Critique of an apologia for Santa Claus

By Joseph E. Green

The analysis referred to in this critique can be found at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1084585

I don’t remember the day my parents informed me that there was no Santa Claus. It seems to me that, like many childhood ideas, it gradually slipped away over time with experience. Each year there was one significant piece of evidence that Santa Claus was real: a present under the tree from him. However, each year also brought new difficulties as I thought over the other aspects of the story. Was it really possible that magic reindeer could enable a sleigh to fly so fast so as to cover the whole world? Was it possible that Santa Claus could demarcate the relative goodness and badness of every child throughout the year? And why did Herr Claus’s handwriting so closely match that of Mom?

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Dulling Occam’s Razor

By Joseph E. Green

We are all familiar with the concept of vestigial organs. As living things change and adapt over time, they sometimes show evidence of previous incarnations of themselves. Our own appendix appears to only be good now for exploding and killing us occasionally, although in the past it served a definite purpose.  Likewise human beings have a coccyx (tailbone) that appears to be a remnant of an actual tail somewhere in the distant evolutionary past.

The same thing is true with ideas. Sometimes ideas survive for centuries long after their usefulness has been shown, time and again, to be negligible. There are people who still believe in a flat Earth. There are still those who believe that God literally walked around the Garden of Eden because he left footprints. And there are those who still invoke Occam’s razor as a principle.

At first glance, this may extreme. Why should Occam’s Razor be equated with these absurdities?

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Alger Hiss, Richard Nixon, and the Devolution of Discourse

By Joseph E. Green

Today’s political reality exists under a canopy of terrorism. Not terrorism as an actuality, for the most part, but terrorism as a perpetual threat, as the creature under the bed.  True, the creature may not want to attack you. The creature may not even exist. However, in order to confirm or deny this information, we have to look under the bed to face it. This is too much for most; so, instead of looking under the bed, people pontificate. “We must limit civil rights in order to prevent terrorism,” says one side. “We must not limit civil rights because this legitimizes the terrorists,” goes another. And television’s talking heads react to one another, without ever questioning whether there is terrorism – or, more precisely, whether the terrorism they are discussing is the right one.

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