Author Archives: Walter Kloover

What should a President’s goal be?

Posted on by
2

What exactly do Americans want the President to be efficacious at? More generally, what overall goal or goals do we want the President and the whole government to aim for?

1)        Maximize mean/median happiness

2)        Maximize mean/median wealth

3)        Minimize wealth disparity

4)        Maximize freedom from government coercion

5)        Maximize freedom from private coercion

6)        Maximize protection from domestic and foreign threats

If maximization or minimization of something is the goal, do we want to maximize that something for:

1)        the current U.S. population

2)        the U.S population 25/50/100 years from now

3)        current American citizens

4)        the current heritage-American population

5)        me

My choice would be to maximize median happiness for the US population 50 years from now. I think focusing on a long-term goal would encourage positive expectations and reduce voters’ selfishness in choosing who to vote for.

Any thoughts?

Comparing Internet Argument Styles: Creationists, IDists, Scientists

Posted on by
239

Skeptic magazine has an interesting article, based on a 2017 article in Science & Education, describing a study that compared the argument topics and argument types found on websites discussing origins issues. It is not clear from the Skeptic article whether they counted arguments on discussion forums.

The comment I found most interesting is:

[T]he ID creationism approach has been, and continues to be, primarily a program meant to prove the existence of God. It therefore bears more resemblance to natural theology and apologetics than it does to science. Seen in this light, it is surprising that ID creationists once believed that ID would somehow help them achieve their goals.

The author characterizes the irreducible complexity argument as an argument meant to prove the existence of God. I suppose some here would disagree.

I think the ID creationists may have believed ID would help them achieve their goals only because creation science had been so decisively rejected. At that point it was either become more scientific or become more apologetic, and science was clearly not a way forward.

The original article is R. M. Barnes, R. A. Church, and S. Draznin-Nagy. 2017. “The Nature of the Arguments for Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Evolution.” Science & Education, 26, pp. 27–47.