New releases

High Impact Science

Blog post by · Published November 15th, 2011

Paul Ehrlich began his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, with this statement:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to
death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a
substantial increase in the world death rate.

Ehrlich predicted the deaths as a consequence of the challenge of feeding a
rapidly growing world population, pointing to recent devastating famines in
South Asia. But even as those words were written, the fields were being planted
with new, higher-yielding semi-dwarf strains of wheat and rice.

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Our Worst Subjects

Blog post by · Published November 14th, 2011

“I prefer to give to local organizations.” I’ve heard this a lot.

Imagine a high school student who sits down to study for exams. Her chemistry
book is lying closest to her on the desk, so she decides to study chemistry.
Her father points out that since she has an A in chemistry and a D in geometry,
studying geometry might help her grades more. “But that book is all the way
over there in my backpack,” the student points out; “I prefer to study
locally.”

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Estimation is the best we have

Blog post by · Published November 9th, 2011

This argument seems common to many debates:

‘Proposal P arrogantly assumes that it is possible to measure X, when really
X is hard to measure and perhaps even changes depending on other factors.
Therefore we shouldn’t do P’.

This could make sense if X wasn’t especially integral to the goal. For
instance if the proposal were to measure short distances by triangulation
with nearby objects, a reasonable criticism would be that the angles are hard
to measure, relative to measuring the distance directly. But this argument is
commonly used in situations where optimizing X is the whole point of the
activity, or a large part of it.

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