I recently read a posting entitled "Math Magic" by Lisa VanDamme on the blog of The Objective Standard. What VanDamme describes seems to be a slow re-invention of the elementary mathematics curriculum that I fondly remember from grade school in Poland, the Łukasiewicz curriculum. Łukasiewicz, a philosopher of logic and mathematics who would later write Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic (Oxford University Press, 1957,) was briefly (in 1919) Poland's minister of Education, which prompted him to write a radical, logic-based primary-school mathematics curriculum. The greatest difference between his curriculum and the usual one was the removal of almost all memorization, and its replacement with algorithms based on principles that the student already understood. For example, no memorizing the 9 times N multiplication table: the student learns to take 10 times N (already understood, easy) and subtract N. Of course, after calculating the result a few times the student remembers the result, at least as well as though it had been memorized - but also understands how getting this result was grounded in previously understood principles.
One beautiful thing was really understanding the logic of everyday algorithms. Learning to add and subtract minutes, hours of the day and days of the week - in first grade, I understood not only how to tell time, but also the logical principles of modulo arithmetic and number bases. Another was how quickly one could advance through concepts when no time was wasted on memorization: the Łukasiewicz curriculum, at least in the school I attended, got to analytic geometry and trigonometry in grade 4, calculus in grade 5. I don't know if the Łukasiewicz curriculum was ever translated into English, although it is the standard in Hungary, Japan etc.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Saturday, September 20, 2008
The History and Relevance of Enlightenment Ideas
The title (above this text on my blog - AR) is a link to a great panel about the History and Relevance of Enlightenment Ideas - 5 speakers, 1 hour and 34 minutes. Much to agree with, some to disagree, but mostly - useful insights from intelligent speakers. But a note to fora.com: next time, please post a list of speakers to copy and paste! Frank Furedi, Hirsi Ali, 3 others...
Another Economic Crisis. Another Age of Dictators?
It is now likely that ongoing government intervention will lengthen and exacerbate the current economic crisis, just as such intervention exacerbated the crash of 1929 into the Great Depression. The Great Depression led to the establishment of fascist, socialist, or mixed fascist-socialist regimes in most previously liberal countries, including the short-lived "New Deal" in the United States, the National Socialist regime in Germany, and a Socialist-Fascist civil war in Spain - an era known to historians as "The Age of Dictators." What, then, are the likely political consequences of the current crisis?
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Robert Heilbroner, the world's most eminent Marxist economist, examined the newly declassified record of the Soviet economy. The results disconfirmed, with the actual evidence of the facts of reality, the foundations of Marxist economics, and the ideology built on that foundation. Marxism, as a foundation for Socialism, was dead.
Marxism, for all its horrors, was an Enlightenment-based idea, and therefore subject to reality-based disconfirmation. As Heilbroner demonstrated from the evidence, "The crucial missing element (in Socialism) is not so much information, as Mises and Hayek argued, as it is the motivation to act on information." Marxist Socialism failed in reality, because it had inherited from Christendom its belief that men can be motivated by appeal to self-sacrifice. It failed because an economy for humans, an economy that works in reality, requires, as its foundation, a morality of self-interest. (This is yet another instance of a fact that was first derived from philosophical considerations by Ayn Rand, and later confirmed independently by a scientist's integration of relevant objective measurements of facts of reality.)
The spectre of the Twenty-First Century is the return of Socialism - that is, of economic systems based on an ideology of self-sacrifice - no longer on the basis of Marx's incomplete embrace of the Enlightenment, but on the basis of Christian "Imitatio Dei" - the original source of all ideologies of self-sacrifice, including Marxism. Economic crises - the previous Great Depression, and the one now around us - bring a popular demand to re-base the economy on a foundation of common morality, which for Christians, as for Marxists, refers to their (pseudo-)morality of self-sacrifice.
But it is a mistake to take the parallels too far. When the Great Depression had run its course, it did not take long for Americans (still animated, back then, by the Enlightenment ideas of America's Founding Fathers) to dump the Marxoid policies of the early FDR administrations and to return to something that at least pretended to be Capitalism. Socialism persisted the longest in Russia, in the world's most darkly mystical and, at its foundation, most deeply Christian culture. Today, the anti-intellectualism inculcated by a Pragmatist educational system has all but erased the ideas of the Enlightenment - America's founding ideas - from the culture of the majority of Americans. Kant, through Pragmatism, has limited Reason and given room to Faith. Leonard Peikoff demonstrates, in "The Ominous Parallels," how Kant's ideas led to National Socialism in Germany. Pragmatism, the dominant pseudo-philosophy of current American politics, is "Kant on Steroids." If a faith-based Fascism/Socialism were to take hold of America, then this time there will be no quick way out.
And so we come to the politics of the day.
In the last couple of weeks, Nick Provenzo and Diana Hsieh took the time to provoke some Christianists into writing and speaking their minds. The results show that the Christianists are fundamentally totalitarian: The theocratic Right lives by faith - and, as we have seen, responds to an argument mainly not with arguments but with wishes for and threats of violence, including murder - the argument from the fist and the knife. They are reason-proof (credo quoia absurdum) and evidence-proof. In their brains, arguments from reason and evidence invoke not thought, but resentment against the intellect for being capable of thought. It is this resentment of the intellect that is the direct cause of the appeal to violence in their responses - and in the policies that a McCain-Palin government would enact and enforce. The Christianists are as totalitarian as the Communists, the National Socialists and the Fascists of the previous century, or their Islamist contemporaries. But the Christianists, unlike the Islamists, are here in America and not mostly overseas. They wear Respectability. And one of them is the vice-presidential candidate to a presidential candidate who is in his seventies and in poor health - a probable replacement President.
The threat level from the far left is not much in comparison. The remaining Communists - Stalinists, Trotskyites, Castroites, Maoists and so on - are totalitarian. But they are, everywhere in America including the Democratic Party, a disreputable fringe. The left-totalitarians can vote and contribute to political organizations and post to left-wing blogs, but not one of them has been elected to political office, anywhere in America, in the last half-century or so. There is no symmetry of threat level here, except in fiction.
The Democratic Party is now, just as it was in the days of FDR, the party of Pragmatist compromise: then of compromise with Marxism, now of compromise with religion. But if religion is the new Marxism, then the Republicans - explicitly in Sarah Palin, implicitly in Senator McCain - are the Communist Party of our time. And if they win, America will be to the 21st Century what Soviet Russia, or National Socialist Germany, were to the 20th.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Robert Heilbroner, the world's most eminent Marxist economist, examined the newly declassified record of the Soviet economy. The results disconfirmed, with the actual evidence of the facts of reality, the foundations of Marxist economics, and the ideology built on that foundation. Marxism, as a foundation for Socialism, was dead.
Marxism, for all its horrors, was an Enlightenment-based idea, and therefore subject to reality-based disconfirmation. As Heilbroner demonstrated from the evidence, "The crucial missing element (in Socialism) is not so much information, as Mises and Hayek argued, as it is the motivation to act on information." Marxist Socialism failed in reality, because it had inherited from Christendom its belief that men can be motivated by appeal to self-sacrifice. It failed because an economy for humans, an economy that works in reality, requires, as its foundation, a morality of self-interest. (This is yet another instance of a fact that was first derived from philosophical considerations by Ayn Rand, and later confirmed independently by a scientist's integration of relevant objective measurements of facts of reality.)
The spectre of the Twenty-First Century is the return of Socialism - that is, of economic systems based on an ideology of self-sacrifice - no longer on the basis of Marx's incomplete embrace of the Enlightenment, but on the basis of Christian "Imitatio Dei" - the original source of all ideologies of self-sacrifice, including Marxism. Economic crises - the previous Great Depression, and the one now around us - bring a popular demand to re-base the economy on a foundation of common morality, which for Christians, as for Marxists, refers to their (pseudo-)morality of self-sacrifice.
But it is a mistake to take the parallels too far. When the Great Depression had run its course, it did not take long for Americans (still animated, back then, by the Enlightenment ideas of America's Founding Fathers) to dump the Marxoid policies of the early FDR administrations and to return to something that at least pretended to be Capitalism. Socialism persisted the longest in Russia, in the world's most darkly mystical and, at its foundation, most deeply Christian culture. Today, the anti-intellectualism inculcated by a Pragmatist educational system has all but erased the ideas of the Enlightenment - America's founding ideas - from the culture of the majority of Americans. Kant, through Pragmatism, has limited Reason and given room to Faith. Leonard Peikoff demonstrates, in "The Ominous Parallels," how Kant's ideas led to National Socialism in Germany. Pragmatism, the dominant pseudo-philosophy of current American politics, is "Kant on Steroids." If a faith-based Fascism/Socialism were to take hold of America, then this time there will be no quick way out.
And so we come to the politics of the day.
In the last couple of weeks, Nick Provenzo and Diana Hsieh took the time to provoke some Christianists into writing and speaking their minds. The results show that the Christianists are fundamentally totalitarian: The theocratic Right lives by faith - and, as we have seen, responds to an argument mainly not with arguments but with wishes for and threats of violence, including murder - the argument from the fist and the knife. They are reason-proof (credo quoia absurdum) and evidence-proof. In their brains, arguments from reason and evidence invoke not thought, but resentment against the intellect for being capable of thought. It is this resentment of the intellect that is the direct cause of the appeal to violence in their responses - and in the policies that a McCain-Palin government would enact and enforce. The Christianists are as totalitarian as the Communists, the National Socialists and the Fascists of the previous century, or their Islamist contemporaries. But the Christianists, unlike the Islamists, are here in America and not mostly overseas. They wear Respectability. And one of them is the vice-presidential candidate to a presidential candidate who is in his seventies and in poor health - a probable replacement President.
The threat level from the far left is not much in comparison. The remaining Communists - Stalinists, Trotskyites, Castroites, Maoists and so on - are totalitarian. But they are, everywhere in America including the Democratic Party, a disreputable fringe. The left-totalitarians can vote and contribute to political organizations and post to left-wing blogs, but not one of them has been elected to political office, anywhere in America, in the last half-century or so. There is no symmetry of threat level here, except in fiction.
The Democratic Party is now, just as it was in the days of FDR, the party of Pragmatist compromise: then of compromise with Marxism, now of compromise with religion. But if religion is the new Marxism, then the Republicans - explicitly in Sarah Palin, implicitly in Senator McCain - are the Communist Party of our time. And if they win, America will be to the 21st Century what Soviet Russia, or National Socialist Germany, were to the 20th.
Friday, September 19, 2008
The NSA Teams Up with the Chinese Government to Limit Internet Anonymity
The title (above this text on my blog - AR) links to an article by Bruce Schneier, one of the top two independent Internet security experts in the United States. The other of the two, Steve Bellovin, with whom I worked writing a course on Internet security back at Bell Labs, is also cited. Schneier's article is about the UN "IP Traceback" project. Don't miss the comments, one of which reads:
"I'm working on some infosec security projects based in China, and I enjoy telling my client "the Chinese government requires a liaison who can hand over all encryption keys on request." Then when they get the very serious "oh, yes, we're dealing with China" looks on their faces I say "...which is exactly the same requirement as in the U.S." Both the U.S. and China are considered 'surveillance societies....' .... the two nations look increasingly similar. But at least having our every blog post traced back to us keeps us safe from terrorism. Or something."
Adam Reed's full disclosure: One of my pre-tenure projects was to put together a professional program in computer and network security at Cal State LA, and to obtain NSA certification for this program. I have a briefcase from one of their more open events, which is simply labeled "The Symposium" with no other text. Their own anonymity they take very, very seriously indeed...
"I'm working on some infosec security projects based in China, and I enjoy telling my client "the Chinese government requires a liaison who can hand over all encryption keys on request." Then when they get the very serious "oh, yes, we're dealing with China" looks on their faces I say "...which is exactly the same requirement as in the U.S." Both the U.S. and China are considered 'surveillance societies....' .... the two nations look increasingly similar. But at least having our every blog post traced back to us keeps us safe from terrorism. Or something."
Adam Reed's full disclosure: One of my pre-tenure projects was to put together a professional program in computer and network security at Cal State LA, and to obtain NSA certification for this program. I have a briefcase from one of their more open events, which is simply labeled "The Symposium" with no other text. Their own anonymity they take very, very seriously indeed...
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Christianism and I, and How It All Became Personal
When the current wave of Christianist policy first washed over America, I was not among those who might later say that they did not know. I knew. I knew about women forced to bear defective infants because late-term abortions were prohibited. I knew about medical scientists forced to move overseas if they wanted to continue their work on therapeutic cloning and other newly prohibited technologies. I knew that government "recommendations" for prescriptions of pain medications had been "tightened," and that physicians who exceeded those "recommendations" were tried and imprisoned for drug-dealing. I knew that one renowned specialist was convicted on testimony about his "nudge-nudge, wink-wink attitude" when explaining the government's "recommendations" to his patients, and so doctors, talking to patients in pain, now made an extra effort to sound sincere. But I was not any of those people, and so I did not go very far out of my way to speak out.
And if I had, what good would it have done? The suffering inflicted by our recent Administrations was not about to be condemned by the Christians, who make up the majority of my fellow citizens. Their belief, however nominal, is that suffering is a precious gift from God. If someone suffers, from oppression by our government or from any other cause, then either God has decided that the victim deserves to suffer, or God has graced the victim with an extra opportunity to earn salvation points with Jesus. A Solidarity movement (like the ones that brought down the Communist regimes of East-Central Europe) would have been, in Christian America, unthinkable. So how much could I have accomplished? And what would the payoff (or payback) have been? I had arthritis of the knees (and other joints) but the pain, even at its worst, was not beyond what could be relieved with over-the-counter pills. Otherwise, my life was (and is) very good.
And then one day, moving a big old computer monitor to the side to make room for a new LCD panel, I felt a spiral of pain around my right leg. It was evening, and so I took a sleeping pill and planned to call my doctor's nurse the next day. The next morning, as I got up from bed and sat down to scan my e-mail, the pain shot up to an intensity I had never imagined possible. The pain was so intense that all was overwhelmed: I could not work or think or focus my consciousness on anything besides the pain. My wife had already left the house for work, and I could not get up from the floor until the evening, when she came home and got me up and took me to a hospital emergency room.
It turned out that a ruptured disk in my spine had crushed my right sciatic nerve, amplifying the pain in my knee a thousand times and turning all sensation from the leg into amplified pain. After an injected shot, the physician wrote out a prescription, explaining that I was getting the strongest pain medication that he could prescribe for sciatica, and that it was limited to 20 pills per week, to prevent withdrawal symptoms when I no longer needed the pills and stopped taking them. Each pill started to work about 15 minutes after I took it, and after a few minutes of relief the pain began to grow again. It grow slowly, and for some two hours I still was able to think and work. At the end of two hours the total pain returned.
I was 3 weeks from the end of the quarter, teaching senior and graduate classes three nights a week, to students who worked full time in the day and then sat in my class from 6 to 10 PM. I was proud of my students, too proud to cancel their classes with just 3 weeks to go. I kept 14 of the pills for my morning chores and to fall asleep at night. I used the other six to cover my teaching hours. Looking at my colleagues, I saw that they knew, and would do the same. For the rest of the day and the week I was one with the pain, and could neither do or be anything else.
Then came the end of the academic quarter, and the operation. The surgeon prescribed a time-release pain killer, and warned me not to take it until after the operation. I took one on my way out of the pharmacy, and the pain withdrew into the background for the rest of the day. I still felt the pain, but now I was again able to feel other things, to think and to focus my mind and to live. This was what I should have been prescribed from my first day in pain. This was what I would have been prescribed, had American physicians been free to practice medicine without fear.
Two months after the operation the pain had gone down enough for me to stop taking the pills. I had the withdrawal symptoms: like two days of a mild flu. And to prevent this, I was forced to spend three weeks in indescribable pain?
And thus it was, that the cliches I had ignored for decades came to meaning in my life. I had not had enough interest in politics, and so politics took an interest in me. Only then was my consciousness raised, and the personal became political. And I started speaking the truth to power.
And if I had, what good would it have done? The suffering inflicted by our recent Administrations was not about to be condemned by the Christians, who make up the majority of my fellow citizens. Their belief, however nominal, is that suffering is a precious gift from God. If someone suffers, from oppression by our government or from any other cause, then either God has decided that the victim deserves to suffer, or God has graced the victim with an extra opportunity to earn salvation points with Jesus. A Solidarity movement (like the ones that brought down the Communist regimes of East-Central Europe) would have been, in Christian America, unthinkable. So how much could I have accomplished? And what would the payoff (or payback) have been? I had arthritis of the knees (and other joints) but the pain, even at its worst, was not beyond what could be relieved with over-the-counter pills. Otherwise, my life was (and is) very good.
And then one day, moving a big old computer monitor to the side to make room for a new LCD panel, I felt a spiral of pain around my right leg. It was evening, and so I took a sleeping pill and planned to call my doctor's nurse the next day. The next morning, as I got up from bed and sat down to scan my e-mail, the pain shot up to an intensity I had never imagined possible. The pain was so intense that all was overwhelmed: I could not work or think or focus my consciousness on anything besides the pain. My wife had already left the house for work, and I could not get up from the floor until the evening, when she came home and got me up and took me to a hospital emergency room.
It turned out that a ruptured disk in my spine had crushed my right sciatic nerve, amplifying the pain in my knee a thousand times and turning all sensation from the leg into amplified pain. After an injected shot, the physician wrote out a prescription, explaining that I was getting the strongest pain medication that he could prescribe for sciatica, and that it was limited to 20 pills per week, to prevent withdrawal symptoms when I no longer needed the pills and stopped taking them. Each pill started to work about 15 minutes after I took it, and after a few minutes of relief the pain began to grow again. It grow slowly, and for some two hours I still was able to think and work. At the end of two hours the total pain returned.
I was 3 weeks from the end of the quarter, teaching senior and graduate classes three nights a week, to students who worked full time in the day and then sat in my class from 6 to 10 PM. I was proud of my students, too proud to cancel their classes with just 3 weeks to go. I kept 14 of the pills for my morning chores and to fall asleep at night. I used the other six to cover my teaching hours. Looking at my colleagues, I saw that they knew, and would do the same. For the rest of the day and the week I was one with the pain, and could neither do or be anything else.
Then came the end of the academic quarter, and the operation. The surgeon prescribed a time-release pain killer, and warned me not to take it until after the operation. I took one on my way out of the pharmacy, and the pain withdrew into the background for the rest of the day. I still felt the pain, but now I was again able to feel other things, to think and to focus my mind and to live. This was what I should have been prescribed from my first day in pain. This was what I would have been prescribed, had American physicians been free to practice medicine without fear.
Two months after the operation the pain had gone down enough for me to stop taking the pills. I had the withdrawal symptoms: like two days of a mild flu. And to prevent this, I was forced to spend three weeks in indescribable pain?
And thus it was, that the cliches I had ignored for decades came to meaning in my life. I had not had enough interest in politics, and so politics took an interest in me. Only then was my consciousness raised, and the personal became political. And I started speaking the truth to power.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Listening to Heroes
Afghanistan's RAWA has been involved in principled resistance against the full spectrum of tyrants: Soviet-supported Socialists, US-supported (and later anti-American) Taliban, and now the US+NATO-imposed experiment in totalitarian democracy: an Iran-style Islamic Republic built on the corpses of American soldiers. RAWA are not Objectivists, but they are Enlightenment-based secularists, and in the context of Afghanistan's tribalist-supernaturalist culture, that's a enough to be heroes. They write:
So. One faith-based, sacrifice-based regime supporting another. And from Washington, our gang of elected traitors claims, of all things, that they stand for America.
The US "War on terrorism" removed the Taliban regime in October 2001, but it has not removed religious fundamentalism which is the main cause of all our miseries. In fact, by reinstalling the warlords in power in Afghanistan, the US administration is replacing one fundamentalist regime with another... Under the US-supported government, the sworn enemies of human rights, democracy and secularism have gripped their claws over our country and attempt to restore (probably meaning "re-impose" - AR) their religious fascism on our people.
So. One faith-based, sacrifice-based regime supporting another. And from Washington, our gang of elected traitors claims, of all things, that they stand for America.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
The Church's preposterously dishonest abuse of biology
According to a recent statement by Catholic bishops, "The Church recognizes that the obligation to protect unborn human life rests on the answer to two questions, neither of which is private or specifically religious.The first is a biological question: When does a new human life begin? When is there a new living organism of the human species, distinct from mother and father and ready to develop and mature if given a nurturing environment? While ancient thinkers had little verifiable knowledge to help them answer this question, today embryology textbooks confirm that a new human life begins at conception... The Catholic Church does not teach this as a matter of faith; it acknowledges it as a matter of objective fact."
Now that is the most preposterous abuse of science that any of us are likely to see in a lifetime. Scientific knowledge is contextual. In the context of biochemistry, the embryo is indeed a separate organism: its DNA, and the peptides and proteins derived from that DNA, are distinct. But the physiology the fetus is, until birth, completely dependent for the requisites of life on the pregnant woman's organism. Physiologically the fetus is, until the moment of birth, part of the pregnant woman's body - part of a single functioning physiological system. Why does the Church take the perspective of biochemistry to be more "scientific," claiming that it ought to be imposed by the state, even on unbelievers, by force, as a matter of "natural law," and ignore the equally scientific - and much more directly relevant - perspective of physiology? Because the biochemistry fits the Church's prior doctrine, and physiology doesn't. Like the proverbial drunk with a lamp-post, the Church picks one bit of science, and ignores the rest, because it is using science for support - preferring this dishonest claim of support to objective illumination. This swindle - for that is what it is - is dishonest enough to disqualify the Church, even if one were to ignore its other crimes, from any claim to genuine moral authority. Either on abortion or on anything else.
Now that is the most preposterous abuse of science that any of us are likely to see in a lifetime. Scientific knowledge is contextual. In the context of biochemistry, the embryo is indeed a separate organism: its DNA, and the peptides and proteins derived from that DNA, are distinct. But the physiology the fetus is, until birth, completely dependent for the requisites of life on the pregnant woman's organism. Physiologically the fetus is, until the moment of birth, part of the pregnant woman's body - part of a single functioning physiological system. Why does the Church take the perspective of biochemistry to be more "scientific," claiming that it ought to be imposed by the state, even on unbelievers, by force, as a matter of "natural law," and ignore the equally scientific - and much more directly relevant - perspective of physiology? Because the biochemistry fits the Church's prior doctrine, and physiology doesn't. Like the proverbial drunk with a lamp-post, the Church picks one bit of science, and ignores the rest, because it is using science for support - preferring this dishonest claim of support to objective illumination. This swindle - for that is what it is - is dishonest enough to disqualify the Church, even if one were to ignore its other crimes, from any claim to genuine moral authority. Either on abortion or on anything else.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Sarah Palin: Still a Reality-Proof Advocate of Abstinence-"Education"
If Sarah Palin got her way, every child in America would receive the same kind of abstinence-"education" that Palin gave to her own children. As one woman wrote,
Theocratic politics is a new phenomenon in America, and so we don't have (yet) a scale of toxicity for its gradations. So I'll borrow the scale from the history of the left. George W. Bush is the theocon equivalent of a Social-Democrat. Sarah Palin, on the same scale, scores as a Maoist. The kind that saw the results of Mao's cultural revolution, as we are seeing the result of the Christianist revolution that Sarah Palin imposed on her family, and kept on believing, and kept on destroying every human life in his path.
This is just so sad.
This poor 17-year-old girl is now saddled with a baby, trapped in a marriage that is statistically doomed to fail, with pretty much no hope of a college education, a career, a future...
And all because her mother abdicated her responsibility as a parent by not teaching her child the basic biology of sex.
My mom taught me about responsible sex. It was awkward and uncomfortable, but she did it anyway. And she taught me about abortion, too, which was more awkward and uncomfortable, but she made it clear that in case of accidental pregnancy, she was my first stop. She'd take me to Planned Parenthood, she'd pay for the procedure, she'd hold my hand the whole time, she'd love me anyway, and she'd help me to get on with my life.
Too bad this kid didn't have my mom instead of hers. She could have had a future. Now she's just stuck.
Theocratic politics is a new phenomenon in America, and so we don't have (yet) a scale of toxicity for its gradations. So I'll borrow the scale from the history of the left. George W. Bush is the theocon equivalent of a Social-Democrat. Sarah Palin, on the same scale, scores as a Maoist. The kind that saw the results of Mao's cultural revolution, as we are seeing the result of the Christianist revolution that Sarah Palin imposed on her family, and kept on believing, and kept on destroying every human life in his path.
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