The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design

The Fatal Conceit by Friedrich Hayek.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

I’m not absolutely sure of anything

Richard Feynman in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1981)

I have approximate answers and possible beliefs in different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything.

Scratch a Progressive and you'll find a Robespierre

From the comments section of a post by Ann Althouse, "Accused College Rapists Have Rights, Too/The victims deserve justice. The men deserve due process."

virgil xenophon said...
"Scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tartar"---Old saying

"Scratch a Progressive and you'll find a Robespierre" ---New saying.

Althouse has spent a lot of time and effort trying to cultivate an intelligent commentariat and the benefits are beginning to show. Vis-a-vis this comment and the new saying, while it may wrong in a general sense, there are certainly more than enough instances to warrant the nervous laugh arising from "Scratch a Progressive and you'll find a Robespierre."

Flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes

From Look It UP! Check It Out! by Jacques Barzun.

In advanced civilizations the period loosely called Alexandrian is usually associated with flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads—in short, a falling away (which is all that decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and enforced from within.

Not even the gods fight against necessity.

From Simonides of Ceos, quoted by Plato in the dialogue Protagoras, 345d (Simonides Fr. 37.1.27 ff.).

Not even the gods fight against necessity.

This is only cliched now because Sartre won

A great point in Read History of Philosophy Backwards by Scott Alexander.

A couple of my bugbears is that 1) we fail to appreciate the path dependencies that got us to where we are now, and 2) we are often insensitive to how unique was that path and to some extent how fragile is our place today. We simply assume all paths inveritably would have lead to the present and that today's circumstances remain robustly inevitable.

Alexander approaches from a different direction, but it is much the same point.

Today I was discussing Sartre with a friend, and a lot of the discussion centered around why people care about Sartre. Sartre’s main point – that no one else can tell you who you are, and you choose what your own values are – seems so cliched, so much like what an uncreative graduation speaker might say – that it hardly seems worth elevating him to the Canon Of Philosophical Greatness.

My hypothesis – and I don’t know if it’s true – is that this is only cliched now because Sartre won. The point of studying Sartre is not to learn that you choose your own identity, but to read him backward – to start with this idea that choosing your own identity is obvious, and then read Sartre to learn exactly how controversial it was at the time and what sorts of arguments Sartre had to go through to get people to accept it, and eventually understand the position that the original reader of Sartre was supposed to have started with. If you succeed, you might still believe that you choose your own identity, but you’ll also understand that this isn’t an obvious necessary fact of the universe, that there used to be people who believed you didn’t and that they had some good arguments too.

Sometimes this is true even when you don’t know that it’s true. When I first studied Hobbes in college, I was under the impression that nobody agreed with Hobbes these days – after all, Hobbes was a believer in absolute monarchy, and now everyone is strongly opposed to that. But later I realized that pretty much everyone is a Hobbesian in that Hobbes was one of the first people to think in terms of people coming together to found a government for their mutual self-interest; previously governments were either just the natural state of human affairs, or part of the hierarchical nature of the universe under God, or composed because the telos of man only flourishes in a community, or not even something you thought about. Indeed, Alasdair MacIntyre seems to be at least partially advocating a return to pre-Hobbesian ideas about government, even though he doesn’t put it in those terms.

The only reason I had Hobbes pegged as “the absolutism guy” was because that was the only place in which his theories differed from my own and so I assumed it was his only idea that wasn’t “obvious”. If I had read him backward, I would have gotten a lot more out of him.

Under what circumstances does increased diversity lead to greater productivity?

An article, Workers happier with members of same gender, study finds by Katie Johnston, reporting on a paper, Diversity, Social Goods Provision, and Performance in the Firm by Sara Fisher Ellison and Wallace P. Mullin.

The paper is recently published but it is old data from 1995-2002. The data set is adequate but narrow, some sixty offices of one professional services firm with 2-19 employees per office. Old data and narrow data set means that it is questionable how robust the results are or the extent to which it can be extrapolated to larger companies, currently, in different industries.

So at best, the conclusions are suggestive rather than reliable.

The study doesn't appear to look at racial diversity, just gender diversity.

It found employees are happier when they work with people of the same sex. The slightly puzzling flip side? Single-sex workplaces aren’t nearly as productive as those where men and women earn their livings side by side.

I don't find this puzzling at all (confirmation bias). Human systems are an aggregate of unexamined trade-offs and that there might be a trade-off between increased diversity and happiness is not unsurprising nor that there should be an association between diversity and productivity.

I think too often researchers ask shallow questions: Does diversity lead to greater productivity? That is certainly a valid question but an incomplete one. The evidence is still mixed - some studies indicate that increased diversity leads to greater productivity and some studies indicate that it reduces productivity. Likewise with happiness.

The more pertinent question, I believe, is "Under what circumstances does increased diversity lead to greater productivity?"

Real diversity (religion, occupation, age, education, socioeconomic status, etc.) has real costs to it. Communication is an obvious one. Language and speech are weighted down with unexpressed assumptions and expectations and if you have many different people from many different backgrounds, it takes a while for people to calibrate with one another and even when they have done so, the probability of miscommunication remains much higher than among people with a shared background. This impacts efficiency (amount produced in a given time period with given resources). Efficiency is also reduced because diversity requires a much greater expenditure of management and executive time in coaching and dealing with the consequences of miscommunication. So that's the cost of diversity, what's the value? The value is inverse of the cost. People with different assumptions have different perspectives and different interpretations. With all those differences, you have a wider variety of hypotheses and have to have a more rigorous vetting.

In some circumstances, the cost of diversity will exceed the benefits, on others the benefits will outweigh the costs. So what are those circumstances. Just a couple of examples.

If you are in a very cost competitive and/or a very fast moving but stable environment, it is likely that homogeneity will be of greater value than diversity. The fact that there are homogenous assumptions is not such a big deal because it a stable environment and there is benefit from the efficiencies of seamless communication and the rapidity that comes from sharing common assumptions.

On the other hand, if you are in an industry subject to rapidly changing technology, regulations, customer expectations, etc. and one that is plagued by significant unknowns and uncertainty, then you are likely to find that having a diverse employee base is likely to be more beneficial. You don't know what you don't know but if you have a diverse employee base who bring a wide range of knowledge, assumptions, and experiences, then it is likely at least someone can speak to the emerging issues and the discipline of precise definitions and conscious vetting of hypotheses will also likely bring greater benefit.

I don't think that the issue is whether you should have diversity or not, the question is to identify under what conditions is diversity most likely to make you more viable. You have to survive and you have to make money - how does diversity facilitate those goals.

By making diversity a goal unto itself, you ignore reality (revenue has to come in and it has to be greater than your costs) which is always a dangerous thing to do.

Diversity as a strategic condition for success then fits into the other finding which the researchers found puzzling enough to remark upon.

The study also found that employees felt good about working for a company that cared about equality between the sexes — as long as that caring didn’t translate into action.

“They liked the idea of diversity more than they liked actual diversity,” Ellison said.

The first line is a classic example of revealed preference. We like something in the abstract but often have different views on it when it is an experienced reality. We all think there ought to be better public transportation for other people to use so that my car commute is faster.

And what is the likely problem with diversity? Probably friction and tension. It is unsettling to have to confront someone about their beliefs or to deal with someone challenging our own. And yet that friction is what generates better decisions and greater productivity.

Trade-offs.

They share the mistake of denying people in the region their own agency

From Two Speeches and a Tragedy by George Packer.

A rather good essay on the Middle East, striking many themes with which I agree. Pleasant in that it actually attempts to look at the nature of the beast rather than use the circumstances for partisan sniping. Packer is observing the contrast between two early speeches in Obama's presidency and his current actions and inactions.

In his first year in office, President Obama gave two speeches—one in Cairo, the other in Oslo—that bear directly on the crisis in the Middle East today. The Cairo speech, in June, 2009, offered a message of peace and coöperation between America, the West, and the Muslim world. It sketched an optimistic vision of the future based on principles of mutual respect, tolerance, human development, and democracy. It quoted verses of the Koran to claim Islam as a religion devoted to these principles. The Cairo speech, coming just five months into his Presidency, depended heavily on Obama’s rhetorical power—and on the very fact of his Presidency as a world-changing event. Not only was he not George W. Bush, he was a black President with the middle name Hussein, who had opposed the Iraq War and spent time in places like Indonesia and Pakistan. It was like a campaign speech directed at Muslims. There was very little follow-up in the way of policies and programs. Today, from Tripoli to Raqqa, from Mosul to Ghazni, from Karachi back to Cairo, that speech is in tatters.

It turned out that the winding down of the American war in Iraq, and the end of the Bush torture policy, and a hands-off approach toward internal conflict in countries like Egypt, Syria, and Iran, did not create the space for a new partnership between the United States and the Muslim world, or allow for positive change within those societies. It’s hard to think of a worse year in modern history for the life conditions of Muslims internationally than 2014 (and there’s been plenty of competition). This has very little to do with what Obama and the United States have done this year—or, more often, failed to do. It turned out that there were violent, intolerant, destabilizing forces within Muslim societies that go deeper and farther back than recent American actions and policies.

It’s very hard for Americans to accept that we are not the root cause of all the world’s good or evil. A kind of nationalistic narcissism joins the left and the right in a common delusion: the first believes that American support for Israel and the invasion of Iraq are behind all the turmoil in the Middle East today; the second sees American ideals and military might as the answer to that turmoil. If only we’d stay the hell out; if only we’d go all in. Both views have a piece of the truth but far from the whole thing, and they share the mistake of denying people in the region their own agency. It’s undeniable that the invasion of Iraq created the vacuum in which Al Qaeda has flourished, and that American support for dictators, from the Shah of Iran to the Saudi royal family, has stoked discontent around the region. It’s also the case that, without American leadership, there would be no international coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham like the one Obama has belatedly formed.

But the original sources of the extreme violence and social disintegration in North Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central Asia are bad government (autocratic, sectarian, corrupt); marginalized, undereducated, economically deprived publics; and homegrown or imported religious ideas within Islam that turn mass murder into an obligation of the faithful. The first two are common enough around the world. It’s the third that turns ordinary misery into the region’s brand of endless horror.

"They share the mistake of denying people in the region their own agency." Everyone wants to use coercion to achieve ends when the reality is that most of what we can do is influence the ends. All these countries and all individuals have to work towards their own goals in their own circumstances in their own fashion. We can influence that to some degree. We cannot both grant everyone agency but then also exercise coercive action over them in such a fashion that they have no choice but to comply.

Without exercising that coercion, we perforce have to grant that their resolution may not be towards means or ends that we like or endorse.

I have been interested to note that I very rarely see anyone discussing, over the past dozen years, the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s (100,000 dead). It didn't make headlines in the US all that often but all the same dynamics and brutalities we are witnessing today in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Pakistan, etc. were on display then. The Algerian military almost solved the problem. The massacres and beheadings came to end but enough of the fanatical strain survived to resurrect itself as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in the 2000s. I wonder what might be the lessons we could learn from the Algerians?

A universe of atoms, an atom in the universe

Richard Feynman in The Value of Science

I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think.
There are the rushing waves
mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillions apart
yet forming white surf in unison.
Ages on ages
before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?
On a dead planet
with no life to entertain.

Never at rest
tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the sun
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe.

It is a characteristic of reality that it tends to smack you in the face like a three-day-old dead fish

I love how old wisdom echoes, often unrecognized, down to today. I just posted a Cicero quote, "Time obliterates the fictions of opinion, and confirms the decisions of nature."

A few minutes later I scan this opinion by Sarah Hoyt complaining about the ignorant first-world-problemism of a tweet. In her takedown she comments:

The world is REAL – an unforgiving place that doesn’t care anymore about your imagination and empathy and happiness than it cares about whether that storm just destroyed your crops; that hurricane just leveled your house; or that sparrow just fell.

[snip]

It is a characteristic of reality that it tends to smack you in the face like a three-day-old dead fish whether you want it to or not, and whether you’ve told yourself some just-so story about how it would be so much better if it didn’t.

What she loses to the pure brevity of Cicero, she makes up for in colorful and pointed language, but she is saying much the same thing as Cicero some 2,000 years ago.