Chocolate - cognitive fuel

Who says its a spurious correlation. Eat more chocolate!

Click to enlarge.

The goal is worthy but the path is unclear

Fukuyama (of End of History fame) is always fun to read. He has bold ideas and is effective at presenting them, even if you might not agree with his argument. He has a new book out reviewed in The Truth About Liberalism by Sophie McBain.

This is apparently the core of the new book, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama.

According to Fukuyama, the three elements of a successful modern democracy are a legitimate and effective state, the rule of law, and democratic accountability. Countries exhibit these to various degrees. Take China, which has a highly effective state but a lack of democratic accountability. In India, the reverse is more true: its democratically elected leaders struggle, thanks to institutionalized corruption and bureaucratic incompetence, to get anything done.

Fukuyama does not single out a particular driving force behind political development, which he sees as a complex interplay of economics, culture, geography, climate, conflict, political personalities, and luck. He does, however, identify patterns. He offers, for instance, an interesting study into how different patterns of colonial rule in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America have affected state development in these areas.

“The problem is that Denmark didn’t get to be Denmark in a matter of months and years,” Fukuyama writes. “Contemporary Denmark—and all other developing countries—gradually evolved modern institutions over centuries.” This means that attempts to impose institutions on countries from the outside rarely succeed. An underlying theme to Fukuyama’s latest work is the importance of humility and the need for policymakers to accept their limitations. In this way, Fukuyama is striking out at two sets of former colleagues.

I read and agree after translating into my own terms.

Legitimate and effective state - Consent of the governed.

The rule of law - Including private property.

Democratic accountability - Transparency, accountability and consequences

I also agree that every state has its own path dependencies towards development that are difficult to discern or predict. You cannot accelerate the seasoning of wood and you cannot impose institutions. It is analogous to the long failure we have had of trying to make people middle class by giving them middle class things (home ownership, education attainment, etc.), failing to recognize that those things are a consequence of being middle class, not a cause of it.

That doesn't mean that there is nothing to be done to help the process along. Only that the things that can be done to help are usually smaller, less obvious and take a longer time than anything we typically do today.

He has the ability to defeat theory by imposing fact.

From Stop Trying To Convince Yourselves Seattle's Pass Call Wasn't Stupid by Kyle Wagner. An intricate discussion of the factors to be considered under constrained circumstances with binary outcomes. A great line:

He has the ability to defeat theory by imposing fact.

And thus does history play itself out. A tapestry of received wisdom, with the design periodically recast by someone willing to impose fact on the pattern.

In my model of KESVB (Knowledge, Experience Skills, Values, and Behavior) it is VB that is the hard element to predict. KES are hard in themselves but even if you have good awareness and measurement of KES, it is the variability of VB that so often determines the outcome.

Someone convinced of victory will sometimes defy the rational, empirical odds and attain victory simply through the exercise of their values and behaviors.

Being in the right place at the right time usually requires a very long investment of being in the right place at the wrong time.

Darius Jahandarie.

Being in the right place at the right time usually requires a very long investment of being in the right place at the wrong time.

— Darius Jahandarie (@djahandarie) February 7, 2015

As the company grows, finance runs the company.

From a comment to a column by Megan McArdle. It doesn't really matter, but the column is Who Needs a Diploma to Be President?

I have never heard it put this way before but there is a ring of truth to it.

When a company is young, engineering runs the company. Then sales does. As the company grows, finance runs the company. Eventually, HR does. How you interact with one another and who you hire are all under HR's purview.

You should run hard and fast away from companies that are run by HR.

I think it is very rare that a company is actually "run" by HR but there are some whose corporate conversation becomes dominated by HR concerns. And those mostly face failure on the near horizon because HR rarely actually understands the business.

It is a pity because there are good ideas in HR and I am a firm believer in the importance of the culture of an organization. If you want to know what the potential of an organization is, good or bad, look at the culture, not at the policies. Regrettably, HR does not work with the same sort of motivating constraints as exist for engineers or salespeople. Without those constraints, there is little competition. Without competition, ideas that are theoretically good never get a chance to be banged around enough to be actually good.

And strew flowers upon the pathways that lead to Knowledge

From the introduction to From The Illustrated London Reading Book, 1851.

To deprive Instruction of the terrors with which the young but too often regard it, and strew flowers upon the pathways that lead to Knowledge, is to confer a benefit upon all who are interested in the cause of Education, either as Teachers or Pupils.

Strewing flowers on the pathways to Knowledge. Love it.

Wlaffyng chyteryng, harryng, and garryng grisbyttyng

From A long decline from The Economist. The younger generation has long been a disappointment, particularly with regard to their unmannerly language.

THE English language, we all know, is in decline. The average schoolchild can hardly write, one author has recently warned. Well, not that recently perhaps. It was William Langland, author of "Piers Plowman", who wrote that “There is not a single modern schoolboy who can compose verses or write a decent letter.” He died in 1386.

English has been getting worse ever since. In 1387, Ranulph Higden, a Benedictine monk and historian, found the culprit in language mixing: “By commiyxtion and mellyng, furst wiþ Danes and afterward wiþ Normans, in menye þe contray longage ys apeyred and som useþ strange wlaffyng chyteryng, harryng, and garryng grisbyttyng.” That is to say (in case your Middle English is rusty) that English speakers had taken to “strange, articulate utterance, chattering, snarling and harsh teeth-gnashing”, bad habits he put down to the mixing together of Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Norman French.

Just how long?

Have young people too lazy to learn to write been with us since the very beginning? A collection of proverbs in Sumerian—the world’s first written language—suggests that they have. “A junior scribe is too concerned with feeding his hunger,” contends one. “He does not pay attention to the scribal art.” It seems that the slovenly teenager, not to mention the purse-lipped schoolmaster, is at least 4,000 years old.

As one might imagine, the folks commenting over at Language Log have some fun with the Middle English passage.

chips mackinolty said,
February 10, 2015 @ 9:46 am

630 years of prescriptivism? Certainly 630 years of "gnashing of teeth"!


Robert Coren said,
February 10, 2015 @ 11:24 am

I have to say that I find the word wlafferynge strangely attractive.


Chris Waigl said,
February 10, 2015 @ 11:57 am

*Love* wlafferynge, chiterynge, harrynge, and garrynge.


Dan Curtin said,
February 10, 2015 @ 2:53 pm

I nominate "grisbayting" as word of the year for 1385!


Ray Girvan said,
February 11, 2015 @ 12:12 pm

I'd translate "harrynge" as "aaaar-ing", as in Talk Like a Pirate.

I am going with wlaffyng chyteryng, harryng, and garryng grisbyttyng as my favorite because it describes so much of the tweeting, posting, and punditing of today. What was old is new again.

To read and speak with elegance and ease, Are arts polite that never fail to please

From The Illustrated London Reading Book, 1851 and attributed to an otherwise unidentified Browne.

To read and speak with elegance and ease,
Are arts polite that never fail to please;
Yet in those arts how very few excel!
Ten thousand men may read—not one read well.
Though all mankind are speakers in a sense,
How few can soar to heights of eloquence!
The sweet melodious singer trills her lays,
And listening crowds go frantic in her praise;
But he who reads or speaks with feeling true,
Charms and delights, instructs, and moves us too.

The greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free

Funny how age and experience change your understanding of things, sometimes reversing them, sometimes adding shades to what seemed brightly delineated, sometimes adding depth not seen before.

I first read Plato's The Republic in its entirety in college with all the callowness and arrogance that comes from youth and inexperience. I knew that I was reading something important but couldn't quite work up any enthusiasm for it. I now see that much depended on the translation and much depended on how it was presented.

Book III opens with what I, at the time, found a problematic text. I fastened on to 1) the freedom of speech aspect of what was being discussed, and more broadly the statism that was being argued, and 2) that this was an example of the Socratic method where a line of questioning starts in one direction but ends up leading you in another. It is almost as if my impressionable and somewhat empty cognitive ability was straining at the limits just to handle the surface of the text.

BOOK III
Such then, I said, are our principles of theology–some tales are to be told, and others are not to be told to our disciples from their youth upwards, if we mean them to honour the gods and their parents, and to value friendship with one another.

Yes; and I think that our principles are right, he said.

But if they are to be courageous, must they not learn other lessons besides these,and lessons of such a kind as will take away the fear of death? Can any man be courageous who has the fear of death in him?

Certainly not, he said.

And can he be fearless of death, or will he choose death in battle rather than defeat and slavery, who believes the world below to be real and terrible?

Impossible.

Then we must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales as well as over the others, and beg them not simply to revile but rather to commend the world below, intimating to them that their descriptions are untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors.

That will be our duty, he said.

Then, I said, we shall have to obliterate many obnoxious passages, beginning with the verses,

’I would rather be a serf on the land of a poor and portionless man than rule over all the dead who have come to nought.’

We must also expunge the verse, which tells us how Pluto feared,

’Lest the mansions grim and squalid which the gods abhor should be seen both of mortals and immortals.’

[snip, multiple of Homeric passages to be extirpated]

And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.

It is that last passage which caught my eye recently. I have been working on the difference between rhetorical and logical/empirical arguments in the context of decision-making. In companies, in teams, and in the public discourse, we often lump all arguments together without distinguishing the two forms and their purposes.

A logical/empirical argument, ideally, is simply seeking to answer the question, "What is true?" A simple question but hard to answer as it involves establishing definitions, surfacing assumptions, seeking out biases, looking for counterfactuals, assessing the quality of the empirical evidence in terms of volume, duration, robustness, replication, randomness, double-blindness, etc. It requires first the validation that the phenomenon exists as an empirical reality and then scrubbing on the hypothesized cause of that reality. It is interesting, fun, hard work, and sometimes useful.

A rhetorical argument does not answer "What is true?" The truth is assumed as a predicate. The rhetorical argument seeks at the least to persuade others of that assumed truth. Occasionally, it also seeks to inspire, through the stirring of the emotions, for others to act on the belief in that assumed truth.

With a logical/empirical argument, you are essentially evaluating its efficiency. Does it address and explain the totality of the evidence with the least amount of effort?

With a rhetorical argument you are instead evaluating its effectiveness. It doesn't matter if the argument is true. It matters whether people believe it to be true.

Much strife and heartburn arises from mistaking the two forms of argument or mixing them together. More importantly, much time is wasted and too often false or destructive actions taken because of a failure to distinguish the two and relying on persuasion (rhetoric) rather than explanation (logic/empirical).

Working through those issues, I now look at that last passage somewhat differently than I did all those decades ago.

And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.

Isn't that, perhaps, another way of saying that we need to be careful about the persuasiveness of rhetoric over the freedom that comes from logic/empiricism. Perhaps thats a stretch but it seems not too great a stretch.

Bad arguments are like bad pennies, they keep turning up

Interesting that this is in the family advice section rather than in the opinion section, Childhood Heroes: Once Self-Made, Now to the Manner Born by Rachel Kadish.

Separate from the substance of her argument, Kadish's article is a good example of the grey area between asserted opinion, a rhetorical call to arms, and logical and empirically-based arguments. In this instance, Kadish has made a rhetorical argument in the form of a logical one. It is a nice case study in telling the difference between the two.

In public discourse, the quality of argumentation is often quite poor, sometimes because the person has only a few hundred words to make a case, but often, also, because people fail to construct an argument that is logically and empirically robust, with many unstated assumptions, hidden biases, averted definitions, etc.

In fact, there are two different argument structures. You can make an argument based on logic and empirical evidence. Or you can make a rhetorical argument. The first is essentially an effort to get at some underlying truth; a defined thesis supported by logic and evidence. With this empirical approach, you evaluate it by looking at the soundness of the logic and the quality of the empirical evidence. Do the conclusions logically follow from the predicates? Is the evidence voluminous, robust, double-blind, longitudinal, replicated by independent researchers, randomized, etc. The drawback to an empirical argument is that it takes time, knowledge, diligence and large word counts in order to cover all the definitions, assumptions, methodology, etc.

Consequently, what you most often see in papers and magazines are not empirical arguments but rhetorical ones. Arguments that might be salt-and-peppered with a dusting of logic and evidence (or not) but which are essentially an assertion based on personal experience and faith in a set of prior, often unstated, beliefs. Sometimes, but not always, the rhetorical argument is a call to emotional arms to address some perceived issue. How can you tell if a rhetorical argument, absent robust logic and evidence, is a true argument? It is often easier to simply look at what we would need to know in order to determine if the argument is true. To the extent that the rhetorical argument does not address those elements that need to be known, then it can be set aside as either unproven or false.

In this case, when you strip away the rhetorical dressing, Kadish is making a straightforward argument: Children derive their heroes from comic books. There is a difference between past children’s comic book heroes and contemporary heroes. The past heroes earned their powers and contemporary heroes are bequeathed their powers. Children who believe that outcomes are predetermined by innate abilities do worse than those who believe outcomes are achieved through effort. Children are measurably affected by what they read. Therefore there is a problem for children being exposed to heroes who are gifted with their abilities rather than heroes who earn them through struggle and effort.

Put so bluntly, it becomes clear that this is a redux of Seduction of the Innocent, 1954 by Frederic Wertham. Seduction of the Innocent was the battle cry for suppression of comic books based on the argument that comics were damaging to the development of children. The research (loosely defined) on which it was based has long since been undermined and discredited.

Kadish’s argument is essentially rhetorical and therefore in order to asses her argument, we need to know:

What do we mean by hero? How are we defining it?

What past era are we talking about? Modern comic books began more than eighty years ago with great fluctuations in volume, variety, titles, genres and characters over the decades. Which decades are we talking about as the past and to which we are comparing the present? The 1930s, the 1960s, the 1990s?

Is there actually a change in the earned versus bequeathed origin stories from past and present comic book heroes? Half a dozen cherry-picked examples from each era does not provide a basis for believing so when there were many dozens of comic book heroes in each era.

What percentage of children actually read comic books with any regularity?

Who do children actually identify as their heroes? Are comic book characters actually viewed as heroes by children?

Of the people and characters that children identify as heroes, what percentage of those are comic book characters (now and in the past)? If comic book heroes are a small percentage of all heroes, then this is likely much ado about nothing.

Do children derive more of their heroes from other sources and do those heroes earn or receive their accomplishments? The stories around sports, arts, religious, and historical heroes are virtually all earned accomplishments rather than received accomplishments.

If most children identify athletes, for example, as their heroes, then what is happening with comic book heroes is likely moot.

Does what we read affect who we become? A widely shared assumption with virtually no empirical support. What studies there are, are mixed. In what way does it matter whether contemporary heroes are gifted or bequeathed if what you read has no measurable impact on your life outcomes?

Do children themselves believe that they get ahead through their own efforts versus simply by good luck and is this more or less prevalent than in the past? If there is no decline in the belief that “the gods help those who help themselves” as it were, then whether there is change in comic book hero origins is likely moot.

Kadish is making a thinly supported rhetorical argument that children should not read modern comics because modern heroes are poor character models for children and set such bad examples that children might pick up bad moral dispositions that end up harming their life outcomes. Basically, comic book characters are bad characters. This is an age old argument with very little empirical evidence over the eighty years to substantiate that comic books, comic book characters, or comic book storylines have any discernible effect on children.

I personally believe that it does make a difference what children read (and when) but I acknowledge that that is a personal opinion with, at best, indirect and anecdotal evidence. Certainly not enough to support a robust argument.