Author: Huenemann

Here is a provocative piece by Charles Murray arguing that employers should not esteem BA degrees over degrees from community colleges. A representative quote:

The benefits of discarding the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification would be huge for both employers and job applicants. Certifications would tell employers far more about their applicants’ qualifications than a B.A. does, and hundreds of thousands of young people would be able to get what they want from post-secondary education without having to twist themselves into knots to comply with the rituals of getting a bachelor’s degree.

It’s a little odd, I think, that Murray seems to value education primarily with respect to employment. I thought the aim is different: not necessarily to make capable workers, but to make more-educated people. Silly me.

… is the 2009 World Question sponsored by The Edge. Some very interesting answers are put forward, including: artificial intelligence, an understanding of creativity, laboratory earch colonies, wisdom, and the chemical control of violence.

New pages; find them through the “Course webpages” link.

First read this article by Michael Shermer, about the human propensity to hear meaning in all sorts of meaningless noise. We are good at finding patterns; but not so good at detecting when we have superimposed a pattern on something meaningless. In Shermer’s words:

Unfortunately, we did not evolve a Baloney Detection Network in the brain to distinguish between true and false patterns. We have no error-detection governor to modulate the pattern-recognition engine. (Thus the need for science with its self-correcting mechanisms of replication and peer review.) But such erroneous cognition is not likely to remove us from the gene pool and would therefore not have been selected against by evolution.

Then have a look at this YouTube featuring “Stairway to Heaven.” It’s played first forward, with lyrics, then BACKWARD, with lyrics. Does this prove the satanic genius of Led Zeppelin? Or simply our lack of a Baloney Detection Network?