So, you’re talking huge numbers here.” [read more]

Smarter Faster Better Notes

Five Key Team Norms:

1. Teams need to believe that their work is important.
2. Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful.
3. Teams need clear goals and defined roles.
4. Team members need to know they can depend on one another.
5. But, most important, teams need psychological safety.

To create psychological safety, Laszlo Bock said, team leaders needed to model the right behaviors. There were Google-designed checklists they could use: Leaders should not interrupt teammates during conversations, because that will establish an interrupting norm. They should demonstrate they are listening by summarizing what people say after they said it. They should admit what they don’t know. They shouldn’t end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least once. They should encourage people who are upset to express their frustrations, and encourage teammates to respond in nonjudgmental ways. They should call out intergroup conflicts and resolve them through open discussion.

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If you want to become a broker and increase the productivity of your own creative process, there are three things that can help: First, be sensitive to your own experiences. Pay attention to how things make you think and feel. That’s how we distinguish clichés from true insights.

Second, recognize that the panic and stress you feel as you try to create isn’t a sign that everything is falling apart. Rather, it’s the condition that helps make us flexible enough to seize something new. Creative desperation can be critical; anxiety is what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways.

Finally, remember that the relief accompanying a creative breakthrough, while sweet, can also blind us to seeing alternatives. It is critical to maintain some distance from what we create. Without self-criticism, without tension, one idea can quickly crowd out competitors. But we can regain that critical distance by forcing ourselves to critique what we’ve already done, by making ourselves look at it from a completely different perspective, by changing the power dynamics in the room or giving new authority to someone who didn’t have it before.

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The creative process is, in fact, a process, something that can be broken down and explained.

“Creativity is just problem solving,” Ed Catmull told me [the author]. “Once people see it as problem solving, it stops seeming like magic, because it’s not. Brokers are just people who pay more attention to what problems look like and how they’ve been solved before. People who are most creative are the ones who have learned that feeling scared is a good sign. We just have to learn how to trust ourselves enough to let the creativity out.”

Source: Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity (2016) by Charles Duhigg.

The Internet Knows You Better Than Your Spouse Does

From Scientific American.com (Mar. 14):

If you enjoy computerized personality tests, you might consider visiting Apply Magic Sauce. The Web site prompts you to enter some text you have written—such as e-mails or blogs—along with information about your activities on social media. You do not have to provide social media data, but if you want to do it, you either allow Apply Magic Sauce to access your Facebook and Twitter accounts or follow directions for uploading selected data from those sources, such as your history of pressing Facebook’s “like” buttons. Once you click “Make Prediction,” you will see a detailed psychogram, or personality profile, that includes your presumed age and sex, whether you are anxious or easily stressed, how quickly you give in to impulses, and whether you are politically and socially conservative or liberal.

Examining the psychological profile that the algorithm derives from your online traces can certainly be entertaining. On the other hand, the algorithm’s ability to draw inferences about us illustrates how easy it is for anyone who tracks our digital activities to gain insight into our personalities—and potentially invade our privacy. What is more, psychological inferences about us might be exploited to manipulate, say, what we buy or how we vote.

SURPRISING ACCURACY

It seems that our like clicks by themselves can be pretty good indicators of what makes us tick. In 2015 David Stillwell and Youyou Wu, both at the University of Cambridge, and Michal Kosinski of Stanford University demonstrated that algorithms can evaluate what psychologists call the Big Five dimensions of personality quite accurately just by examining a Facebook user’s likes. These dimensions—openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism—are viewed as representing the basic dimensions of personality. The degree to which they are present in individuals describes who those people are.

The researchers trained their algorithm using data from more than 70,000 Facebook users. All the participants had earlier filled out a personality questionnaire, and so their Big Five profile was known. The computer then went through the Facebook accounts of these test subjects looking for likes that are often associated with certain personality characteristics. For example, extroverted users often give a thumbs-up to activities such as “partying” or “dancing.” Users who are especially open may like Spanish painter Salvador Dalí.

Then the investigators had the program examine the likes of other Facebook users. If the software had as few as 10 for analysis, it was able to evaluate that person about as well as a co-worker did. Given 70 likes, the algorithm was about as accurate as a friend. With 300, it was more successful than the person’s spouse. Even more astonishing to the researchers, feeding likes into their program enabled them to predict whether someone suffered from depression or took drugs and even to infer what the individual studied in school.

The project grew out of work that Stillwell began in 2007, when he created a Facebook app that enabled users to fill out a personality questionnaire and get feedback in exchange for allowing investigators to use the data for research. Six million people participated until the app was shut down in 2012, and about 40 percent gave permission for the researchers to obtain access to their past Facebook activities—including their history of likes.

Researchers around the world became very interested in the data set, parts of which were made available in anonymized form for noncommercial research. More than 50 articles and doctoral dissertations have been based on it, in part because the Facebook data reveal what people actually do when they are unaware that their behavior is the subject of research. [read more]

What the AI Overlords could do with this data!

7 Reasons Why the Equality Act Is Anything But

From The Daily Signal.com (Mar. 14):

Most Americans don’t want a nationwide bathroom requirement, health care mandate, or “preferred pronoun” law based on gender identity, but congressional Democrats seem to think it’s time to impose them.
Nancy Pelosi delivered Wednesday on her promise to introduce the so-called Equality Act, which would elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to protected classes in federal anti-discrimination law.
Although that may sound nice in theory, in practice sexual orientation and gender identity policies at the state and local level have caused profound harms to Americans from all walks of life.
How might a sexual orientation and gender identity law on the federal level, as introduced in the House and Senate, affect you and your community? Here are seven ways:

1. It would penalize Americans who don’t affirm new sexual norms or gender ideology.
2. It would compel speech.
3. It could shut down charities. A federal sexual orientation and gender identity law could force any social service organization to open up private facilities—including single-sex bathrooms, showers, and sleeping areas—to members of the opposite sex.
4. It would allow more biological males to defeat girls in sports.
5. It could be used to coerce medical professionals.
6. It could lead to more parents losing custody of their children. The politicization of medicine according to gender ideology will create more conflicts among parents, doctors, and the government. A federal sexual orientation and gender identity law would jeopardize parental rights nationwide.
7. It would enable sexual assault. A complaint under investigation by federal education officials alleges that a boy who identifies as “gender fluid” at Oakhurst Elementary School in Decatur, Georgia, sexually assaulted Pascha Thomas’ 5-year-old daughter in a girls’ restroom. The boy had access to the girls’ restroom because of Decatur City Schools’ transgender restroom policy.

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The Equality Act defies the purpose of anti-discrimination laws. The original Civil Rights Act was enacted to protect African-Americans from being denied access to material goods and services.
The Equality Act, by contrast, would be used as a sword to attack people and force them to adopt new ideologies about human sexuality. [read more]

This is insane legislation. Then again what do you expect from the insane? This act is anything but equal.
More articles about this act:

• Nancy Pelosi’s ‘Equality Act’ Would Be Disastrous. Here Are 5 Likely Victim Groups
• 5 Key Moments From Equality Act Hearing
• BreakPoint: The Equality Act vs. Religious Freedom
• Look to States for Preview of Havoc the ‘Equality Act’ Would Wreak
• Nancy Pelosi’s Equality Act Would Undo Trump’s Most Significant Achievements
• 234 House Democrats, 2 Republicans Co-Sponsor Bill Forcing Schools to Let Male Athletes Compete on Girls Sports Teams

Dangers to avoid when dealing with Scripture

• Unnecessary Elective Surgery –not teaching the whole counsel of God
• Watered-Down Wine –reducing the authority of Scripture
• Hearing Without Hearing –not being attentive to the words of the Bible
• Cold, Dead Orthodoxy – missing the lifestyle that should result from reading God’s Word
• Arrogant Reading – intentionally or unintentionally interpreting the Bible for our own purposes
• Doctrine-less Discipleship – practicing discipleship without knowing the teachings of Scripture
• Christian Pole-Sitting – reading God’s Word in isolation from a supportive community of believers

Source: “Can You Trust the Bible?” Course: Week Seven from DTS.edu.

Finland's Government Collapsed Under Weight Of Socialized Healthcare

From Zero Hedge.com (Mar. 13):

Healthcare costs, which are high because of governments, have caused the collapse of the Finnish government. Prime Minister Juha Sipila and the rest of the cabinet resigned after the governing coalition failed to pass reforms in parliament to the country’s regional government and health services, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Finland, like much of the developed world, faces an aging population, with around 26 percent of its citizens expected to be over 65 by the year 2030, an increase of 5 percent from today.  The strain on the socialized medical system is impossible to ignore, and cannot be fixed by more government interference.

And the problems with socialism continue, as money is taken from some and given to others, eventually, the takers will outnumber the makers.

The only reform that could possibly help these failing systems is to have the government step back and let competition and the free market thrive. Of course, that’s the one thing governments cannot and will not do because it means giving up power and control over people’s lives.

Reuters reports that soaring treatment costs and longer life spans have particularly affected Nordic countries. It isn’t just Finland.  Sweden and Denmark face similar bleak outlooks for their socialism as well. [read more]

Tax Lessons

• There is no such thing as a free lunch. Except in very special circumstances, cutting tax rates does not stimulate the economy to increase revenues.
• Taxes collected do not measure the social cost of government; spending is a much better metric. If the government cuts tax collections without restraining spending, all it’s done is put off the reckoning of who will bear the cost.
• Tax policy changes create winners and losers, both within and across generations. Talking about this is not class warfare.
• Taxes entail economic cost. They replace the incentive to work, save, and invest, and encourage taxpayers to engage in unproductive tax shelters. Centuries of experience proves that taxpayers do respond to those incentives, but there is considerable disagreement about how much they respond. Nonetheless, it is apparent that the all-in economic cost of a dollar of government services is significantly more than a dollar.
• If we value services the government provides more than their cost, we should grow up and tax ourselves to pay for them. If not, they should be eliminated.*
• A large and growing number of spending programs are now run through the tax system. Policymakers should apply the same scrutiny to those “tax expenditures” as to traditional spending. If they are not worth the cost. they should be eliminated.* And if they would work better as a traditional spending program, they should be removed from the tax code.
• The tax code could be made simpler and more efficient by eliminating preferences and loopholes, consolidating tax subsidies with similar aims (such as the vast array of education credits and deductions), and eliminating the ultra-complex AMT. This is easy for tax policy experts to say and hard for politicians to do (because those preferences and loopholes all have powerful constituencies).

Source: Taxes in America. What Everyone Needs to Know (2013) by Leonard E. Burman & Joel Slemrod.

A couple of article on taxes:

• Some Thoughts, Facts, and Charts about Taxes: Bring Us Back To 1913; Or Better Yet, Bring Us Back To 1912!
• The Real History of the American Income Tax

*Like that would happen. Taxes laws have too much power in them.

Christian Faith and Reason

Militant atheists and secular progressives think that faith and reason are polar opposites of one another. This is far from the truth. If anything they are complementary of one another.

Below are Bible verses that show reason isn’t a foreign concept in Christianity. The italics are my emphasis.

• But these speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves.* (Jude 1:10)
• And Jesus said to him, "You shall love Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." (Matthew 22:37) (Deut. 6:5)
• And according to Paul's custom, he went in to them and reasoned with them from the Scriptures on three Sabbaths, opening and setting forth that the Messiah must have suffered and to have risen from the dead, and that this is the Messiah, Jesus, whom I preach to you. (Acts 17:2-3)
• If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me. But if I do, even if you do not believe Me, believe the works, that you may perceive and may believe that the Father is in Me, and I in Him.^ (John 10:37-38)
• Do not quench the Spirit.
  Do not despise prophecies.
  Prove all things, hold fast that which is good. (1 Thessalonians 5:19-21)
• Come now and let us reason together, says Lord: Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they are red as the crimson, they shall be like wool. (Isaiah 1:18)
• Get wisdom, get understanding; do not forsake and do not turn away from the words of my mouth. (Proverbs 4:5)

A good book on faith and reason is Dr. Michael Guillen’s book Can a Smart Person Believe in God? (2009). He says yes.

H/T to the book Forensic Faith: A Homicide Detective Makes the Case for a More Reasonable, Evidential Christian Faith (2017) by J. Warner Wallace.

One final thought. Even militant atheists have to have faith. They fly on airplanes of course. How do they know the plane they are flying on won’t have a malfunction in midflight? Or a bird flies in an engine? Or if the pilot is drunk or overly tired? The answer is they don’t.

*In other words, don’t let your passions overrule your common sense.

^Actions speak louder than words. Jesus doesn’t exclude Himself from this proverb.

Here Are 5 Hysterical Environmentalist Claims in Modern History

From The Daily Signal.com (Mar. 11):

Peddlers of the Green New Deal know that the only way for their radical agenda to become reality is if Americans buy into the wildest claims of climate extremists.

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Here are five of the biggest misses:

1. Population Bomb to Cause Global Famine by 2000

The first Earth Day, in 1970, was filled with hyperbole and exaggerations about mankind’s future. Much of the craziness was unearthed in a remarkable exposein 2000 by Reason contributor Ronald Bailey.

One of the most common ideas, in a throwback to Malthus, was that the global food supply simply couldn’t keep up with population growth.

Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University—now named the University of North Texas—wrote about how mass starvation was in the world’s near-term future.

Ah, yes, all the scientists agree that the world will end by the year 2000.

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2. Air Pollution Will Be So Bad That City Dwellers Will Have to Wear Gas Masks

Another grand prediction at Earth Day 1970 (it was full of doozies) was that the air pollution problem common to many American cities would continue to get exponentially worse without widespread government control of the American way of life.

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3. Entire Nations Could Be Wiped Out by 1999

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., a self-avowed socialist, recently claimed that the world would end in 12 years if we don’t radically transform our economy to combat climate change.

The decade long window of pronounced doom seems to be a favorite among climate alarmists.

…………………

4.  Ice Caps Will Melt Away

Predictions about the polar ice caps melting have been common. Dramatic pictures of polar bears floating on tiny icebergs have been some of the iconic images of the climate change movement.

Former Vice President Al Gore said at a conference in 2009 that a scientist predicted a “75 percent chance that the entire polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice free within five to seven years.”

In 2014, the ice caps were still there. In fact, it’s 2019 and the ice caps are still there.

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5.  The Coming Ice Age

In 1958, Betty Friedan, one of the leading thinkers of radical, modern feminism, wrote an article in Harper’s magazine describing the “coming ice age.”

It seems the mixing of climate science and radical left-wing politics is nothing new.

Friedan based her article on the work of two scientists, geophysicist Maurice Ewing, director of Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Observatory, and geologist-meteorologist William Donn.

She explained how these scientists foresaw American port cities being drowned by rising oceans, and how a giant glacier would cover Europe and North America. The scientists described conditions by which the earth would dramatically warm and then cool, sending us into another ice age.

These scientists were more cautious in their predictions than others, but this didn’t stop Friedan from speculating that, based on their calculations about the rate of warming, a layman could conclude that “the Arctic Ocean will be open and the Ice Age [will] begin in another twenty years.”   [read more]

New Bill to Tax Stock Market Could Devastate Ordinary Savings and Retirement

From The Daily Signal.com (Mar. 6):

A new tax proposal in Congress aims to stick it to the rich. But if passed, it could devastate the U.S. financial system and ruin the value of ordinary Americans’ retirement accounts.

The proposal, introduced by a team of Democrats* in the House and Senate, would assess a penalty each time someone sells a stock, bond, or other financial instrument. It would tax each of the roughly 10 billion U.S. equity market trades each year, among other transactions.

The goal, presumably, is to hit the rich. But the stock market is not just a tool for the wealthy.

Some of the largest shareholders and beneficiaries of our modern financial system are pension funds for public-sector employees and private retirement account holders. Firefighters, teachers, university endowments, and private retirement savings all benefit from sophisticated equity markets. Many employers issue short-term debt to cover payroll and young start-ups sell securities to fund their growth.

This proposal would handicap markets for U.S. saving and investment. It would levy a tax of 0.1 percent on the value of every stock, bond, and derivative transaction in the U.S. or made by a U.S. resident.

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The tax would also increase costs for small businesses and start-ups trying to raise funds. A start-up that sells $50 million in securities would now owe a $50,000 tax—not a trivial sum.

But most of all, the tax would hurt ordinary American savers.  [read more]

*Of, course it is from the Dems. They never met a tax they disliked.

Why We Should Teach Girls to Be Individualists Instead of Feminists

From FEE.org:

The first problem with feminism, regardless of what meaning you put into it, is that even the term itself singles out a particular group of people—women—by appealing to the "feminine." It is often argued that the term is used to outline the target group of the movement. However, when one group marks itself out, it contributes to the segmentation of society. Nothing is wrong with this until the group starts calling for privileges and unnecessary concessions. This special treatment is justified by claiming a certain sect of society is responsible for their woes.

Opportunity versus Outcome

The feminist movement has been especially effective at promoting all sorts of measures aimed at ensuring women are as free to pursue their goals as are men, such as gender quotas. It is key to distinguish between equality of opportunity—which is one of the pillars of individualism—and equality of outcome, which undermines individualism.

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Why Compete with Men When You Can Be an Individual?

Using your competitor’s tactics can help you maintain your place, but it won’t help you win the race. For this very reason, feminism hasn’t won yet and never will if it carries on in its current form. The victory of feminism is only possible if it dissolves into individualism.

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Individualism is a philosophy that treats all individuals equally, regardless of their gender, race, upbringing etc. It is a merit-based system of beliefs and, therefore, is mainly concerned with the value every individual can bring to the world. Individualism encourages us to leverage what we have and to harness our new sides.

Teaching girls to compete like men is a flawed and poisonous strategy. It’s time we started teaching girls to compete like individuals and to use feminine to their advantage in fair and value creation-oriented competition based on equality of opportunity.  [read more]

Everyone regardless of their gender should be individualists.

Don’t look now: why you should be worried about machines reading your emotions

From The Guardian.com (Mar. 6):

In recent years, technology companies have started using Ekman’s method to train algorithms to detect emotion from facial expressions. Some developers claim that automatic emotion detection systems will not only be better than humans at discovering true emotions by analyzing the face, but that these algorithms will become attuned to our innermost feelings, vastly improving interaction with our devices.

But many experts studying the science of emotion are concerned that these algorithms will fail once again, making high-stakes decisions about our lives based on faulty science.

Emotion detection technology requires two techniques: computer vision, to precisely identify facial expressions, and machine learning algorithms to analyze and interpret the emotional content of those facial features.

Typically, the second step employs a technique called supervised learning, a process by which an algorithm is trained to recognize things it has seen before. The basic idea is that if you show the algorithm thousands and thousands of images of happy faces with the label “happy” when it sees a new picture of a happy face, it will, again, identify it as “happy”.

…………….

Amazon, Microsoft and IBM now advertise “emotion analysis” as one of their facial recognition products, and a number of smaller firms, such as Kairos and Eyeris, have cropped up, offering similar services to Affectiva.

Beyond market research, emotion detection technology is now being used to monitor and detect driver impairment, test user experience for video games and to help medical professionals assess the wellbeing of patients.  [read more]

Yea, the AI Overlords will use this algorithm to determine who is a threat to them or not.

15 Things Conservatives Say Democrats’ Election Bill Would Do

From The Daily Signal.com (Mar. 4):

House Democrats tentatively have set a vote this week on election legislation that conservatives say would inhibit states’ powers to set qualifications for voters, remove safeguards on voter registration rolls, and undermine the integrity of elections.

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Here are 15 things conservative opponents say you should know about the proposed legislation, highlighted from a fact sheet created by The Heritage Foundation. Analysts with Heritage say the bill would:

1. Seize the authority of states to regulate voter registration and the voting process by forcing states to implement early voting, automatic voter registration, same-day registration, online voter registration, and no-fault absentee balloting.

2. Make it easier to commit voter fraud and promote chaos at the polls through same-day registration, as election officials have no time to verify the accuracy of voter registration information and cannot anticipate the number of voters, ballots, and precinct workers that will be needed.

3. Hurt voter turnout through early voting by diffusing the intensity of get-out-the-vote efforts while raising the cost of campaigns. Voters who vote early don’t have the same information as those who vote on Election Day, missing late-breaking developments that could affect their choices.

4. Degrade the accuracy of registration lists by automatically registering individuals from state databases, such as DMV and welfare offices, by registering large numbers of ineligible voters, including aliens as well as multiple or duplicate registrations of the same individuals.

5. Constitute a recipe for massive voter registration fraud by hackers and cybercriminals through online voter registration not tied to an existing state record such as a driver’s license.

6. Require states to count ballots cast by voters outside of their assigned precinct, overriding the precinct system used by almost all states that allows election officials to monitor votes, staff polling places, provide enough ballots, and prevent election fraud. Mandates no-fault absentee ballots, which are the tool of choice for vote thieves.  [read more]

Yea, the bill sounds crappy. A complete federal gov’t takeover of the election system. Below is the rest of the bill:

1. Prevent election officials from checking the eligibility and qualifications of voters and removing ineligible voters.
2. Cripple the effectiveness of state voter ID laws by allowing individuals to vote without photo identification and merely sign a statement in which they claim they are who they say they are.
3. Violate the First Amendment and perhaps cover a vast range of legal activity.
4. Expand government regulation and censorship of election campaigns and political activity and speech, including online and policy-related speech.
5. Reduce the number of Federal Election Commission members from six to five, allowing the political party with three commission seats to control the commission and engage in partisan enforcement activities.
6. Prohibit state election officials from participating in federal elections and impose numerous other “ethics” rules that are unconstitutional or unfairly restrict political activity.
7. Require states to restore the ability of felons to vote the moment they are out of prison.
8. Transfer the power to draw congressional districts from state legislatures to “independent” commissions whose members are unaccountable to voters.
9. Violate separation of powers and directly interfere with the president’s constitutional duties.