The usual disclaimer: it was a beautiful and holy Mass shared with lovely people, my beloved brothers and sisters in Christ.
Χριστός γεννάτα!
And the large choir and band (piano, drums, bass, horn – and guitars you couldn’t hear) did crank out several traditional carols. So there’s that.
But the Off Off Broadway Assisted Living Choir could not leave it at that. Three of their selections were those abominations where a traditional carol is either parted out to be used as the basis of a show tune, or as a cantus firmis, as it were, over which the composer tacks a much inferior second song.
One of the most basic rules of business is: pick the right competitor. There’s a parallel rule in music. It should be obvious, but apparently is not, that beloved classic Christmas carols attained that status by being *good*, such that – follow closely now – whatever tune you write is all but guaranteed to sound lame in comparison. Unless you’re a Bach or Beethoven equivalent, chances are slim you will catch lightning in a bottle and thus come up with anything that doesn’t sound stupid when put up against a classic carol.
The compositions Frankensteined from the body parts of far better tunes get the classic Off Off Broadway treatment: dramatic pauses, towering melodramatic crescendos, long drawn out ending, and just a bit of pyrotechnics for the lead singer.
Exactly what the holy Sacrifice of Mass is calling for: a bit of Me Me Me! Music. Can’t get enough of that action.
Merry Christmas! Happy 12 days of Christmas, which begins today. And a happy and holy new year.
Based on the evidence of the creche at the local church, one of the stories left on the cutting room floor was the arrival at the manger of the shepherdess and her levitating sheep:
She’s able to keep that thing from floating away with only 9 and 1/2 fingers!
On a more serious note, I’m working on a major education post over Christmas break. Other than that, have a holy last few days of Advent, a Merry Christmas, and a happy new year!
Life in the Medieval University, by Robert S. Rait, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1912, is exactly what the title says it is, a survey of the what it was like to live at the great universities of Europe during the period of their founding and early development. It is a charming, short book, written by an English don a century ago – you know you’ll be getting good solid prose, at the very least clean and readable. I love reading works from this time and place. It’s a relief to read people following a tradition of clear, smart writing.
Universities began in the 12th century, and Rait starts his story there. Before then, monasteries and convents would have schools attached to or incorporated within them, which only incidentally trained secular scholars. The nobility would employ tutors for their kids or send them to a monastery school for a few years. Charlemagne had his schools of chant.
Peasants only rarely got any education. When all manuscripts had to be hand copied onto expensive media, learning to read was largely pointless – read what? Who in the village had any books, beside the parish priest with his bible and sacramentaries? So a boy who wanted to be a priest would be just about the only one for whom learning to read had much utility.
In some sense, universities are the expression of a desire for secular education. Of course, in the 12th century, all secular meant was ‘not attached to the ordained priesthood’. Education was always centered on and imbued with religion. At some point, and Rait takes up his story after this point, education became sperate from the monasteries even while remaining fundamentally Catholic.
The early universities bore little resemblance to our modern research universities. I tend to think of quads, student centers, ubiquitous athletics, an array of purpose-built buildings (labs, classrooms, admin, dorms, and so on). The early universities started with none of this. Indeed, at least in Italy, a university was a collection of students. College towns and professors were all but held hostage by the students, who could and sometimes did simply leave for greener pastures. Having a large body of young men move into your town generated a good deal of highly desirable economic activity: at the very least, the students would need to rent living space and buy food. They also attracted professors who would need to do the same. Those same professors were dependent for their living on the sometimes capricious wills of the students.
In the north and England, the masters who taught seemed to have had more power. Partly this was due to the early development of endowed ‘colleges’, which were collections of students and masters living together in buildings built for that purpose by noble or ecclesiastical patrons. Having a building made the threat of the ‘university’ as the student body simply leaving less serious. (Rait does mention that some of the colleges at Oxford had in their rules recognition that politics or war might make getting out of town desirable, and had provisions for the endowments to follow the students and masters in such cases. This mass movement of students from one town to another did happen in England.)
In either case – rule by the students or rule by the people making the endowments – crowding a bunch of young men together away from home had the obvious problems. The St. Scholastica Day riots at Oxford were merely one among many such riots involving ‘town and gown’, and other smaller issues were innumerable. Animal House has ancient roots.
While Germany and France get some mention, Rait mostly draws from English schools for his accounts of the development of colleges and the town and gown problems. Gradually, patrons, who built the buildings, wrote the rules, and funded especially the poorer students, gained power. Slowly, the University evolved from a collection of students with no physical plant, to physical plants housing collections of students. The ‘management’ – the patrons and the ‘visitors and governors’ appointed by the patrons (local bishops and lords, hired professional managers) – eventually grew to hold almost all power in the university.
(side note: at Harvard, a school founded in the 17th century by Calvinist dons from Cambridge, it was still possible for the students to get the President fired or make lesser changes through protests of one sort or another, up until modern times. So formal power and actual power were not always the same.)
All this is fascinating and fun to read, but the main points for my purposes: how was University education conducted? What did it take to get into a school and become a master? How were classes conducted? Who awarded the degrees? This is the system that produced and in which worked giants like Thomas, Albertus, and Oresme. It would seem we would do well to learn from it.
To get into a University, the main if not only qualification was mastery of Latin.
The student of a medieval University was, as we have seen, expected to converse in Latin, and all instruction was given in that language. It was therefore essential that, before entering on the University curriculum, he should have a competent knowledge of Latin. College founders attempted to secure this in various ways, sometimes by an examination … and sometimes by making provision for young boys to be taught by a master of grammar. The Founder of New College met the difficulty by the foundation of Winchester College, at which all Wykehamists (1) … were to be thoroughly grounded in Latin. It was more difficult for a University to insist upon such a test, but in 1328, the University of Paris had ordered that before a youth was admitted to the privileges of “scholarity” or studentship, he must appear before the Rector and make his own application in continuous Latin, without any French words.
As discussed elsewhere on this blog, even as recently as the late 19th century and even in America, Latin was promoted not just as an essential language for any scholar, but also as a gateway to scholarship itself. In the report of the Committee of 10’s subcommittee on Latin, the members argued that a foundation in Latin should be required of all(!) high school students, as mastery of Latin had long been known to develop in students precisely the scholarly habits and skills any advanced education required.
In the medieval University, ‘grammar school’ was the place students mastered Latin so that they could benefit from a university education.
There were plenty of grammar schools in the Middle Ages, and a clever boy was likely to find a patron and a place of education in the neighbourhood of his home. The grammar schools in University towns had therefore originally no special importance, but many of the undergraduates who came up at thirteen or fourteen required some training.
The basis of the medieval curriculum in Arts is to be found in the Seven Liberal Arts of the Dark Ages, divided into the Trivium (Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic) and the Quadrivium (Music, Arithmetic, Geometry and Astronomy). The Quadrivium was of comparatively little importance; Geometry and Music received small attention; and Arithmetic, and Astronomy were at first chiefly useful for finding the date of Easter; but the introduction of mathematical learning from Arabian sources in the thirteenth century greatly increased the scope of Geometry and Arithmetic, and added the study of Algebra.
The method:
Lectures were either “ordinary” or “cursory,” a distinction which, as Dr Rashdall has shown, corresponded to the “ordinary” and “extra-ordinary” lectures at Bologna. The ordinary lectures were the statutable exercises appointed by the Faculty, and delivered by its properly accredited teachers in the hours of the morning, which were sacred to the prelections of the masters. Cursory lectures were delivered in the afternoon, frequently by bachelors; but as College teaching became more important than the lectures given in the Schools, the distinction gradually disappeared. Ordinary lectures were delivered “solemniter” and involved a slow and methodical analysis of the book. The statutes of Vienna prescribe that no master shall read more than one chapter of the text “ante quaestionem vel etiam quaestione expedita.” Various references in College and University statutes show that the cursory lecture was not regarded as the full equivalent of an ordinary lecture…. The instructions given to the Vienna doctors of law illustrate the thoroughness of the medieval lecture in all faculties. They are first to state the case carefully, then to read the text, then to restate the case, then to remark on “notabilia,” and then to discuss questions arising out of the subject, and finally, to deal with the Glosses. So, at Oxford, the Masters in Arts are to read the books on logic and the philosophies “rite,” with the necessary and adequate exposition of the text, and with questions and arguments pertinent to the subject-matter.
This thoroughness of presentation was reflected in the expectations for the students:
Since study is a vehement application of the mind, and requires the whole man, the scholars are forbidden to fatigue themselves with too many lectures—not more than two or three a day—and in lecture they are not to take down the lecturer’s words, nor, trusting in writings of this kind, to blunt their “proprium intellectum.” In the Schools, they must not use “incausta” or pencils except for correcting a book, etc. And what they have been able to retain in their memory they must meditate on without delay.
The insistence on meditation was a useful educational method, but as teaching became more organised, the student was not left without guidance in his meditations. The help which he received outside lectures was given in Repetitions or Resumptions. The procedure at Repetitions may be illustrated from the statutes of the College of Dainville at Paris: “We ordain that all bursars in grammar and philosophy speak the Latin tongue, and that those who hear the same book ordinarily and cursorily shall attend one and the same master (namely, one whom the master [of the College] assigns to them), and after the lecture they shall return home and meet in one place to repeat the lecture. One after another shall repeat the whole lecture, so that each of them may know it well, and the less advanced shall be bound daily to repeat the lectures to the more proficient.” A later code of the same College provides that “All who study humane letters shall, on every day of the schools read in the morning a composition, that is a speech in Latin, Greek or the vernacular, to their master, being prepared to expound the writer or historian who is being read in daily lecture in their schools. At the end of the week, that is on Friday or Saturday, they shall show up to their master a résumé of all the lectures they have learned that week, and every day before they go to the schools they shall be bound to make repetitions to one of the philosophers or of the theologians whom the [College] master shall choose; for this work.”
Recap: a boy who wanted to go to a medieval university would first master Latin in a grammar school by age 13 or 14, and then typically join a college. He would then attend two or three lectures in the classic trivium and quadrivium each day for 5 or 6 days a week. After each lecture, he was expected to meditate on the lecture; he would then be expected to ‘recite’ what he had learned to a scholar of his college. Memory was emphasized, lectures were not generally written down, and were not delivered slowly enough for a student to write them down.
Outcome:
The career of a student was divided into two parts by his “Determination,” a ceremony which is the origin of the Bachelor’s degree. At Paris, where, at all events in the earlier period of its history, examinations were real, the “Determination” was preceded by “Responsions,” and no candidate was admitted to determine until he had satisfied a Regent Master in the Schools, in public, “de Questione respondens.” The determination itself was a public disputation, after which the determiner might wear the bachelor’s “cappa” and lecture on the Organon (Aristotle’s writings on Logic – ed.). He continued his attendance on the lectures in the Schools up to the time of his “Inception” as a master. The Inception was preceded by an examination for licence and by a disputation known as the Quodlibetica, at which the subject was chosen by the candidate. The bachelor who was successful in obtaining the Chancellor’s licence proceeded to the ceremony of Inception, and received his master’s biretta.
Wow. That sounds like a real education to me.
Aside: this process illustrates the characteristically medieval emphasis of qualitative understanding over quantitative or numerical evaluation. I would think a medieval scholar would have found the idea of number or letter grades absurd, especially the idea mastery was to be determined by simply getting enough points in the right classes. Rather, the student has changed qualitatively over the course of his education. He *is* a bachelor or master. It is a matter of a change in his character. This change can be seen by other masters – they recognize themselves, as it were, in the candidate, and are the fit judges of whether or not the change has taken place.
I found this book inspiring. As John Taylor Gatto said, the greatest triumph of modern education is that people can’t imagine doing it any other wat. This book describes another way.
1. An undergraduate, graduate or fellow of Winchester College
Started here, continued here, here. and here. Since science is the study of the metrical (measurable, countable) properties of physical objects, we need to be very careful with our measuring and counting. We’ve talked about how, even or especially in what appear to be simple situations, it’s critically important to know
what is being counted
how it is to be counted
who is doing the counting
why it is being counted
To put this negatively, if you don’t know the answers to these questions, you cannot ‘follow the science’. You can do as you’re told, but without this information, you simply do not know what you’re talking about. Or, to go back to language I’ve favored in the past, an honest man owes no allegiance to any claims that ‘science has shown’ unless all the above issues have been satisfactorily addressed.
In a saner world, these questions would be used to filter out unsubstantiated claims. An inability or unwillingness to answer these questions is a sure sign of a charlatan, that you are being manipulated toward someone else’s goals.
Modern cargo cult science reveals itself readily when faced with these issues. The advocates for just doing as you’re told hate this stuff, and play their ‘I’m an expert, you’re an ignorant peon’ card whenever anyone starts asking uncomfortable questions. And, indeed, it does help in some situations to be familiar with the terms and methods of particular branches of science. BUT – not usually. Usually, a general understanding of how science works, such as I’ve tried to lay out in these short essays, is enough to push back against unsubstantiated claims of ‘science’.
To give a harmless example, I know very little about cosmology or astrophysics. But what I do know: it’s pretty hard, or at least, pretty uncertain, to count and measure faint objects billions and billions of miles away. I’m not sure how, exactly, the motion of stars in the fringes of galaxies millions of light years away are being measured – but I can imagine it’s not super-tidy. There are going to be theories stacked upon theories and tons of math supporting any conclusions. So, when cosmologists argue over dark matter, I keep in mind that this is all based on very difficult observations of what appear from here to be tiny dots of light, if that. And that the motion of these stars is not something anyone can directly see, but rather is based on another stack of theories – Hubble’s Law, standard candles, red shifts, and so on.
I have no reason to doubt any of this stuff – but I also have no reason to give anything more than very conditional assent. So that when the James Webb starts throwing shade on all this, I’m not surprised in the least. It’s hard not to think of modern cosmology as a house of cards. But – at least it’s harmless. Nobody is likely to die over the proof or disproof of cosmological theories.
Now to the hard examples: when the Covid panic hit, I, along with many others, started looking for the answers to the basic questions above. On the ‘what is being counted’ front, we have a pile of undefined or poorly defined terms, and utter inconsistency from place to place and over time. What’s a ‘case’? How about a ‘death’? These seem easy – but remember the trees! Then came the ‘how’ – total chaos in the data! At various times and places, a ‘death’ meant anyone who died while having any 2 symptoms, without any testing to confirm. Other times and places, anyone dying after a positive test, regardless of symptoms or actual cause of death (I remember death #2 in California – a drug addict who overdosed and had no symptoms – but had tested positive!) And so on.
The ‘who’ included nursing home docs in a situation where the home got substantial money for caring for Covid patients. Hardly a conflict of interest free situation. In science, in tricky judgement situations, it’s common to have a second party far removed from the immediate judgement review and confirm the count. Never happened here.
The ‘why’ stinks to high heaven.
Do I know anything much about virology or genetic engineering or epidemiology? Not really – but the point here is that I didn’t need to know much to spot the obvious fraud. None of the issues involved are related to the scientific specialties - all are general principles of science and logic.
Finally, the right answer to virtually all scientific questions is: I don’t know. Really. There’s much more uncertainty and guesswork out there than the practitioners and the mindless cheerleaders will ever admit. Remember: for an assertion that ‘science has shown’ to carry any weight at all, at a minimum the issues above must be addressed. It’s not a crime to not know the answer – it’s a crime to push an agenda without being willing or able to answer.
There are layers and layers, and some things really are complex, but these simple rules will smoke out the fraudsters almost every time.
I’m finishing up Life in the Medieval University, a book from a Cambridge don first published in 1912. It’s very interesting. Last night, was reading about the St. Scholastica’s Day Riot of 10th February, 1354 at Oxford. It went on for days. People died. The inciting incident: some students went to a tavern, and complained about the wine, an argument ensued, and the students threw it in the face of the tavern keeper – and all hell broke loose.
It’s clear that a whole bunch of simmering animosity boiled over. The rest of the chapter is about “Town and Gown” conflicts all over Europe. The students and faculty, while typically bringing welcome economic activity to the college town, were, it seems, often insufferable. It took intervention from local nobles all the way up to the Pope to get things to calm down. Which they never really did for long.
So we have a long history of townie animosity toward colleges, going way back to the 13th century at least.
So, today, David Warren writes on University reform. He’s in favor, as I am, of burning it all down and salting the earth where it stood. He traces the problem back to – the 13th century.
Mr. Warren’s website refuses to permit reblogging, so I hope he doesn’t mind me simply posting the 5-paragraph essay, to spread his important thoughts:
The most encouraging development in the West — something that fills me with hope for our future — is the destruction of our universities. In truth, they have been giving trouble for a long time, and it could be argued that it was the creation of lay universities, to replace dedicated monastic schools, that marked the beginning of the end of Christendom in the later “Middle Ages.” But this topic would take up too much space. (The best way to approach it is through the study of student life in the XIIIth and XIVth centuries, and the degradation and dissolution it brought to Paris, Oxford, and other European cities.)
Alas, like the atom bomb, universities, once created, cannot be uncreated. We must find a way not only to cohabit with them, but to tame their worst excesses. The tyranny imposed by nuclear weapons is what must be allayed; by comparison the explosion of these weapons is a much lesser threat. Similarly, with the damages of higher education: their tyranny is actually worse than the student riots.
The first step in this subjugation must be, of course, to remove all public funding. This is only a half-measure, because private funds will still be controlled by university administrators. So part of our programme must be, to get rid of them. This cannot be done by public legislation, but must be performed one school at a time. Violence will not be necessary, for the typical college president is an abject coward, and likewise, his staff down to the humblest janitorial assistant.
Consider, universities came as close to being defensible as they would ever be, in days now unfortunately passed, when professors were paid little, and when they had to devote several hours in each week to unpleasant administrative labours. But this was necessary if we were to avoid the horrible evil of “professional” university administrators.
Note, that I do not complain about the obscene salaries these bureaucrats grant themselves; it is their biological existence that disturbs me. I am pro-life, and thus opposed to their capital punishment (except for additional cause). Our tolerance and patience must expire, however, just short of that.
I have mentioned that Recusant Ranch is ‘home’ to our own little herd of deer. 7 acres, and you can generally find 4-5 deer on the property any morning and most of the day. Just hanging, and not in a butcher’s cooler sort of way. And these are only the regulars – there’s a big buck missing one antler that drops by, as well as other deer. Our land is crisscrossed with deer trails.
Ol’ Mono-Antler, down by the creek
In our 3 full months here, while I see deer along the road (dead and alive) almost daily, I’ve only had to take action for 1 deer while driving. Nothing too dramatic, but minor evasive actions were required. But yesterday, daughter and son-in-law hit one full on out on the main highway – said they were going about 60, hit the brakes, but still hit the deer hard. It died quick, and left chunks of itself on the front of the car.
I suspect the car is totaled. Somehow, this did not trigger the airbags, and my daughter and her husband were able to drive it home. But the front end is destroyed – one headlight totally gone, the other not too happy, and the hood itself crumpled from the front. Through the mercy of God the deer did not flip up and go through the windshield.
When we first got here, we had a pleasant talk with one set of our neighbors, who have lived here for 23 years. During our chat I mentioned casually that it would good if a few of these deer got popped, they seem far too comfortable around people. I was frowned at by Mrs., and told they didn’t shoot deer.
Around the corner from where we live, a sort of deer-friendly meadow has been set up along the road. This road is nearly the only way to get into town from our area. Hand-made deer crossing signs and deer warnings have been set up. I think they put out food for the deer – at least, there are often half a dozen deer present in the meadow. Posted speed limit is 45, but through there the actual speed might tend to be 40 – it’s a windy road.
OK, so right along the main road into town, where regular traffic is zipping along, we have people positively inviting deer to hang out right along the road. Seems not very smart to me.
I think the poor infants in our area think the deer are nice, and at any rate have a right to be here. But so do we. By the logic (yea, yea, I know, humor me) of the birds and bunnies people, we people are no more or less ‘natural’ than any other creature. So, like deer (and rats, and mountain lions, and mosquitos) we have a right to live wherever we want. The real problem: we’ve eliminated all the other predators who would otherwise keep the deer in line. For good reason, we can’t live too close with the mountain lions, bears, and wolves.
The completely natural thing to do would be for us humans to embrace our role as apex predators and do Mother Nature’s own work and heavily thin the deer population. I can’t imagine that 200 years ago there were anywhere near as many deer as there are now, when the area was full of bears and mountain lions and Indian hunters, and before people had planted all these nice fruit trees and other deer food. If we take them out in an orderly and consistent manner, the deer don’t get to die, or worse, get crippled THEN die, in encounters with cars. And I don’t loose any children or grandchildren due to the pretty, pretty vermin playing chicken on the highways.
I hear venison is delicious when properly prepared. I plan to find out.
As I pointed out on what I shall continue to call Twitter, the estimates as bunkum. They come from Frontier Economics and were first commissioned by the makers of Wegovy, presumably to make their effective but expensive weight loss drug look like a relative bargain.
Their previous estimate of the cost of obesity to “society” was £58bn. This year’s estimate is £98bn, most of which (£57bn) comes from lost quality-adjusted life years. As I tire of pointing out, these are internal costs to the individual which, by definition, are not costs to wider society. I can’t stress enough how absurd it is to include lost productivity due to early death as a cost to the economy. You might as well calculate the lost productivity of people who have never been born and claim that contraception costs the economy billions of pounds.
Since the previous estimate, the costs have been bulked up by including the costs of being overweight, but there is no indication in the wafer-thin webpage of what these are. Being merely overweight doesn’t have many serious health implications. The healthcare costs have doubled, but as in the previous report, the new estimate does not look at how much more healthcare would be consumed if there was no obesity. No savings are included. What we need is the net cost.
The “report” that The Times turned into a front page news story is no more than a glorified blog post. It contains no detail, no methodology and none of the assumptions upon which it is based can be checked. It comes with an eight page slideshow from Frontier Economics which is described as a “full analysis” but which doesn’t contain any useful figures either.
Estimates like this are bound to mislead the casual reader into thinking that they are paying higher taxes because of obesity. There is no other reason to publish them, as they have no academic merit. They are designed to be misunderstood.
Sure enough, the very next day The Times was explicitly claiming that the putative £98 billion — now rounded up to £100 billion — was a direct cost to government …
Jumping the gun on the conclusion to the counting trees essays: go through the thought process of setting up this ‘study’. You’ve got, off the top of my head –
What constitutes obesity? (Note this is a fairly contentious area, even excluding the ‘body positive’ lunatics. BMI, for example, is so basically flawed as to be useless – yet it’s used all the time.)
How is it measured? No, really – you throwing the *population* on a scale, one by one? Or – what? Any holes or biases in whatever your method is?
What constitutes a ‘cost’? How is it measured? (I have a finance degree. This is like a minefield-level question. Fights break out over the allocation of indirect costs.)
And dozens more questions. Let’s just stop there. Here we have *one* number presented as the *truth*. It should be obvious even without the writer’s takedown that it’s absurd.
Started here, continued here and here. We’ve reached the point where we’ve settled on definitions, and maybe, we hope, settled on a single methodology:
Say we’ve decided that each team of counters is to count every tree they can approach and measure (4″ diameter at 18″ off the ground). Every homeowner on the block will be asked permission for access to their back yards. Backyards that cannot be accessed due to denial of or other failure to obtain permission will be assumed to have the average of the backyards for which counts were obtained. This process will be followed by each of 10 teams of counters over the course of a month.
Next, we need to decide how we will determine our final number. Average? Simply state the range? Make some more or less reasonable assumptions , and choose a count? Each of these make some degree of sense. What doesn’t make sense is stating any number as if it is THE count. The sciency thing to do is to state how the number was arrived at and all the decisions and rules used to get the counts themselves. You do this so the reader can understand the limitations of the count, and decide how useful it is.
It needs to be stressed that there is no one count that can simply be stated without qualification. Unless our block has no trees (and we can validate this by looking everywhere), or perhaps is manicured like a park such that only a handful of large trees are present (and we can verify this), there is simply no way for a bunch of people to manually count trees however defined, such that it can be confidently stated exactly how many trees are in a block.
And that number may change tomorrow.
I hope I’ve made clear that even simple sounding questions – “How many trees do you have on your property?” – can be devilishly hard to answer.
The next step cuts to the heart of science: who is doing the counting, and why?
Let’s mix it up a little: now we want to know the number of trees on 1,000 acres of Forest Service land. This land is being considered for leasing out for harvest. In this case, what qualifies as a tree is limited to conifers suitable for lumber – say, minimum 16″ in diameter 18″ off the ground. Or, I’m sure that the lumber industry has developed a thorough way of determining if a given area is worth harvesting – let’s assume we’re using whatever method that is.
Now we have 10 teams who will independently use the agreed upon methodology to count trees. Let’s assume that more trees equals better for the lumber companies that will be bidding on the right to harvest these 1,000 acres. Here are our 10 teams:
Team 1: Retired people who live right along the border of the 1,000 acres
Team 2: Representatives of the John Muir Society
Team 3: Professional assessors working for Lumber Company A
Team 4: Earth First! members
Team 5: Local woodworking enthusiasts
Team 6: People who live downstream along a creek that flows through the 1,000 acres
Team 7: Professional assessors working for Lumber Company B
Team 8: People from a lumber company not expected to bid here, but who have lumber rights to 10,000 acres in the area.
Team 9: Local fishing enthusiasts who consider the creek that flows through the 1,000 acres to be their personal hot spot.
Team 10: a team from a company trying to sell counts based on satellite images.
Is this information you, as a consumer as it were of the numbers, want. In other words, you would want to be aware of who exactly is doing the counting and why. You would want to know of any known or potential conflicts of interest.
You’re not getting one number, or even one range of umbers, that agrees across teams, except by chance. Here’s the kicker: even if the counters are the most scrupulously honest people in the world, it’s all but certain that their interests will skew the count in the direction they would like. One is tempted to say that, of all the counters, the lumber company assessors are the most likely to reach an honest count, because it is in their company’s interest to know exactly what they might be bidding on. BUT – since they’re estimating anyway, maybe they give a low estimate as their teams’ report – and use a high estimate to base their company’s bid on. They could do exactly that – with a clean conscience!
It is fair to say that Western science consists of recognizing and addressing all the issues listed in these four little essays. This last – confirmation bias – is in some ways the biggest and most pernicious problem. The most important part to keep in mind: the possibility of confirmation bias lurks even in the work of the most honest and diligent researcher. Alas, it is also a truism to say that a scientist suspects confirmation bias in everybody’s work except his own.
Rosy-dactyled Dawn grips the eastern horizon.The lighting is all wrong – it was much darker and more colorful, but that’s what I got with a cell phone camera – but that’s a quarter moon.
What is a palm tree doing in the foothills of the Sierras? Good question. The land is full of trees that don’t belong there. What you want to see is several varieties of sturdy oaks, and maybe some smaller trees, on largely open hillsides – that’s what this part of California looks like in its native raiment. What we got is a land choked with many unknown species, maples, magnolia, pines, as well as the citrus, almonds, apples, persimmons, plums, a pear, and goodness knows what else.
Seems to be a combination of overzealous planting of landscape and fruit trees, plus 20+ years of neglect and volunteers. This is what chainsaws were invented for. And lots of burn piles.
Yard Sale of the Mind 