The appallingly different "Other"

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Orphans of empire

From Procopius's History of the Wars Book V Gothic War. When empires retreat there are those left in the eddies and shallows, mostly unregarded by history. As the light of civilization dimmed, they manned the walls to the best of their diminishing abilities.

Now other Roman soldiers, also, had been stationed at the frontiers of Gaul to serve as guards. And these soldiers, having no means of returning to Rome, and at the same time being unwilling to yield to their enemy who were Arians, gave themselves, together with their military standards and the land which they had long been guarding for the Romans, to the Arborychi and Germans; and they handed down to their offspring all the customs of their fathers, which were thus preserved, and this people has held them in sufficient reverence to guard them even up to my time. For even at the present day they are clearly recognized as belonging to the legions to which they were assigned when they served in ancient times, and they always carry their own standards when they enter battle, and always follow the customs of their fathers. And they preserve the dress of the Romans in every particular, even as regards their shoes.

From In Search of a Better World by Karl Popper.

Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake.

Close to useless

From Larry Summers sounds pretty pessimistic here by Tyler Cowen.

It has been my experience that forecasting by experts is far more fraught with error than is commonly realized though there has been increasing research and reporting on the issue in the past ten years. Here is a for instance.

The Economist had a remarkable statistic. The IMF makes forecasts for every country every April. There have been 220 instances across several decades and some number of countries where growth was positive in year T and negative in year T+1. Of those 220 instances, the IMF predicted it in April in precisely zero of those 220 instances. So the fact that there’s a sense of complacency and relative comfort should give very little comfort.

Economic turns are notoriously hard to predict, but they are among the most consequential of forecasts. To miss all 220 turns is indicative of profound lack of understanding of the deep mechanics of the macroeconomy. I don't think the IMF is alone but they might have the most embarrassing record.

For nothing now can ever come to any good

One of the most poignant declarations of grief.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone
by W. H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Friendship is unnecessary

From The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. That's an interesting insight.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Homo unius libri

From Wikipedia.

Homo unius libri ("(a) man of one book") is a Latin phrase attributed to Thomas Aquinas in a literary tradition going back to at least the 17th century, bishop Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) being the earliest known writer in English to have done so. Saint Thomas Aquinas is reputed to have employed the phrase "hominem unius libri timeo" (meaning "I fear the man of a single book").

60% of people lie during a typical 10-minute conversation

Probably more of a fun factoid than, perhaps, a rigorous truth. From 60% of Your Colleagues Are Lying To You by Travis Bradberry.

University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman has studied lying for more than a decade, and his research has reached some startling conclusions. Most shocking is that 60% of people lie during a typical 10-minute conversation and that they average two to three lies during that short timeframe.

Now there's privilege

From Snapshots and Visualizations of the Global Economy by Timothy Taylor.

I like visualization of data. Numbers are fine but somehow, when you start figuring out ways to display numerica data non-numerically, you always end up with some additional insights.

I like this, The World's Economy Divided by Area, originally from HowMuch.

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35 of the world's 196 countries make up 91% of the world's economy in terms of GDP. This, despite the title, is really about productivity and not wealth. The US, with about 4% of the world's population, produces 23% of the world's output. Not bad for a country that was a renegade upstart testing a new idea of governance just two centuries ago.

Here's another visualization that adds perspective. The Global Wealth Pyramid.

Finally, here's a depiction of the distribution of global wealth from Credit Suisse in "Snapshots of Global Wealth" (October 15, 2014). If you have more than $100,000 in wealth (and yes, your housing equity and your retirement account are included here), then you are sitting above the 90th percentile of the world wealth distribution. If you have more than $1,000,000 in wealth (or if you plan to end up at that level of wealth by the time you reach retirement age), you are in the 99th percentile of world wealth.

Startlingly, an average middle-class American couple who attend a good college, works for forty years and saves 10-15% into a retirement account, don't divorce, buy and payoff the mortgage on a home, can anticipate, without extraordinary risk or effort, being in the global 1% by the time they retire. Now there's privilege for you.

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Defining Authoritarian as "people who want their children to be respectful, obedient, well-behaved and well-mannered"

Excellent deconstruction of an argument in The Scarlet ‘A’: Can junk science sink Trump? by James Taranto.

The demolition of the argument hinges on the hard work of checking the cited sources for consistency in the way the source is being used and examination of the logic tying the argument together. On both counts, the argument fails. What Taranto does is not actually all that hard. The problem is that we are inclined to take people at face value. We trust that they are arguing in good faith and that they have themselves validated their own argument. That trust is often misplaced. Instead of taking the ten or fifteen minutes to slow down, examine the constituent parts of the argument and then go back and check the sources, we simply accept it as given. To our detriment.

Here is a pivotal part of the argument deconstruction.

Still, let’s concede that MacWilliams’s characterization of these ideas as “authoritarian” is a legitimate opinion, whether one agrees with it or not. But MacWilliams isn’t just saying he regards Trump’s proposals as authoritarian. He claims to have scientific evidence that Trump’s supporters have authoritarian inclinations:

My finding is the result of a national poll I conducted in the last five days of December under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sampling 1,800 registered voters across the country and the political spectrum. Running a standard statistical analysis, I found that education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate. Only two of the variables I looked at were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the latter.

You may wonder: How in the world does one detect a tendency toward “authoritarianism” in a polity that has little direct experience of it? A poll that asked Americans’ attitudes toward Hitler—generally regarded as a totalitarian dictator, not an authoritarian one, but it was MacWilliams who cited Nazi Germany—would surely turn up almost unanimous hostility. Other historical and contemporary authoritarian figures like Mussolini, Franco and Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen may not have enough name recognition in the U.S. to yield any useful guidance about American attitudes.

It turns out MacWilliams’s method is entirely different:

My poll asked a set of four simple survey questions that political scientists have employed since 1992 to measure inclination toward authoritarianism. These questions pertain to child-rearing: whether it is more important for the voter to have a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious. Respondents who pick the first option in each of these questions are strongly authoritarian.

In other words, what the poll found was that Republicans who want their children to be respectful, obedient, well-behaved and well-mannered have a propensity to support Trump. When you put it that way, it doesn’t reflect badly on him—or on them—at all.

MacWilliams commits the fallacy of equivocation, which a fact sheet from the Texas State University Philosophy Department defines as “when a key term or phrase in an argument is used in an ambiguous way, with one meaning in one portion of the argument and then another meaning in another portion of the argument.” The Texan philosophers provide some humorous examples, among them:

Noisy children are a real headache. Two aspirin will make a headache go away. Therefore, two aspirin will make noisy children go away. . . .

Sure philosophy helps you argue better, but do we really need to encourage people to argue? There’s enough hostility in this world.

MacWilliams—and, according to him, other political scientists since 1992—defines “authoritarianism” as an inclination to exercise parental authority. He then conflates that esoteric meaning with the more common political usage of the term, which he applies as a scarlet letter to Trump and his supporters.

There is an abuse of authority here—in the application of a veneer of science to a political attack that is not only empirically baseless but logically fallacious. Oh well, at least that’s good enough for David Brooks.

When Taranto lays it out so clearly, it is almost insulting the sleight of hand used to construct McWilliams' argument in the first place.