Very good post, but I must point out that there is in fact a great deal of psychological literature on decision-making, and I am alarmed at the number of decisions that adults "make" that are foregone conclusions of programming. This is not the abstract "there is no free will because free will implies uncaused causation" but a much more concrete "the conscious mind spends a lot of time justifying and making up explanations for decisions that the subconscious makes without recourse to reason."

Come to think of it, the "age of consent" is probably closely linked to the age at which our brains really start to behave in that way--perhaps it could be said that only a child is capable of actually making a conscious decision. "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few" is a well-known observation, but the basis is that as we age we become more set in our ways and less capable of assimilating new information and thinking in new ways.

That's the theory. Do the facts bear it out? Does it look like we, as a species, tend to make informed and wise decisions? About sex? Marriage? Children? Transportation? Pollution? War? Finances? Ethics? Time management? Quality of life? ...?

I think it's a little more complicated than that. When one person's decisions affect everyone else, what then? Is it liberal or conservative to try to control greenhouse gases, carcinogenic and toxic waste in the water table, deforestation, overpopulation, etc? I guess that wanting to control those things qualifies as a vision of a Great Society (or at least a marginally sustainable one)--and at least the late behaviour of the two parties is pretty consistent with your description. But if that's true, then the conservative platform is literally the platform of doom.

Interesting, but that's not my read of "liberal" intent. Republicans (not your "conservatives") are constantly trying to tell people what to do. The liberals often do as well, but not here. The problem is that it is impossible to enforce the absence of a law: you can't just say "let's not make a law." The winner of the fight over whether to control marriage or not is the one who passes a law saying "Marriage is defined as [blah blah blah] ...". If liberals were trying to control people in the way that conservatives are, they would tell you whom you must marry. Instead, they are trying to create a law that guarantees you the power to make your own choice. Is that conservative?

Interesting... but Ch. 4 of Freakonomics makes a strong case that if your Grand Vision of society values low crime rates, then access to abortion is critical. So, yes, if you believe Levitt and Dubner, then this debate too can be cast as you've cast the ones above. I can't do their argument justice here--the very short and vegetarian version is that women tend to be good judges of whether they're in a position to raise children--but you might enjoy it.

I'm not sure, but I have a hunch that that's because they don't have enough power in the USA to have to deal with actual issues. How would a libertarian handle global warming / ozone hole / etc? How would a communist handle human laziness?

It's pretty stupid of people to knowingly choose to live in a flood zone. Or an earthquake zone. Or within 1000 miles downwind of Yellowstone. Or within range of a nuclear weapon. Or, frankly, on a planet run by humans. You can't do all the research and learn of all possible risks; it's nice to have building codes and whatnot so you can trust that a house you buy is actually safe from some forms of damage. Which ones?

Yes. On the other hand, I ask the government to protect me from bullies, like foreign invaders, people running red lights, corporations dumping toxins into the water supply, etc. Do you believe that I should do all of that myself?

In what will be millions of similar cases in this century, I can't take personal measures to protect myself from rising sea levels--should I go out and kill everyone who releases greenhouse gases? I don't see why it's unreasonable to expect the government to take responsibility for saving lowlanders.

Of course, if we could somehow just stop the sea level from rising... oh, wait, we know how to do that! Cool!

It appears to me that your party is the neocons. Specifically, Republicanism today means you support at least some of (1) Ecoterrorism: privatised permanent destruction of natural resources such as air, water, forests, etc. (2) Transferring financial power away from "government" and towards corporations. (3) State-mandated religion. (4) Suspension of civil liberties, wiretaps, searches, torture, etc... (5) Fear, isolationism, proud ignorance, and the suppression of science and education. From where I sit, it seems that the Democrats are currently doing better on 1, 2, 3, and 5.

Which of those do you like? If the answer is "none", I'm very curious as to how you figure you're a Republican, given that what I listed has indisputably been very much our Republicans' agenda for some time now (check the voting records). If you do like some of those, you may be Republican, and I'm curious how you figure they're a good thing.

There were times in the past when those roles were reversed to a greater or lesser extent, but for now that's where things stand.

How am I wrong?

Email never had an expectation of privacy anyway. Not that I think the government is doing the Right Thing here, but if you use email for communications that should remain private, you're an idiot if you don't encrypt.

Fortunately, strong encryption has been fairly easy for many years. I'm fairly aghast at how often this is forgotten. And I'd like to see a judge rule that cracking a GPG-encrypted email doesn't violate an expectation of privacy.

Those who voted for Bush in the second term directly support ecoterrorism, suspension of habeas corpus, torture, wars of aggression for oil, socialised religion, contempt for science, etc. Those who voted for him in the first term could have known that quite a few of those items were very likely based on his past performance; if they didn't like those things then they just voted without doing their homework. You CANNOT say that anyone lending support to a party whose track record was for those things opposes them. That was well-established as the party's agenda--if you claim not to support the party's agenda but you support the party, you are a moron.

We have something called "science" and it does a decent job of letting us understand the effects of our actions. Your right to do whatever you want ends when it starts to conflict with my right to do whatever I want, and there can be peace only if we restrict our rights such that we don't infringe on the rights of others. Why should you have the right to destroy something that we all share? Why shouldn't I tell you what to do in order to protect that? Why is it unreasonable to afford all of us the same rights? Given that humans do destroy things that don't belong to them, and that that does destroy everyone's ability to live in peace, why shouldn't a government prevent that?

For example, pollution. If you dump mercury into the water, or cut down forests, or spew greenhouse gases, then you are destroying things that I need in order to live. What gives you the right to do that? Why is it reasonable for you to claim that right?

A more complex example, with a fuzzier conclusion: abstinence-only education increases teen pregnancy and STDs. There is just no question about that. Teen pregnancy increases crime, unemployment, and every kind of environmental problem. The Bush administration adamantly supported abstinence-only education, as has every Republican administration for quite a while. Now--are they ignoring a fact, or are they of the opinion that teen pregnancy, STDs, underachievers, crime, etc., are good? You tell me! Either interpretation is valid.

Um... it was deregulation in the USA that was responsible for the downfall of the world's economy. Every other first-world country is socialist to a much greater degree than we are, and they were doing just fine, thank-you-very-much. The country that is doing the best in the world is not just socialist, but pretty much communist. Where do you get the idea that socialism is bound to fail, when evidence shows that it is fully capable of succeeding brilliantly? Check the data yourself!

As for Bush's socialist agenda failing--perhaps it's Bush's way of implementing it. Apparently it's not that hard to get right, but Bush was just brilliant enough to fuck up even half-assed socialism.

Really? Your research supports that claim? If so, you're just about the only climatologist in the world with that opinion. Please link to your papers (and, of course, make sure you make clear who paid for the research). Or do you somehow think that you're more knowledgeable than the people who have the training, the data, and the supercomputers?

Yes, it's a stopgap.

But we need a stopgap. We need to reduce carbon levels yesterday, and that means not just cutting emissions to nothing, but also an emergency program of planting trees, which if done on a large enough scale, could save our asses from the fire for the next 100 years while we figured how to actually live like a civilisation that means to be around for a while.

I, for one, support military intervention in Brazil, the Amazon, Canada, and all those other places where people are cutting down trees... um, that'd be everywhere. But it looks pretty good compared to the alternative.

I agree--mostly. Gun to the head of anyone who allowed wiretaps, right from the assholes who gave the orders all the way down to the techs who implemented it. And YES to raising taxes and cutting spending--with one small caveat.

The small caveat is that Obama came to power as our economy was crumbling due to many decades of bad decisions, and the theory--crazy though it was--was that if the government encouraged lots of Americans to buy lots of American products (some of them even involving smart investment in energy-saving technology like insulation), then the economists would see GDP figures that they liked. The Bush plan, in contrast, was to enrich a bunch of his friends at the expense of the rest of the country and world, and blow up many billions of dollars' worth of expensive electronics and munitions in a foreign country in order to secure our future as The Country Whose Whole Economy Is Based On A Resource That We Don't Have (and that would destroy us if we did have it, anyway).

Obama's plan worked a little bit, anyway. GDP is up and the growth looks like it's attributable to the stimulus money (says yesterday's The Atlantic). Unemployment is not down, so his plan wasn't really a huge success (education incentives and the end of the Gag Rule will take quite a few more years to do any good). I think that as soon as we prop up failing businesses like GM we have strayed idiotically far from capitalism (and this from a confirmed socialist Canadian) but when you get right down to it, Obama had an impossible problem to solve, and he's making mistakes but at least he's trying.

Assuming we need to rebuild our economy from scratch (not completely unreasonable since it's a pyramid scheme at the moment), is Obama going about it the right way? Not really, but a little bit. Bush was the exact opposite--a total sell-out to deregulation- and hate-mongers, completely and proudly ignorant of history and science.

One area that our government needs to spend more on is regulating the industries and individuals that destroy the commons. Just as someone needs to enforce the Constitution, so also someone needs to ensure that I don't get rich by destroying common resources, like air, water, topsoil, etc. Cutting spending here will exacerbate a problem we've known about for quite a few hundreds of years, and it's rather shocking that Americans are still even more primitive here than the quality of our bread and cheese would suggest. If we prop up the economy by allowing industry to dump toxic manufacturing byproducts into the water table or the air, etc, then we all die. Yay economy? Why is this not considered a matter of National Security? Why don't we have restrictions on SUVs? Why does the EPA have so little power?

Ultimately, I suppose it's a good time to start learning Chinese.

So we're augmenting the flow: now not only will I get "Greetings Dear, I am Ivan Ilych of the First National Bank of Nigeria" but also "Warning from Operation Eagle Claw: You may have been pwn3d!" And no doubt, "Warning from Operation Eagle Claw: You have been pwn3d. Your identity has been stolen by a Nigerian scam syndicate. Please verify your identity by sending us your SSN and we will fix everything."

What matters isn't whether you can come up with a quantitative measure for whether there is sexism. What matters is whether women have a hard time in an environment due to their own observations.

Forget placing blame. That's only really important if you're trying to punish someone.

Rather, look for a solution. I have found that it is not really that difficult to listen to complaints and problems and to try to be sensitive to perceived issues without compromising my honour.

You can think of this as risk management. There might be sexism that you can't see. If there isn't and you don't act, then no problem. If there isn't and you do act, again, the actions required are pretty insignificant and will probably make you a better person anyway, but certainly nobody loses much. If there is and you do act, everyone wins big! If there is and you don't act, then the consequences are truly too horrible to comprehend (like: you'll have to date women who just don't appreciate love poems written in perl. Or, if you're feeling empathic today, a lot of women made miserable by feeling unwelcome when they seek a community of fellow geeks). So, given observation noise, what's the most sensible course of action?