One of the disadvantages encountered by those trying to understand society is due to the inability to perform experiments in a controlled environment. In the hard sciences – chemistry or physics, for example – this isn’t as much of a problem. The scientist in the lab can conduct experiments in which certain variables can be changed and others can be removed, making it possible to determine what factors cause specific results. Sociologists (and anyone else that’s trying to understand society) can’t do this, and as a result, reams of statistics are quoted, some of which do not tell us exactly what we would like to think that they mean. Even when the statistics themselves are properly understood, they’re frequently used in misguided attempts to imply that certain attributes cause others, when in fact they just happen to show up next to each other. Correlation doesn’t imply causation – i.e., just because two things happen at the same time (or one follows the other) doesn’t necessarily imply that one caused the other.
Cause and Effect, Part 1
July 19th, 2009Dispatches from Yosemite
July 13th, 2009My job – which has had me working on the road quite a bit lately – has me in Sacramento for the end of this week and the beginning of next week. Rather than have my employer buy two round-trip plane tickets so I could be home for the weekend, I volunteered to stay out here in the greater Sacramento area.
The Hops are Free!
May 22nd, 2009If you’re a foodie and/or a beer geek that lives in Alabama, you may know about this already. Just in case:
Alabama – up until today – had some of the most antediluvian beer laws of any state in the union – the size of bottles was limited, as was the ABV percentage of the beer that was sold. Today, the activism of the folks over at Free The Hops finally succeeded in getting Alabama’s beer laws changed.
This has been an ongoing saga for a few years, now, but hopefully this means that we’ll start to see more high-gravity beers in Alabama. Quite a few world-class beers – Belgian Trappist Ales, and the like – are now legal to sell.
Political Philosophy in the Information Age
April 2nd, 2009One of the fairly new developments with which the last few generations of humans have had to contend is being part of a society in which there is more information than any one person can reasonably be expected to absorb. If you think about it – in terms of human history – this is actually a fairly recent development. If you lived in the year 1700, for example, you could conceivably read everything that had ever been published on a topic like, for example, chemistry, before you tried to embark on a career as a chemist. That doesn’t work anymore: if a student of chemistry tried to read everything that has been published on chemistry, there’s no way to finish reading everything in just a single lifetime. In addition, it’s a pretty safe bet that in chemistry (in addition to a host of other subjects), new material is being published at a fast enough rate that even if you set out to read all the material that was published after the date that you started reading, not only will you not be able to keep up, but you’ll get farther and farther behind.
Frustration with the Church
March 24th, 2009I haven’t been carefully observing evangelical Christianity for long enough periods of time to categorize myself as a keen observer of trends in the church. However, in the short period of time that I’ve actually been watching, I’ve seen a few movements within the church that propose – to put it mildly – some striking changes with regards to theology or the way the church operates. The examples that most easily spring to mind are (a) the house church movement, which has been around for awhile, and the (b) emerging and (c) emergent church movements – now (correctly) categorized as two separate movements. For purposes of this discussion, we can get away with oversimplifying our description of the emergent/emerging movements by suggesting that they are embodied, respectively, by Mark Driscoll and Brian McLaren. Both of these movements are still (relatively) new on the scene.