Radley Balko wrote a nice summary for Reason of studies demonstrating the routine misuse of explosive and drug-sniffing dogs by police. The problem is not that the dogs are not capable of finding drugs or explosives, but rather that their human companions are generally poor at distinguishing when the dogs are genuinely indicating drugs/explosives vs.…
Tag archives for Reason
Nice Reason.TV look at bailouts.
Ronald Bailey’s Attack of the Super-Intelligent Purple Space Squid Creators is one of the best articles I’ve read in a long time that uses a bit of humor to expose the idiocy behind creationism, and especially the most unintentionally hilarious moment in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Near the end of the silly new anti-evolution film,…
Writing in Reason Magazine, Damon Root attempts to rehabilitate the image of “social Darwinist” Herbert Spencer. Root’s article is based on a forthcoming article by Princeton University economist Tim Leonard who blames Spencer’s poor reputation on historian Douglas Hofstadter. Hofstadter was a socialist, and so the free market capitalist Spencer was a perfect villain, especially…
In July, Ronald Bailey wrote several articles for Reason while attending the Global Catastrophic Risks Conference in Oxford. You can read Bailey’s dispatches here, here and here. The conference was sponsored by Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute which is run by the always interesting Nick Bostrom. Bostrom opened the conference with perhaps the little bit…