If, appearances to the contrary, the customer actually sets the price in a marketplace, and all this hullabaloo is about ebooks, then what is the proper price for an ebook?

Nobody knows. The market is still shaking itself out, and pricing models require some fairly complex calculus about tradeoffs (some of which Moses Siregar III covers here). J. A. Konrath is firmly advocating for the $2.99 price point, and his number seem to back up his decision. A number of newcomers are pricing their books at the rock bottom end of the market, on the very sensible assumption that, since they have no established name, they need to be an impulse buy if they’re going to sell at all. Others are pricing above the current median range of $2.99-4.50 (where over 70% of the top sellers sit, according to my research over the last few months) on the assumption that looking expensive will attract the buyer looking for material that rises above the slush, and attract that buyer well enough that any sales hit they take from the higher price will be more than made up for in the higher income that the higher prices generate.

It’s a calculated bet, and at the moment there are precious few people conducting any experiments with pricing. This leaves the field to the experimenters–and in any open marketplace, experimentation provides that most precious of commodities: information.

However, one thing all these people have in common with savvier established authors and publishers: they understand what business we’re in.

No matter how pretty or profound or affecting our prose, we’re in the entertainment business. There is art to what we do, and passion, and often a deeply held hope that what we write will connect with people and make a difference in their lives, but none of that gets past the most basic, essential piece of advice any writer ever gave to another about the business:

“Let’s not kid ourselves: We’re fighting for their beer money.” -Robert A. Heinlein

No, I’m talking about industries and businesses that don’t yet know they’re dead. The ones whose future demise is as certain as the next big earthquake: we don’t know quite when, and we don’t know quite where, but the prospect that somebody will huff and puff and blow the house down has a probability of 1.

There’s a pretty reliable way to spot a zombie, and it’s on display everywhere in publishing right now. This summer, I’ve seen it everywhere from PW to BEA to some of the audio leaking out of WorldCon to Litopia (where it’s becoming such a regular feature that I’m beginning to think that the otherwise erudite, urbane, and thoroughly enjoyable panel have all been sniffing from the same glue barrel). It’s predictable, it’s boring, and it’s the thing that will, in the end, make publishing go the way of the music industry (hopefully not the buggy whip industry, though that’s always possible):

An entitlement mentality.

In other words, when faced with changes, the industry starts talking about “value” as if it’s something intrinsic. They talk about falling prices and lower barriers to entry “cheapening” the “reading experience.” They talk of the problem of “wading through the crap” and of falling advances, and fret about how agents and publishers and writers are going to make a living.

As a writer who’s currently pursuing multiple release avenues for his work, I’ve got a vested interest here. I want to get paid for my work, more than I get through my tip jar (though, if you do drop cash in the tip jar or buy books through my Amazon links, thank you!) or through selling tech articles. I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I’m in this game for the money: I love telling stories, and I want to make my living at it.

But, I do not deserve to make my living at it, unless I can find the people who want the stories I have to tell. All businesses, of all kinds, exist for one reason (and one reason only): because they meet a market demand.

The Real Cost of a Book

Michael Shatzkin has gone over what the margins are on differrent types of books at different pricing structures, and it gives an idea at least of what publishers report their margins as.

Michael Stackpole has also done a whole series on ebook pricing, during which he makes the point that what costs are involved in ebook production could be drastically reduced if publishers would move their operations out of New York. Not only would they be able to reduce overhead and salaries without reducing quality of life for their employees, they’d also be in a position to get out of their rather expensive mafia-controlled (not kidding) shipping contracts, and their complicity in money laundering (a plus all around, I’d think).

Suffice it to say, the marginal cost on an ebook is 10-20% less than on a mass market paperback, without factoring in returns. More units sold equals lower marginal costs, while the per-unit profit grows accordingly. And that’s without moving anyone out of New York.

So, if you’re going by costs, an ebook should cost, at lowest, around 20% less than the mass market paperback of the same book.

But, believe it or not, I don’t think this matters at all.

Literary Conceit

To explain why I think that way, I have to walk you through a bit of Econ 101.

A market is anyone willing to trade, and there are a lot of different markets out there. Writers have, for years, been marketing to publishers, not to fans. We sell, or don’t sell, according to the tastes of editors. Most editors have pretty damn good taste, others not so much, but their job is to acquire books that they can sell to their market: the people who buy books.

You see a problem built into the system already: other economic considerations aside, because only a certain kind of person has the temperament and bearing to be an editor (it is, after all, a highly political job best suited for well-educated, intelligent, personable people), the books made available to the customer will appeal to only a limited subset of the potential reading audience.

As a multi-NYT Bestseller told me a while back (and no, I’m not saying who): “Fans? I don’t give a damn about the fans. I can’t afford to. I have to keep my editor interested if I want to keep writing.”

So, in books, the consumer is not the customer, which is (to put it mildly) kind of perverse. But, just as with the music industry, digital product is changing where the power lies and putting it where it belongs: in the hands of the consumer.

The consumer is, after all, the ultimate end of the supply chain. Giving them the proximate power means that a lot of the rest of the economic model of publishing has to shift, or it won’t last. And the consumer sets the price in any market. If a consumer doesn’t buy an item because the price is restricted, it’s overpriced. If the price of an item induces so many people to buy it that it creates a supply shortage, the price is too low. All businesses, whether they realize it or not, set their prices to take advantage of a sweet spot where they get the most profit possible per unit (well, not all businesses do this. Those who are unable to find this price point or control their costs so they can live at this sweet spot go belly-up pretty damn quick).

But, of course, some writers, agents, and publishers think they’re indispensable. They are the curators and bastions of culture, after all. If it weren’t for them, we’d all be awash in the lowest form of vulgar entertainment. There’d be no place for art (this is a nearly-verbatim paraphrase of a line I heard recently on a well-respected literary talk show).

This also is a huge crock of shit. Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo were paid by the word. Poe wrote for money and was considered a hack. Shakespeare was vulgar popular entertainment. There is no qualitative difference in the recipe of art versus schlock that any of us can see now, though an entire industry (critics) exists to try to hide that basic fact. The difference between vulgar entertainment and high art isn’t the intention of the writer, the heart she puts into her story, or social consciousness. The only difference is “What are people reading a hundred years from now?”

The stuff that ages well, that stays relevant and motivates people to keep recommending it, reading it to their children, and passing it on—that’s art. That’s the stuff that’s hit something vital in the cultural soul. The rest of it is just vulgar entertainment (some of it transcendentally beautiful entertainment, some of it boring or crappy as hell—your mileage may vary).

Writers. agents, and publishers (in common with other successful businesses) also tend to believe that they deserve their position. They don’t. Markets are fickle. You deserve where you are today because you earned your way there by meeting a market demand and being relevant–you don’t deserve to stay there tomorrow unless you’re relevant tomorrow.

I don’t care if that’s not fair (and I also actually don’t like it, because it means my retirement probably isn’t ever going to happen), it’s the way life works. As Doni Kollin (whose day job is as an economics professor) said to me over a drink recently, “In business, as in evolution, the big don’t eat the small. The fast eat the slow. And the big guys are usually slow.” If you’ve grown big, you have to be more competitive, not less, because the young-and-hungry are nipping at your heels.

For a recent parallel, look at the IT world. Fifteen years ago, Microsoft ran the world, Netscape was dead, Google didn’t exist, and Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. Now, Apple is the biggest IT firm in the world, Google runs the internet, Firefox is the most popular browser, and Microsoft no longer defines the industry. This is what happens in a normal ecosystem.

So, How Do I Spot a Zombie Again?

Zombie businesses and industries suffer under a trio of delusions:

1) They’re indispensable.

2) They set the prices.

3) They deserve their position.

Not one of these things are true.

The notion of indispensability depends on the assumption that “The way we do things today is the optimal way.” It’s almost never true. No industry—not the oil industry, not the auto industry, not the banks, not farming, and not writers—is indispensable. All of them exist because they meet a market demand. Sometimes, that market is lobbyists, governments, editors, ad executives, or the teeming masses of humanity—but if they stop meeting that demand, they stop existing. Once a business starts thinking they’re indispensable, their days are numbered.

Consumers set prices. There is no such thing as “intrinsic” value. An item is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. If you price ebooks at $15.00 a unit, as many people will pirate them as buy them. Price them at $3.00-$5.00, most people will buy, not pirate (because pirating is more trouble than buying at that price), and your aggregate profit margin will be better. Start thinking that you control your product’s price, and your sales are going to fall.

And as far as deserving one’s position? Don’t make me laugh. The more open a market gets (and by ‘open’ I’m talking transparency as well as freedom), the more meritocratic it gets. The people who succeed are those who meet the needs of their consumers. Period. You don’t meet those needs, you fade.

So, no, I don’t think it matters how much it costs to produce an ebook. It only matters that there are some people and businesses who are willing to take the risk and bear the costs in an attempt to meet a market demand, because if they meet the demand well, their marginal costs will go to near-zero.

The Real Meaning of eBooks

Economists have a term for what happens when a new player enters a market and, through innovation, changes the fundamentals of how it works: creative destruction. By making old ways of doing things obsolete, or by creating viable persistent alternatives, growth happens in a marketplace. Opportunity is created. Sometimes, the fabric of society is radically transformed. Almost always, this means that folks wedded to the old paradigm are in for a rough ride.

Now, in the publishing world, the barrier to entry is so low that thinly disguised fan fiction writers can have a shot at the market. It is, truly, turning into a slush pile out there. But that’s not a bad thing. Some of those slush writers will succeed brilliantly the same way Rodriguez and Tarantino did with independent film as outsiders. Most won’t.

Why? For the first time ever, fans matter in a measurable way. Sampling, podcasts, any one of the now 31 (and growing) genre-friendly, pro-rate paying e-magazines, and market innovations such as Stackpole’s Chain Story help customers discriminate between good and bad product. They build reputations. Reputations matter.

But there’s another, even better effect of having the barrier to entry set very low: there is room for literally thousands of new niche markets to develop. Just like what cable did to TV, just like what the internet did to music and radio, so too e-readers and smart phones and POD and open marketplaces are doing to literature: filling out the bell curve, feeding pent-up demand in sectors that were previously under-served, and providing opportunities for oddballs like me to find audiences who really want us.

Viva la Revolución!

This post has a follow-up, which you can find here.
—
Copyright 2010 J. Daniel Sawyer

Scientific knowledge has progressed astoundingly fast since most of the current party political alliances were formed seventy years ago, and that pace has accelerated since the last medium-sized realignment thirty years ago. The lessons of history in that same period of time are also momentous – if anyone actually cares to look at them. And most don’t. This creates a problem.

I’ve had a lot of fun this election year tweaking my left-wing and right-wing friends by telling them I’m voting ‘No’ for President this year. “It’s the most important election of the last fifty years!” they tell me “You must participate.” They may be right – it could be a hugely important election, which is precisely why I’m not voting for either major party candidate of for either of the two big minor party candidates.

You see, I’m sick to the teeth of Democrats claiming the mantle of science while ignoring economics any time the findings of that discipline contradict the New Deal Keynsianism that infects the party. I’m sick of Republicans being in favor of “free markets” when they bail out failing businesses. I’m sick of both parties claiming that they are forward looking when their major alliances are built on late-1960s political expediency. I’m sick of the Libertarians pretending that anarchy and liberty can co-exist in a meaningful way, and I’m sick of the Greens claiming that opposing GMO crops and technological advance while embracing pseudo-Marxist economic policies are the key to an environmentally viable future.

In 1862, in his address before Congress, Abraham Lincoln called “Bullshit” on the way partisan politics were polarizing the north on the issues surrounding the Civil War. He said: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.” The same is true today. Thirty years ago, “left-winger” David Brin and “right-winger” Ronald Bailey could never be seen as allies, and yet now, while they have some minor quibbling disagreements on taxation policy and public research funding and other minor points here and there, both are in fundamental agreement on issues of science, technology, trade policy, environmental concerns, human morality, reproductive technology, and civil rights. The same kind of shift has occurred everywhere, as the facts of the world have shifted beneath the complacent, religious devotion of people to their political parties.

It used to be that you could marry theocrats to conservatives who loved traditional freedoms, because both were opposed to social change that seemed too rapid for the country to handle. That kind of alliance doesn’t work anymore, because the country has adapted to the rapid rate of change while preserving its heritage of individualism.

It used to be that you could bring Left-wing Malthusians together with humanist scientists over environmental concerns. But as science shows that the only way towards responsible environmental stewardship is technological innovation on a grand scale rather than a scaling back of industry, that alliance becomes just as inviable.

There is a political divide in America. But it’s not between the “left” and the “right.” It’s not even between the Keynsians and the Hayekians, although that argument will remain very important for decades to come. No, the divide is fundamentally between those who see humans as a legitimate part of the natural world and those who do not.

Those who do not see humans as a viable part of nature tend to see them instead as either a blight upon nature or the rulers of nature, but they agree that science and technology are fundamentally tools by which humans exercise dominion over nature. They may not agree on abortion, but they do agree about genetic engineering. They may not agree about tax policies, but they do agree that taxation should be a tool of social engineering. They may not agree on the ultimate destiny of humanity, but they do agree that a peaceful society must be fairly ideologically uniform. And, militarist or peacenik, they also tend towards cultural and economic isolationism.

Meanwhile, those who do see humans as a legitimate part of nature form a group that is generally favorable towards both technological advance and environmental stewardship. Favorable towards both a peaceful world and economic freedom. Opposed towards both the enforced repression of minorities and towards the prescriptive Newspeak that comes from the New Right and the New Left. And, militarist or peacenik, this group tends towards a policy of active international engagement on cultural and economic levels. This natural alliance might find internal division over issues such as gun rights, or minimum wage, but those differences are minor compared to the differences in parties of the past.

This political realignment has been in progress for some time now, and it may take quite a while for it to conclude. But personally, I’m sick of participating in a quadripolar political game that is fifty years out of step with the fundamental facts of the world. Since I live in California I have the luxury of my vote not counting no matter what I do, so this year I’m taking advantage of it to make my point.

Whichever way you vote, take time to consider the fundamentals of your political philosophy. Dig down below your policy positions, figure out what really matters to you. Examine your positions and values critically, and see if they really line up. See if they line up with the candidate you support. Don’t just vote out of habit.

As for me, this year I really am voting “No.” On everything.

This recent opinion piece on abortion illustrates the point nicely, although the language is very religious and the whole essay is shot-through with magical thinking. Even removing those magical elements, the view articulated there holds true even for many Republicans whose worldview is primarily secular (yes, they really do exist).

Of course, this view of abortion doesn’t just rest on religious authority, it claims to be rooted in a clear understanding of history and to take seriously the view that if we mess around with our biology we are playing God (a job we’re not qualified for). A zygote is a living organism that, if left alone, will develop into a human, therefore abortion ends a human life, therefore it must be murder, and any ethical gerymandering to the contrary can’t change that fundamental fact. Ditto for stem cell research, which destroys human embryos, or for hybrid experimental cloning, and for dozens of other biotech research techniques.

At first blush, that seems to be a pretty solid rooting in biology – but it’s not. A true ethical grounding in biology has to contend with a few other facts that make the connections between point A and point B very tendentious.

The first problem is evolution: All life is made from the same stuff, and human life on a biological level is in no way distinctive. Human nature and human biology are subject to the same selective pressures as the rest of the biosphere, plus the internally imposed selective pressures of human culture. It’s not impossible to make a case for human exceptionalism (I’m a human exceptionalist myself), but it’s not axiomatic.

The second problem is embryology: only somewhere between 25% and 60% of all zygotes become viable pregnancies, and 8% of those that do fail to make it to term without any intervention. Not every conception results in a life – and most wouldn’t even if medical abortion were never discovered. George Carlin had it right: If life begins at conception, then every sexually active woman who’s had at least three periods is a serial killer.

The third problem is technology: Since the conception of a zygote creates a life, and if that life is seen to have value because it is a potential human being, then technology poses a new and frightening problem. A zygote has only a minority potential of surviving to birth – and so does a clone. Although cloning tech is still in its infancy, it is now possible to artificially split embryos in vitro, making every IVF procedure the potential ancestor of countless offspring in one generation. More importantly, it is now possible to take the genetic material from an adult skin cell and implant it in the nucleus of an ovum, throw a few hormonal switches, and have a viable zygote. With this the reality, every time I scratch my arm I’ve engaged in a holocaust of potential human beings.

The fourth problem is medical: We now know beyond any doubt that the seat of human consciousness is the central nervous system (i.e. the brain). You can argue about souls all you want – whether there is a ghost operating the machine or whether we are all machine – but the machine does not operate at all without a brain. Before the 22nd week of gestation, there isn’t enough of a brain there to operate the machine. Any ghost that may exist can’t have moved in yet. Citation.

These four problems are not the only problems with Republican attitudes towards biotech. There’s also the question of those who die from potentially curable diseases if research is suppressed – are their lives worth less than, or more than, the lives of potentially viable zygotes and blastocysts?

Banning pre-viability abortions, banning biotech procedures, or banning government funding of either will neither reduce the number of murders in the world, nor will it reduce eugenics. It will not further respect for human life – in fact, as demonstrated in the book Freakanomics, an abundance of unwanted children leads directly to an increase in violent crime and a lessening of the social value of human life. Therefore here, as with the Democratic equation of "mitigate global warming by reducing energy consumption," the policy prescriptions will not – and can never – achieve the aims they are meant to achieve. And yet right-wing Republicans and abortion, just like left-wing Democrats and global warming, the prescriptions themselves are a matter of doctrine, not of reason, and it’s a damn shame.

Join me for my concluding thoughts on the whole topic in Part 3

William James hit a lot closer to the truth when he spotted that Americans are a fundamentally religious bunch. We don’t usually like to think of ourselves that way – even most of us who are religious in a traditional sense tend to pride ourselves on being independent, pragmatic thinkers. We like science – we really do – but most of us don’t really know what science is, and this is where we get into trouble. Even our scientists often mistake ideology for science.

Looking at things through a scientific lens (that is, a perspective that is empirically grounded), one would expect political philosophy among scientfically-minded folk to change as the experience of history and the accumulation of knowldege schools us in the ways of the world. That doesn’t mean that all political opnion should converge on a common conclusion: It’s quite possible, through differences in priority order, for clear-thinking people to disagree on what particular actions should follow from a given and agreed-upon body of knowledge (and that kind of disagreement is healthy). However, this isn’t what happens in today’s America.

Douglas Adams nailed the way politically-minded folk tend to think in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, where a main character talks about a computer program that helps people make decisions. It doesn’t work forward from problem to solution, instead it allows the user to chose his desired solution (for example, owning a Porche when he can’t afford the payments) and then work backwards to the present situation, creating a bulletproof logical scenario that nobody can shoot down (not even the financing director at the Porche dealership). This is not goal-oriented thinking and planning, it’s maturbatory self-justification, and it’s pretty much de rigeur politics. Perhaps that’s just human nature – but here’s where it gets tragic and irritating.

The 21st century has seen the cementing of a very strange dynamic in American politics, whereby each side of the political discussion picks its own facts and tries to ignore the rest.

For example, if you don’t like second-hand smoke you’ve got a custom-made political movement already on your side. All you have to do to fight alongside them is pretend that studies showing an actual elevated disease risk through continued exposure over a long period of time actually mean that anyone anywhere who smells second-hand smoke is being poisoned. It’s really easy, all you have to do is ignore the single most basic law of biochemistry: The dosage makes the poison.

The same kind of dynamic goes for nuclear power, or carbon dioxide, or private property rights, or environmental regulation, or evolutionary theory, or lowering the drinking age. You can pick a side, and find a custom made political machine ready to spin reality in the direction you’re already sympathetic to.

This election year is a fun exercise in spotting this kind of thing, because we have one candidate (Obama) who’s deliberately positioning himself as the pro-science guy, in opposition to the Bush administration and the McCain candidacy. He supports NASA. He supports stem cells. He’s on record saying that he doesn’t think blastocysts are human beings. He even (in opposition to major blocks of his own party) supports Nuclear power. He positions himself as a pragmatic man who intends to implement real-world solutions, over/against the fuzzy thinking of his opponent.

On the other hand, we have another candidate (McCain), who has picked a running mate specifically to appeal to the rural romantic consitutency of the country. He talks about freedom and saving the economy, and he’s running with someone who speaks in tongues, thinks humanity begins at conception, and thinks the Earth was created in six days not-too-long-ago.

On the face of it, it seems like a pretty clear choice for anyone who cares about science. On one hand you have a guy who cares about going to Mars – on the other hand you have a guy who thinks a planetarium projector is an “overpriced overhead projector” akin to a futuristic SharpVision.

I wish it were that simple, but it’s not. The curious political alignment of the early 21st century has produced an environment where each party has become very good at spotting pseudoscience and antiscience bullshit in the other party, but can’t smell it in their own even when it’s shoved up their nose. Here are two examples, one from each party’s list of pet issues, to illustrate my point.

Democrats, for example, tend to assume a straight-line cause-and-effect relationship between the scientific fact “CO2 is a greenhouse gas, whose concentrations are rising rapidly, and this drove most of the climate change in the 20th century” and the policy conclusion “we must conserve energy in order to prevent as much damage to the bioshpere as possible.” But no such obvious relationship exists. You can make a case for such a relationship, but in order to do it you have to ignore another whole field of science: economics.

Without getting too technical, economics is the study of the monetary, social, and political systems that result from human interaction in a given set of conditions. As with most social sciences it’s a contingent and contextual field, but the thing that sets it apart from most other “soft” sciences is its quantifiability. Economic phenomena can be measured, and based on the measurements falsifiable predictions can be made, and over time, a more coherent picture of how the economic world works has been built from earlier theories and ideologies that have been subjected to testing in real-world laboratories.

Energy conservation is a fun economic study, because there’s one thing that energy conservation always results in: net energy usage increases. That’s because as demand for energy for a particular application falls, due to more efficient technologies, the money and resources previously devoted to that task get freed up. When that happens, any or all of three things happens: money previously spent on a small number of energy-intensive activities gets spent on a larger number of less energy-intensive activitie. 2) task which used to be too expensive for a segment of the populationn (because they couldn’t afford the energy costs) become accessible, due to increases in efficiency and consequent lower costs of operation. 3) a short-term collective decline in demand results in a short term drop in energy prices, as supply exceeds demand on the market. Any of these three eventualities leads to a net increase in energy usage – all three operating together leads to large net increases in energy usage, even while the per-application energy usage and costs fall through the floor. If you’re an environmentally conscious person who wants to reduce greenhouse emmissions and pollution, you’re not going to achieve your goal through mandating more efficient technologies, or promoting a cap-and-trade carbon scheme, or encouraging energy conservation among the hoi polloi. Those measures will instead reliably lead to higher and higher levels of net energy consumption – both per capita and in aggregate.

Continued in Part 2

For those of you who haven’t stumbled upon this conference yet, here’ s a brief history:

The Beyond Belief Conferences started three years ago in response to the culture wars arising from the new era of jihad, the resurgence in American religiosity, the wars over science in school, and the so-called “New Atheist” movement. Meeting at the Salk Institute, a number of America’s (and Europe’s) top scientists joined in a three day interdisciplinary conference entitled Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, and the Future of Reason. At the conference, it became clear that the split between the antireligious and the generically secular scientists drove as deeply as does the cultural divide between fundamentalists and mainstream believers. However, one thing that seemed unanimous was that the future of the West depends upon a culture-wide renewal of scientific inquiry and thinking.

Year two’s conference was entitled Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 and focused upon the different kinds of relationships people have with science. It got really interesting as several speakers on economics presented their recent research and different attendees talked about the entrenchment of their own political biases and how it effects the way that they cope with different scientific disciplines.

This year, the conference is entitled Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark in honor of the late Carl Sagan’s final book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Specifically, the conference gets its focus this year from the following paragraph from the introduction to Demon-Haunted World:

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

Written in 1996, that quite seems remarkably prescient today – even if Sagan’s views on economics were outdated and somewhat simplistic (an argument for another time), the notion of a technocracy where only an elite knows anything about how the technology works, where the common person is swallowed in superstition, and where all dissent is centered around marginal (and, frankly, stupid) issues like “Should we post the Ten Commandments in our courthouses?” and “Did he have sex with that woman?” and “Why do I have to pay money to see a doctor?” is both chilling and familiar. After all, such issues do distract us from debating issues that might actually effect how we make account of ourselves in terms of preserving and furthering liberty and prosperity, intelligently engaging holy wars without and within, limiting nuclear proliferation, and creating alliances that decrease the incentives for warfare.

I can’t speak yet to how year three is, because I’m about to start watching them this afternoon as they become available on Google Video. However, there are a number of reasons why you should take the time to watch it (as well as the previous two conferences):

1) It is easy to think of the scientific community as an ivory tower free from the concerns of the real world. The truth is far more radical: scientific inquiry has advanced to the point where very few things that we discover fail to have a direct bearing on how day-to-day life unfolds. The reach of this phenomenon is astounding. It also gives the lie to postmodernist claims that scientific knowledge is a fictional construct designed to serve white male power structures.

2) If ever you’ve thought that “scientists say xxx” is a meaningful statement, you need to watch these conferences. These are the best and brightest minds in the English-speaking world, and they disagree violently on a number of important issues. As an exercise in critical thinking, watching the conferences is fabulous, as you sit through lectures, presentations, panel discussions, and sometimes shouting matches, you see how prone even the best among us is to the tug of ideologically-driven magical thinking, and how frightening integrating new discoveries can be. There is very little in the way of consensus science practiced here – the constant call from the audience is “show me the evidence.”

3) On the flip side, all of you who keep hearing about The Secret or What the Bleep Do We Know?or the “Intelligent Design” philosophy (no, it’s not a theory, by admission of its proponents at the Dover Trial – read the transcripts) and think that scientific controversy means that there’s support for your claims, you’d do well to give this a watch too. “Controversy” doesn’t mean “a theory in crisis” any more than “consensus” means “it is proven.” Reality is far subtler, and you won’t get a better baptism by fire than watching scientific conferences where such things are discussed.

4) The best reason I can think of to watch it: You’re curious. You want to learn about the world, but it’s too big and you don’t know where to start. Well, start here. These scientists are witty, intelligent folks, many of them have excellent senses of humor, and very little of what gets discussed is dry. And, dammit, it’s *fun.*

And on the topic of this year’s election, economic meltdown, and other things: as I look out over the blogosphere, I see a lot of party-line thinking. In a world as complicated as ours, under an Republican President AND a Democratic Congress with some of the worst records in history, party-line thinking doesn’t cut it. If you continue to go to your party and your partisan activist groups as your primary source of truth, you’re asking for trouble.

You know how the Intelligent Design folks say “teach the controversy?” Well, if you’re a curious person, or you’re a politically or socially active person, then you damn well better understand the controversies you care about – and that means reading the other guy’s newspapers and blogs. A climate skeptic? You’d better be reading RealClimate.org. A Global Warming believer? When was the last time you read ClimateAudit.org? A bioconservative or a transhumanist? Have you read Kurzweil, Bailey, Fukiyama, and the Report of The President’s Committee on Bioethics? Not every issue has two sides – and some issues have ten sides, but if you’re feeding your brain on only the stuff you find agreeable, you don’t have an informed opinion. So, if you’re of voting age and you have a pet issue, and you can’t articulate the controversy from an opposing point of view (in language that the opposition would find agreeable) then, frankly, you probably don’t understand the issues you care about well enough to vote on them, and we’d all be better off if you stayed home.

You want to be informed and involved? Well, then, have a Candle, and maybe it can help you get an Election. If not, you can still have a lot of fun with the Candle.