Centerfield

Certainly understandable feelings. I put it down to growing pains, though. There are plenty of sites with high traffic rates which have been able to maintain some dignity. They don't all turn into dKos or DU or LGF. If it becomes a real problem, then we can look at requiring registration before posting, more aggresively deleting inappropriate comments, etc. As we are linked to more often from that source, the AOL "regulars" will quickly learn who we are, and the obnoxious ones will stop posting if we make them unwelcome enough.

I think you're probably right about when they link to us. It's going to be a hot-button topic with a post that takes a strong position one way or the other. Personally, what I'd like to see us become is a definitive source for the basic, unvarnished facts underlying the issue, coupled with our usual thoughtful discussions. I think this post from Powerline is the kind of thing I would like to produce and see more of here. With our combined experiences in government at all levels, we should be able to produce this sort of thing.

Truly, I'm delighted at the increased exposure, and I think we need to try to take advantage of it to promote our views and way of thinking to a wider audience (right, Paul?).

What is this referring to? I don't know anything about this.

One comment about Pat's statement about the "basic, unvarnished facts underlying the issue." At the risk of sounding post-modern (which I'm not), I'm not sure there is such a thing. The kind of facts that people use to judge political issues are usually, it seems to me, are always filtered through an interpretive lens. That's why I think it's a pipe dream to expect to uncover some set of agreed upon "facts" that will form the basis of a discussion. In many cases, agreeing upon a particular "fact" effectively determines the nature of the discussion.

Marc, go read the Myrick to W: Hell No! post immediately below this one and you'll understand what we're talking about.

As for facts, yes, there are many issues where facts are less relevant than opinions. But there are many other issues where there are real, objective facts that can and should be discovered, if for no other reason than to help us understand our own prejudices better. Take a look at the Powerline example I used. Their first reaction was definitely against the deal, but they were still able to present a very good compilation of real facts regarding the issue. The AOL invasion revealed an awful lot of misunderstandings out in the universe. Many still think that UAE is buying the ports, rather than buying the company that operates the ports. Many don't even realize that the previous managing company was foreign-owned. I linked elsewhere to Hugh Hewitt's excellent interview with the head of Coast Guard's port security section in their headquarters, who talked with some specificity about how little influence or impact the ownership of the operating company has on security issues. These are the things we should be striving to present in as unbiased a form as possible.

Everything Pat said.

I heard a radio story this AM in which they were still suggesting that arabs would be running port security, which we know isn't true.

If we can talk even one or two cats out of the fraidycat tree, that's a small victory.

Interestingly, traffic yesterday was lower than the previous Wednesday. Link.

Thanks for the link, Todd. I wasn't sure who had that information available.

Last Wednesday, we had two big threads on Al Gore and Dick Cheney. The Cheney thread is when we had the first batch of AOL drive-bys.

The Cheney thread last Wednesday was linked by AOL on Thursday. I posted the cached site link in the other thread (you were WAY late, Bob...). Overall our unique visitor traffic is consistently up by about 50% from this time last year (the post '04 election slump) which is good. And it's much more consistent.

What, someone noticed that I set up a traffic counter? I thought I was the only one who checked it. Been there for 2.5 years now, but you do have to go looking to find it. :-)

You sift a lot of gravel to find nuggets. The drive-bys dump and run. The more thoughtful readers might get hooked, and they're not the ones posting the reflex rants.

In many cases, agreeing upon a particular "fact" effectively determines the nature of the discussion.

Yet the nature of modern political ranting is the insistence on having one's own "facts." I'm with the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan there.

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

Determine what the reality is, then you can argue about opinion and context. Otherwise it's just fundies of one stripe or another screaming their dogmas at each other. Much of what is tossed around as "fact" in the blogosphere isn't. It's doctrine and dogma and opinion and hyperbole and sarcasm, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. (Told y'all I'd be quoting Shakespeare soon...) I think it's imperative that any substantive discussion of issues BEGIN with stripping the hype out of the hyperbole, so you can deal with the realities.

And who knows? Maybe there's a market for used rboles.

Tully: I apologize for being late yesterday.
Next time I'll bring a note explaining how I was busy saving the planet from the forces of evil and entropy.

Don't you just hate it when work gets in the way of your hobbies?

That's why I turned my hobbies into paying work, Bob. :-) But I just had to note that you missed the post buried down there in the flood of potted meatoid drive-by....

It was pretty sad what we saw posted. Irrationality at its finest.

Tully,

The point about facts that I'm trying to make is that they are often contested and not necessarily clear. For example, is it a "fact" that the military is or is not mistreating prisoners at Guantanamo? That might turn on an individual's definition of the term "mistreating" (even if we agree on the specific acts that are occurring). To some, it is a "fact" that we are mistreating prisoners,while to others, it is a "fact" that we are not. How you come down on this is likely to determine the terms of the debate.

Right Marc. In that example, what we'd want want to do is try to separate out the part of that which we know and can agree on as fact from the part that's opinion, possibly based on some subset of facts.

That's why when I try to describe stuff like that, I try to use words that feel accurate to me, sometimes even regardless of how they might make others feel. Like "entitlement." I don't view this as pejorative like some others do. Democracies can decide upon entitlements. That's OK. And when they cost money, we need to review them based on our ability and desire to fund them.

in the Guantanamo case, we know that there are these foreign prisoners detained against their will based on suspicion of terrorism, with no or very few rights of due process being granted. And we know the conditions are at the very least spartan and restrictive. That's pretty factual, wouldn't you say?

The disagreement seems to come in where people have differing opinions about whether indefinite detention (and maybe unpleasant interrogation) without due process is by itself mistreatment.

Marc, that's why it's important to get down to the bare, nitty-grit facts. One of the things I pointed out in the Gore thread was that words we interpreted one way were very likely to be interpreted very differently by his Saudi Arabian and Middle Eastern audience. By focusing on facts, we can pare down to exactly what our disagreements are.

Many people still believe that Guatanamo guards "mistreat" the Koran. In fact, they handle it with great reverence. One copy of the Koran was accidentally sprinkled with urine when a guard took a leak outside and the wind blew it threw a ventilation hole. The more we can narrow the facts down, the more we can see exactly where we disagree. We may not be able to agree on the definition of "mistreating", but we can identify the specific acts occuring and then focus the debate on whether or not that constitutes "mistreatment" or "torture".

You seem to have wandered into the question of whether there is such a thing as absolute truth (or an absolute fact). I would maintain that nothing is absolute. Even if I link to a government website that shows oil import levels, those numbers can be disputed for accuracy and political bias. There is a whole science called metrology (not meteorology) that's been bumping up against this problem for ages. There is a reason we have an institution call NIST. Reality tends to be soft and squishy.

Who said anything about absolutes. But trying to get to the bottom of the actual facts is a lot better than simply saying "mistreatment is bad" when we don't actually know what is really going on, isn't it?

I would maintain that nothing is absolute.

Hmmm. Would you be willing to stand under a rock suspended by a rope while someone sawed through the rope? Is gravity relative? Mass?

Some things are pretty darn absolute. Gravity is relative to mass and proximity, for example, but when you're standing on the surface of the earth the assumption of one G absolute is a pretty strong one.

Not relative, just weird.
The rock isn't going to drop straight down. Coriolis forces, wind and local gravimetric anomalies will affect its trajectory. If its high enough it will miss me completely. An then you can start talking about quantum mechanics and the finite (put incredibly small) possibility the rock will miss me.

The universe is governed by very weird rules that's why Einstein objected to God playing dice with it.

In the end you always run into the Heisenberg uncertainty principle:

“In quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that one cannot assign, with full precision, values for certain pairs of observable variables, including the position and momentum, of a single particle at the same time even in theory. It furthermore precisely quantifies the imprecision by providing a lower bound (greater than zero) for the product of the standard deviations of the measurements. The uncertainty principle is one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics and was discovered by Werner Heisenberg in 1927. “ (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Pat: True, trying to get to the bottom of the actual facts is important, but perception will ultimate affect the final conclusion. I took a evangelical Christian friend kayaking in a wilderness area. The TVA and erosion had cut a section of mountain aside. When I pointed out the thousands of strata his response was, “God made it that way, the earth was only about 6000 years old”. One set of facts two conclusions.

I never said otherwise, Bob. But VERY, VERY often, getting the facts straight (facts, not conclusions such as the age of the earth or the meaning of "mistreatment") will allow MOST people to reach the same conclusions, or at least to recognize where exactly they are differing philosophically.

LOL. You're wigglin', Bob. And you didn't answer the question.

There's a big difference between "full precision" and "good enough for al practical purposes."

Did you ask him why God post-dates his reality checks?

The rock isn't going to drop straight down.

I'm not wiggling; I'm just trying to make a point. Whether I would be willing to stand under the rock would be entirely dependent on the specific parameters of the setup.

Example: How big is the rock? How much does it weigh? What is its composition? How high above me will it initially be released? Will this occur indoor or outdoors? Can I wear a helmet?

When you really start examining the details there is wiggle room. When you try and make a measurement there is a lower limit to your precision. That feature is built into the physical reality of the universe and has been REPEATEDLY verified.

Sorry to get preachy but this is one of my pet peeves. Just because a meter, dial, speedometer or odometer reads a value doesn't mean its right. At best it is an approximation and at worse the unit is not calibrated to a NIST traceable source and completely wrong.

PS: Don't underestimate the Coriolis effect ; naval gunnery tables are different for the northern and southern hemispheres because of it. It is the effect that makes hurricanes spin.

Bob, I think you made your point. But, maybe because it is your pet peeve, you seem very resistant to the attempts of everyone else here to contextualize your point, to ground it in the real world.

As you must also know as a scientist, it's not just inevitable that calculations get rounded off, it's also perfectly acceptable depending on the real-world purposes of your calculations, how you're going to use them.

Even if all the facts are variable and debatable, this doesn't mean that its impossible to separate them into the ones that are factual enough for us to use for our intended purposes, and one which really aren't factual enough.

That using rounded calculations and assuming various imprecise measurements can be factual enough for prescribed purposes is indisputable. I'm sitting on the 11th floor of a building that proves humans can construct sturdy useful things even without precisely determining the exact physical reality of the universe.

And you know that, so why not incorporate that knowledge into the nature of how you respond to others who push your buttons and set off your pet peeve?

BK: I not upset or anything. I just used this as an excuse to play "Bill Nye the science guy". I measure reality on a daily basis in the lab. Its fuzziness definitely influences my view of politics and human interaction. I guess I need to work harder at conveying this world view.

Maybe I should write a book.

One comment about the "basic, unvarnished facts underlying the issue."

Sometimes when you talk about varnishing, you take a shellacing. I wouldn't stand under the rock either.

If I changed the rock to a piano and specified a windless day, would you admit that some of the parameters are implied, Bob? :-)

Usually I'm the one pointing out to you that some "sciences," while deterministic, are so dependent on chaotic models (and on non-deterministic variables) that certainty diminishes rapidly as time extends.