Do the evolution

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 2:05 PM - 15 Comments

Dan Gardner reads the front page of the Globe.

I thought it was embarrassing when a chiropractor was appointed Canada’s minister of science and technology.

I thought it was more embarrassing when physicist Steven Chu became US Secretary of Energy, thus setting up future meetings at which American science is represented by a Nobel laureate and Canadian science is represented by a man who thinks putting pressure on the spine is a wonder cure for all that ails us.

And it was still more embarrassing when the Conservative government, in a budget that tossed money to any upstretched hand, actually cut funding for scientific research. This, I thought, is the very depths of embarrassment. It can’t get any worse than this.

Well, I was wrong. Oh lord, oh lord! Was I wrong!

Later, he disagrees somewhat vehemently with our Paul.

What's the difference between Ishmael Beah and Omar Khadr?

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, January 24, 2009 at 9:48 PM - 30 Comments

That’s Chapter One in a new book I’m working on called “Questions Dan Gardner Asked Two Years Ago.”

Full circle

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 3:14 PM - 11 Comments

Andrew Sullivan—linking to Joe Klein, who I linked to while linking to Dan Gardner, who was linking to Paul Wells—on the state of play in Washington.

The main impression I get from the various Obama peeps and appointments and, well, vibe, is that their fundamental interest is in governing. For eight years, we had an administration interested entirely in politics. These incoming people have actually thought about what to do with respect to actual, practical problems.

'Gothic high school'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 6:41 PM - 5 Comments

Dan Gardner, while lauding our Paul Wells, on the current state of affairs in Ottawa.

For as long as I’ve been a journalist, I’ve bemoaned my colleagues’ obsession with politics — and I’ve consoled myself by saying “at least it’s better than in the US.” But no longer.

The eager wonks descending on Washington to deal with the dire economy and hundred other pressing problems have inspired American reporters to look at the actual substance of democratic governance. You know, public policy. Laws. Regulations. Taxes. The things that actually make a difference to people who work, raise kids, and generally have neither the time nor the inclination to pay attention to the ephemeral minutiae — read “bullshit” — of who’s hot and who’s not.

The opposite trend is evident in this country. Ever since the deficit was beaten in the late 1990s, the political class — politicians, journalists who write about politicians, and the people who read what journalists write about politicians — has become steadily less serious about public policy. We are now at what I hope is the nadir of this trend, with a government that suboridinates all policy to politics and a media that subordinates all reporting to the hissing and scheming in the halls of Ottawa’s gothic high school.

Compare and contrast that with Joe Klein’s latest dispatch from Washington.

Megapundit on former Megapundit

By selley - Saturday, November 22, 2008 at 4:40 PM - 23 Comments

Margaret Wente in today’s Globe and Mail:

The lesson of the black swan is that the world is governed not by ordinary and predictable events but by extraordinary and unpredictable ones. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is an example of a black swan. The Internet is a good black swan, the crash of ’08 a bad one. Except for one or two eccentric cranks, no one saw it coming.

An easily Googlable Bloomberg story, in which Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, insists the economic crisis is not—repeat, not—an example of a black swan, and explains that among other people he—Taleb—saw it coming some time ago.

“The financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic—when one fails, they all fall,” Taleb wrote in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which was published in 2007. “The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup.”

Taleb said the current crisis is a “White Swan”, not a Black Swan, because it was something bound to happen.

“I was expecting the crisis, I was worried about it,” Taleb said. “I put my neck and money on the line seeking protection from it.”

Wow, is that ever embarrassing. And it’s precisely why we’re not reading Wente anymore unless someone calls our attention to something particularly extraordinary. In this case, that person is Dan Gardner, who politely notes this egregious error on his new blog.

logrolling in our time

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 1:11 AM - 0 Comments

It has taken me too long, but I’ve finally bitten into the new book Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, by my OC colleague Dan Gardner. I’m about half-way through, and it’s a thoroughly impressive work so far.

Dan opens the book by raising a conundrum quite dear to my heart: “We are the healthiest, wealthiest, and longest-lived people in history. And we are increasingly afraid. This is one of the great paradoxes of our time.”

There has been a rash of books and films recently on the politics and culture of fear, but unlike most of them, Dan is not content to blame the media, or blame corporations. He leads us through the evolutionary biology that underlies our sense of risk and the innumeracy that confounds our attempts at managing it, and only then does he turn to the way these cognitive dispositions allow for political manipulation.

In short, this is the best book out there on one of the most important subjects of our time. Under no circumstances should you give any consideration to Heather Menzies’ thoroughly incompetent review of the book in the Globe and Mail a few weeks back. The review would be a scandal, were incompetent reviews not the usual run of things in the Globe’s books section.