What, did you just arrive on this planet after thumbing a ride on a passing spaceship piloted by a green bug-eyed monster who was headed for the Basingstoke roundabout? What do you think will happen during those 90 days if the studies reach any conclusion that is not "OMG underground diesel exhaust is teh AWESOMES!!!11!"?

You would only think that if you did not work in those fields. Those who do work in those fields (including my best friend) are keenly aware of the comically low quality, the embarrassing irreproducibility, and the appalling "p hunting", that all enter in to studies in psychology, experimental psychology, and sociology. Not to mention the very grave "selection bias" problems that stem from the fact that most psychology and sociology studies are poorly funded and are therefore conducted on fellow psychology and sociology students.

No one who has experienced the state of research in those fields would ever, ever consider basing legislation on such results.

The whole idea of "proper spelling" is a recent cultural invention. Prior to the 1800s, writers often spelled things phonetically. And while a misspelling can occasionally "change the meaning of what is being said", I doubt it happens more than rarely that a) a misspelling changes the meaning significantly yet b) the readers don't catch the mistake from context.

In my mind, the best argument to make in favor of proper spelling is: search engines. Today the zeitgeist thinks using search engines, and most search engines (including e.g. the simpler 'find' commands) are not spelling-agnostic. Not yet anyway.

But even then, how often do your search results depend on the difference between "it's" and "its"?

Reminds me of something we say in UI design meetings:

"If 3% of your users screw up, it's a user problem... but if 30% of your users screw up, it's a UI problem."

If the fracking process is not tolerant of hasty, underfunded, undertrained, fly-by-night drilling operations, then the process is not suitable for deployment here in the West.

Yep yep.

As a US citizen now thoroughly ashamed of my society's behavior (esp. regulatory capture, as well as the all-classes corruption of the housing bubble), this news is the first time in my entire life that European society has seemed superior.

It is quite a moment for me, coming as it is at the tail end of twenty years of staunch libertarian patriotism.

Yeah, THAT will sure attract new talent to their space program! Alex, I'll take Perverse Incentives for 500 rubles, please!

And never mind the equally important point that the current team at least learned something and won't repeat this particular mistake again. Can't say that for the new team.

I am amused to report that they couldn't even handle that. Laika was accidentally killed very very early in the flight. The rest of her time aboard the capsule, and the gentle story of her demise, was all fiction.

I taught my two sons to program. Only one of them liked it, but they both got an astonishing side benefit from it: it taught them to see their own brains as software... with algorithms and bugs. In the context of a broader parent-child discussion of recognizing and dealing with personality bugs, programming seems to make it real, in a way that no amount of lecture can.

Haven't you noticed how few people are introspective, how few are even capable of thinking that their thoughts and feelings may be incorrect?

Look, I with agree you, but your arguments still need work. The right to control your body does not obviously follow from right to feed yourself. Nor does self-ownership obviously follow from ownership. Nor does total ownership obviously follow from partial ownership (think your use of a laptop provided by your company).

Your rights derive from MY self-interest, because your rights morally bind me in some way. I can make the argument, perhaps persuasively, that it is obviously right for me to allow you to feed yourself, and even to get ahead, but to disallow you from ruining your life with heroine. From my point of view, I must deny you full self-ownership because my self-interest requires me to defend society from addictive destructive substances.

Or imagine you are arguing with a Roman, who believes he has all rights to the dozen slaves he captured in Lydia. Can you explain to him why his arranement is automatically wrong for all of the players? Remember, the only reason the Roman economy could support such a large empire (i.e. so much border to guard) was via slaves captured on conquests.

Hint: if you enter a philosophical discussion with an insult, and then pepper the rest of your post with additional ad hominem, then your own philosophy still needs work.

Quite a lot of work.

Those concepts are not axiomatic. I can easily conceive of the existence of slavery, in which most aspects of a person are controlled by various means.

Sensible, maybe, but not axiomatic. It may also be impossible to hold together a social pattern without at least some degree of state control over what people do with their bodies. Just look at what the (de facto) freedom to use opium did to China for a century.

Agreed; by then, Germany had really run off the rails. I also feel we did right by Japan, when we rebooted their society after the war and turned them into a Western-style state that is vastly more free and efficient than it was.

Very good. Now tell us *why* all humans possess those rights.

The definition doesn't help, either... a political right is defined as "A behavior which you may practice, and anyone who tries to stop you is automatically wrong." No information there about where the right springs from.

The answer, that most people will not agree with, is: rights are the those behaviors that humans must practice if they seek to establish a pro-human society, where 'pro-human' means a society whose primary goal is the long-term production of safety, comfort, and pleasure. Any other society is automatically wrong, in the sense of "illogical for humans to seek".

I used "regulatory capture" because it points to a solution, at least in principle. Whereas for the more general problem of "corruption", no one has any idea how to fix it. Religion used to be the answer ("The invisible old man in the sky who loves you will torture you forever!!!11!"), but that has lost all credibility these days. And with the college curriculum passionately certain that certainty is impossible (i.e. Skepticism), there is no alternative in sight.