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[Guest guest]

Dan, all,

Over the last weeks and going back to the Democratic primary race, I've

had several discussions about the nature of experience. As you well know

given your background, psychologists who specialize in expert and

decision-making behavior and cognitive performance view experience as a

feature of behavior that integrates with other features and factors.

The question, 'who is more experienced?' will evoke a 'folk psychological'

answer that substantially, if not completely, departs from what the

researchers have noted. Still, the bottom line is what do we need to know

to have confidence in predicting whether future decisions will be good

ones?

And this leads to regarding other features and factors.

So, I see you wanting to pull the wool over my eyes on this. Luckily, the

inchoate and ill-informed views necessarily predominate in politics. I

would say we don't really know if Mrs. Palin is, in the cognitive sense,

very capable. However, one rule of thumb we can employ is that her

decision making will correspond to an inflexible set of rules, call this

ideology, and, in this respect, it might not matter whether she is capable

or not.

***

It seems to me Barry Goldwater was the last principled Conservative. How

it is that Conservatism is still offered today as a kind of

traditionalism, and, at the same times, the political tactics deploy the

modern version of the Big Lie*, seems to lead to a dissonant proposition:

'gain power at all costs and then revert to decency and principle.'

This doesn't strike me as a trustworthy position. Makes me think of Carl

Schmitt more than Russsell Kirk.

But a sucker is born every minute. Probably the Democratic brand is in

worse shape.

" Well, it's a very strange political campaign. I mean, out on the campaign

trail, McCain and Palin are talking about how they stood up to

the Republican party, they fought the Republican establishment, and they

battled Republicans. Their message: vote Republican. "

---Jay Leno

***

inorganic matter just sorta *organized itself* into primitive life

Generally, AG Pentacostals are young earth creationists.

The actuality was: inorganic matter organized into primitive life.

Scientists don't know much at all about how this came about. Whereas

creationists entertain a wide range of beliefs that go from the young

earthers to the--so far--discredited attempts to infer a supernatural

hidden hand behind many mechanisms of biological generativity.

There is also the perspective that God created the mechanisms of

evolution. Ask yourself why this doesn't sit well with creationists of any

stripe?

Palin wants to teach the controversy. There is no controversy, but to want

to teach it anyway simply means Mrs. Palin has been indoctrinated and,

very likely, wouldn't be able to articulate in rational terms why

Intelligent Design should be raised to the level of a scientific

competitor to evolution. Of course nobody else has articulated this

rationally, so this isn't a big knock on Palin! But the agenda is to, in a

sense, " overrule " both science and evolution, and have it defer to a

Christian cosmological scheme.

Your analogy about dealing out royal flushes doesn't make sense because,

at a minimum, you have to also make sense of the less patterned deal that

comes after your amazing string. And, you don't actually make any account

for your amazing string; you sound here like the creationist sociologist

Steve Fuller, who thinks the supernatural explanation is the most

'parsimonious.'

regards,

* and the Big Lies are stacking up into an impressive edifice of mendacity.