None of us are in a position to figure out everything for ourselves. We are all dependent on experts in specific fields for knowledge. While an expert’s reputation and record of reliability and honesty can and should be factored in, we don’t want to unquestioningly accept the assertions of authorities since it is possible that they may be mistaken or not as expert or knowledgeable as they claim to be or may even be lying

So to what extent is it reasonable to depend on experts? Bertrand Russell in his 1941 book Let the People Think suggested that rather than depend on this or that expert, one should look at the views of the aggregate of experts and draw the following reasonable inferences:

1. “that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain;
2. that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and
3. that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.”

That seems like a good rule of thumb.

But of course, you will rarely get unanimity among experts. There will almost always be dissenters. But at least when it comes to scientific matters, there often tends to be an overwhelming consensus and what I do is see what the dominant views are. So for example, in the case of global warming, since an overwhelming majority of climate scientists say that it is occurring and is man-made, Russell would say (according to rule (1)) that it would be foolish to insist that they are wrong. Similarly, since an overwhelming majority of biologists accept the theory of evolution as the means by which speciation occurred, Russell would say that it would be silly to confidently deny it. At most one should voice tentative dissent.

When it comes to economic or political questions where there is often not only no unanimity but not even a dominant consensus, rule (2) comes into play and it is wise to not place one’s faith too strongly on one particular view.

I saw a news item that said that the plane that managed an emergency landing in the Hudson river without any casualties is being shipped to a museum in Charlotte, NC for display.

My question is: Why? I am as pleased as the next person that no lives were lost in that accident but why would anyone care to see that particular plane, which is just like any other plane? Do they think it has some special significance?

I feel the same way about the things in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum is Cleveland that I have not as yet visited. Why would I want to see (say) the clothes worn by Elvis or a guitar played by Jimi Hendrix? It would be different if there were something unique about the item itself that was distinguishable from the person it is associated with that made it interesting. If, for example, Jimi Hendrix had a special guitar made that enabled him to play in ways that other guitars would not allow, then I can see its value in a museum.

I can also understand wanting to preserve and see (say) the marked up copies of drafts of music or book manuscripts to see how the creator’s ideas evolved. But the mere fact that something was owned by someone famous or is a relic of a famous event does not (for me at least) count for much.

On this independence day holiday, I am repeating a post on what to me is one of the most intriguing phrases in the US Declaration of Independence. It is contained in the famous sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I have always found the insertion of the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right to be appealing. One does not expect to see such a quaint sentiment in a revolutionary political document, and its inclusion sheds an interesting and positive light on the minds and aspirations of the people who drafted it.

While happiness is a laudable goal, the suggestion that we should actively seek it may be misguided. Happiness is not something to be pursued. People who pursue happiness as a goal are unlikely to find it. Happiness is what happens when you are pursuing other worthwhile goals. The philosopher Robert Ingersoll also valued happiness but had a better sense about what it would take to achieve it, saying “Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.” [My italics]

Kurt Vonnegut in his last book A Man Without a Country suggests that the real problem is not that we are rarely happy but that we don’t realize when we are happy, and that we should get in the habit of noticing those moments and stop and savor them. He wrote:

I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

Yes, this planet is in a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any “Good Old Days,” there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, “Don’t look at me, I just got here.”

There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity — the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, “Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end.”

When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, “You’re a man now.” So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.

Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a man can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war.

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Good advice.

Apparently 60% of the population have left and right feet that are of different sizes, and of those 80% have larger left feet, which apparently has something to do with right hand dominance. (I got this information after a quick search from this website but cannot vouch for its reliability.) So that means that 40% of the general population have feet of equal size, 48% have larger left feet, and 12% have larger right feet.

I belong to the larger left foot group. When I buy a new pair of shoes, if I forget to try it in the store with my left foot, I end up with a pair in which the left foot starts to feel pinched and uncomfortable later in the day when people’s feet start to swell. For some, the inequality is so great that they buy two pairs of shoes in two different sizes and use only one of each, which seems like a colossal waste. As a partial and somewhat clumsy solution, this website offers people a way of exchanging unused mismatched shoes.

But why must shoes be sold in equal size pairs at all when this does not suit the needs of more than half the population? Why not allow people to pick the correct size for each foot? Doing so should lead to little or no waste, even if 100% of the population had the same side foot being larger. For example, if I needed a size 11 left shoe and a size 10 for the right, someone else with a larger left foot would need a size 10 left and a size 9 right, and so on. So all the mid-range sizes would be paired off and sold, except to different customers.

There may be a few left over of the largest right shoe sizes and the smallest left sizes but assuming the above distribution is right, a quarter of those would be bought by people with larger right feet, leaving only a few unsold. And over time, manufacturers would be able to estimate production more accurately and eliminate even this waste.

So shoe manufacturers and retailers, what about it?

This interactive map shows surprisingly large variations across the US. The darker the region, the higher the life expectancy. The article states that the US is 37th amongst all countries in overall life expectancy at birth in 2007 (although the CIA Factbook estimates it at 50th for 2011) and is now stagnant or even declining, hardly something to be proud of for the world’s largest economy.

The range within the US is huge, varying from highs of 86 years for women in some counties in Florida to a low of 65.9 years for men in Holmes county in Mississippi.

I had never heard of Tracy Morgan until he appeared on The Daily Show a few weeks ago and I took an instinctive dislike to him. He seemed kind of obnoxious. I did not know if he was really like that or was playing a part and I did not really care.

The next thing I heard was that he had let loose a nasty homophobic rant during his stand up comedy routine.

Tina Fey, who plays his boss on a TV show, criticized his comments and in the process said something important that I hope all people will take to heart: “I hope for his sake that Tracy’s apology will be accepted as sincere by his gay and lesbian coworkers at 30 Rock, without whom Tracy would not have lines to say, clothes to wear, sets to stand on, scene partners to act with, or a printed-out paycheck from accounting to put in his pocket.”

Even if you don’t like gay people, you would be wise to keep your anti-gay bile to yourself, not because they will threaten you, but because they are all around us and we depend on them whether we are aware of it or not.

From China comes this terrible story about a 21-year old man, the child of wealthy parents, whose car hit a 26-year old peasant woman riding a bicycle. Although the woman supposedly suffered only minor injuries, the man then proceeded to stab her eight times, killing her, before fleeing the scene. He apparently thought that she might report him to the police and also seek compensation from him. He was executed for the murder.

When I read such stories, I wonder what makes some people, when confronted with a relatively small problem, lose all sense of perspective and escalate things into a major tragedy. What made this young man think that committing a murder would be better than dealing with the complications arising from a traffic accident?

One sees this all too often in the US where someone suffers some personal setback, such as losing a job or spouse, and then goes on a rampage killing multiple people, often members of their own family and even their children.

These stories make me wonder whether only some people have the propensity for extreme and irrational violence or whether everyone’s brains contain these impulses and that they are only held in check by the more rational parts of their brains. Is what distinguishes one from another merely the amount of self-control we are able to exercise?

Kevin Drum touches on a peeve that I share, which is how politicians toss out slogans that sound strong and tough when the actual ideas contained in those slogans are obvious, vague, impractical, implausible, or even meaningless.

He gives four examples:

• Zero tolerance
• Everything is on the table
• Across the board cuts
• Doing nothing is not an option.

He calls for further examples. Here are some of my pet peeves:

• Eliminate waste
• Reduce bureaucracy
• Hold people accountable

Any other ideas?

The recent events surrounding Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund accused of sexually assaulting the person assigned to clean his hotel room shows, irrespective of the truth of the matter that eventually emerges, how vulnerable hotel housekeeping staff is to predatory guests.

Jacob Tomsky, who has worked in various capacities in the luxury hospitality business, says that events like those alleged in the Strauss-Kahn story are sadly all too frequent, and that guests not only often try to take advantage of the staff sexually, they also frequently falsely accuse them of doing things such as stealing, making international calls from the room, going through their belongings, etc..

I encounter the housekeeping staff in hotels quite a lot. When I go to conferences, the meetings take place in the hotel itself and so I frequently go back to my room during the day between sessions, sometimes for extended periods when there are no talks I want to listen to. Since I cannot read or work very well in public places with a lot of background noise and movement (a symptom of my need for lack of distractions when I am working), I prefer to work in the quiet of my room. As a result, I frequently encounter the housekeeping staff, sometimes in the hallways, and sometimes when they knock when I am in the room. It never happens that they come in unexpectedly because I always have the deadbolt in place when I am in the room.

The host-guest relationship becomes ambiguous when you stay in a hotel. Since you are renting the room, it ‘belongs’ to you in some sense and so, if you wish, you can think of yourself as the host and anyone who enters as a guest or, in the case of the housekeepers, your personal employees. On the other hand, you are the transient while the housekeeping staff is there permanently, which can make you feel like you are the guest and they are the host. I tend to think of myself in the latter category and so I try to accommodate the hosts and not upset the work schedule of the housekeeping staff. As a result, if they arrive and knock while I am the room, I tell them to go ahead and clean the room while I continue to work, and they usually do so.

My interactions with the housekeeping staff are friendly but minimal, limited to exchanging smiles and a few pleasantries, since we both have work to do. It had not occurred to me until the Strauss-Kahn story broke that the staff might have to make quick judgments in such situations as to whether I could be trusted to be in the same room with them.

As Dean Baker points out, one of the important facts about this case is that the reason that the employee was able to complain was that she belonged to a union.

This matters because under the law in the United States, an employer can fire a worker at any time for almost any reason. It is illegal for an employer to fire a worker for reporting a sexual assault. If any worker can prove that this is reason they were fired, they would get their job back and probably back pay. (The penalties tend to be trivial, so the back pay is unfortunately not a joke.)

However, it is completely legal for an employer to fire a worker who reports a sexual assault for having been late to work last Tuesday or any other transgression. Since employers know the law, they don’t ever say that they are firing a worker for reporting a sexual assault. They might fire workers who report sexual assaults for other on-the-job failings, real or invented.

In this way the United States stands out from most other wealthy countries. For example, all the countries of Western Europe afford workers some measure of employment protection, where employers must give a reason for firing workers. Workers can contest their dismissal if they think the reason is not valid, unlike the United States where there is no recourse.

Unions matter for many things other than the ones we most focus on, such as obtaining decent pay and benefits. They also provide minimal protections against abuses by the rich and powerful. Without them, management of luxury hotels would be strongly tempted to sacrifice their employees in order to placate the wealthy clientele who abuse them.

He gives it the drubbing it deserves but has some friendly advice for the new bride: persuade your new husband to abdicate before it is too late, and that corrupt and soul-killing institution gets you too.

Myself, I wish her well and also wish I could whisper to her: If you really love him, honey, get him out of there, and yourself, too. Many of us don’t want or need another sacrificial lamb to water the dried bones and veins of a dessicated system. Do yourself a favor and save what you can: Leave the throne to the awful next incumbent that the hereditary principle has mandated for it.