He will kiss the hand that had no food to offer

Speeches That Changed the World by Cathy Lowne is an odd little collection of "Over 100 of the most influential speeches ever made". Well, not quite. The choices are highly eclectic and because of that the book is more intriguing than it would otherwise have been had it hewed more strictly to its claim. One speech is that by George Graham Vest in his closing argument in the suit his client brought against a neighbor for killing his dog, Old Drum.

Gentlemen of the jury, the best friend a man has in this world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or daughter whom he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us—those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name—may become traitors to their faith. The money that a man has he may lose. It flies away from him, perhaps when he needs it most. A man’s reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads. The one absolute, unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world—the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous—is his dog.

Gentlemen of the jury, a man’s dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he can be near his master’s side. He will kiss the hand that had no food to offer, he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wings and reputation falls to pieces he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens. If fortune drives the master forth an outcast in the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him to guard against danger, to fight against his enemies. And when the last scene of all comes, and death takes the master in its embrace, and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way, there by his graveside will the noble dog be found, his head between his paws, his eyes sad but open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true even to death.

The Gods of Wisdom and Virtue

Among my favorite poems is Rudyard Kipling's Gods of the Copybook Headings. Here is a rendition by Bill Whittle where he takes license to change a couple of archaic phrases in the poem in order to make it more accessible to the modern audience. In this instance, I think it works.

The Gods of Wisdom and Virtue by Bill Whittle

But our preferences do not determine what's true

Carl Sagan in Wonder and Skepticism.

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.

Then who is the skepticism going to be mainly applied to?

I recently posted in Critical Thinking - Much talk and little action, that there was a gap between how widely we praise critical thinking and how little we do as a society to cultivate and encourage critical thinking.

Carl Sagan in Wonder and Skepticism has an explanation.

If skeptical habits of thought are widely distributed and prized, then who is the skepticism going to be mainly applied to? To those in power. Those in power, therefore, do not have a vested interest in everybody being able to ask searching questions.

People are happier when they perform the virtues, in fact the very seven virtues of the Western tradition

From Happyism: The creepy new economics of pleasure by Deirdre N. McCloskey.

As a result, real income per head commenced rising after 1800, from the hopeless $3 a day that humanity had endured since the caves to the $125 a day that increasing portions of the world now enjoy—and anyway to the $30 a day that the average human now consumes, including Chadians and Bangladeshis in the average with the Japanese and Americans. It’s ten times more stuff, more access to clean water, a higher life expectancy, and even, for the middling, more dishes of ice cream and more pastrami on rye. And, for the swiftly rising percentage of $125-a-day folk, it means more Mozart and more college degrees.

[snip]

In 2004, there appeared a gratifyingly sensible compendium of positive psychology, closely edited by two leaders in the field, Seligman and Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. In 664 large pages, 40 scientists from clinical and social psychology and related fields present a “manual of the sanities.” The conclusion? The same as Groundhog Day: People are happier when they perform the virtues, in fact the very seven virtues of the Western tradition (found also in the literature and philosophy of the East and South and no doubt the North): prudence (the virtue beloved of economists), justice, temperance, courage, faith (as identity), hope (as purpose), and love.

[snip]

Ominously, however, happiness studies have been diverted into an applied science. The happiness measurers very much want to direct us and are itching to engineer a happy society. They do not know what they are talking about, but are very willing to put “policies” about it into practice anyway. In a finely argued but erroneous book of philosophy, for example, Daniel Haybron a few years ago made a case partly on the basis of the new science of happiness against what he calls “liberal optimism,” or the belief since the eudaemonic movement and the bourgeois revaluations of the eighteenth century that “people tend to fare best—and pretty well at that—when empowered to shape their [own] lives.” He doubts it. But on what basis, since psychology is singularly ill-equipped to yield such doubt? As Haybron himself points out, tests on college kids do not range across enough experience. History is more to the point. Of course people make mistakes about their lives, and sometimes spend their lives badly. But as even Haybron acknowledges, the liberal experiment since 1700 has yielded gigantically better lives in every sense for a constantly increasing number of us. Haybron, and many of the elite critics of how other people spend their time on Earth, is an admitted pastoralist and disdains the sick hurry of modern life. Yet is he himself not living a happy life, which his ancestor around 1800—who in any case died in childhood and childbirth—did not?

Read the whole thing, it is far too dense to adequately summarize in a few selected paragraphs.

Proof that humans can work magic

Carl Sagan in Cosmos p. 281

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.

Critical thinking - much talk and little action

From Critical Thinking to Argument by Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau. Just picked it up and have not read the book yet, other than to dip into it here and there. Looks promising.

From the preface:

Probably most students and instructors would agree that, as critical readers, students should be able to

* Summarize accurately an argument they have read:
* Locate the thesis (the claim) of an argument:
* Locate the assumptions, stated and unstated:
* Analyze and evaluate the strength of the evidence and the soundness of the reasoning offered in support of the thesis; and
* Analyze, evaluate, and account for discrepancies among various readings on a topic (for example, explain why certain facts are used, why probable consequences of a proposed action are examined, and why others are ignored, or why two sources might interpret the same facts differently).

A noble goal but I wonder what percentage of people, whether graduating high school students, college students, adults or teachers would actually be able to successfully fulfill these basic actions. I suspect it is a very small number. And if they are not able to do so, can we then say they are not critical thinkers? And that, if not critical thinkers, they are therefore unable to make effective decisions?

I fully advocate that we ought to be explicitly teaching children to think critically, read critically and write (communicate) critically. It appears to me that many people talk about the importance of critical thinking but few if anyone is actually teaching what it means to be a critical thinker and certainly are not modelling it. In addition, as valuable as critical thinking is in a modern, complex and sophisticated civilization, I think we omit a major truth when we ignore that most people survive quite well with little or no training in critical thinking. Traditional values married with common heuristics seem sufficient for most circumstances.

Politics, the art of evading trade-offs, is a mother lode of non-critical thinking. One of the shibboleths making the rounds (and an age old one at that) is that we ought to close the deficit by taxing the wealthy just a little bit more. Forgetting all the other elements of this problematic argument, it is a simple exercise to demonstrate that a 100% tax rate on the entire income of all those in the top 1% would be insufficient to close the deficit. I believe I have seen the data that even confiscating the entire income of the top 10% is insufficient. Regardless of what we think a fair tax rate might be for the wealthy, we ought to be perfectly clear that whatever that rate is won't close the deficit. And yet, clear and as easily discernable as that false argument is, it is accepted uncritically by vast swaths of well educated people. And that is just a randomly selected example. Politics is an exceptional field for the need for but absence of critical thinking.

The best we can do is a system that fails a little bit better

As usual, a thoroughly insightful article by Megan McArdle, Chasing the Tails.

Over the last few years, I have been having a lot of earnest conversations with people in the financial industry, and people who cover it, about the extent to which the crisis was produced, and/or worsened, by the attempt to quantify, or at least numerify, the exact amount of risk in the system so that it could be hedged and regulated away. "Value at risk" and its near kin produced the illusion of safety, as Taleb (to whom Davies is responding) has been screaming for years. Worse, it produced a systematically biased illusion of safety; everyone was making pretty much the same mistake. That mistake was to take the sort of risk that is safe 99.995% of the time--but catastrophic when everyone's bets went south at once. We may have minimized the number of bank failures in normal times only by increasing the risk of a single, catastrophic event that took the whole system down.

I agree. As we extract risk and error from any system, we increase short term tactical efficiency at the expense of long term adaptability. We typically reduce the the large number of minor tremors and instead store up geological energy for a few large earthquakes. The aggregate volume of adjustment is all the same, the only difference is whether we take it in small increments or in large lumps. And sometimes of course, we don't get to choose.

This paragraph also taps into one of my other bugbears; our tendency to mistake precision for accuracy (a good discussion of the distinction can be found in Samuel Arbesman's The Half-Life of Facts in Chapter 8. 99.995% is a reasonably precise measure of risk, but as experience has demonstrated, based on faulty knowledge and models as it was, it was highly inaccurate.

McArdle's comment

As one fixed-income manager mordantly noted, "The most dangerous thing in the world is a nominally risk free asset."

calls to mind that quote from Douglas Adams in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

This conclusion is, I think, correct but one that everyone wishes to avoid.

And yet it seems that we could move more in that direction. Reduce the leverage in the system, and hope that means fewer events like 2008.

Notice I said "fewer", not "none". Neither markets nor government are perfectible; the best we're going to get is ones that work pretty well most of the time. In 2005, everyone--homebuyers, bankers, regulators, legislators--was making essentially the same mistake. And while it's more comfortable to believe that this was malevolent, the more prosaic truth is probably that sometimes large groups of people get stuff badly wrong. We can't plan our way to a risk free system. The best we can do is a system that fails a little bit better.

Our core portfolio of knowledge is reasonably good in the near term. In order to maximize productivity (get richer), we are always seeking to drive out variation and error. However, the more efficient we become at producing income (through productivity) in the short term, the more at risk we put our accumulated wealth in the long term. In the far future and in the outer boundaries of our knowledge there is far greater uncertainty and variability and we have to be much more adaptable to surprises and exogenous shocks. Near term tactical efficiency demands stasis, predictability, and stability which is counter to what we need in the strategic long term.

Unconsciously, we are always stumbling around trying to find some sort of optimum balance between the stability that cultivates short term efficiency and the adaptability that prepares us for long term effectiveness. These two goals are rarely clearly perceived and the mechanisms that mediate them are at best poorly comprehended.

There is another lesson in the recent financial crisis. We explain short term failures in a narrative fashion, hewing closely to acceptable archetypes - "The financial crisis was caused by greedy and morally corrupt bankers whose actions were exacerbated by lethargic and ignorant regulators" or some such.

This is different from the truth of the future. We approach the veil of our ignorance through data and measurements and we learn new things in increments. We don't comprehend the truth. The Human System is multivariate, complex, chaotic, non-linear, homeostatic, self-correcting, contextually sensitive, dynamic and heterogeneous and ridden with tipping points and hidden feedback loops. It is natural that the more distant future should be less clear than the stark present. There is simply too much going on. Make an accurate prediction and you make out like a bandit. Very few people usefully predict something very far in the future.

What goes right is more important than what goes wrong

From The Heart Grows Smarter by David Brooks.

Longitudinal studies are great but you have to be careful about how they evolve over time. Especially when you start to look for things much later in the study different from what you were looking for when you began.

It’s not that the men who flourished had perfect childhoods. Rather, as Vaillant puts it, “What goes right is more important than what goes wrong.” The positive effect of one loving relative, mentor or friend can overwhelm the negative effects of the bad things that happen.

In case after case, the magic formula is capacity for intimacy combined with persistence, discipline, order and dependability. The men who could be affectionate about people and organized about things had very enjoyable lives.

But a childhood does not totally determine a life. The beauty of the Grant Study is that, as Vaillant emphasizes, it has followed its subjects for nine decades. The big finding is that you can teach an old dog new tricks. The men kept changing all the way through, even in their 80s and 90s.

I think Vaillant is very much on the mark: “What goes right is more important than what goes wrong.” So much of our sociological and policy research is focused on trying find what goes wrong in childhood and fixing that rather than trying to understand what are the magical elements of what has to go right. Humans, and especially children, are immensely resilient. We can overcome many reversals. But there are a few things that critically need to go right in order to improve the odds that a life will play out in a positive fashion.

Our research into reading suggests that a handful of actions in the first four or five years have an exceptional impact on school readiness, grades, reading capability, etc. These actions are: having plenty of books around, routinely reading to a child, letting them choose stories, lots of conversation, and being seen to read oneself. All cheap and easy.

As Brooks observes, "The positive effect of one loving relative" can make all the difference. It is similar with children reading. Every habitual reader can tell you two or three books from their childhood that were a catalyst to their love of reading. The right book at the right time in the right place. Impossible to identify in advance or to specify. All you can do is create the right circumstances where it is likely that a child will engage with that particular catalytic book.

On a somewhat separate note, this comment "The big finding is that you can teach an old dog new tricks. The men kept changing all the way through, even in their 80s and 90s" reminded me of Aeschylus' line in Agamemnon (line 928)

Only when man's life comes to its end in prosperity can one call that man happy.

I prefer the more succinct rendering "Call no man happy till he is dead."

We have to distinguish the core of science from the frontier

The Half-life of Facts by Samuel Arbesman. Page 163.

Science is not always cumulative, as the philosopher of science Thomas Kune has noted. There are setbacks, mistakes, and wrong turns. Nonetheless, we have to distinguish the core of science from the frontier, terms used by SUNY Stony Brook's Stephen Cole. The core is the relatively stable portion of what we know in a certain field, the facts we don't expect to change. While it's no doubt true that we will learn new things about how DNA works and how our genes are turned on and off, it's unlikely that the basic mechanism of encoding genes in DNA is some sort of mesofact. While this rule of how DNA contains the information for proteins - known as the central dogma of biology - has become more complex over time, its basic principles are part of the core of our knowledge. This is what is generally considered true by consensus within the field, and often makes its way into textbooks.

On the other hand, the frontier is where most of the upheaval of facts occur, from the daily churn in what the newspapers tell us is healthy and unhealthy, to the constant journal retractions, clarifications, and replications. That's where scientists live, and in truth, that's where the most exciting stuff happens. The frontier is often where most scientists lack a clear idea of what will become settled truth.

As John Ziman, a theoretical physicist who thought deeply about the social aspects of science, noted:

The scientific literature is strewn with half-finished work, more or less correct but not completed with such care and generality as to settle the matter once and for all. The tidy comprehensiveness of undergraduate Science, marshalled by the brisk pens of the latest complacent generation of textbook writers, gives way to a nondescript land, of bits and pieces and yawning gaps, vast fruitless edifices and tiny elegant masterpieces, through which the graduate student is expected to find his way with only a muddled review article as a guide.