Even if you really haven't found any good smackdowns of your mistakes recently, continuing to draw attention to that failure to find successful criticisms of your views does start to sound like boasting.

Of course Plato is trying to set up his discussion of the deep issues of justice, but he was also a dramatist of a kind, so it is probably wrong to ignore the surface issues entirely. Sokrates is being rude to Kephalos, or at least teasing him, and Sokrates is famously poor, so Kephalos suggesting that wealth=virtue is at least in part just Kephalos responding in kind to Sokrates' verbal sparring.

Also interesting that with only 3 women on the list, women took the first and third spots, and the worst woman was middle of the pack. Perhaps the Fed needs more women.

The pace of the references seems to increase over time. Of course, this could be an artifact of more recent references being easier to find, but I don't wish to impugn the thoroughness of the efforts by the Claires, so I'm going to assume this is a genuine pattern. What might it mean?

The problems are so numerous. I suppose one of the less obvious ones that occurs to me is that part of the benefit of having people vote is that giving them a say in how the state is run helps make them feel that the state is theirs, as opposed to something inflicted on them, and biasing the system against some of the participants will undermine that effect for those who suffer the bias. Plus corruption, perverse incentives (gives the powerful incentives to discourage education of the masses), the less educated have less say anyway because of less money and influence, enough so that their interests are inadequately served by politicians more interested in swaying those who can help them with money and connections, and Mill's proposal would serve to further increase this systemic bias against the lower classes, and so on and so forth.

On why there haven't been more 9/11 style attacks, I thought the research on terrorists generally suggested that the most likely explanation is that there just aren't very many terrorists motivated enough to carry out such attacks.

The costs of the intelligence agencies seem to be quite high. Even their literal dollar costs are, in the case of the U.S., immense (tens of billions annually). But this is probably dwarfed by the costs in terms of the ways secrecy is always abused, to cover up damaging incompetence and corruption. On the other hand, the controversy over the value of intelligence agencies, at least among those who seem to be making a serious attempt to look at what evidence we have, is between those who think they're slightly useful and those who think that they are useless. Everything we don't know about them would have to be quite different from, and vastly better than, everything we do know about them for the intelligence agencies to be worth it. Everything we know about how people behave when they have no oversight and can conceal all of their corruption and mistakes suggests that, on the contrary, the stuff that is more secret is almost certainly worse rather than better. So the probability that the accomplishments of the intelligence agencies could outweigh their costs seems negligible to me. One example I like to point out; during the cold war, the Soviet Union was much better at keeping secrets from the United States than the U.S. was at keeping secrets from the Soviets. But the Soviets decisively lost the cold war. It isn't really controversial that one of the biggest contributors to the Soviet collapse was corruption. Since as noted, secrecy enables corruption, I think there's a good case to be made that the Soviet skill at keeping secrets was actively counter-productive, contributing to their inability to compete with the less secretive West.

@Omega: doubtful. The Iowas had no such problems, and the guns on Yamato were really only slightly more powerful than the Iowa guns. On another note, I've always been mildly curious what they screwed up in the turbine design; the Yamato and Musashi seem to have been significantly less fuel-efficient than other battleships of the era. I've heard the original idea was to use diesel engines, and the Japanese switched back to the traditional turbines because (like everyone else at that time) they couldn't figure out how to make big enough diesel engines that would work reliably; did the fact that the turbines were a late substitution mean the turbine design was rushed? Or was it corruption in the military contracting, or what? Certainly with Japan's desperate fuel situation, the poor efficiency of the turbines drastically reduced the usefulness of those battleships.

Hmmm. While my first response to one of these studies is always that people should be taking more seriously the possibility that all that's being revealed is the effect of the environment on brain development, you are perhaps too hasty to conclude that this study conflicts with genetic determinism. If the differences appear around 12 to 14, another obvious possibility is that genetically programmed hormonal changes are responsible for the differences.

My first encounter with the term "visible minority" was rather ironic; a Canadian acquaintance of mine described himself as one (why it seemed worth mentioning is irrelevant here). I hadn't previously thought of him as any kind of minority, and looking at him in light of this new self-description, I was unable to determine what ethnicity he was likely to be (he shaved his head, so no clues from hair, his skin was tan, but not especially dark, and none of his facial features provided any clues I was able to pick up on). However, I didn't voice my doubts about the adjective "visible" in his case.

Er, Humbert's an unreliable narrator, sure, but I think you're being way too hard on Gerhard Brand. The medieval tradition of courtly love is deeply, deeply problematic, a fact that Brand seems to be invoking, and I don't think it's crazy to suggest that it's problematic in ways similar to the ways Humbert's attitudes are problematic.

An argument could certainly be made for Nixon/Agnew having an advantage over more recent Republican candidates when it comes to their policies, but any policy advantage they may have is surely insufficient to make up for the points they lose for aggressively subverting the democratic process and the rule of law to the extent that they did.

At the end you consider the problem that when you are dreaming, you generally don't notice the gappiness and irrationality, which of course raises the possibility that there was gappiness and irrationality in your apparently consistent and detailed chess experiment, but you just didn't notice. But you dismiss this as an "additional" doubt beyond the "simply solipsistic" doubt. I'm not satisfied; this distinction between "simple" and "additional" doubt looks fairly suspect to me, more convenient than principled.

I don't know if that wasn't up last time I searched, or if I just didn't search hard enough; I did my own translation a few years ago. For balance, I like to give my students both sides of the discussion, and at least give them access to the Heidegger essay Carnap criticizes. I have found translations of "What is Metaphysics?" online, but the only translation I've found which includes the postscript (http://www.wagner.edu/departments/psychology/sites/wagner.edu.departments.psychology/files/download/Martin%20Heidegger%20-%20What%20Is%20Metaphysics.pdf) obscures the fact that Heidegger was at least in part responding to Carnap (again a translator doesn't use "overcoming" for "ueberwindung"; Miles Groth uses "getting over" instead. Since the paragraph does contain a reference to "will to power," I guess at least the connection to Nietzsche isn't completely obscured in this case). Also, I don't know if I need to change my adobe PDF reader settings or if there's something wrong with the file, but the Greek words don't show up properly, though I guess that's a minor issue for me since I couldn't read them anyway. Not sure if I want to do my own translation of Heidegger.