Wednesday, November 30, 2022

History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Woman in the mirror (The Spanish Shawl), 1924 by Archimede Bresciani da Gazoldo

Woman in the mirror (The Spanish Shawl), 1924 by Archimede Bresciani da Gazoldo
























Click to enlarge.

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Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Times to consider - Captain John Smith and Jamestown


























Captain John Smith, based on an engraving done in 1616.
John Smith Map of 1616 (colorized by Preservation Virginia).

Click to enlarge.

Captain John Smith (1580-1631) was your classical Elizabethan adventurer.  Born to respectable yeoman parents, he was a man of his times.  

John Smith (baptized 6 January 1580 – 21 June 1631) was an English soldier, explorer, colonial governor, Admiral of New England, and author. He played an important role in the establishment of the colony at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in America, in the early 17th century. He was a leader of the Virginia Colony between September 1608 and August 1609, and he led an exploration along the rivers of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay, during which he became the first English explorer to map the Chesapeake Bay area. Later, he explored and mapped the coast of New England. He was knighted for his services to Sigismund Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, and his friend Mózes Székely.

Jamestown was established on May 14, 1607. Smith trained the first settlers to work at farming and fishing, thus saving the colony from early devastation. He publicly stated, "He that will not work, shall not eat", alluding to 2 Thessalonians 3:10. Harsh weather, lack of food and water, the surrounding swampy wilderness, and attacks from Native Americans almost destroyed the colony. With Smith's leadership, however, Jamestown survived and eventually flourished. Smith was forced to return to England after being injured by an accidental explosion of gunpowder in a canoe.

Smith's books and maps were important in encouraging and supporting English colonization of the New World. Having named the region of New England, he stated: "Here every man may be master and owner of his owne labour and land. ...If he have nothing but his hands, he may...by industries quickly grow rich." Smith died in London in 1631.

Smith's exact birth date is unclear. He was baptized on 6 January 1580 at Willoughby, near Alford, Lincolnshire, where his parents rented a farm from Lord Willoughby. He claimed descent from the ancient Smith family of Cuerdley, Lancashire, and was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Louth, from 1592 to 1595.

Smith set off to sea at age 16 after his father died. He served as a mercenary in the army of Henry IV of France against the Spaniards, fighting for Dutch independence from King Philip II of Spain. He then went to the Mediterranean where he engaged in trade and piracy, and later fought against the Ottoman Turks in the Long Turkish War. He was promoted to a cavalry captain while fighting for the Austrian Habsburgs in Hungary in the campaign of Michael the Brave in 1600 and 1601. After the death of Michael the Brave, he fought for Radu Șerban in Wallachia against Ottoman vassal Ieremia Movilă.

Smith reputedly killed and beheaded three Ottoman challengers in single-combat duels, for which he was knighted by the Prince of Transylvania and given a horse and a coat of arms showing three Turks' heads. However, in 1602 he was wounded in a skirmish with the Crimean Tatars, captured, and sold as a slave. He claimed that his master was a Turkish nobleman who sent him as a gift to his Greek mistress in Constantinople, Charatza Tragabigzanda, who fell in love with Smith. He then was taken to the Crimea, where he escaped from Ottoman lands into Muscovy, then on to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth before travelling through Europe and North Africa, returning to England in 1604.

All this by the age of 24 and with his most important accomplishments still before him.

Smith's whole life was a miracle of escapes and reverses of fortune.  Captain John Smith accompanied the Virginia Company expedition intended to establish a commercial colony in Virginia and setting sail December 20th, 1606.

During the voyage, Smith was charged with mutiny, and Captain Christopher Newport (in charge of the three ships) had planned to execute him. These events happened approximately when the expedition stopped in the Canary Islands for resupply of water and provisions. Smith was under arrest for most of the trip. However, they landed at Cape Henry on 26 April 1607 and unsealed orders from the Virginia Company designating Smith as one of the leaders of the new colony, thus sparing him from the gallows.

Among a throng of gentlemen adventurers, Smith was one of the very few among the 104 settlers who knew anything about farming, mapping, war, or governance under emergency conditions.  He is credited with seeing the colony through its first most difficult years.

The landing in Virginia on April 26th, 1607 occurred under difficult circumstances.  The terrain was riparian and swampy.  The temperatures were hot and muggy in the summer (with all the related insect life) but the North Atlantic was in the midst of the Little Ice Age and therefore the winters were very hard.  The area was well settled by Native Americans but the tribal relations and alliances were unsettled in the region, exacerbated by the difficult weather patterns.

It took all Smith's skills in soldiering, farming, and diplomacy to hold the colony together and see it through very lean times when more people died than survived each year.  Only replacements from the Virginia Company in London ensured that headcount increased over time.  

Captain Smith's storied and disputed encounter with Pocahontas occurred in 1607.






























Click to enlarge.

As the colony grew and as the company in London attempted to exert more control and direction from a distance, the place for Captain John Smith, savior though he was of the venture, became less tenable.  In 1609, a mere two and a half years after his arrival, Smith was wounded by an accidental gunpowder discharge and returned to England to recover.  He never returned to Virginia.

But that was by no means the end of his adventures.  He returned to the colonies in 1614, this time to the area which he named New England, a trip both commercial and exploratory.  He made two further journeys to New England, one late in 1614 when his ship was dismasted and another voyage in 1615 when he was captured by French pirates in the vicinity of the Azores Islands.

This was a recurrent event in Smith's action filled life.  He was captured and eventually escaped from the Ottomans.  He was captured and escaped from the Native American Powhatan Confederacy.  He was captured and escaped from French pirates.  He eventually managed to escape and returned to England where he remained until his death in 1631.

In addition to all these adventures, Smith authored several travelogues and studies, including A True Relation of Virginia, published anonymously in 1608. 

The Proceedings of the English Colony In Virginia was published in 1612 and combined a mapping of the Chesapeake area with botanical, wildlife and ethnographic observations.  His third publication was A description of New England published in 1616.

New Englands trials was published in 1620 covering various events and explorations of the New England coast.  This was followed by the much lengthier The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, which was published in 1624.  

In 1626 he published An accidence or The path-way to experience: Necessary for all young sea-men, or those that are desirous to goe to sea, briefly shewing the phrases, offices, and words of command, essentially an instruction manual for maritime war.  

In 1630 he published his autobiography, the title of which was virtually a chapter in itself, The true travels, adventures, and observations of Captaine Iohn Smith, in Europe, Asia, Affrica, and America from Anno Domini 1593 to 1629: his accidents and sea-fights in the Straights: his service and strategems of warre in Hungaria, Transilvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia, against the Turks, and Tartars: his three single combats betwixt the Christian Armie and the Turks : after how he taken prisoner by the Turks, sold for a slave, sent into Tartarias: his description of the Tartars, their strange manners and customes of religions, diets, buildings, warres, feasts, ceremonies, and living: how hee flew the Bashaw of Nalbrits in Cambia, and escaped from the Turkes and Tatars: together with a continuation of his Generall history of Virginia, Summer-Iles, New England, and their proceedings, since 1624 to this present 1629: as also of the new plantations of the great river of the Amazons, the iles of St. Christopher, Mevis, and Barbados in the West Indies / all written by actuall authors, whose names you shall finde along the history.

His final publication was the year he died, Advertisements for the unexperienced planters of New-England, or any where.

What a life.  But it was an era that fostered big characters.  Where Jamestown had Captain John Smith, Plymouth Plantation had Captain Myles Standish (also experienced in the Low Countries Wars).  In the same period there was Sir Walter Raleigh venturing and mapping and fighting.    

In some ways, though, Smith stands out for his pragmatism and all roundedness.  He was never only one thing, he was always many things simultaneously.  What is amazing to me, beyond the serial escapes across his life, is how well he documented his ventures in a time when publishing was just beginning to flourish.  He was truly a man of his times, undiminished by latter day pinheads trying to constrain a Whitmanesque man of multitudes into small a singular pieces.  

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This is financial and investigative reporting 101.

From Citizen reporting beats legacy media on a crucial, complex story (yet again) by Alex Berenson.  The subheading is While the New York Times et al offer puffery on Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX collapse, expert outsiders sift through the wreckage and get to the truth; this is Twitter and Substack at their best.  

Covid-19, Ukraine War, FTX, election results - we are seeing this pattern again and again.  My old mainstays New York Times and NPR, but all the legacy media, have their narrative driven stories which are neither timely nor accurate/complete.  You want the best and most complete version, you resort to selected substacks, selected Twitter accounts, selected blogs.  That portfolio of substacks, accounts, and blogs is always evolving based on what the issue might be and it takes time and effort to sort the wheat from the chaff.  

But done well, you eventually end up with an informational ecosystem which is fast, reliable and more complete, accurate and balanced than anything we used to get from the old mainstream media.  The old MSM was easier.  You just payed a few hundred or thousand dollars a year and consumed what they served.  Now you have to work to cultivate the ecosystem and it takes constant tending.  

The outcome is approaching the quality we used to enjoy from the mainstream media.  And compared to the remnant husks of the New York Times and NPR?  Far superior.  In both cases you barely get five paragraphs or thirty seconds in to their reportage before they are offering declarative statements about things which are clearly highly contingent and disputable.  

From Berenson.

Fourteen years ago, when Bernie Madoff’s massive hedge fund collapsed, the New York Times and other elite media aggressively dug into what had happened - and why and how regulators had failed to stop it. I know - I was part of the Times team.

By this point, business reporters were experienced covering financial collapse. Along with al Qaeda and Iraq, Wall Street’s various meltdowns were the story of the 2000s, starting with the technology stock crash in 2000, running through Enron and the other giant accounting frauds, and culminating in the bank crisis and Madoff.

The most crucial element in covering these failures and frauds:

Don’t believe what they tell you.

Financial companies depend on leverage - borrowing from other institutions against their customer deposits. Leverage inherently means risk. Even a solvent company can break if too many customers or counterparties want their money back all at once. Management has to make sure that doesn’t happen; it has to keep confidence high at any cost.

Frauds depend on opaque accounting, accounting that no one from the outside can challenge or in some cases even understand. Complexity is the grifter’s friend.

Yet at its heart the fraud always runs the same way: cash leaves the balance sheet, and assets that aren’t really assets take its place. Those “assets” can be crypto tokens or prebooked profits on future electricity sales or capitalized software development costs or almost anything else. What they have in common is that they cannot be turned back into cash quickly - or sometimes at all.

Thus managements at complex financial companies have both the motive and the opportunity to spin, if not outright lie.

And if a collapse comes, they have every reason to hide their roles in what’s happened, and to blame malign outside forces for their problems - everything would have been fine if I’d just had a little more time, time to unwind my losing position, time for my investment to recover, time to raise more cash, time to flee to Argentina…

—

This is financial and investigative reporting 101.

But the Times and other elite media outlets have failed miserably at it in the case of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that collapsed and filed for bankruptcy last week, and Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s founder and majority owner.

Worth reading.

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History

 

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This millipede moves on political, economic, cultural, biological, and countless other legs, each of which has a different tempo and rhythm.

From Progress and possibility by Christopher Hobson.  The subheading is Musil's millipede.

I have never heard of Robert Musil before and am not an especially huge fan of German academics or literary fiction but I appreciate the introduction from Hobson.  Musil appears to be wrestling with comprehending and expressing the same phenomenon with which I am mulling - the necessarily integrated world of both empirical realism and emotional wisdom.  Or something like that.  I stumble on the mere expression of the issue.

This sense of progress is not pleasant. It reminds you, in the most extreme way, of a dream in which you are seated on a horse and cannot get off, because the horse never stands still. You would gladly take pleasure in progress, if only it took a pause. If only we could stop for a moment on our high horse, look back, and say to the past: Look where I am now! But already the uncanny process continues, and after experiencing it several times, you begin to feel queasy in the stomach with those four strange legs trotting beneath you, constantly carrying you forward.

'Art Anniversary'

Progress itself is not something that unfolds in a single line. Every present period is simultaneously now and yet millennia old. This millipede moves on political, economic, cultural, biological, and countless other legs, each of which has a different tempo and rhythm.

'Mind and Experience: Notes for Readers Who Have Eluded the Decline of the West'

These are two attempts by Musil to describe an idea the Great War had left in tatters. Both evoke similar themes - a creature moving, doing so largely of its own volition and at its own pace - but each emphasises slightly different features. The imagery of the horse captures that feeling of being carried by a force outside one's control; jerky, uneven, uncomfortable. The mild sense of vertigo that one gets when facing a world relentlessly moving forward, combined with the unreality that exists in a dream. With the millipede, he pointed to the difficulties of providing clear explanations:

One simply explains the World War or our collapse first by this, then by that cluster of causes; but this is deceptive. Just as fraudulent as explaining a simple physical event by a chain of causes. In reality, even in the first links of the chain of causality the causes have already flowed and dissolved beyond the scope of our vision.

Musil was not denying the presence of causes, but doubting our capacity to comprehend all of what was present and determinative. Indeed, he questioned those who presented the Great War as a decisive break, and suggested that, ‘everything that has appeared in the War and after the War was already there.’ It is not just elephants that blind men struggle with, we feel different parts of a millipede, and then guess.

Throughout his work, Musil searched for what can be sensed but not fully grasped, what exists at the edge of our comprehension. In The Man Without Qualities he wrote, 'however understandable and self-contained everything seems, that is accompanied by an obscure feeling that it is only half the story.' Awareness without full understanding, appreciating enough to know something is missing, but not being able to precisely locate what that is.  

I am in love with the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment and Classical Liberalism but also see aspects of those beliefs which are self-undermining.  

Specifically, I have an abiding suspicion that much of the success of Age of Enlightenment world view and its attendant Classical Liberalism involves a necessary dependency between empirical realism and the scientific method and some amorphous and indistinct amalgam of religion and family and culture.  

Empirical realism with Classical Liberalism, left unconstrained, can lead to forays into despotism, authoritarianism and genocide.  They are constrained by fundamental Christian beliefs in combination with particular cultural elements, principally beliefs in human universalism and consent of the governed.  

Neither of the latter two attributes are logically derived, they are simply observed in place as necessary constraints on the otherwise munificent outcomes of empirical realism and scientific method.  

One of our challenges these days, it seems to me, is that the mean time to greater connectivity, technological revolution and universal engagement now exceeds the mean time for cultural and religious accommodation and evolution.

More specifically, it feels as if religious and spiritual perceptiveness are being bludgeoned in to ever more circumscribed bounds such that they no longer serve as the counterweight to untrammeled empirical logic.  

Seems like these are perhaps issues Musil might have been thinking about as well.   

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I put that man down hours ago, why do you keep carrying him.

From STAT, Churnalism and A Zen Parable by Adam Cifu, MD.  A dubious piece of research is published and Cifu finds it hard not to pile on.  A pleasantly gentle introduction to the issue of exercising restraint in a wild of wide open communication.

There is a Zen parable in which two monks, one old and one young, are walking through a forest. They come upon a rich man by a stream. The rich man says to the older monk, “Monk, carry me across that stream so I don’t get my clothes muddy.” The young monk begins to protest but the older one quiets him and carries the rich man on his back across the stream.

The monks go their way, and the rich man goes his.

After a few hours walking in silence, the old monk says, “It is a beautiful day to walk in the forest. Days like this are ones you must cherish.”

The young monk replies, “That rich man was terribly rude to you. I can’t believe that you agreed to carry him across the stream. He was younger and stronger than you.”

The old monk says, “I put that man down hours ago, why do you keep carrying him.”

Last week STAT published an article titled How infectious disease experts are responding to Covid nearly three years in. Vinay Prasad published a hilarious screed about this article on his Observations and Thoughts Substack and cross-posted it here.[i] His take is definitely worth a read.

In the STAT article, the author admitted that “many people appear to have given up trying to avoid the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Restaurants are packed, airports are hopping. Once-ubiquitous masks are now an increasingly rare sight.” He reached out to “epidemiologists, virologists, immunologists, and related experts” with a series of “yes” or “no” questions and then published the data of the 34 who replied. These 34 people had definitely NOT given up on trying to avoid SARS-CoV-2

I should have read the article and Vinay’s take and left it behind as the old monk left the rich man, but the article has been bothering me.[ii] I hope that writing about it will allow me to forget it.

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Interior with reading girl by Sigmund Sinding (Norwegian, 1875-1936)

Interior with reading girl by Sigmund Sinding (Norwegian, 1875-1936)























Click to enlarge.

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Monday, November 28, 2022

Dominus vobiscum

Dominus vobiscum

Dominus vobiscum (Latin: "The Lord be with you") is an ancient salutation and blessing traditionally used by the clergy in the Masses of the Catholic Church and other liturgies, as well as liturgies of other Western Christian denominations, such as Lutheranism, Anglicanism and Methodism.

The response is Et cum spiritu tuo, meaning "And with your spirit." Some English translations, such as Divine Worship: The Missal and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, translate the response in the older form, "And with thy spirit." Eastern Orthodox churches also follow this usage, although the episcopal and presbyteral blessing are one and the same; in Greek, Εἰρήνη πᾶσι, eirene pasi, "peace to all." In the Roman Rite, this usage is only for the bishop, who says Pax vobiscum. The ICEL translation presently in use for Roman Catholic Masses in English has "And with your spirit."

In the Episcopal Church, the response to "The Lord be with you" is "And also with you."

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If it is a serious problem, it warrants making a serious argument

Here is another epistemic mystery.  From Harassment in Economics Doesn’t Stay in Economics by Annie Lowrey.  The subheading is When women in the profession face mistreatment, everyone suffers.  The essay is in The Atlantic magazine.  

The subheading is clearly a nonsense feel-good trope like "diversity is our strength."  "Everyone suffers"?  That clearly depends on who is speaking and with regard to what are held to be the important goals.  Some may suffer a lot, some not all, and some only a bit.  It is a worthwhile question to explore and quantify but in terms of a self-evident truth, there is no substance there.  

Lowery writes of a perceived "pervasive and persistent sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination" within the discipline.  She writes well and somewhat rhetorically persuasively.  But only somewhat.  

Here is a woman in the richest country in the world, at the top of both mainstream media and academia, in a country with quite stringent laws against discrimination and sexual harassment, alleging a pervasive misogyny.  Given her ideological orientation, it is not just a crisis of sexual bias but racial bias.  The problem is white men.  

Ultimately the field is tilted to the worldview of the white men who dominate it. 

Given the high standing of black economists such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Glenn Loury, perhaps Lowrey's views are constrained by only being familiar with left leaning academics.

Lowery's essay seems to substantially depend on the views of a single economist, Betsey Stevenson.  Stevenson's opinions open and close the essay.  The meat of the argument is around the purported experiences of two anonymous female economists.  There is no analytic rigor or data to support Lowery's position.

Just how common is the experience being described?  How many sexual harassment cases (from either sex) are brought each year?  How prevalent are these in economics versus other academic disciplines?  How prevalent are these cases in academia compared to other sectors, other countries?  What are the appropriate measures of discrimination, sexual or otherwise?  None of this is addressed in the article.

Writing well about a couple of anonymous stories is no real argument at all.  If the allegations are real, they should be treated seriously but Lowery does not treat it seriously at all.  She passes off idle storytelling as serious argument-making, devaluing the topic.

The epistemic mystery is just how much weight to place on Lowery's argument?  It is narrowly sourced, anonymously sourced, and there is a clear ideological drift to it.  How close is it to painting any sort of reality?

I am quite comfortable believing that academia is pervaded by status seeking, bullying authoritarians unwilling to accommodate those with alternative views and comfortable preying upon the professionally vulnerable.   A mere passing familiarity with the entire PhD process and the indentured servitude of associate professors suggests that this is a system open to abuse.

Is there such abuse?  And to what degree is the sexual abuse that does exist a function of misogyny or a product of a hierarchical authoritarian system characterized by low epistemic diversity?

I don't know and Lowery doesn't even attempt to make the case.  And I wish she, or others, would.  If it is as bad as alleged, it really needs a root and branch reform.  

But if this is mere ideological special pleading then . . . well, it's a waste of time to even engage.

Her essay reminds me of a somewhat nominally similar piece from The Atlantic many years ago,  Why Women Still Can’t Have It All by Anne-Marie Slaughter.  The subheading was It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.

It had the same note of special pleading on behalf of members of the most privileged class of people to have ever existed.  

In Slaughter's case, the solution was to abandon the competitive market system and switch to a government system designed to make the lives of women in academia and an interest in politics easier.  A laughable solution but one with a devoted and vocal following.  

Maybe Lowery's claims are true and if so they, there should indeed be reforms to make the life of the professoriate easier and safer, more open and less authoritarian (but if you are on the left, beware what you are asking for.)

But I would have a far greater receptiveness to Lowery's argument if it were not so ideologically and class self-serving.  Whatever the horrors of misogyny and sexual harassment might be in academia, I can guarantee that it is worse by several factors in some other sectors.  Focus on the women at the bottom of the economic pyramid who have little voice, few allies and no leverage.  If you are concerned about harassment and misogyny, fix it for those victims.  By focusing on the already successful and privileged, the moral argument loses salience.  

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An epistemic concundrum

Tyler Cowen links to an interesting thread I had seen on Twitter, Here’s what it’s like when your kids get sick in Québec right now – a long thread.  Click through to the distressing thread.  This is an epistemic challenge.  Everyone everywhere complains about the terrible health service they receive.  And in some cases it is almost certainly true that the complaint is fully warranted.  But how can one know with any confidence.   

Even in a relative constant and contained environment you get massive disagreements about basic facts.  On Next Door a few weeks ago in my neighborhood, someone posted about some bad experience in a local hospital and asked for recommendations about which other hospitals in the area provided better service.

The discussion was fascinating in that it was voluminous, heated, and contradictory.  Ten people were in love with Hospital X and ten hated it, both groups offering detailed examples of excellent or disastrous service.  Same for Hospital Y and Hospital Z.

Everyone seems, as far as a healthcare is concerned, to be either the unfortunate victim or the lucky beneficiary.  

It is of course necessarily true that across a random population of users, there will be variability in service provision but this bi-modal distribution of hatred and adulation makes it difficult to interpret whether the opinions being expressed are in any meaningful way related to the actual quality of service being provided.

I come across enough concerning accounts to believe that in Canada and the UK, and possibly also in Australia, that the national health systems might be in some spiral of dysfunction.  How and why remaining unclear.

Maybe in some other countries as well but not nearly as clearly.  

And maybe none of them are in distress.  

It is simply difficult to objectively and empirically conclude much that is meaningful about these critical but immensely complex aggregation of systems and how they actually achieve public health and/or provide public health service adequate and appropriate to their consumers.

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Ratings have limited utility

From Should patients use online reviews to pick their doctors and hospitals? by David A. Hyman, Jing Liu, and Bernard S. Black.  From the Abstract:

We compare the online reviews of 221 “Questionable” Illinois and Indiana physicians with multiple paid medical malpractice claims and disciplinary sanctions with matched control physicians with clean records. Across five prominent online rating services, we find small, mostly insignificant differences in star ratings and written reviews for Questionable versus control physicians. Only one rating service (Healthgrades) reports on paid medical malpractice claims and disciplinary actions and it misses more than 90% of these actions. We also evaluate the online ratings of 171 Illinois hospitals and find that their ratings are largely uncorrelated with the share of hospital-affiliated physicians with paid medical malpractice claims and disciplinary sanctions. Online ratings have limited utility in helping patients avoid physicians with troubled medical malpractice and disciplinary records, and steering patients away from hospitals at which more physicians have paid medical malpractice claims and disciplinary sanctions.

Efficient markets depend on timely and accurate signals.  One of those is usually price but there are plenty of others such as reputation, consistency, quality, reliability, etc.  

Heavily regulated industries often lose their signaling effectiveness and become less productive, efficient, and effective.  This research would seem to argue that the medical industry has no effective signaling capability.  Certainly not price.  And apparently not quality. 

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The many fans of Robert Louis Stevenson

A wonderful essay celebrating the talents and achievements of Robert Louis Stevenson.  From The strange case of Robert Louis Stevenson by The Money Illusion.

He starts by identifying some of the more illustriously literary of Stevenson fans: Borges, Proust, Nabokov, Henry James, Walter Benjamin, Fernando Pessoa, Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese, Bertolt Brecht,  Hemingway, Kipling, Chesterton, Jack London, Natsumi Soseki, Javier Marias, and Roberto Bolano.

He was loved by our best literary readers, loved by the public, but sneered at by the literary establishment.  An odd state of affairs.

There are far too many great writers on this list for us to brush away their Stevenson appreciation. So what’s going on here? It cannot be that Stevenson is too difficult for the literary establishment, as he’s also popular with average readers. I suspect it is more nearly the opposite problem—Stevenson is too pleasurable. Some critics wrongly equate greatness with difficulty.

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History

 

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An Insight

 

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An Insight

 





















Click to enlarge.

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I see wonderful things

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Logic and communication

One of the blessing of Thanksgiving is the opportunity to share long open conversations with old friends and families.  Full with appreciation of good food and good company, there is a nice generosity of spirit which encourages interesting, clever and witty conversations.  

Conversations which keep you thinking long after the meals are cleared and everyone has returned to their roosts and their routines.

Many such free flowing conversations on complex matters often center around communication specificity.  What exactly is meant or intended?  What is the definition of the word being used?  The concept being bandied?  Such exchanges are always useful because they help both speaker and listener refine what they are thinking.  Clarification is nine tenths of the issue it sometimes seems.

Lack of clarity of communication also intersects with logical inconsistency.  

Thinking about the general issue, it occurred to me that there might be an interesting poll to be done consisting of two statements which are functionally equivalent but expressed differently.

What might the results be were we to ask a random sample of 1,000 people:

Do you support banning all private gun ownership in America?

No context, no frame, no slant, no background.  Just do you support such a ban?

Then polling a separate 1,000 people.  This time the question would be:

Do you support restricting gun ownership to only the government?

Functionally these questions amount to the same thing.  No private ownership of guns and guns use restricted to the government and its authorized agents.

If you read this as an exercise in logic, the answers should be the exact mirror inverse.  If 35% support an absolute ban on private gun ownership, then 65% should be in support of only the government owning guns.  

But I don't think that is what we would find.  Regardless of what the empirical results might actually be, my guestimate would be that perhaps as many as 25% might wish to ban private gun ownership outright.  I also suspect that the percentage comfortable with all gun ownership being restricted to the government and its agents is far less than the logically implied 75%.  

I suspect 25% might support a ban on private ownership but that probably less than 10% would support only the government owning guns.

This is not about what might a specifically desirable policy.  This is about logic and communication.  Perhaps I am wrong but even when the questions logically consistent with one another, I suspect that people would not understand them to be so and would provide responses which would be at dramatic odds.  

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Data Talks

 

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Lace of Shadows, 2021 by Dita Lūse (Latvia b. 1972)

Lace of Shadows, 2021 by Dita Lūse (Latvia b. 1972)
























Click to enlarge.

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A pure integrity is the quality we take first into calculation

From The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 24, p. 82, ed. Julian P. Boyd, et al. (1950).  Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Garland Jefferson (June 15, 1792). 

I am sure that in estimating every man’s value either in private or public life, a pure integrity is the quality we take first into calculation, and that learning and talents are only the second.

This can be matched with Samuel Johnson's observation.  From The History of Rasselas, Ch. 41 (1759) by Samuel Johnson.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

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A frustrated academic with a professor’s incapacity to finish anything properly

From On Marx by Alan Ryan 

If the German government had not sent Lenin across its territory and back to Russia in a sealed train in early 1917, we might today regard Marx as a not very important nineteenth-century philosopher, sociologist, economist, and political theorist. If he had not had the good (or bad) luck to be treated as the source of near-divine wisdom by the ideologists of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, we might treat his economics as an interesting offshoot of the Ricardian system, and his historical theories as an interesting variation on themes first sketched by Hegel, Saint-Simon, Guizot, and Comte. Political theorists would complain, as I shall, that his political theory is sketchy and unfinished. They might explain his lurchings between cynicism and utopianism as a reaction to the vagaries of his fellow radicals, or a consequence of the fact that Marx was a frustrated academic with a professor’s incapacity to finish anything properly, a man of many deep insights who was unable to complete any project before being distracted by the next.

 
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The terror of free speech

I love that Glenn Greenwald is such an articulate and staunch advocate of free speech.  From The Media's Deranged Hysteria Over Elon Musk's Promised Restoration of Free Speech by Glenn Greenwald.  The subheading is It was easy to predict that there would be an all-out war from Western power centers if Musk sought to mildly reduce censorship on Twitter. Still, the media outdid itself.

It is hard to overstate how manic, primal and unhinged is the reaction of corporate media employees to the mere prospect that new Twitter owner Elon Musk may restore a modicum of greater free speech to that platform. It was easy to predict — back when Musk was merely toying with the idea of buying Twitter and loosening some of its censorship restrictions — that there would be an all-out attack from Western power centers if he tried. Online censorship has become one of the most potent propaganda weapons they possess, and there is no way they will allow anyone to dilute it even mildly without attempting to destroy them. Even with that expectation in place of what was to come, the liberal sector of the corporate media (by far the most dominant media sector) really outdid itself when it came to group-think panic, rhetorical excess, and reckless and shrill accusations.

In unison, these media outlets decreed that not only would greater free speech on Twitter usher in the usual parade of horribles they trot out when demanding censorship — disinformation, hate speech, attacks on the “marginalized,” etc. etc. — but this time they severely escalated their rhetorical hysteria by claiming that Musk would literally cause mass murder by permitting a broader range of political opinion to be aired. The Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz even warned of supernatural demons that would be unleashed by these new free speech policies, as she talked to a handful of obviously neurotic pro-censorship “experts” and then wrote about these thinly disguised therapy sessions with those neurotics under this headline: “‘Opening the gates of hell’: Musk says he will revive banned accounts.”

But the self-evident absurdity of this laughable meltdown and the ease of mocking it should not obscure that there are lurking within these episodes some genuinely insidious and serious dangers. These preposterous media employees are just the sideshow. But what they are doing, unwittingly or otherwise, is laying the groundwork for far less frivolous and more serious people to use the attacks on Musk to further fortify the regime of censorship they have been constructing: the limitlessly demonizing language heaped on him, the success they have already had in driving away many if not most corporate advertisers from Twitter, the threats to once again abuse the monopoly power of Google and Apple to destroy Twitter or at least cripple it if Musk does not comply with their censorship orders (as they succeeded in doing last year to the free speech site Parler when it became the most-downloaded app in the country and refused to censor on demand).

Click through for the whole essay and all the useful links.  
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Sunday, November 27, 2022

History

 

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An Insight

 

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Systems with open communications tend to self correct

A very excellent thread drawing a comparison between the aviation industry approach to threats and dangers and the approach demonstrated by the public health sector.  A comparison not favorable to public health.
Click through for the thread.

KC-10 Driver indirectly makes a point which I think to be extremely critical.  Systems with open communications tend to self correct.  Incentives are valuable.  Training, skills, and credentials are important.  But all of them together, without open communications, will often fail.  As demonstrated with the Covid-19 public health fiasco.

The ignorance, arrogance, and mandating were bad enough but the effort to suppress dissenting opinions and contrary evidence is what ultimately brought down the whole "experts" charade.  The mainstream media conspired, along with the tech companies, to create a shadow system of censorship but it eventually became obvious.

Free speech is the hallmark of Age of Enlightenment culture and Classical Liberal thought.  There is no red flag brighter than any effort at restricting the freedom of speech and making selected data and opinions unacceptable.  

It is why all authoritarian systems will eventually fail.  They make a long time to do so but they will inevitably fail, and faster the more complex and more rapidly evolving might be the circumstances.  Complex systems are prone to misdiagnosis and you need both the incentive structures and the freedom of communication that allows for constant adjustments and course corrections.  Without those corrections, ultimately authoritarian systems drive themselves off the rails.

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Bread Line, New York, 1932 by Clare Leighton

Bread Line, New York, 1932 by Clare Leighton


























Click to enlarge.

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Saturday, November 26, 2022

An eternal truth

From The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Book V, Chapter II, Part II, Appendix to Articles I and II.

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

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The coevolutionary process involving markets and morality partly consists of economic markets shaping a moral system of a universalist and internalized prosociality

And, finally, there is this from Market exposure and human morality by Benjamin Enke.  From the Abstract:

According to evolutionary theories, markets may foster an internalized and universalist prosociality because it supports market-based cooperation. This paper uses the cultural folklore of 943 pre-industrial ethnolinguistic groups to show that a society’s degree of market interactions, proxied by the presence of intercommunity trade and money, is associated with the cultural salience of (1) prosocial behaviour, (2) interpersonal trust, (3) universalist moral values and (4) moral emotions of guilt, shame and anger. To provide tentative evidence that a part of this correlation reflects a causal effect of market interactions, the analysis leverages both fine-grained geographic variation across neighbouring historical societies and plausibly exogenous variation in the presence of markets that arises through proximity to historical trade routes or the local degree of ecological diversity. The results suggest that the coevolutionary process involving markets and morality partly consists of economic markets shaping a moral system of a universalist and internalized prosociality.

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We document a robust positive association between market participation and moral behaviour towards anonymous others

Similarly, there is this from Market Participation and Moral Decision-Making: Experimental Evidence from Greenland by Gustav Agneman and Esther Chevrot-Bianco.  From the Abstract:

The relationship between market participation and moral values is the object of a long-lasting debate in economics, yet field evidence is mainly based on cross-cultural studies. We conduct rule-breaking experiments in 13 villages across Greenland (N = 543), where stark contrasts in market participation within villages allow us to examine the relationship between market participation and moral decision-making, holding village-level factors constant. First, we document a robust positive association between market participation and moral behaviour towards anonymous others. Second, market-integrated participants display universalism in moral decision-making, whereas non-market participants make more moral decisions towards co-villagers. A battery of robustness tests confirms that the behavioural differences between market and non-market participants are not driven by socioeconomic variables, childhood background, cultural identities, kinship structure, global connectedness and exposure to religious and political institutions.
                                                                                                                                            
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We find that market-oriented societies have a greater aversion to unethical behavior, higher levels of trust, and are not significantly associated with lower levels of morality under any model specification.

From The moral costs of markets: Testing the deterioration hypothesis by Justin Callais, Colin Harris, and Ben Borchard.  From the Abstract.

The expansion of markets has generated significant material benefits. Yet some worry that this increase in wealth has come at a significant moral cost. Markets may crowd out or even corrupt existing moral values, causing moral deterioration. We test this hypothesis using both fixed effects and matching methods to estimate the impact of market institutions on a society's moral values. Contrary to the deterioration hypothesis, we find that market-oriented societies have a greater aversion to unethical behavior, higher levels of trust, and are not significantly associated with lower levels of morality under any model specification. Furthermore, we find that becoming more market oriented does not cause a significant reduction in a society's moral values. Together, our results suggest that being or becoming more market oriented does not cause moral deterioration.

Any system with positive incentives is obviously prone to individuals wanting to circumvent the rules, be they legal rules, personal rule, religious rules, or cultural rules.

The flip side of that argument is that people advance in a market economy by providing others goods or services they desire at a price and quality they find acceptable.  The more they sell the more benefit is generated for everyone.

Any sociology research is prone to criticisms but it is interesting to see one which moves against the faddish norms of academia.


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Reconstruction of the Acropolis and Areopagus in Athens, 1846 by Leo von Klenze

Reconstruction of the Acropolis and Areopagus in Athens, 1846 by Leo von Klenze.



















Click to enlarge.

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Do not confuse science and risk management. The one is about truth and the other about surviving.

From Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  

(Tail) risk management is about surviving, not getting into irreversible trouble.  It isn't about understanding.  It's about surviving.

Science is a collective procedure to get closer to the truth.

Do not confuse the two, as @WHO and @CDCgov did in 2020!

Risk management supersedes science.

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The much murk, gloom and unhealthy miasma cloistering our governance processes.

From Other People's Money and How Bankers Use It by Louis D. Brandeis, later Supreme Court Justice Brandeis (1916-1939).  Chapter 5.  The original version of the chapter was published in Harper's Weekly in 1913.  

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman. 

A nice trilogy - Electric light, Sunlight, and Publicity to maintain the health of the body politic.   We are short on all three right now.  The Covid-19 fiasco has revealed just how much murk, gloom and unhealthy miasma there is cloistering our governance processes.  

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History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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They'll believe anything

From That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis (Space Trilogy)

Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.

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An Insight

 

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Travellers, 1933 by Herbert Badham (Australia)

Travellers, 1933 by Herbert Badham (Australia) 




























Click to enlarge.

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Friday, November 25, 2022

History

 

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An Insight

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Specialization is for insects.

From Time Enough for Love (1973) by Robert Heinlein.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
 
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If your prestige depends on the funding of others, there is no prestige to be had.

From There's Just Too Many Damn Elites by Erik Torenberg.  The subheading is And not enough high-status cushy jobs to go around.

This is similar to a situation that was emerging in developing countries back in the late seventies and early eighties.  I recall doing research on the Egyptian education system at that time.  They had thrown in their lot with the Soviet Union, had a planned economy, and their universities were intended to help improve to the human capital that the nation required for a glorious future.  

The problem was that their planned economy was not generating the profits or job growth necessary to accommodate the increasing flow of university graduates.  The young people studied hard but had no where to go.  They wanted the prestigious jobs that should go with prestigious education certificates but those were simply not available in the planned economy.

The government increasingly became the employer of last resort, hiring the surfeit of university graduates and placing them in various departments and agencies.  But there was little actual work to be done.  The positions were prestigious sounding titles to go with the university degree but with little actual responsibility or activity.

Increasingly, university graduates worked two jobs.  Their official government job and then, off the books, a second private sector job.  Between the two jobs, the graduate could put together an adequate income.  Just.

It was, of course, not a sustainable model.  Unutilized graduates with fake jobs became restless, and the national budget could not afford all the outflow.  

Thats the background with which I read Torenberg's piece.

The PMC exists somewhere between what we think of as the traditional working class and the ruling class. While they aren’t capitalists and don't own the means of production, they do play a big role in upholding and extending capitalism’s reign.

In other words, managers are a specific type of employee that are materially on the side of labor—but symbolically on the side of capital. 

What Ehrenreich noted was a bifurcation: On the higher end more commercial PMCs were peeling off to join the elite tier of wealthy CEOs and managers, while on the lower end the PMCs were suffering from a collapse of many of their preexisting professions (e.g. academics, journalists, etc).

And so the academics and journalists had to make a choice: they could either join the traditional working class to fight against the capitalists or they could join the capitalists against the working class in the hope of getting rich in the process.

[snip]

Activism became not just a social philosophy, but an elite status marker. As David Brooks once put it, “You have to possess copious amounts of cultural capital to feel comfortable using words like intersectionality, heteronormativity, cisgender, problematize, triggering, and Latinx”. More specifically, you have to go to college to learn those words, which excludes two-thirds of the country.

Activism also became a strategy for professional advancement beyond college. By calling out the privilege and moral failings of those above them in the corporate pecking order, young elites became able to intimidate Boomer administrators and usurp power from them.

This isn’t all just ideological posturing, it’s also a practical necessity. The truth is that we have too many college educated people without technical skills who expect high-status and high-paying jobs and there simply aren’t enough jobs for them. So the posturing isn’t only a way to signal high-status, it’s also a way to ensure they continue to hold an elite job. 

[snip]

Summarizing Elite Overproduction theory: The problem with having too many elites is that we don’t have enough cushy jobs for them. As the number of elites expands, there's a growing pressure to find roles for them so that they can keep their luxurious lifestyles. Thus, the state steps in to create roles for these excess elites that are  appropriate for their status. The state can’t create jobs for all of them, so the private sector is expected to step in as well, hence the explosion of administrative jobs in companies. 

As the elites continue to expand and the state struggles to find roles for them all, we begin to see intense competition for the few positions that exist. In the face of  losing out on the money and status they expected to get, elites become very angry and turn on each other, creating intra-elite conflict.

One signal of intra-elite conflict is an emphasis on credentialing. In the old days when the majority of the elite youth could expect to inherit their parents’ wealth and status, they didn't bother to go to university. But in the wake of elite over-expansion, we watch them now fight for credentials as a way of distinguishing themselves.

Thomas Sowell makes this point as well - that unserious people gravitate to jobs with little clear responsibility or accountability:

Malcolm Kyeyune has an interesting thesis around all this: He noticed that many jobs in the professional class — academics, journalists, activists, bankers, consultants, middle-managers — lack clear accountability. They claim to hold others accountable but have little accountability themselves, neither to the market nor the electorate. The most ambitious people sometimes self-select out by becoming entrepreneurs. Conversely, bureaucracies attract people (on average) who conform, which means that these bureaucracies become increasingly run by people who prioritize conformism over quality. You see this in Corporate America too, where the organization is increasingly influenced by HR and PR. 

[snip]

What this means is that we've created a huge surplus class of administrators in our imperial machine. And there's simply not enough things for them to do since all the manufacturing is done somewhere else. So one way to view some of these activist-oriented jobs is to see them as a make-work program for elites. There is a whole web of managerial technocrats, government regulators, activists, people who run media orgs, NGOs, etc that helps serve this goal. To be sure, there’s lots of great people doing important work at philanthropic organizations, but there are also plenty of people at both private and public sector organizations who are claiming to be doing important work but are not actually having an impact—and there’s often insufficient accountability mechanisms to do something about it. As we just saw with the FTX blow up, just because someone claims to be doing good does not mean they are.

When activists advocate for new rights, they’re also implicitly advocating for a permanent cast of managers to monitor the implementation of these new rights. This is why some of the problems the multi-billion dollar activist class was created to solve will in fact never be “solved”. It’s a challenge of incentives: people are less likely to solve a problem if solving the problem means losing their jobs.

The PMC of course wants to retain high-paying jobs as consultants and communicators — And for many years, companies could get away with a bit of excess in the name of social impact (and good marketing). But with increased interest rates and a deteriorating macroeconomic environment, these roles are increasingly harder to justify. 
 
The message being that the only prestigious jobs are those which actually produce prestigious improvements in productivity.  Everything else may have nice titles and impressive degrees but they are not prestigious because they are entirely dependent on mooching off the productivity of others.

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