Being clearer about the Realitybase mission.

This blog has a new and more directly descriptive subtitle.  At the same time, I fussed with the font colors and sizes with the intent of improving readability.  If you're reading a feed instead of the blog itself, you won't see the changes unless you click through.  Why not do that once and then tell me what you think? 

When I set up this blog in October 2007, I used this quotation from Josh Billings as the subtitle: 

The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so."

When I asked for comments, Mike and Peter (and maybe others) said they couldn't see the point and that I needed to explain more directly what this blog is about. I finally got around to that in the last few days, aided by an evolution and sharpening of my own understanding about what I'm doing here. I find that I am most often motivated to post to point out the objective wrongness of some bit of conventional wisdom that seems to be driving public policy problem descriptions and/or solutions. My m.o. is to marshal facts and analyses to refute the error and then stop.  I generally don't have an alternative theory or ideology that I'm promoting--other than, of course, the idea that rationality and an accurate understanding of the real world should rule.  So, while I may propose what I consider a better way of understanding a problem, there is usually more than one plausible solution and I don't usually offer one.  Regrettably, I am well aware, as my posts on epistemology attest, that it is very hard to dislodge beliefs with mere facts or, as the saying goes, "It takes a theory to beat a theory."