Friday Hodgepodge

Blog Roundup

1. At Thinking Directions, Jean Moroney argues that an interesting way to achieve clarity on one's goals is to write one's own eulogy:

This is not a morbid exercise in considering your death. Nor does it concern some secondhand desire for adulation. Rather, it is an opportunity to get clearer on what in fact gives meaning to your life by your own standards.

...

Here is a simple method adapted from Judy Carter's book, The Message of You, which is written for public speakers. Ms. Carter recommends writing two eulogies: one from the point of view of a coworker and another from the point of view of a family member. These are two very different viewpoints, each of which will give you insight into your life.

Following are notes on why this exercise works, how to do it, and whether to share it with anyone.

2. At the blog of the Texas institute for Property Rights, Brian Phillips discusses what "school choice" is and isn't:

School choice programs are a step in the right direction. But many more steps are required to actually attain educational freedom. While school choice isn't the ideal, it isn't a compromise to supports such policies. At any given time, there is a range of policies that are politically acceptable -- i.e., the Overton Window. Some of those policies move us closer to freedom, while others move us away from freedom. Today, school choice is politically acceptable; abolishing government schools is not.

We should support school choice, but we must not confuse it with educational freedom. [bold added]

I agree with that last sentence, and would emphasize that those of us who do support complete separation of education and state be vigilant about helping people be clear about that distinction.

3. At Value for Value, Harry Binswanger shares a comment he made during a discussion that had -- as one might expect today -- attracted lots of what he calls "Pharma-haters." In support of a lone rational comment, Binswanger added in part:

[T]hese people's delusions about "greedy corporations" somehow keeping medical breakthroughs off the market show a comic-book level of thinking. Do they seriously think that the researchers who are toiling to reverse the aging process hate mankind? Do they think that researchers would withhold the de-aging treatment from their own families? And their own friends and colleagues? Then what about the friends and colleagues' friends and families? And how would the knowledge, once discovered, be kept secret and hence kept off the market? [bold added]

Following is a nice, logical demolition of that kind of thinking in the form of a short, easy-to-retain what if type of story for anyone who might need one, want one to use later, or simply enjoy a break from today's bizarre Zeitgeist.

4.At Roots of Progress, Jason Crawford considers the question, Should we "go against nature?"

In doing so, he finds two very different ideas are being conflated:

Image by Blake Verdoorn, via Unsplash, license.

"Nature" can mean immutable natural law. We defy this at our peril. If we dump raw sewage where we get our drinking water, we will suffer epidemics. If we expose ourselves to radiation, we will die from cancer. If we fail to irrigate our fields, we will go hungry at the first drought. (These are Kipling's "gods of the copybook headings.")

But another sense of "nature" is: whatever exists and whatever happens apart from the agency of humanity. It is the chance arrangement of molecules and their motions, before or separate from the conscious, directed, purposefulness of human beings. A river, pursuing its natural course, whether or not it is navigable, whether or not it causes dangerous flooding. A field, with whatever natural level of fertility it happens to have, and whatever plants happen to be growing in it, whether or not they are edible. Wild animals, whether or not they are good companions, whether or not they attack us, whether or not they destroy our crops or our homes, whether or not they carry disease.

This second sense of "nature" is amoral and indifferent to the needs of life.

Crawford concludes with a very helpful rewording of Bacon's famous aphorism, Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

-- CAV