Ice breaking

From Punch Magazine.

Click to enlarge.

A dearth of free citizens who were willing to fight for their own freedom and the values of their civilization

From Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson. Page 156.

Franks, Lombards, Goths, and Vandals may have been tribal, and their armies were poorly organized; yet such “barbarians” nevertheless shared a general idea that as freemen of their community they were obligated to fight — and free to profit from the booty of their enemies. In that sense of civic militarism, they were more reminiscent of the old classical armies of a republican past than had been the hired imperial legionaries on Rome’s defensive frontier:

The massive reliance on citizen-soldiers in the West lowered the demands on the central government for expenditures to support the military. . . . Indeed, the flexibility of the West in building on developments that took place during the later Roman Empire resulted in immense military strengths, which, for example, proved their worth in the success for two centuries of the crusader states against overwhelming odds. (B. Bachrach, “Early Medieval Europe,” in K. Raaflaub and N. Rosenstein, eds., War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds, 294)

The legions had crumbled not because of organizational weaknesses, technological backwardness, or even problems of command and discipline, but because of the dearth of free citizens who were willing to fight for their own freedom and the values of their civilization. Such spirited warriors the barbarians had, and when they absorbed the blueprint of Roman militarism, a number of effective local Western armies arose—as the Muslims learned at Poitiers.

Short term predictions are always optimistic and long term predictions are always pessimistic

From Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn by By Richard R. Hamming.

In any case I will often use history as a background for the extrapolations I make. I believe the best predictions are based on understanding the fundamental forces involved, and this is what I depend on mainly. Often it is not physical limitations which control but rather it is human made laws, habits, and organizational rules, regulations, personal egos, and inertia, which dominate the evolution to the future. You have not been trained along these lines as much as I believe you should have been, and hence I must be careful to include them whenever the topics arise.

There is a saying,"Short term predictions are always optimistic and long term predictions are always pessimistic". The reason, so it is claimed, the second part is true is for most people the geometric growth due to the compounding of knowledge is hard to grasp. For example for money a mere 6% annual growth doubles the money in about 12 years! In 48 years the growth is a factor of 16. An example of the truth of this claim that most long-term predictions are low is the growth of the computer field in speed, in density of components, in drop in price, etc. as well as the spread of computers into the many corners of life. But the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides a very good counter example. Almost all the leaders in the field made long-term predictions which have almost never come true, and are not likely to do so within your lifetime, though many will in the fullness of time.

Lullington Church by James Bateman

Lullington Church by James Bateman.

Click to enlarge.

Beatrix Potter's last work

From Punch Magazine.

Click to enlarge.

War is logistics

From Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson. Page 155.

The horse-drawn, iron-tipped plow first emerged in Europe, allowing farmland to be broken up more quickly and deeply than with the old wooden blades drawn by oxen. The ability to farm more efficiently gave Westerners greater food and opportunity than their counterparts to the south and east. By the end of the twelfth century, windmills, which were unlike anything in the Near East or Asia, appeared in England and northern Europe. With a rotating horizontal axis and a system of gears, such machines could mill wheat at rates unimagined either in classical antiquity or the contemporary non-West. Improved water wheels—more than 5,000 in eleventh-century England alone—were used not only to grind grain but to manufacture paper, cloth, and metal. The result was that Western armies were able to campaign farther from home—both because they could take greater amounts of supplies with them and because farmers could go on campaigns for longer periods. Historians often remark on the unruliness of Crusader armies, constant bickering in command, horrendous camp conditions, and the occasional imbecility of their tactics, forgetting that the transportation and supply of thousands of soldiers to the other side of the Mediterranean was a feat of logistical genius unmatched by Islamic armies of the day.

8th Huguenot War

Procession of the Catholic Holy League on the Place de Grève, Paris, 1590-3 by Unknown. Last of the French Wars of Religion in the 16th century during which some three million died.

Click to enlarge.

All leaders are dreadfully unpopular

Interesting. From Europe's Merkel, Macron, May less popular than Trump by Paul Bedard.

I keep making the point in conversations with friends that the Trump surprise victory in our 2016 election is simply another data point in a much larger trend. That among all the large settled, long-standing democracies across the OECD, there is an emerging divergence between the electorate and the insular elite. Voters are everywhere turning against those who seek to represent them.

My suspicion is that voters are turning against the elite because the elite (politicians, bureaucrats, media) are seeking to govern voters, not represent them. There is, essentially, a democracy deficit. But that is an explanation of the phenomenon rather than a confirmation that the phenomenon is real.

The above article lays out the details, with the caveat that polling accuracy is deeply suspect.

Popularity of key OECD leaders:

Trump (USA, 330m people) - 42%

Markel (Germany, 83m) - 40%

May (Britain, 66m) - 28%

Marcon (France, 67m) - 28%

That's 216m Europeans who have an even dimmer view of their elected leaders than do Americans. I couldn't find numbers for Spain (incipient secession, 47m), Italy (financial collapse, 61m), and Greece (economic and financial collapse, 11m), can probably safely be added, bringing the total to 335m Europeans in countries where the electorate is disgusted by their elite and whose elite are disgusted by their electorate.

In The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait and‎ Adrian Wooldridge address some issues related to a democracy deficit, or perhaps, more accurately, governmental sclerosis owing to institutional bloat. I am not convinced of their thesis but they are observing the same phenomenon.

Instead of fighting our political battles as to which corrupt/incompetent/disconnected (pick your descriptor) party is most dysfunctional, we ought to be, I think, turning our attention to the philosophical side. How do we fix the rent seeking, regulatory capture and parasitical class institutionalization which afflict so many advanced democracies? I don't think it is reformed statism which is where much of the little conversation that there is goes. I think it is the harder job of living up to our original aspirations of our Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberal ideals. How do we ensure that government is indeed the vehicle for all citizens, not just those who self-anoint themselves as leaders?

Ideas propagate faster than knowledge

An idea I have been playing with over the weekend without coming to any particular hard view.

Ideas propagate faster than knowledge.

It is appealing and makes sense and there are several proxy measures which might suggest it to be true. But weekend cogitation is no rigorous test.

Give me a pattern and I, and most people, can likely spin a dozen hypotheses in so many minutes as to why the pattern exists. Say it is accepted as a fact that children from homes in poverty do worse than children from homes in the upper quintile of income. Alternate explanatory hypotheses that can be found in reporting and op-eds almost any day of the week:

Rich children get more tutoring.

Rich children go to better schools.

Rich children live in cognitively enriching environments which carry over into school.

Rich children receive more parental support navigating the learning environment.

Poor children are more subject to emotional or physical trauma which spills over into school.

Poor children live more fragile lives and are not as robust.

Poor children have lower IQs.

Poor children misbehave more.

Poor children are more concentrated in dysfunctional cities.

Poor children are from single parent families and receive less educational support.

Poor children are from single parent families and are not taught how to behave.

Poverty is self-replicating.

Poor children are more exposed to environmental hazards which affect their school performance.

Teachers have lower expectations of poor children.

It takes only a few minutes to spin out the ideas as to what might be causing the performance differential. It can take years to actually refine and test all the possible hypotheses. Ideas which possibly true are easy to generate. Knowledge which is reliably and robustly true is far more rare.

I am, subject to actual research and testing, willing to accept the probability that it is true that "Ideas propagate faster than knowledge."

I think there is a second level consideration. Not only is it easier to generate ideas than to test them but it is more cognitively expensive to transmit knowledge than it is to transmit ideas. You have to build schools and cultural institutions to transmit knowledge over time and from place-to-place from one generation to the next. For families and societies it entails an expenditure of scarce capital and for those learning, it is an intensive investment in cognitive effort to learn the multiplication tables or equations in calculus or the periodic table or how to translate a language.

Whereas knowledge transmits only through concentrated effort and expenditure of money and attention, ideas can transmit through emotion. An explanation of a phenomenon which appeals to one's pre-existing emotional understanding of the world and to one's preexisting biases can travel further and faster than any fact. Indeed, emotional conviction tends to make people oblivious of facts which undermine an emotional position.

So ideas are easier to generate and transmit than is knowledge. In an era of low effectiveness transmission vectors for ideas and knowledge, this imbalance might not perhaps have been as consequential. But with everyone connected all the time, perhaps the imbalance between emotionally transmitted ideas (and ideologies) versus factual knowledge is more consequential.

I wonder if this structural imbalance has something to do with some of the key points made in Social media threat: People learned to survive disease, we can handle Twitter by Glenn Harlan Reynolds.

I’ve been reading James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, and one of the interesting aspects to the earliest civilizations is how fragile they were. A bunch of people and their animals would crowd together in a city, and diseases that weren’t much of a threat when everybody was spread out hunting and gathering would suddenly spread like wildfire and depopulate the town almost overnight.

As Scott writes, an early city was more like a refugee resettlement camp than a modern urban area. He observes that “the pioneers who created this historically novel ecology could not possibly have known the disease vectors they were inadvertently unleashing.”

[snip]

It took three things to help control the spread of disease in cities: sanitation, acclimation and better nutrition. In early cities, after all, people had no idea how diseases spread, something we didn’t fully understand until the late 19th century. But rule-of-thumb sanitation made things a lot better over time. Also, populations eventually adapted: Diseases became endemic, not epidemic, and usually less severe as people developed immunity. And finally, as Scott notes, surviving disease was always a function of nutrition, with better-nourished populations doing much better than malnourished ones.

[snip]

Where we can do something right away is with the equivalent of nutrition. Traditional training in critical thinking — the sort of thing the humanities used to revolve around, before they became focused on “social justice” — seems like it would be a useful protective. A skepticism regarding groupthink, ad hominem arguments and virtue signaling would likely offer considerable protection against the sort of mass hysteria we seem increasingly vulnerable to. Likewise, a social consensus on important ideas — the kinds of things we used to teach in civics classes — would help.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan - best politician among thinkers since Jefferson

From Barone, Michael, describing Daniel Patrick Moynihan in The Almanac of American Politics 2000. Washington D.C.: National Journal. pp. 1090–1091.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson, now approaches the end of a long career in public office.