kapitza

The practical effect of the shift from patronage to grants is a transition from multipolar to unipolar science. Any one rich patron may or may not have an instinct for what research deserves support, but their collective judgment should be a fairly wise crowd. Few rich people were born yesterday.

In a grant-funded ecosystem, even multiple funding institutions which are branches of multiple governments tend to merge into one big meta-institution, with one big opinion. This is how we get intellectual monocultures across many fields, especially fields without practical feedback from a commercial application. One big opinion is hard to change. Unfortunately, science is kind of about changing our minds...

That would come as news to Singapore:

https://www.mfa.gov.sg/content/mfa/media_centre/press_room/p...

Not that our society is Nazi -- it's pretty much the opposite. Nonetheless, the feeling of everything becoming poisoned by politics is inescapable. If you prefer you can go over to Breitbart and read about how Twitter is a mess because it doesn't respect free speech and banned Milo. Somehow I don't think this will leave you feeling any better.

All questions about the legitimacy of climate science are questions about whether simulations of the earth's atmosphere ("general circulation models") can be validated or have predictive power, at least with realistic computing resources.

However, the big-O question is an interesting reflection on the ratio between how much scientific communication effort goes into influencing the public, versus educating the public.

There is also not much funding available for studying positive impacts of global warming. Scientists have known about the Arrhenius effect for over a century, and in pre-WWII texts the treatment is generally "isn't it cool that burning fossil fuels not only gives us power and light, but is good for agriculture and might prevent the next ice age?" The past is a foreign country, and in that country it was generally assumed that warm periods were good for humans and cold ones were bad. (Mostly because ag yields.) They didn't even really think about it -- and nor do we think much about it, either. Plus ca change...

Upvote if you didn't know the answer and had to Google it? Downvote if everybody knows the answer and it's a stupid question?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and...

Japan's backward immigration policies may change:

http://www.japantoday.com/category/kuchikomi/view/ready-or-n...

We need to build a net. They have to go back!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/opinion/americas-sweatshop...

By "no one questioned" you mean "no one even referred to." Except for the preface of the First Folio.

A 16th-century alderman in Stratford is not an "educated" status. Most experts of any persuasion agree that Shakespeare's father was probably illiterate. He signed his name with a mark:

http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/10-things-you-didn...

The classical education received by a top-tier nobleman of the time was far superior (at least in terms of Greek and Latin) to anything available today. The number of Englishmen who received this quality of education was incredibly small.

A better analogy might be, say, NFL quarterbacks. If I see someone who can win the Super Bowl at quarterback, and I'm not sure about his identity, I can be pretty sure he's spent most of his life training as a QB, was a high-school star and probably a college star, etc. That's going to be a pretty small set. If I have a data point that tells me that someone with a biography like mine was named Super Bowl MVP, my Bayesian trust in that data point is going to be pretty low.

It's not even clear that the "Heminges and Condell" text was written by Heminges and Condell. More likely it was just written by Jonson.

Your priors need to be adjusted a little to work with Elizabethan texts. A good rule is that if it's printed on paper and claims to convey some factual information, it is probably in some way a lie.

This was because people often got in trouble for writing things that other people didn't want written. So think of it a little like the Soviet Union. Except in the Soviet Union, there is only one KGB.

Eg, if person A is an earl and person B is not, and person B offends person A, person A can pretty much do anything to person B, up to and including having person B whacked. And there are a lot of people with rank A.

In an environment like this, you're going to develop a literature that is very careful about writing some shit down just because it's true. So nobody really trusts anything in print. So why not be in the habit of constantly embroidering, which is after all an art form of its own? What you write down is what should be true, according to whoever you want to please today.

So it's not that the Elizabethans were all chronic liars, or whatever. But decoding what really happened in a period like this, from the various lies and embroideries that people wrote on paper, is never a task to be taken lightly.

http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/firstfolio.html

Even in this text, the connection is pretty artful. And the Elizabethan era is not exactly well-known for frank, transparent confessions in print. The Folio is a rather slender evidentiary basis for supporting a large breeding population of zebras.

You have to remember how status-conscious the Elizabethan era was. Imagine if a scathing academic novel becomes a bestseller, nominally fiction, but obviously a scathing roman-a-clef about the NYU English Department. But the name of the author, as shown on the book, is the name of an illiterate immigrant from Senegal, who happens to sell sunglasses on the pavement outside the NYU English Department.

A zebra would be that the immigrant is actually a brilliant writer, who has overheard many conversations among the professors. A horse would be that the novel is written by one of the professors, who asked the immigrant his name and thought it sounded cool. Or maybe was the immigrant's lover. Or maybe it's just a coincidence.

We are inclined to find the "zebra" version heartwarming and believable, because we believe in the American dream. Elizabethans did not believe in the American dream. They would have found the "country-bumpkin actor wrote courtly sonnets" theory preposterous, and paid very little attention to attestations on paper -- which were notoriously fraudulent. Today's professors have all kinds of problems in figuring out which Elizabethan actually wrote what.

All Oxfordians (people who believe "Shakespeare" was a beard/pen name for Edward de Vere) agree that Shakespeare was an actor, ie, "player." It's also well-known that acting was a low-status occupation in Elizabethan society, explaining why people mocked Shakespeare's coat of arms.

Writing, especially writing erudite verse in the Tudor court style, was not a low-status occupation in Elizabethan society. Anonymity/pseudonymity was not universal, but common.

So an Oxfordian would ask: why is Shakespeare, as a social climber, awarded arms for a low-status profession that's considered basically artisanal in caste, leading to general mockery, when in fact he practices the high-status profession of courtly playwright/poet?

Social climbers were not at all unheard of in the Elizabethan world. What is unheard of is a social climber who is not a social lion, whose resume is well-attested, whose presence and personality is constantly documented -- like, say, Ben Jonson.

Doctors say: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses. Maybe Shakespeare wasn't a social climber at all, but remained a country bumpkin his whole life, as he moved from stagehand to actor to what we'd now call a producer? Maybe the plays and sonnets read like late Tudor court poetry because they are late Tudor court poetry? Maybe, like much Tudor court poetry, it was written pseudonymously, not for publication?

The one coincidence that Oxfordians have to explain is how Vere wound up publishing under the name of this real individual, Shakespeare. Who (like Vere himself, of course) was involved in the theater world. Pseudonyms are typical in Tudor court poetry, but "beards" aren't.

My guess, an idea I've never seen anyone else broach for obvious reasons, is that Will Shakespeare's first occupation when he came to London was... male prostitute. Again, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses. Maybe Vere just thought this week's boy had a pretty name.

Here's some Tudor court poetry, by the way:

http://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/what-is-desire-by-edw...

Note the second stanza, which sounds exactly like Shakespeare to my ear. No one else from the period sounds like this. An Oxfordian would call this Shakespearean juvenilia.

Both these groups have full access to the alien records and have upgraded leading personnel to a very high level. Apparently there was a full-out psychic duel between Thiel and Altman at Bilderberg this year -- no word on who prevailed, but both seem to have survived. This time. "Brexit" may be a sign, though.

When you look at how ordinary people choose a city to live in, the most important variable is who else gets to live there. Everything else is a rounding error.

Boulder, Colorado is a beautiful little city. Its population is roughly the same as that of West Point, Liberia. Compare a city with the legislation and architecture of West Point, but the population of Boulder, to a city with the legislation and architecture of Boulder, and the population of West Point. Which would you rather live in?

When you treat human beings as generic, interchangeable parts, you're missing the first lesson of Christopher Alexander's approach: design real solutions for real people. You probably wouldn't fund a YC company that assumed the world consisted of 6 billion interchangeable customers.

Apparently this lifestyle is only available if you're a (to use the author's term) "Marxist." But then again, I suppose anyone can read Negri and Hardt if they're patient enough.

No word on what, if any, ideological filters Google is supposed to apply to its contractor pool so this doesn't happen again. Perhaps they could ask trap questions about postcolonial theory, rejecting anyone who answered correctly...