Questions for Penn & Teller on TAM7

[skepticality]

The entire presentation that was done about the Skeptools website was ALL about how to promote Skeptical thought through the internet!

I'm trying to figure out how any of the talks had anything to do with the whole Skepticism in the Age of The Internet thing. Which is why I wonder why they bother with themes.

For the record, I enjoyed Adam's talk.

 

[lippard]

The entire presentation that was done about the Skeptools website was ALL about how to promote Skeptical thought through the internet!

Likewise for Tracy King's Sunday presentation on making an effective viral video.

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

The entire presentation that was done about the Skeptools website was ALL about how to promote Skeptical thought through the internet!

Yeah, I was referring to the lectures, not the papers.

 

[Philip]

I'd ask Penn whether he thinks that not only the government but also private entities can violate human rights and, if he does think so, whether it is inconsistent for a self-professed libertarian to violate others' rights.

 

[Phlebas]

I'd ask Penn whether he thinks that not only the government but also private entities can violate human rights and, if he does think so, whether it is inconsistent for a self-professed libertarian to violate others' rights.

Thank Jebus that won't lead to a boring political conversation

Maybe we should all take turns asking him to give us a hint about how the bullet trick works.

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

Maybe we should all take turns asking him to give us a hint about how the bullet trick works.

At TAM 4 (I think), I was talking with Jamy Ian Swiss about magic tricks, and basically asked him if magicians all knew how each others tricks worked. He said, yes, most magicians either know how a given trick works, or can figure it out fairly easily. However, he said the bullet trick is one that very few people know how it works.

 

[aofl]

At TAM 4 (I think), I was talking with Jamy Ian Swiss about magic tricks, and basically asked him if magicians all knew how each others tricks worked. He said, yes, most magicians either know how a given trick works, or can figure it out fairly easily. However, he said the bullet trick is one that very few people know how it works.

You know, if we held Penn down and tickled him long enough, I bet he'd tell us.

That or pee his pants.

A

 

[Elentar]

Libertarianism

Libertarianism seems to pop up quite a bit at Tam. As one attendant put it, it's supported by a small but vocal minority. What I am about to say should probably be it's own topic, but I thought I would respond here.

Intellectuals tend to like isms--it used to be said that Marxism was the opiate of the intellectuals. There is nothing so seductive as the promise of a one size fits all principled solution to everything. But of course, there is no such solution. Life is messy. You can't understand it all in a sound bite. Libertarianism is the ism de jour.

The issue of public schools comes up because America put a lot of money into high school education, with outstanding results. This needs to be followed up with college education, both in intellectual areas and in trades. The cost of not doing so is that you have to pay for ignorance, which is a great deal more expensive--prison costs about $70,000 per inmate. In what way is this Libertarian?

I suspect that Penn's unstructured time was an attempt to advance the cause of Libertarianism without appearing to be dedicating the time to it. Teller himself is an Objectivist. Now, Ayn Rand is attractive to all 20 year olds, who consider themselves the unappreciated creator. If you're still an Objectivist at 30, you're a slacker, and if you're still an Objectivist at 40, you haven't being paying attention (kind of like being a Catholic at 40).

But P&T are not the only Libertarians in the group. Michael Shermer threw in his opinion that anyone who thinks government can do anything is still caught up in a faith based point of view--ignoring the now well known statistics in health care: Canada 8-9% of GDP (starved, but providing adequate care), France and Northern Europe 12% of GDP (lavish), America 15% of GDP (one quarter excluded, another quarter cheated). Adjust for GDP, and America pays double for half the health care. There are economies of scale in government management, which Tommy Douglas used to provide a surplus in health care and retire his government deficit. This is old news--60 years old. The only way you could not know this is to be in the grip of an ideology.

Government is good at infrastructure, private industry is not--look at California's experience with power, or the major power blackout in the northeast a few years ago. This, again, is old news. What gives? And why are so called rationalists still spouting this crap? The evidence is in, several times over.

Any opinions?

 

[lippard]

Libertarianism seems to pop up quite a bit at Tam. As one attendant put it, it's supported by a small but vocal minority. What I am about to say should probably be it's own topic, but I thought I would respond here.

Intellectuals tend to like isms--it used to be said that Marxism was the opiate of the intellectuals. There is nothing so seductive as the promise of a one size fits all principled solution to everything. But of course, there is no such solution. Life is messy. You can't understand it all in a sound bite. Libertarianism is the ism de jour.

The issue of public schools comes up because America put a lot of money into high school education, with outstanding results. This needs to be followed up with college education, both in intellectual areas and in trades. The cost of not doing so is that you have to pay for ignorance, which is a great deal more expensive--prison costs about $70,000 per inmate. In what way is this Libertarian?

I suspect that Penn's unstructured time was an attempt to advance the cause of Libertarianism without appearing to be dedicating the time to it. Teller himself is an Objectivist. Now, Ayn Rand is attractive to all 20 year olds, who consider themselves the unappreciated creator. If you're still an Objectivist at 30, you're a slacker, and if you're still an Objectivist at 40, you haven't being paying attention (kind of like being a Catholic at 40).

But P&T are not the only Libertarians in the group. Michael Shermer threw in his opinion that anyone who thinks government can do anything is still caught up in a faith based point of view--ignoring the now well known statistics in health care: Canada 8-9% of GDP (starved, but providing adequate care), France and Northern Europe 12% of GDP (lavish), America 15% of GDP (one quarter excluded, another quarter cheated). Adjust for GDP, and America pays double for half the health care. There are economies of scale in government management, which Tommy Douglas used to provide a surplus in health care and retire his government deficit. This is old news--60 years old. The only way you could not know this is to be in the grip of an ideology.

Government is good at infrastructure, private industry is not--look at California's experience with power, or the major power blackout in the northeast a few years ago. This, again, is old news. What gives? And why are so called rationalists still spouting this crap? The evidence is in, several times over.

Any opinions?

Your argument against objectivism is simply ad hominem. I know it's possible to make better arguments against it than that.

The main factor for marginal improvements in education is not how much money is spent, as the McKinsey & Co. comparison of educational outcomes across OECD nations showed. The countries producing the best educations aren't the ones that spend the most money, they are the ones that do the most to make sure they have good teachers, and while there is no doubt a minimum amount of money required to ensure that, merely paying more doesn't do the job.

http://lippard.blogspot.com/2007/11/how-to-improve-education.html

Your health care statistics are a rather incomplete picture. You need to look at quality as well as availability. The main issue with making health care a public good is that it is overconsumed and has to be rationed.

Your power example regarding California is a poor one, since the problems were caused by the inept way in which California partially deregulated, leaving in place a system that could be gamed by companies like Enron. If you read _The Smartest Guys in the Room_, you'll see that the energy traders were a lot smarter than the regulators, and were following the rules that government set down. Incompetent regulation doesn't make for a good argument against deregulation.

I don't think it's accurate to argue that all government infrastructure is well built, maintained, and run, and all private infrastructure is not. I can think of counterexamples on both sides of that equation--the crumbling highway and bridge infrastructure, for example, is a poorly maintained public infrastructure. Internet backbones are a well maintained private infrastructure.

I think there are lots of grounds on which to criticize libertarianism, especially libertarianism founded on natural rights claims. But I think the best political philosophy is political skepticism that demands empirical justification for claims. There is a strain of libertarianism that is more pragmatic, consequentialist, and empirical; Will Wilkinson at the Cato Institute is a good advocate of that position, as is David Friedman (Milton Friedman's son). Wilkinson refers to himself as a "market liberal" and is an advocate of views that have sometimes been called "liberaltarianism."

http://lippard.blogspot.com/2008/06/liberaltarianism.html

 

[Skeptic Guy]

I would ask why there is only one hole in each pane of glass in the bullet catching stage act. I suspect it's because two holes would shatter the glass completely. But they could not answer even if I could ask and I could not ask because I respect them and the act. Somebody else ask em, K?

I saw the BS episode on NASA not too long ago and their stance on NASA is that they are really good at the science and should continue to manage robotic exploration of space, but they should leave manned exploration to the private sector. They seemed to believe that the private sector could do manned flight safer than the government. I'm not sure that I buy that. Cheaper, maybe, but I don't know that they have the magic sauce to make it safer.

And the public school thing is just silly.

 

[lippard]

I saw the BS episode on NASA not too long ago and their stance on NASA is that they are really good at the science and should continue to manage robotic exploration of space, but they should leave manned exploration to the private sector. They seemed to believe that the private sector could do manned flight safer than the government. I'm not sure that I buy that. Cheaper, maybe, but I don't know that they have the magic sauce to make it safer.

There is certainly an internal division within NASA between manned and unmanned exploration, with the latter attracting the larger budget while producing fewer useful results. The main argument for the former is to generate public support. so that the latter can still go on.

Private space companies probably have greater economic incentives to make it safer than governments do. Private space companies look like they're the way things are going in the U.S., so the thesis will get tested by Virgin Galactic.

And the public school thing is just silly.

I think there's a stronger argument for government to be in the business of providing educational funding and setting educational standards than there is for it to be in the business of operating schools. Those are certainly logically separable cases.

 

[Kil]

I have a concern about the amount of libertarianism being promoted at TAM, though I think that TAM5 was far worse. I don't know if it's on purpose or if it's just that several prominent skeptics also happen to be libertarians.

I asked Penn if he thought that libertarianism should be the default politic of skeptics. He said "no." Fair enough. I really wanted to ask Shermer the same question, but I didn't get the chance...

 

[JoeEllison]

There is certainly an internal division within NASA between manned and unmanned exploration, with the latter attracting the larger budget while producing fewer useful results. The main argument for the former is to generate public support. so that the latter can still go on.

Private space companies probably have greater economic incentives to make it safer than governments do. Private space companies look like they're the way things are going in the U.S., so the thesis will get tested by Virgin Galactic.



I think there's a stronger argument for government to be in the business of providing educational funding and setting educational standards than there is for it to be in the business of operating schools. Those are certainly logically separable cases.

Ahhh, yes... another heaping, steaming pile of libertarian poowoo.

 

[lippard]

Ahhh, yes... another heaping, steaming pile of libertarian poowoo.

What is? The claim that it's *possible* that private space exploration will have a better safety record than publicly-funded space exploration and that the test will be in the empirical results? Or the claim that it's *logically possible* to separate government's role in funding and setting standards from actual supply of a good, since it's already done for other goods such as food, as well as education itself, very commonly at the college level and less so at the primary level?

I don't see how either of those claims constitutes "woo," would you care to explain? And perhaps supply something better than an ad hominem argument?