The Text Of Posts Half Written

Following up the previous post, here's the contents of some drafts I'm never going to finish.

A Capitalist Considers Climate Change

As I write this, it's a warm afternoon in late October. Leaves are falling outside, and I'm wondering if I should do any homework before dinner. It seems like an idyllic day during Indian Summer--or is it something more? The scientific evidence would seem to suggest so.

The considerable resistance to this notion is, I believe, a product of how the issue is framed. Generally, those on the left will say you have two options. One the one hand you can be conservative Christian who wants to cut down the rainforest and enslave puppies, damn the consequences! On the other, you can be a progressive environmentalist who loves pansies, rainbows, and Mother Earth.

This post is not going to be a discussion of whether climate change is a real thing. No, today we're talking about how to face it.

Polarization of not-inherently-partisan matters is a feature of our political system, and the climate change debate is just another example. Either you deny global warming, or think anthropogenic climate change is the worst thing since unsliced bread. Saying otherwise invites criticism from both left and right. Being a libertarian, I'm already used to that. What's one more issue?

As with so many things, the climate change debate is a false dichotomy. Leftists believe that Gaia must be obeyed, and the right believes Terra is ours to do with as we will.

But nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Rationality and Leaving People Alone

Libertarians, and Objectivists in particular, have this supposition that if everyone behaved rationally (or their perception of "rationally;" I'm realizing more and more that rationality is a very, very complex mode of thinking) no one would violate one another's person or property. I think this is accurate, but it's not really very intuitive. Some very intelligent people, like Jerry Pournelle, are completely confused by it. Discussing his Political Axes:

On the anti-statist end of the scale we can see the same tendency: extreme anti-rationalism ends with the Bakunin type of anarchist, who blows things up and destroys for the sake of destruction; the utterly rationalist anti-statist, on the other hand, persuades himself that somehow there are natural rights which everyone ought to recognize, and if only the state would get out of the way we'd all live in harmony...

The problem, I think, is a misunderstanding about egoism. I've been meaning to rectify this for some time.

Egoism is a recognition of your nature as a self-interested being. In the context of a rationalist philosophy such as Objectivism, it also implies the fact that other individuals are self-interested, too.

Towards Single Transferable Vote

For those who don't know what Single Transferable Vote is, the YouTuber CGP Grey has an excellent series of videos about voting systems called Politics in the Animal Kingdom. I've included the video on STV at the bottom of this post.

Nearly everyone you meet says they think our elections are unfair and would like to see a third party enter the political arena. Nevertheless, Libertarians and Greens remain by the sidelines for a very simple reason: the spoiler effect. Minor parties usually attract more voters from one of the major parties than the other, leading to a win for the major party they least prefer. Consequently, disaffected citizens continue voting for one of the major parties, simply to prevent the other from gaining a majority.

How can we escape this trap? I'm glad you asked. Enter: the Single Transferable Vote.

I won't attempt explaining STV.

[There was originally a video in here]

Be sure to view the footnotes

Notes On Things Not Written

ICYMI, about a week ago I tweeted the titles of various posts that had been languishing in my drafts, with whatever summary could be crammed into the remaining characters. Surprisingly, it wasn't very hard, which suggests a lot of these ideas didn't need a full-fledged post in the first place. (My thought was to start using my public Tumblr for these, but after that last update....)

However, there's a few that had something approaching an outline, and I'd like to archive those before deleting the posts from my drafts.

Daylight Savings Decentralization

One of my last false starts on a political post before I really began doubting the truth of non-aggression libertarianism. Relevant CGP Grey video.

Twice a year, the inhabitants of a certain nations set their clocks forward or backwards an hour, with the nominal intention of extending the minutes of daylight during the summer months. 

Premise: DST not worth it
States control time zones
No state has incentive to switch stronger than incentive to stay
Failure of decentralization

Unbundling Higher Education

This post was heavily influenced by my experience at Purdue University, where "research" and "undergraduate" were rarely heard in the same sentence. Everything in undergrad was geared towards training, not stretching the frontiers of what's possible--and the occasional grad student or post-doc had been there so long that it made me want to cry.

At the same time, I was learning a great deal about entrepreneurship, thanks to my attempt to earn their certificate in that field. In fact, one of our assignments was to devise a business model for the university.

What struck me was how much interest there was in money for research despite the fact I was already paying more than I could afford, and getting nothing out of research dollars. My thought was "how can we focus on making college cheaper," not "how can we milk the government research grant machine for all it's worth."

This gave me the idea to unbundle higher education. If college is about getting a degree, it should be about getting a degree. And if it's about discovering new things, it should be about discovering new things. And since those two field didn't overlap for the student, it made no sense for then to overlap for faculty (especially in the midst of a PhD glut).

Turns out Purdue is just crap--though they might be the first school to adopt equity student finance--and most colleges do mix training with research, which can help undergrads get jobs after leaving. I'd already realized this by the time I write the actually text below, but was still hedging. I'm archiving this, in part as a reminded that colleges don't have their business model figured out at all.

In the course of my college education, I've often wondered just why people spent so much time talking about research. As far as I could see, it was a distraction from the real purpose: learning a trade. In retrospect, this is a simplistic view, particularly in my chosen field of engineering. Research, design, and development have a mutualistic symbiotic relationship. Nevertheless, I think there is a case to be made for unbundling higher education.
Our institutions of higher learning do not focus on a single core competency. That our colleges support athletic teams and offer academic degrees should be clear evidence of this. Just as no college devotes its entire athletic budget to a single sport, so too does the academic sphere split it's attentions. Though the variations are countless, the general divide (that we will consider, at least) is between research and training.
The "research university" was invented to meet two conflicting needs: to impart existing information, and to obtain new knowledge.
Introduction: where did the research university come from?

• Two conflicting needs: impart and obtain knowledge

• Manpower problem--insufficient number of people trained in technical fields

• "Solution": have researchers teach basic concepts

Why this model failed

• Research has become increasingly divorced from implementation

• Undergrads like me don't benefit from PhDs teaching introductory courses

• Students going into industry aren't properly prepared for company life

21st Century Solution: separate training and research

• Private research firms have existed for a long time: it's time for a renaissance

• Graduate schools + research institutes should be more separated from ugrad education

• We have the manpower, let's focus on core competencies

Conclusion: the future of higher education

• More technical world blurring boundaries between amateurs and professionals

• Training is more important than research for many careers

• Stop depriving both groups of their maximum capacity

Notes

• Pre-research ugrad vs training ugrad

• Professional glut

• Internet education options

• Model allows for specialization

• For-profit institutions (advantageous for researchers, who aren't relying on gov't $$$)

Frontiers and the nature of Morality

Consisted entirely of this quite by Rose Wilder Lane

“Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.”