DISQUS

Richard, I like what you're saying about "coherence". It seems to fit with Will's commitment to having no contradictions in his belief system (which led him away from Christianity, if I'm remembering some of his earlier blog posts aright). But there are issues with this approach as well. "GOD DID IT" is a perfectly coherent way to explain everything you see, but that doesn't mean it's true. :-) Conversely, the body of scientific knowledge we have is relatively coherent now (setting aside, e.g., the clash between quantum mechanics and relativity), but that certainly hasn't always been the case. Maybe something like *predictive power* is what we want: a proposition is likely to be true if it helps you predict future events. But then we're back to the reproducibility problem again, aren't we? :-)

Richard, thanks for your reply! Your argumentation is quite clear. I wonder, though, why our hypothetical fairy-watcher should trust an amorphous concept like "scientific consensus" (or even "background knowledge" or "everybody knows that...") rather than visual experience. Is it simply because the latter is a social construct -- an opinion created by many people with lots of give-and-take? Why is that necessarily a better guide to truth? Certainly people sometimes hallucinate and dream; but equally as certainly, communities of people sometimes believe mad things.

I found this very interesting: "That is, if something plays a role in our best explanation of some phenomenon, you should believe it exists." There's something a little tricky about this. What is this "our best explanation"?

Is "our" = "the scientific community"? Should one's belief rest on a consensus opinion of a collection of scientists? But scientists are just people -- their consensus opinion changes over time, is subject to the vagaries of history, chance, and social pressure, and in many, many cases, there is no consensus yet. Plus, a large proportion of today's scientific theories are bound to be largely incomplete, if not downright wrong. And anyway, the scientific method exhorts one to cultivate an attitude of *doubt*, not an attitude of belief.

Finally, of course, science is simply not very good at establishing beliefs about non-replicable experiences. Perhaps I told you I saw a fairy in my garden the other night. A scientist would naturally suspend belief until the experience had been replicated, preferably with some kind of recording devices present. But fairies are capricious creatures, and it's often hard to get them to cooperate. Even if fairies "really do" exist, they will, by nature, never sit still and allow scientists to do experiments on them. So should I trust the scientific consensus on something that cannot be experimented on, or should I trust my own eyes?

Will, that metaphor is certainly... uh... vivid...

Will, I think you can be a little more careful about drawing the analogy between linguistics and morality.

It is true that every setting of the linguistic parameters produces a working language. And it is true that most linguists believe that no language is "better" than any other. But the second statement does not follow from the first!

One could easily imagine a case in which different parameter settings generate languages that are wildly different in terms of communicative efficiency, lyricism, their efficacy as a tool to help men get women into bed, or whatever scale you want to measure them with.

Linguists have found through OBSERVATION that all languages are about the same in terms of communicative efficiency and complexity. Chomsky's "Principles and Parameters" approach does NOT explain this!

One could try to explain this observational fact via evolutionary pressure, but that is not a view that Chomsky would endorse. He is, in fact, quite opposed to evolutionary just-so stories.

What does this mean for morality? It means you could easily have a generative, parameter-setting approach to morality, AND have some of the generated moralities be awful and others be great. The purpose of the parameters model would not be to judge moralities, but to predict the set of moralities that are possible for humans to hold. That, I think, would be a very worthy goal.

Slocum, I'm certainly no expert on this topic. Still, here's what jumps to mind:

* Concerning the Gallery of Regrettable Food, I completely agree that the diet of suburbanites has improved dramatically since the middle of the 20th century. The processed food industry has gotten a lot better at preserving and transporting food from farm to factory to grocery store. (It still has a long way to go, though. Only a very few of the hundreds of types of salad greens travel very well, so you only get a few types in the grocery store.) This is why my original question concerned diets from a century ago, not 60 years ago.

* The NY Times article has very little to say about nutrition, other than that most modern Americans are bordering on obese, and some studies suggest that poor nutrition in the formative years can lead to health problems later on. The article largely lays the blame for the poor condition of Americans in the 19th century at the door of disease, which was obviously a huge problem, especially for American urbanites (who mostly lived in tight-packed squalor).

The article also doesn't compare body size and longevity of 19th-century Americans with people of other countries or previous centuries. You might find this (http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/science/artic...) intersting, for example. The Cheyenne of the 19th century were apparently some of the tallest people in the world; they certainly aren't that way now, so you can't lay the blame on genetics. The article has a definite socialist slant, but you can ignore that and just look at the data on height, which indicates that the Civil War period, the main point of reference for the Times article, was a definite low point for European-American health.

Slocum,

To answer you fully would take way too much space on Will's blog, but here are some things to think about:

Corn mush with cod oil doesn't necessarily sound tasty (especially if it's prepared with a garnish of seagull poop, which I agree is not very sanitary). But it's packed with excellent nutrients, including cod oil, which is a perfect source of omega-3 fatty acids -- something that most Americans get nowhere near enough of today.

As for eating out of the root cellar, it's true that most of the human race went through lean times and times of plenty every year. It's what we're used to, evolutionarily speaking, and it's what we're designed for. I suspect having less to eat every once in a while would make the obesity problem in this country disappear rather quickly.

If that's not how you (or most people) would LIKE to eat -- if they'd rather have a convenient Twinkie and a soda than homemade applesauce and root beer (both of which are dirt cheap if you do it yourself, healthy, and available in the winter if they're stored properly) -- then maybe that is the real answer to my original question.

Nicholas, I don't think the difference between organic and non-organic food -- or the difference between food from Peru and food grown locally -- is a nebulous subjective quality measure. There is a huge difference between feeding your children soda, Twinkies, white Wonder "bread", etc., all transported across the world via fossil fuels, versus buying a share of the crop of a local organic farm and eating actual food. I've seen the difference in the quality of life for my own children (fewer bouts of illness, no tendancy to overeat, more energy, etc.). The food from the local farm is a little more expensive, but not prohibitively so.
My wife and I wonder why most people -- especially people at the lower edge of the middle class (say, those who work at Wal-Mart), who actually CAN afford the nicer food!, continue to eat crap.
In other words, the quality of food eaten by most people in this country has DROPPED SIGNIFICANTLY over the past century. Can anyone explain that to me?

Bah.
The only reason that Washington DC is able to support so many lobbyists, beaurocrats, and various hangers-on is because of the air conditioner. The city is barely habitable otherwise.
The whole military industrial complex is this man's fault.

Will, dude, you just rock.

I've been reading the Cato blog faithfully, and it's very nice. But this recent post of yours is, to my mind at least, so much clearer, sharper, funnier, and convincing than anything else that has appeared there. You've got a serious heavy talent for this. Are you writing a book? I'd like to buy it. Whatever it's about. Even if it's, like, "My Favorite Iowa Mormon Recipes" or something.

Seriously. I mean it.