How's this for a grand sounding claim?

The great conflict of our time is between truth and fashion, and fashion is currently winning.

Film Review: A Hidden Life (2019)

Terrence Malick’s latest film, A Hidden Life, confirms his status as among the most original directors of our time. The story—which centers around an Austrian man in the early 1940s refusing to swear loyalty to the Reich because of his Christian convictions—is less interesting than Malick’s signature cinematographic approach. Most directors tend to hold shots stationary during conversational scenes and introduce movement during action sequences, thereby putting us on a level with the characters and identifying with their state of mind. With Malick, on the other hand, it’s as if he’s putting us in the perspective of a disembodied observer that floats, bobs, and hovers around and through the characters and the breathtaking vistas of the Austrian Alps. The observer is neither situated as a character nor as an omniscient watcher, but rather as a curious spirit who’s not quite sure what is going on, so the spirit probes, turns, and retreats inquisitively and whimsically, oblivious to the tragedy unfolding around it. The effect is captivating rather than disorienting or vertigo-inducing. The constant sweeps and pulls of the camera inevitably pulls the viewer into the world that powerfully integrates character, viewer, and scenery. It can become hypnotic. Malick’s movies are not for everyone—they unfold slowly, and with sudden temporal jump cuts within scenes that leave our disembodied observer constrained by sequence, but not time—and yet this is all part of the experience. The film rewards the patient, curious viewer with an experience of how radical film techniques can be used to tell a highly traditional story about the power of old-fashioned decency and family bonds to overcome in even the most challenging times.

Power and Free Speech

A popular idea circulating among the woke is that free speech is a tool of the powerful and therefore a weapon of oppression. Not only does history say otherwise, but so does logic. Notice that suppression of free speech, by definition, requires power to censor, therefore it is always, without exception, carried out by the powerful (usually governments—generally the most powerful entity in a given society). There are logically coherent (although bad) arguments for censorship—such as Willmoore Kendall’s idea that the best society is marked by majority rule and censorship is a tool the majority should use to protect itself from subversive minorities—but those making such arguments never delude themselves that somehow it’s the weak, powerless, oppressed doing the censoring. The most powerful and oppressive institution in nearly every society is the body with a monopoly on force—the government. When governments censor, it is therefore the strong and powerful shutting down someone weaker, ergo the claim that free speech is a tool of the powerful is quite misguided.

Popper or Bayes?

I read a book review the other day in which the author said he wasn’t a Popperian who believed in falsification, but a Bayesian who believed in updating. In my view, this is a false dichotomy, on par with saying, “I don’t believe in math, I believe in engineering.” Just as math is the preconditional method of engineering, so Popperian falsification is the preconditional method of Bayesian updating. We can only update beliefs if we have submitted them for falsification. Those people who don’t make their beliefs falsifiable (Freudians, astrologers, etc.) always find ways to make their theory “confirmed” by any outcome, regardless of what happens. They never get to the point where they can update a belief because an unfalsifiable belief never needs updating. Updating beliefs as we find outcomes contrary to our expectations is the essence of rationality and the only weapon we humans have against confirmation (and other) bias, and the only way we can truly be Bayesian. Falsification is not opposed to updating, falsification is what makes updating possible.

Stimulus for Tests

The Covid-19 problem is ultimately an epistemic problem. That is, the pandemic could end in a week if we simply knew exactly who had it. If every person infected with Covid gave off a big red glow, those people would quarantine themselves (and we would avoid them, literally like the plague), not infect anyone else, and then the virus would have no hosts to carry it on.

It’s for this reason that so many bright minds, such as Nobel Prize winner Paul Romer, have hammered home the importance of an efficient testing system. If testing were widespread enough, that would be a terrific substitute for lockdowns, closures, and masking. A possible proposal: instead of having the government send out stimulus checks with no strings attached, why not make them contingent on weekly testing? That is, you go to a testing booth (perhaps private contractors?) and in exchange for your getting tested for Covid, the government releases the check. That would both have the stimulative effect they are looking for by sending out the checks, but also have much of the epistemic “cure” for the virus that we are looking for.

1619 Project and Conservatism

Virtually every history textbook frames the American Founding in terms of right and left, calling the revolutionaries, such as Adams, Washington, and Jefferson, “liberals,” and those who opposed the revolution, such as Galloway and Dickinson, “conservatives.” Now that the 1619 Project has declared that the movement for independence was immoral, does that mean the “conservatives” were correct all along and that the 1619 project promoters are on the political “right”?

Genetics, corn, and free will

Geneticist Richard Lewontin made one of the best arguments for the importance of environment in human development by pointing out that if you take genetically identical handfuls of seed corn and plant one handful in Iowa and the other in the Sahara, you will get radically different results—healthy, abundant corn growing vs. no corn at all. The implication for humans is clear: environment matters and genetic determinism is incorrect. But what Lewontin didn’t consider that is every bit as telling, is that you can take humans who are genetically the same or close to it (siblings) and “plant” them in the same environment and get radically different outcomes. That doesn’t happen with corn or any other organism. The divergences of outcome among humans who share genetics that we don’t see in other organisms is powerful evidence for the essential, but invisible human trait—free will.