About the Power of the CIA

How powerful is the CIA? Consider this "Six ways till Sunday . . ." comment Chuck Schumer to Rachel Maddox in 2017:

Maddow: "Let me ask you, I don't know if you've seen this. I don't want to blindside you with this. This is the latest tweet--as you were just saying--the President elect's latest unsolicited pronouncement on the intelligence community. This was his tweet just a little while ago tonight, and as you see the scare quotes there."

The intelligence briefing on so called Russian hacking was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange.

Maddow: "We're actually told intelligence sources tell NBC News since this tweet has been posted, that actually this intelligence briefing for the president elect was always planned for Friday. It hasn't been delayed. But he's taking these shots, this antagonisms, taunting to the intelligence."

Chuck Schumer: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you. So even for a practical, supposedly hard nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this."

Maddow: "What do you think the intelligence community would do if they were mad?"

Schumer: "I don't know, but I from what I am told, they are very upset with how he has treated them and talked about them. And we need the intelligence community. We don't know what's gonna--look at the Russian hacking! Without the intelligence community, we wouldn't have discovered it."

Maddow: "Do you think he has an agenda to try to dismantle parts of the intelligence community. I mean, this form of when we talk to hostility . . ."

Schumer: "Let me tell you, whether you're a super liberal democrat or a very conservative Republican, you should be against dismantling the intelligence community."

In the meantime, Seymour Hersh has just released another jaw-dropping story, this one about John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, the CIA and the Mafia. Title: "THE KENNEDYS' SECRET SICILIAN OPERATION: What the CIA didn't tell the Warren Commission."

And I'm slowly working my way through The Devil's Chessboard, by David Talbot. Dozens of sordid tales about the CIA.

Continue ReadingAbout the Power of the CIA

The Lack of Attention to Reverse Asymmetries

In 2019, after writing 214 articles, Michael Shermer was booted out of Scientific American because the "science" magazine increasingly became scientific. One of the problems he noticed is that the editors were quick to criticize group disparities only when they ran in the woke direction.  An excerpt from "Scientific American Goes Woke: A case study in how identity politics poisons science":

[R]everse asymmetries never warrant explanations of reverse biases. To wit, this same study reported that “women earned 57%, 60% and 52% of all Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees respectively in the U.S. in 2013-14,” but proposed no reverse biases against men to account for such imbalances. Neither did a 2019 Council of Graduate Schools study that found for the 11th year in a row women earned a majority of doctoral degrees awarded at US universities (41,943 vs. 37,365, or 52.9% vs. 47.1%). Our attention is drawn to the lower percentages of female doctorates in engineering (25.1%), mathematics and computer sciences (26.8%), physical and earth sciences (35.1%), and business (46.7%), followed by discussions of systemic bias, but no such structural issues are on offer for the lower percentages of male doctorates in public administration (26.4%), health and medical sciences (29%), education (31.6%), social and behavioral sciences (39%), arts and humanities (48.1%), and biological sciences (48.6%). When the data is presented in a bar graph rank ordered from highest to lowest percentages for females earning doctorates (below), the claim that the fields in which women earn lower percentages than men can only be explained by misogyny and bias is gainsaid by the top bars where the valance is reversed, unless we are to believe that only in those bottom fields are faculty and administrators still bigoted against women whereas those in the top fields are enlightened.

About four years ago, Jordan Peterson illustrated another asymmetry, one for which many people only see one side of the equation. That's the confirmation bias at work, once again.

The question addressed in this video is whether western culture is a "patriarchy." Here's the video (I cannot figure out the name of the woman not the right). I made the following transcript:

Interviewer: I mean, that's the that's my idea of the patriarchy, which is a system of male dominance of society.

Jordan Peterson: But that's not my sense of the patriarchy.

Interviewer: So what's yours?

Jordan Peterson: Well, in what sense is our society male dominated?

Interviewer: The fact that the vast majority of wealth is owned by men, the vast majority of capital and is owned by men, women do more unpaid labor

Jordan Peterson: A tiny proportion of men. And a huge proportion of people who are seriously disaffected are men. Most people in prison are men. Who most people who are on the street are men. Most victims of violent crime are men. Most people commit suicide and men. Most people who die in wars are men. People who do worse in school are men. It's like, where's the dominance here precisely, what you're doing is you're taking a tiny substrata of hyper-successful men and using that to represent the entire structure of the Western society. There's nothing about that that's vaguely appropriate.

Continue ReadingThe Lack of Attention to Reverse Asymmetries

Modern Day Segregationists

Glenn Greenwald Tweets:

The modern-day segregationists do everything possible to keep people divided by race, prevent them from having joyful and natural interactions, ban them from appreciating the culture and humor of others, and in general demand that they have as little in common as possible.

Two thoughts keep haunting me these days.

1. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. 2. Most evil is the result of ignorance (Socrates).

People need to calibrate their information ecosystems and pay attention to dissenting views, or else they will be destroyed by the confirmation bias.

Continue ReadingModern Day Segregationists