Games aren’t life and death – they’re much more important than that …
I’ve just discovered Herb Gintis. I suppose I should have noticed his name before now, given the long time that I’ve been staring glazed-eyed at the torrent of stuff that comes out on the evol-psych mailing list, to which he frequently contibutes. He’s Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts and is at the Santa Fe Institute. His rich Website has cartloads of academic material on game theory, experimental economics, and suchlike voguish keys to the universe.
I know some instructors will be offended by my harsh treatment of neoclassical economics, classical game theory, and other traditional topics. My defense is that this stance counters the more common bias of professors, which is to hold received wisdom in excessively high regard, doubtless recalling the pain and suffering they incurred in acquiring it and the misgivings they were obliged to swallow before believing it.
…Experimental game theory has become increasingly influential in affecting research priorities. I have thus included references to tests of the descriptive accuracy of particular models throughout the book. Ironically, game theory is often hoist on its own petard: many of its most fundamental predictions—predictions that would have been too vague to test with any confidence in the pre-game-theoretic era—are decisively and repeatedly disconfirmed, in laboratory settings, with substantial agreement among experimenters, regardless of their theoretical priors.
Chapter 11 reviews this material at some length, concluding that these predictive failures are due to game theory's adopting Homo economicus from neoclassical economics. Homo economicus is great when people are faced with anonymous marketlike conditions, but not when engaged in strategic interaction.
…Economists are fond of using the Folk Theorem of repeated games and the Tit-for-Tat simulations to argue that human cooperation can be understood in terms of long-run, enlightened self-interest, but we will argue in chapter 11 that this view is profoundly incorrect. There are two major problems with the idea that cooperation can be understood in terms of long-run self-interest (charitably interpreted to include regard for kin). The first is that self-interest results in cooperation only when agents are sufficiently future-oriented (i.e., the discount rate is very low); but in situations where a social system is threatened and likely to be destroyed, cooperation is most central to survival and agents are likely to be very present-oriented, since the probability of future interactions is low. Therefore, societies in which cooperation is based on long-run self-interest will invariably collapse when seriously threatened. The second problem is that there is sizable evidence that we are considerably more prosocial than is predicted by the long-run self-interest models.
Except in the context of anonymous market interactions, the idea that human beings are self-interested is particularly implausible. Indeed, some of the major predictive failures of game theory stem from not recognizing the positive and negative aspects of preference and welfare interdependence. Homo economicus might be reasonably described as a sociopath if he were to be set loose in society.
…In short, evolutionary game theory replaces the idea that games have "solutions" that agents "learn," with the idea that games are embedded in natural and social processes that produce agents who play effectively.
Dispensing with the rationality postulate does not imply that people are irrational (whatever that means). The point is that the concept of "rationality" does not help us understand the world.
There are some course notes elsewhere that drive home part of this:
Strong Reciprocity and Human Sociality
•Human groups are highly social despite a low level of relatedness.
•There is an empirically identifiable form of prosocial behavior in humans, which
I will call strong reciprocity, that in part explains human sociality.
•A strong reciprocator (a) is predisposed to cooperate with others; and (b) punishes
non-cooperators even when this behavior cannot be justified in terms of extended
kinship, reciprocal altruism, or what is the same thing, long term self interest.
Libertarians should pay attention, regardless of ‘theoretical priors’: our rhetoric, still under the shadow of Ayn Rand, makes too much play with the notions of rationality and self-interest. (Rand thought her mother – (sister?) – was beyond hope of reclaiming for rationality when she visited Ayn in the States, tasted the delights of American civilization for weeks, and still pined for Russia. A concept of human excellence that has no place for love of homeland – the place in which you were born, not the place you choose to adopt – is a monstrous concept.)
Perhaps I should have heard of Gintis from a different direction – decades ago he coauthored a book called Schooling in Capitalist America, and he seems to have been - still is ? - as much of an egalitarian as that title portends. Pouf! I care not a fig. This is powerful science. And not for a moment will I be persuaded that its findings should give aid and comfort to the statists.
Thursday, November 21, 2002 How to afford solar energy: give up using electricity
I never tire of calculations about solar energy. They are a guaranteed corrective to environmentalist blather. Here’s a fine one at the splendid HowStuffWorks site:
Question
How many solar cells would I need in order to provide all of the electricity that my house needs?
Lots of number-juggling leads to the crux:
… From our calculations and assumptions above, we know that a solar panel can generate 70 milliwatts per square inch * 5 hours = 350 milliwatt hours per day. Therefore you need about 41,000 square inches of solar panel for the house. That's a solar panel that measures 17 feet by 17 feet or so (5.18 meters square). That would cost around $16,000 right now. Then, because the sun only shines part of the time, you would need to purchase a battery bank, an inverter, etc., and that often doubles the cost of the installation.
If you want to have a small room air conditioner in your bedroom, double everything. …
OK, so as a Brit I’m not going to be using an air-conditioner, small or otherwise, in my bedroom. More assumptions favourable to the solar enthusiast follow:
Because solar electricity is so expensive, you would normally go to great lengths to reduce your electricity consumption. Instead of a desktop computer and a monitor you would use a laptop computer. You would use fluorescent lights instead of incandescent. You would use a small B&W TV instead of a large color set. You would get a small, extremely efficient refrigerator. By doing these things you might be able to reduce your average power consumption to 100 watts. This would cut the size of your solar panel and its cost by a factor of 6, and this might bring it into the realm of possibility.
The thing to remember, however, is that 100 watts per hour purchased from the power grid would only cost about 24 cents a day right now, or $91 a year. That's why you don't see many solar houses unless they are in very remote locations. When it only costs about $100 a year to purchase power from the grid, it is hard to justify spending thousands of dollars on a solar system.
Well said, and it can’t be said too often.
>>>
Industry-leading solutions for your restriction orifices
If you want to know more about electricity, you could do a lot better than go to this page , maintained by an outfit called Flowsoft: I was chortling smugly over the inadvertent humour for half a paragraph before I realized it was hilariously advertent.
On another page you’ll find a large collection of Murphy’s Laws-type jokes, some of which could provide substantial matter for a sermon. Still other pages provide the sorts of jokes that engineers like.
And what do the fun-lovers at FlowSoft do? They “provide flow element sizing and control software for the chemical, petrochemical, and power industry.” Their prize product is ORIFICE for Windows:
ORIFICE for Windows is a Windows based flow element sizing software package. ORIFICE is suitable for size orifice plates, flow nozzles, venturis, lo-loss flow tubes, and restriction orifices.
No, my best guess is that this is not a joke. No matter: FlowSoft deserve our thanks for globally distributing such lines as “thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, and frogs like Galvani's …”
"It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the
press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us the freedom of
speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who gives us the
freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier who salutes the flag, who
serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag who
allows the protester to burn the flag."
If you have a distaste for war and the political classes, and you don't mind swallowing your propaganda whole from US Democrats, you could do worse than visit the Chickenhawks database, run by the New Hampshire Gazette. This lists
public persons - generally male - who (1) tend to advocate, or are fervent supporters of those who advocate, military solutions to political problems, and who have personally (2) declined to take advantage of a significant opportunity to serve in uniform during wartime.
This is, of course, a long list of overwhelmingly Republican politicos and media personalities, since they‘re the ones who are ‘bellicose’. The definition of ‘bellicose’ is highly question-begging, since we can disagree profoundly about which problems demand political solutions and which ones military. (But congratulations to the NHG for keeping the distinction between ‘bellicose’ and ‘belligerent’ sharp. Perhaps the confusion is less prevalent on their side of the Atlantic.)
Many of the names will be meaningless to most British readers. But right at the top is George W Bush, described as having avoided the Vietnam War by being AWOL – from the National Guard, in which he was enrolled. Something about his having missed a year or more of his service. There are fistfuls of links, which I don't care about enough to follow up.
Bush Senior can’t be faulted, of course. Rumsfeld escapes the list.
With disarming honesty, the site owners say up front:
Some individuals may qualify more for their political associations than for any demonstrated personal tendency towards bellicosity.
Thanks for making that clear.
I hope that Clinton will be reassessed:
He may have launched a few cruise missiles to distract us from a dalliance with a girl half his age, but our judges believe he wasn't bellicose enough to make the cut. Your mileage may vary.
Surely his bellicosity rating should be boosted by his recent recruitment-drive speech at the Labour Party conference in Blackpool - intended to corral the lefty sheep behind Blair by disngenuously hinting that with their support he can rein in Bush?
(By the way, since we've mentioned Clinton - Ken Starr is listed as a chickenhawk, with the profession of ‘Persecutor’.)
Under the heading Will deaf lesbians be a libertarian vanguard for human genetic modification?, I recently posted the following press release to the Libertarian Alliance Forum :
Deaf lesbians, "designer disability," and the future of medicine
Julian Savulescu
With the completion of the human genome project, the genetic basis of
disease is becoming better
understood. Genetic tests for disabilities are increasingly becoming
available to allow couples with a
family history of genetic disease to select healthy offspring. But some
couples wish to select for
disability. Might there be good reasons for acceding to such requests?
Should we help to create disabled babies?
Should genetic tests be offered to couples seeking to have a child to
allow them to select for disability? Many would see deliberately creating
disabled babies as the most perverse manifestation of creating designer
babies but, in this week's BMJ, Julian Savulescu argues that there may be
good reasons for acceding to such requests.
... As rational people, we should all form our own ideas about what is the best
life. But to know what is the good life and impose this on others is at best
overconfidence - at worst, arrogance, he concludes.
My posting was followed by an objection by Alice Bachini. After quoting the paragraph immediately above, she wrote:
...but it's exactly right. To decide that a human
being should be deaf without consulting it first is
all these things. Also it's immoral. If a child wants
to be deaf later on, having experienced hearing, fair
enough; I just suspect that this outcome is extremely
unlikely to happen indeed.
How would you feel if your parents decided you were
going to be deaf before conceiving you? I'm sorry, but
deafness is a disability, not a special blessing,
otherwise we'd all be sticking hot pokers in our ears.
It seems tragic to me if deaf people can't get real
about this and get on with their lives. Political
correctness gone absolutely stark staring bonkers.
To which I replied:
My point was that this ethical question is a sharp test of one's
libertarianism. I believe the desire of disabled people (lesbian or not) to
have disabled children to be utterly degraded. Yet I agree with Savulescu
that they should have the right to do exactly that. The reason is that I
believe in anyone's right to do what does not harm others. And these people
are not harming the child or anyone else.
The disabled child has no cause of complaint against its parents. The
alternative to being born disabled was not to be born at all. If it is
better to live than not to exist at all, the child is indebted to its
parents for its life. (Disabled people have sued their parents in the
American courts for having been brought into the world. But it seems
anything can happen in the American courts. I doubt that the plaintiffs
could be successful.)
The case would be different if deafness were inflicted on a hitherto healthy
embryo: that would be a grave crime. I think this is what Alice has in mind,
since she says:
> To decide that a human
being should be deaf without consulting it first is
all these things.
>
The press release that I posted may not make it completely clear that
what's being talked about here is the selection of the desired embryo from a
number of embryos, not the modification of any of them. As the full article
says:
>
some deaf couples
have expressed the desire to use prenatal genetic test
ing of their fetus or in vitro fertilisation and
preimplantation genetic diagnosis to select a deaf
child. These choices are not unique to deafness.
Dwarves may wish to have a dwarf child. People with
intellectual disability may wish to have a child like
them.
>
It would be different too if the child were born with a condition that
condemned it to live in agony (so that it really would prefer nonexistence).
Note that I'm not claiming that if you disagree, you're not a libertarian.
It's a constantly made objection to the free market that large companies can force inferior products onto consumers just by using the power of their size and the benefits of economies of scale. VHS won over Betamax when, it’s said, there was either nothing to choose between the systems or Betamax was actually better. The QWERTY keyboard, an attempt to speed up the primitive mechanical typewriters, has become so entrenched that it can’t now be replaced by supposedly better ones, such as the Dvorak layout. Windows rules the world when the superior Mac OS deserves that place. And so on.
The hidden implication is, of course, that intervention by expert planners and benevolent governments to correct these ‘market failures’ will improve our lot.
But ‘market power’ implies that the consumer is getting products at low prices - which is good. And anyway, it’s hard to find cases where one product is objectively better than another - what’s better for one group of consumers isn’t better for others.
There’s a lot that could be said on this (for example, that there’s no question of a buyer having a right to a product at any price other than the one that the producer chooses to set) – but I’m interested right now in the fact that the supposed defeat of superior products by inferior ones is usually a myth. On ‘QWERTY’ v. ‘Dvorak’, try this Reason article – and for criticism see here.
Here’s another case. The interesting information below was posted by Rolf Brunsting, of Darp in the Netherlands, in EPOC Digest no. 83 of September 29 - EPOC Digest is a discussion list for Psion PDA users. (Rolf is not responsible for any other opinions expressed here.)
I'm inclined to say that VHS was the better product. Sony (Betamax) and Philips (V2000) had the idea that people would mainly record television programs. While most people actually rented pre-recorded movies and other material from a video rental store. The design and engineering behind the Betamax and V2000 systems to get a better quality recording didn't give the consumer a better picture for pre-recorded tapes. The additional expense of Betamax and V2000 machines didn't pay. That both Sony and Philips discouraged the release of adult material and the more violent horror movies didn't help either.
In other words, Betamax and V2000 didn't give the consumer what (s)he wanted and failed as consumer products.
Very interesting.
In fact, it’s often hard to find different products that do exactly the same job. There’s an old story about a businessman testing an advertising executive’s prowess by slamming down two 50-pence coins and demanding “I’m the customer. Convince me that I should prefer that one to this one!”
But producers are never competing to offer identical products. There’s always some difference. Sometimes that difference is just a few pennies difference in price, or easier availability in the shops. Often it’s more substantial.
An interesting legal decision in the battle between Amerindians and US government agencies over the Kennewick Man remains. Justice Jelderks' ruling seems cool, rigorous, and above the pressures of interest-groups clamour.
Saturday, August 03, 2002
A marvellous new British Library site for scholarly versions of Darwin's writings:
Despite an impressive proliferation of Darwin texts on the internet, almost all exclude essential bibliographical information such as edition, publisher, place of publication, etc. Page numbers are nowhere to be seen. These factors vastly reduce the usefulness of these texts as they cannot be easily cited. It is impossible to know if one is reading a first or sixth edition. ... If scholars are to find digital texts more useful, it must be perfectly clear which historical text is represented and they must be citable in conventional ways. The texts provided here are an attempt to do so for the writings of Darwin.
Accept no substitute.
I've just started reading Darwin's Descent of Man. I started with a download from another site of a couple of chapters of the first edition (1871). I'll be taking succeeding chapters from the BL site, which has the second edition (1882).
Some years ago, when I worked as a non-unionized employee in publishing companies, I was told more than once that I was benefiting from the union chapel's efforts in negotiating the annual in-house pay increases. At the time I couldn't see through this, and felt duly guilty, while taking the money.
It was only much later that I realized that the union acted in its self-interest by insisting that its potential competitors (including freelances like me) should have their rates raised at the same time as those of union employees. I owed the union nothing.
The right of the non-unionized to undercut their unionized competitors is a sacred right. Let's organize Scab Pride Day.
Chris
http://www.chris-cooper.blogspot.com/
-----Original Message-----
From: anton [mailto:anton]On Behalf Of Anton Sherwood
Sent: Monday, July 22, 2002 7:53 PM
To: libertarian-alliance-forum@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [LA-F] New and improved shakedown
> http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/local/3708898.htm
>
> The United Teachers of Dade wants Miami-Dade County schoolteachers
> and others who aren't members of the union to pay an ``administrative
> fee'' to help cover the cost of negotiating new contracts that would
> benefit all district staff.
Hm. My political agitation benefits everyone . . . .
Just because you're a technophobe, it doesn't mean your computer isn't out to get you
Even by my standards it's been an excessive time since the last entry. I put myself off-line for over a week when I carried out my long-planned campaign to reinstall Windows. Reinstallation might be a simple act of digital cleansing that computing geeks do twice a week without turning a hair, but it made me tremble to think about it, and in the event I was right to be afraid.
By far the easiest part of the operation was buying a CD-writer to back up the family's data. I'd hardly put down the phone to dabs.com before my new LiteOn was through the door. (Cudos to dabs.com. Of course, I have no connection whatever to them, blah blah ...)
Backing up data spread itself over a couple of weeks. My mountain of unread emails was the main problem. But finally it was done.
Reinstallation seemed to go well. Afterwards the machine was light and speedy, and still is, in fact. But I couldn't get the modem working. After a couple of days and then a quarter of an hour on a premium helpline, I was told that the appropriate driver wasn't to be found on the backup CD that had come with the system.
While I waited for a replacement disc, I struggled with other things that weren't right. I was saved by the power unit exploding when I plugged the PC in after the top had been off. (I wasn't the last family member to look at the brute's innards before this happened, but I haven't enough evidence to prosecute.)
Anyway, with a nice clear case of hardware malfunction, I could take it to a PC doctor with a good conscience, and let them fix the lot for the bargain price of an arm and a leg.
All this time I could have been repairing to the local library and using their Internet access to blog, free of charge (that is, at the expense of the cyber-poor of the county). But, well, when it was sunny I had washing to put out and bring in, and when it was raining, who wants to cycle to the library?
Women pride themselves on multitasking
As I come in from walking the dog, I walk past my daughter's room. A CD is playing full belt: someone called Pink, I later discover. But my daughter is in the next room. She's sitting on the piano stool watching TV while listening to the music. The TV sound is right down, but it doesn't matter because she's seen this episode of Ally McBeal before – probably three times. It doesn't matter anyway, since she's talking on her phone. After a while she decides not enough is going on, so she starts playing on the piano with her free hand.
Please put brain into gear before engaging keyboard
On the front page of The Times, one day during Wimbledon, concerning Tim Henman, who had just struggled to win a match:
... there is nothing so paralysing as opportunity.
Except, perhaps, lack of opportunity?
A new plague
This was forwarded on the Evolutionary Psychology mailing-list weeks ago:
From: "Ian Pitchford" Subject: Money and Madness
Cover Story
Money and Madness
Posted June 3, 2002
By Kelly Patricia O'Meara
A child who doesn't like doing math homework may be diagnosed with the mental
illness developmental-arithmetic disorder (No.315.4). A child who argues with
her parents may be diagnosed as having a mental illness called
oppositional-defiant disorder (No.313.8). And people critical of the
legislation now snaking through Congress that purports to "end discrimination
against patients seeking treatment for mental illness" may find themselves
labeled as being in denial and diagnosed with the mental illness called
noncompliance-with-treatment disorder (No.15.81).
The psychiatric diagnoses suggested above are no joke. They represent a few of
the more than 350 "mental disorders" listed in the American Psychiatric
Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM-IV), the billing bible for mental disorders which commingles neurological
diseases with psychiatric diagnoses. ...
The whole article is well worth reading. A couple more quotes:
The pending proposals would expand the 1996 legislation to require that caps, or limitations on [insurance benefits] coverage, be the same for mental illnesses as those provided for medical illnesses, in the name of so-called mental-health parity. When it comes to "mental illness" and "medical illness" however, there is no scientific parity between the two schools of thought. That is, only one is based in physical science. ...
... one might even ask the surgeon general how he could make the statement that "mental disorders collectively account for more than 15 percent of the overall burden of disease" when he admits later in the report that there is no physical proof thus far of mental disease in any of the psychiatric diagnoses.
According to Wiseman, "Numerous studies show psychiatrists tend strongly to use health-insurance benefits up to the point that they are exhausted, at which point the patient is declared cured. ...In this legislation, the government is saying that if there's a million-dollar cap on treating a patient's cancer then there has to be a million-dollar cap on treating shyness when it is called social-anxiety disorder. So once the person gets 'treated,' the bill reaches the cap and they're pronounced cured. Such diagnoses will run insurance costs into the stratosphere.
Anyone who didn't know that CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is in trouble would have been alerted by the opening sentences of this press release:
... Following the meeting [the CERN] Council issued this statement:
Confidence in CERN – in its management, in its ability to deliver, and in its future – was the key theme of the meeting. Confidence in CERN's technical ability was underlined in the report of the External Review Committee (ERC) presented to Council, ...
The heading of the release is superbly dreary:
CERN Council takes important steps forward
and was presumably designed to repel the inquisitive.
Steven Milloy has an item about the 30th anniversary of the criminal US ban on DDT, which has had such dire consequences for millions who will never be known to the do-gooders who preened themselves on this victory.
DDT use has virtually disappeared. Many countries blindly followed the U.S. ban or succumbed to activist pressure.
But there are other battles still to be fought in this war. Milloy reports that:
Activists recently succeeded in pushing a virtual world-wide ban in the form of a United Nations’ treaty signed by the Bush administration, but not yet ratified by the Senate.
Keith Windschuttle has been ploughing the anti-Grapes of Wrath furrow for some
time. Just found this on his site The Sydney Line ("Since the 1920s, Sydney
has generated a way of thinking that amounts to a distinctive intellectual
tradition"... ) from 1999.
I've instituted a new group of links at the left: Data Hygiene, for sites providing useful clutter therapy for the brain.
The Statistical Assessment Service in Washington puts out a newsletter (print and online) that assesses the statistical basis for the latest media flaps. One snippet from the latest issue:
… While previous studies have claimed to find a connection between violent images on TV and violent behavior, this study claims a direct connection between watching TV and violence no matter the content…
… [But if] watching less TV is a by-product of greater involvement in civil society, then such involvement would cause an unusually low rate of violence, rather than TV causing a higher rate. If so, then this study has looked at things the wrong way round. …
The AFU and Urban Legends Archive is a treasure-house of mad modern myth. And some that's motivated rather than mad. This item from the Politics section could save a few of my gun-fan friends from embarrassment:
Hitler Gun Control …
"This year* will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!"
--falsely attributed to Adolf Hitler …
Damn. Another smear opportunity lost.
Steven Milloy at JunkScience.com has this story in his FoxPop column currently:
Anti-fun food activists at the Center for Science in the Public Interest just delivered another junk science-fueled scare.
Pizza is the new laugh-out-loud hazard, an act of dietary terrorism apparently perpetrated to sell CSPI's new anti-restaurant book.
[… generous portions of nourishing information and then …]
… What would be more useful to consumers is something called "CSPI Confidential." Such a book might describe CSPI's 30-year history of fomenting bogus food scares including attacks on Chinese, Mexican and Italian foods, movie popcorn, caffeine, the fat-substitute Olestra, meat, fast foods, and snack foods to gain publicity for purposes of fundraising tens of millions of dollars.
Keep visiting all these sites for regular inoculations against gullibility.
_________
If you're sure your intellectual antibodies are up to strength, then visit:
In the summer of 1994, I became aware of a very strange phenomenon, human spontaneous involuntary invisibility, which was apparently happening to people in the U.S.
… Vera in Ventura, California, who tried to get assistance in a post office, only to be completely ignored by other customers and the postal clerk. I have kept in touch with Vera and she has had other apparent invisibility experiences in stores and other public places. Sheila in Roanoke, Texas, continues to have invisibility experiences, some of which have occurred in restaurants and at the airport.
… Jean in Tucson, Arizona, wrote me of her experiences. She has had them occur in the library when she attempted to check out books and in clothing stores. … "You wouldn't think a tall woman with red hair, high heels in a purple dress and dangle earrings would be invisible, would you?"
Then there is the case of Melanie in Ventura, California, who became invisible while sitting on her own living room sofa and staring at the wall, lost in her own thoughts. Her husband was walking around the house looking for her but could not see her sitting there, only several feet away from where he was walking.
But Donna, any wife will tell you that husbands are like that when it comes to finding things that are right under their nose ....
After writing the previous piece, I became curious to know whether Roger Scruton has compromised sufficiently with the modern age to establish a Website. Has he just. http://www.rogerscruton.com/ is a major enterprise.
If you explore it, you'll find he turns an honest bob or two from Horsell's Morsels, "Britain's fastest-growing post-modern rural consultancy." It offers no end of good stuff, including:
Log Cutting
With many mature and dying trees we have a plentiful supply of ash, elm, oak, willow and fruitwoods, which we turn into finely sculpted logs that can be used as plates, stools, weapons and garden furniture. They can also be burned. £50 a load.
and
Logic Chopping
In this day of sound-bites and hasty opinions, of instant dogma and equally instant retreat from it, there is no defence except the skilled logic chopper. Our vorpel blades go snickersnack around the heads of all opponents, and we emerge tired but victorious from conflicts which leave the world astonished, bewildered and depressed. Try us with your brief, and see your opponents’ arguments cut to pieces before your eyes.
I seem to remember RS in The Times once excoriating American practitioners of philosophy therapy as quacks, latter-day sophists. I hope all the Horsell activities are ethical products, philosophically viewed.
There's a lot of facetiousness on the site, worthy of the blogosphere. I suspect that top management needs to exercise a guiding hand on some of the enthusiastic junior staff.
The New Statesman came through the door today. It's not mine, of course. My son takes it, having been persuaded by his mother to have a subscription as a gift. The deed was done when my back was turned. I'd rather it had been Loaded or NME or The Oldie.
The cover story: 'Laptop Fascists', by John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. It seemed from the title to be about the perils of the hordes of far-Rightists online. Resentful of this selectivity, I growled: "How many laptop Trotskyites are there?"
Actually it's not about the use of new technology by neo-Nazis at all: rather, it dwells on their position as 'modernizers', but ones who realize that (according to Gray) economic liberalization and prosperity can go hand in hand with political illiberalism:
Like the fascist parties of the past, the far right accepts the economic orthodoxies of its time. Today, those are the orthodoxies of the free market.
… the notion that a modernised economy is bound somehow to engender a liberal society [is] a fantasy. … The link between liberal values and economic growth is a historical accident, not a universal law.
…the Enlightenment faith that, with the growth of knowledge and wealth, human beings will shed their various, divisive identities to become members of a universal civilisation. Once the prerogative of Marxists, this fanciful rationalistic creed is now the intellectual basis of market reform throughout the world.
… in Europe today, where welfare states and trade unions are strong, persuading voters to accept open borders must be a forbiddingly difficult task.
… Europe has contrived to weaken national identities at a time when the legitimacy of its institutions has never been more widely questioned. It is a dangerous place to launch an experiment in liberal utopianism.
Interesting article. Exactly the same hand-wringing is taking place on the classical-liberal side of the fence.
---
I'm surprised to find Roger Scruton doing the NS wine column. The last time I heard his name mentioned in libertarian company, a comrade snorted. But I have a lot of time for Scruton. I go out of my way to read or hear him. I'm glad he and his opinions are nowhere near power, because he's a paternalist and I don't believe that Paternalist Knows Best. But I always emerge wiser from an encounter with him. He gives the impression that his views are the product of a deep, thought-through system of values that infuse his whole life. He seems to be – as far as I can tell – one who lives as a philosopher should, reflectively.
I have to say the same about Anthony Grayling, whom I've had a go at previously. He's popped up recently on radio and in the papers on the side of the angels, defending voluntary euthanasia and drug legalization. But, although I probably overlap more with Grayling than with Scruton on most issues, it's the latter who seems to me to have depth.
But I shan't be reading Scruton's wine column. Surprisingly, this is the acme of pseudery:
The Merlot from the Languedoc is both shy and impeccable, like an endimanche peasant. Don't be deceived by the "vin de pays" label: in the Languedoc, this means nothing. After a few months in the bottle, this shy peasant may well become a jovial buffoon.
… The reservas and gran reservas have more of the sleepy vanilla flavour for which Rioja is famed. But the Crianzas have a firmer tread on the palate, and this one wound its way down the oesophagus like a sure-footed donkey on a mountain path.
I suppose there just isn't enough that is true and useful to fill a weekly wine column.
This is a nice surprise: a blast in defence of free speech from an unpromising-sounding source: the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism. This page, by Marek Kohn and dating from 1999, discusses racial theorizing, including that of the wild-eyed maverick psychologist Chris Brand. It ends:
Brand was to have discussed `Race, Intelligence and Censorship' at Edinburgh's Cyberia Café with myself and Kenan Malik. Following threats of violence from the ANL [Anti-Nazi League], the café's proprietor cancelled the event on police advice. Instead, the ANL staged a pocket rally in which various speakers congratulated themselves on having suppressed the debate. One of them was the comedian and columnist Jeremy Hardy, who dismissed talk of freedom of expression as `liberal rot'. I found this particularly nauseating from a man who makes a nice living from saying what he pleases and, in doing so, stands on the shoulders of those liberals he despises. But the shriller he and others became, the more they sounded as though they were trying to convince themselves.
Well said. Jeremy Hardy has been in the news as one of a group of pacifists who took the anti-Israeli side during the recent strikes against Palestinian towns. I fall about whenever I hear Hardy on the radio: he's some kind of comic mad genius. But his political obsessions sometimes made it hard to laugh, and reading about his role in the nasty incident described above will make it harder.
In Bedford public library a display describes the rooftop solar-panel installation that helps out with the building's electricity needs. It says the peak output on a sunny day would be about 333 watts. A digital screen shows that on this day of hazy sunshine, the output is fluctuating around 167 watts. The caption says you can view the panels if you go up to the third floor. I go up. There it is: a rectangle of about 5 square metres, shiny, patterned, something that wouldn't be out of place in Tate Modern.
Think of it: if the Council could afford to invest in two more of these, then on very sunny days the staff would have enough solar power to boil a kettle.
Just got waylaid by a virtual man with a clipboard. The Philosophers' Magazine is doing a poll, and I thought I'd tell 'em what they wanted to know. Anyone can do it. It has 10 simple questions, and like all polls, it requires you to choose from among a few knee-jerk responses, and no shilly-shallying with nuanced positions and reasoned qualifications.
For example: do you "Strongly Disagree, Tend to Disagree, Neither Disagree nor Agree, Tend to Agree or Strongly Agree" that "abortion of an eight-week old foetus is morally wrong"? I opted for Tend to Disagree; but I can't be as whole-hearted as the majority of my libertarian acquaintance.
I can't, for instance, go along with Dan Pink (April 26; linked to by Virginia Postrel) when he says " ... if people actually knew what an embryo was, this debate [about therapeutic cloning] would be over--and the anti-therapeutic cloning crowd would have to slither away. ... To place this clump of cells [a few days old] --non-sentient, nearly invisible, and never intended to become a human being--on the same (indeed, a higher) moral plane than actual human beings suffering from grave diseases just doesn't make sense."
But his opponents aren't lacking knowledge here: they don't believe the embryo is sentient, they don't regard its visibility as relevant, and it's the fact that it's never intended to become a human being that they find repugnant. The genetic identity of a potential human being has been determined by this stage. Those hostile to cloning for research are impressed not by what this little dot of matter now is, but by what it will become if nurtured rather than used as an object of experiment.
There's an enormous amount more to say on this - I just want to stick to the point now that Dan Pink is too sanguine in blaming opposition on ignorance. A great many ethical and political disagreements do rest on disagreement about the facts of the case, but the most intractable ones rest on differences of world-view for which there is no question of a rational resolution. When we've learned all we can about the physiology of fertilization and gestation, and argued out all the ethical principles and consequences and analogies we can, there are going to be irreconcilable and irresoluble differences between people over the moral status of the embryo (at any specified stage of development).
There is no such thing as a right answer here. That's not sitting on any fence: pointing to the existence of a hundred-foot high fence isn't the same thing as sitting on it.
So chew on that, objectivists. It means that in a free society, people are going to divide into communities of divergent moralities, and the anti-abortionist ones are just going to have to live alongside communities of people whom they regard as murderers. As they already have to do, of course - but they're not reconciled to the fact.
Following up the fuller debate between Lomborg and Scientific American, I find the bias of SA more egregious than I'd realized. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who formed the magazine's lynch party included John P. Holdren. I mentioned earlier Julian Simon's bet as to whether certain metals would fall or rise in price in the ten years to 1990.One of the three environmentalists who lost their money to Simon was Holdren - who, naturally, had been criticized in Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist.
Another was Stephen Schneider, who once made this infamous plea for lying in the environmentalist cause:
"So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have."
The intellectual world seems prepared to forgive Schneider for this little peccadillo: he is currently "professor in the department of biological sciences and senior fellow at the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, is editor of Climatic Change and the Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather and lead author of several IPCC chapters and the IPCC guidance paper on uncertainties."
Scientific American: tribune of the liberal-Democrat-voting people
When Bjørn Lomborg published his Skeptical Environmentalist, Scientific American felt it had a duty to defend the public from the heretic. So it published an eleven-page rebuttal. Now it's allowed Lomborg a one-page reply - with even this capped with a rejoinder from John Rennie, editor-in-chief. The text is below.
I don't find Rennie's piece convincing. His view of the debate is revealed in such phrases as: "it is the scientists who are having a harder time getting equal space for their side"; "sowing distrust of the environmental science community". So it's environmental scientists versus the rest. Lomborg is an economist, and there are supposed to be no dissenting environmental scientists to speak of.
Scientific American has done this kind of lynching before, with Murray and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve. Chief would-be executioner that time was Stephen Jay Gould.
The Thomas Lovejoy guy mentioned in the exchange below sounds worth watching - the species-loss equivalent of the egregious Paul Ehrlich, who was so humiliated in his famous bet with Julian Simon.
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The Skeptical Environmentalist Replies
Recently Scientific American published "Misleading Math about the Earth," a series of essays that critized Bjørn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist. Here Lomborg offers his rebuttal.
After Scientific American published an 11-page critique of my book The Skeptical Environmentalist in January, I’ve now been allowed a one-page reply. Naturally, this leaves little space to comment on particulars, and I refer to my 32-page article-for-article, point-for-point reply at http://www.lomborg.org/ and on the Scientific American Web site (http://www.sciam.com/explorations/2002/041502lomborg/).
I believe many readers will have shared my surprise at the choice of four reviewers so closely identified with environmental advocacy. The Economist summarized their pieces as “strong on contempt and sneering, but weak on substance.”
The book was fundamentally misrepresented to the readers of Scientific American. I would therefore like to use this opportunity to stake out some of the basic arguments.
I take the best information on the state of the world that we have from the top international organizations and document that generally things are getting better. This does not mean that there are no problems and that this is the best of all possible worlds, but rather that we should not act on myths of gloom and doom. Indeed, if we want to leave the best possible world for our children, we must make sure we first handle the problems where we can do the most good.
Take global warming, where Stephen Schneider berates me for neglecting and misunderstanding science and failing to support the Kyoto Protocol. But in my book I clearly use the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as key documentation, and all the uncertainties notwithstanding, I accept that science points to anthropogenic global warming. (This is in contrast to the contrarians who deny global warming or indeed to early work of Schneider, who suggested that we could be heading for a new ice age.)
Schneider claims that I don’t understand the research in studies by Richard S. Lindzen and by the Danish solar scientists. Yet Lindzen replies: “... at one fell swoop, Schneider misrepresents both the book he is attacking and the science that he is allegedly representing.” And the solar scientists: “It is ironic that Stephen Schneider accuses Lomborg of not reading the original literature, when in his own arguments against Lomborg he becomes liable to similar criticism.”
With global warming our intuition says we should do something about it. While this intuition is laudable, it is not necessarily correct—it depends on comparing the cost of action to the cost of inaction and the alternative good we could do with our resources. We should not pay for cures that cost us more than the original ailment.
The Kyoto Protocol will do very little good—it will postpone warming for six years in 2100. Yet the cost will be $150 billion to $350 billion annually. Because global warming will primarily hurt Third World countries, we have to ask if Kyoto is the best way to help them. The answer is no. For the cost of Kyoto in just 2010, we could once and for all solve the single biggest problem on earth: We could give clean drinking water and sanitation to every single human being on the planet. This would save two million lives and avoid half a billion severe illnesses every year. And for every following year we could then do something equally good.
Schneider tells us that we need to do much more than Kyoto but does not tell us that this will be phenomenally more expensive. His attitude is the sympathetic reaction of a traditional environmentalist: solve the problem, no matter the cost. But using resources to solve one problem means fewer resources for all the others. We still need the best information on science, costs and benefits.
Take biodiversity. Thomas Lovejoy scolds me for ignoring loss of species. But no. I refer to the best possible U.N. data, and I accept that we are causing species extinction at probably about 1,500 times the natural rate. But unlike the traditional environmentalist who feels we have to do whatever is needed to stop it, I also ask how big this means the problem is. Answer: Over the next 50 years we might lose 0.7 percent of all species. (This contrasts both to contrarians who deny species extinction and to Lovejoy’s wildly excessive warning from 1979 of a 20 percent species loss from 1980 to 2000.) By the end of this century the U.N. expects we will have more forests, simply because even inhabitants in the developing countries will be much richer than we are now. Thus, the species loss caused by the real reduction in tropical forest (which I acknowledge in the book) will probably not continue beyond 2100.
Take all the issues the critics did not even mention (about half my book). We have a world in which we live longer and are healthier, with more food, fewer starving, better education, higher standards of living, less poverty, less inequality, more leisure time and fewer risks. And this is true for both the developed and the developing world (although getting better, some regions start off with very little, and in my book I draw special attention to the relatively poorer situation in Africa). Moreover, the best models predict that trends will continue.
Take air pollution, the most important social environmental indicator. In the developed world, the air has been getting cleaner throughout the century—in London, the air is cleaner today than at any time since 1585! And for the developing countries, where urban air pollution undeniably is a problem, air pollution will likewise decline when they (as we did) get sufficiently rich to stop worrying about hunger and start caring for the environment.
While I understand the traditional environmentalist’s intuitive abhorrence of prioritization, I believe that the cause of environmentalism is not well served by the Scientific American feature, clearly trying to rubbish the whole project. If we want to build an even better tomorrow, we need to know both the actual state of the world and where we can do the most good. I have made an honest effort to provide such an overview, based on science and with all the references clearly cited.
John Rennie, editor in chief of Scientific American, replies:
Disappointingly, Lomborg has chosen to fill his print response with half-truths and misdirection. Perhaps in this brief space he felt that he could do no better, but critics of The Skeptical Environmentalist also find such tactics to be common in his book. He implies that he has been wronged in getting so little space; our 11-page set of articles is a response to the 515-page volume in which he made his case, and which was widely and uncritically touted in the popular media. (Long before our article, for instance, The Economist gave him four unanswered pages for an essay.) So far it is the scientists who are having a harder time getting equal space for their side. Anyone still interested in this controversy will find on http://www.sciam.com/explorations/2002/041502lomborg/ our original articles and Lomborg’s detailed rebuttal of them, along with refutations to his rebuttal.
Lomborg and The Economist may call them “weak on substance,” but our pieces echo identical criticisms that have been made in reviews published by Nature, Science, American Scientist, and a wide variety of other scientific sources—not venues where insubstantial criticisms would hold up.
Lomborg’s stated proof that he understands the climate science is that he relies on the IPCC’s report, but the argument of Schneider (and other climatologists) is of course that Lomborg picks and chooses aspects of that report that he wants to embrace and disregards the rest. Lomborg boasts that he isn’t a global-warming denier, but how is that relevant? The criticism against him is not that he denies global warming but that he oversimplifies the case for it and minimizes what its consequences could be. The reference to Schneider’s theories about global cooling reaches back three decades; all good researchers change their views as new facts emerge. How does this bear on the current debate except as personal innuendo?
As in his book, Lomborg repeats that the Kyoto Protocol would postpone global warming for only six years. This is an empty, deceptive argument because the Kyoto Protocol isn’t meant to solve the problem by itself; it is a first step that establishes a framework for getting countries to cooperate on additional measures over time. The cost projections Lomborg uses represent one set of estimates, but far more favorable ones exist, too. Given that the additional antiwarming steps that might be taken aren’t yet known—and so their net costs are impossible to state—it is premature to dismiss them as “phenomenally more expensive.”
As Lovejoy’s article and others have noted, Lomborg’s simplistic treatments of biodiversity loss and deforestation are inappropriately dismissive of well-grounded concerns that those numbers could range far higher. (And why resurrect a claim in a paper that Lovejoy wrote 23 years ago when he and others have far more recent estimates?) Moreover, one problem of Lomborg’s statistical methodology is that it tends to equate all items within a category regardless of how valuable or different the individual elements are. For example, there may be more forest in 2100 than there is today, but much of that will be newly planted forest, which is ecologically different (and less biodiverse) than old forest.
When Lomborg restates the number of lost species as a percentage of total species, is he simply showing the true size of the problem or is he perhaps also trying to trivialize it? By analogy, in 2001 AIDS killed three million people, with devastating effects on societies in Africa and elsewhere. But that was only 0.05 percent of all humans. Which number is more helpful in setting a public health agenda for AIDS? The answer is neither, because numbers must be understood in context; Lomborg creates a context for belittling extinction problems.
Lomborg is being disingenuous when he protests that our authors did not even mention half his book. As our preface to the feature stated, we asked the authors to comment specifically on just four chapters. The flaws in those sections alone discredit his argument.
Environmental scientists are all in favor of setting priorities for action; Lomborg pretends otherwise because he disagrees with the priorities they set. Even if his effort to describe the “actual state of the world” (a naive goal, given the world’s complexity and the ambiguity of even the best evidence) is honest, his argument is not credible. And by sowing distrust of the environmental science community with his rhetoric, Lomborg has done a severe disservice not only to those scientists but also to the public he has misinformed.
Last Friday I went to one of "Brian's last Fridays". Brian is Brian Micklethwait. I've mentioned him before, but this time is going to be different, because standards are going to improve all round in this blog from now on, and so I'm going to explain who he is. Brian is, of course, a giant of the mighty UK Libertarian Alliance. He regularly posts on Libertarian Samizdata, and he hosts meetings on the last Friday of each month.
At Friday's meeting, Perry De Havilland, the Samizdata meister, talked about blogging. And I learned that I'm going to have to sharpen my act up.
That's why this blog is link-rich. Bloggers link to everything, because it's etiquette, and it pays. Links mean hits, and hits mean ego-gratification. If Bill Gates had a blog, I'd link to it right now and say what a great job he's doing. But if he has got one, then he's hiding behind a pseudonym - HornyGeekInSeattle, or some such.
I had been planning to slip this blog's URL into my email sig and let people notice it in ones and twos. After all, if you can't be private and secluded on the Internet, where can you? But I understand now that the blogosphere is a hit jungle, and you have to be a hitslut if you're to be noticed at all.
Now this sort of link is dead easy to do. But the longer-lasting links that should be floating on the left of the screen are more difficult. That's why they're not floating right now. After poking around in my settings, I decided, in my ignorance, that it must be peculiarly hard to create these links, involving knowledge of HTML and radical interference with the template. A conversation with Patrick Crozier at Brian's meeting dispelled these cloudy fears, born of ignorance, and replaced them with hard certainty, born of knowledge. It is absurdly hard. Well, annoying and fiddly, anyway. But with the help of Patrick and others, even I can crack it.
I'm afraid Patrick might now find himself bombarded with requests for more help from thousands of blog dummies like me, who will see his name when they come flooding here because of all the links that I'm going to be posting from now on.
By the way, our monarchy, celebrated for its incomparable pageantry, has a fine Website. And look what Her Majesty is offering!
This is your chance to win a family ticket to the main events in London over the Golden Jubilee Weekend, 1-4 June 2002. Enter our free on-line competition by 10 May 2002. Click on the Golden Ticket to start.
Hurry over there right now!
I'm going to mail her right away with the news of my personal commendation. Once she's linked back, I expect a fair proportion of the UK tourist trade to be passing through here.
Apparently blogs can be broadly classified into journals and punditry. The distinction is that punditry is occasionally of interest to someone other than the author. One qualification: journal blogs written by hot babes describing their active sex lives can be interesting to others. These, of course, are liable to be fiction.
It's a far cry from hot babes to the Blessed Virgin Mary, celebrated for her incomparable immaculateness, but she too has a pretty cool site. I don't see any competitions up there at the moment, but it's still unmissable. Just skim through that list of all the people, places and things that she's patron saint of:
… Arizona, Arkansas, armies of Jalisco, Army of the Andes, diocese of Austin, Texas, Australia, Austria, aviators, … Chilean navy, China, clothworkers, coffee house keepers, coffee house owners, Colombia, Colorado, … fishermen, fishmongers, flooding, Florida, flyers, diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend Indiana, France, French air crews, … diocese of Monterey California, motherhood, motorcyclists, … storms, Switzerland, diocese of Syracuse New York … Tanzania (8 December 1964), tapestry workers, Tennessee, Teutonic Knights, Texas, tile makers, travellers,
I'm going to pray to her right away. If I can just get a link from her, I'll be getting a fair slice of those coffee-house keepers, French air crews and tapestry workers. I hope blogger.com is going to be up to this traffic.
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The other night, as we looked through this blog, I pointed out to Brian that he had a name-check (March 24). He thought to himself, "How the hell is anyone going to know who I am, you stupid bastard?" Out loud he said he was flattered that I hadn't felt it necessary to explain who he was. This shows you how courteous Brian can be. He's since said some more courteous things about me on Samizdata (April 28).
I'm in that same Woolworth's cafe again. You see that it's a haven for writers, artists and intellectuals, a Deux Magots of Bedford town centre. Though as far as I can judge from looking at my fellow customers, an undiscovered one.
Perhaps because they stop doing chips at 2:30.
More from Grayling's The Meaning of Things (see previous posts).
"... for liberty is not licence, it is something better: it is open-minded, tolerant and reasonable restraint." (p. 141)
Oh no it isn't!
If I wore tee-shirts with slogans on them, I'd have one reading: "Liberty is licence." And thanks to Grayling, I now think I'd put that on the back, so that people could see on the front: "Liberty is not open-minded, tolerant and reasonable restraint...."
I'm writing this in the Old Market Inn, next to the Cathedral Close in Winchester. I'm here on a nostalgic day trip, leaving my wife and family carless in Bedford. I tried the Old Coach House, opposite the Guildhall, but walked out when I found it was dominated by a TV screen showing motor sport. When I came into this pub, I didn't notice the piped music. Wish I didn't notice it now.
I've just pocketed a sachet of vinegar from the bowl on the table. I've read that they can make good Cartesian divers. You drop one into a water-filled plastic bottle and screw on the lid. When you squeeze the bottle, the pressure increase compresses the air bubble in the sachet, it becomes denser overall, and sinks. Since I've just told my readers this in a kids' book I'm writing, I think I'd better confirm it.
[Later: it didn't work. But a large pen-top weighted with paper-clips performs spectacularly.]
When you're next in Winchester, I can recommend Flower's bitter.
A specific incident had told me that I needed a day visiting my birth-town alone. It was when I was here with my family a couple of years ago, and stopped the car near the house where I spent some of the later years of my childhood.
It was in a country road above the city, called Kilham Lane. On that visit I was bewildered by the houses that surrounded me. Some landmarks must have survived from the times when I had known it, but I was too embarrassed to ask for the five minutes I needed to get my bearings. The house that seemed most likely to be mine looked like nothing I could remember.
[5:24 pm On the motorway, returning.]
I took the wrong turning when I was trying to get into Kilham Lane,and drove into a hilltop suburb that has surrounded my old home. An ancient water tower that had been lost and inaccessible in the woods in my time is now an arts centre, forsooth.
Given the leisure to get my bearings, I could identify my house easily enough. Or rather, the site where it once stood. The new broad-fronted monster, covered with a yellow wash, could not be the modest house I lived in, no matter how much extended. It blocks off the view from the road of what had been a long garden behind. Ornate lamp standards stand at the entrance. Usually buildings from one's childhood seem to have shrunk when revisited in later life, but the houses along the lane seem to have grown in stature. Flanking one side of a narrow track, they are places for private people.
The large pastures opposite seem unchanged. The brick wall that bordered one side of the lane further along is still there, though this has shrunk - it's not the long, high canvas for chalk graffiti that I remember.
The house we lived in before this one was a council house in Cromwell Road, a mile down Stanmore Hill. I don't know whether the council or the occupiers now own it. But its exterior is as shabby and hopeless as I assume it was 50 years ago. It is still a place to be escaped rather than improved.
[Later I posted the following on the Peter Symonds, Winchester, Unofficial Nostalgia Corner site. Peter Symonds' was a boys' grammar school when I was there. In later years it was transformed into a sixth-form college for both sexes.]
Recent graduates of PSC will probably want to skip this post. It consists strictly of old-geezer reflections on how the place looked to me last Sunday, when I visited Winchester on a solitary nostalgic day trip. I was comparing it with my recollections from 1955–'63, so everything I say will be very old news indeed for anyone who's stayed in touch with the place. But it might be of interest to those who've stayed as cut off from Peter Symonds as I have over the years.
I wandered round the town first, which I've seen only fleetingly over the years. Well, guess what: some things are different after 40 years. In Southgate Street the hotel (I think it used to be called the Southgate Hotel) now calls itself the Hotel Du Vin, forsooth. I remember the window of Chaplin's the gunmaker as being filled with sports guns. Now it displays nothing more martial than Swiss army knives and Barbour jackets.
In Jewry St, there's now a Bottoms Up wine superstore where once I lusted after Hornby Dublo train sets (was it Curry's then?). In the High Street, God Begot House is now the home of a pizzeria.
In City Road there's surely some mistake with the bus stops. The signs claim that something called the 5c goes to Chandler's Ford, and there's no mention of the no. 47 that I caught every schoolday for years.
The stop is right next to the barber who must take the blame for most of the haircuts seen in school photos for decades. The shop-front doesn't seem to have been touched since I last went there. The name rings a bell: 'James H Marsh – Gentlemen's Hairdresser'.
The Theatre Royal has been revived for many years – as a theatre, not as the cinema I knew. The Odeon Cinema has vanished from North Walls, but the Reference Library that it housed is still nearby.
Back down in the town, I couldn't bear to go into the grotesque Brooks shopping centre (that campanile!). Instead I visited Debenham's. In the days when it was Sheriff and Ward's, my father was its display manager. His window-dressing skills won many prizes, including the first foreign holidays our family ever had. It's still a bit quaint, despite opening on a Sunday, but I was disappointed that cash isn't still whisked around the place by vacuum tubes.
Driving to Peter Symonds and parking in Boscobel Rd, I found that the tuck-shop had gone. ("What the hell is a tuck-shop?" Go read Bunter and Jennings... .)
I wandered around the grounds unbothered by anyone. There was some event going on in a lecture-room, and there were a couple of families with kids and dogs in the grounds, down by the old CCF hut.
Nearly every view from the old classrooms seemed to be blocked by a new building. The place is a construction site right now, with what looks like student accommodation going up, eating away at the top of the great field. I don't remember the Bronze Age burial mound right in front of the old classroom block. Perhaps all the masters (for thus we called them in those days of yore, children) were buried there when the school became a college. The old and new buildings are one almighty jumble, with no hint of planning or landscaping that I could discern.
I peered through the windows of the Freeman block, which was opened in my time at the school. I was looking for the long, narrow, raked desks on which we played a type of table football with coins propelled with rulers. In that classroom I was once unjustly humiliated when assisting Jock Shields with a science lecture. (He wasn't to blame – it was all the fault of ... but don't get me started on that… .)
And there I remember Jock once being overcome with grief when giving the Sixth Form a general studies talk on sex, of all things. (He'd given us a choice of that or some other subject, which I forget, and we'd made the predictable choice. We gazed in awe at what we'd unleashed.)
I couldn't recognize the room. It has somehow been shrunk into an ordinary classroom.
Down at the south-east corner of the field, that is surely the same building that was the canteen block where I avoided as much as I could of the detestable school meals. And that glorified Portacabin seems to be exactly the same temporary prefab that appeared in my time, housing four rooms. In one of them I undertook to learn Greek instead of a second modern language, because I was interested in Greek science and philosophy, as gleaned from Mentor paperbacks. Once I remember sitting there watching heavy snow falling silently and turning the twigs of the hedge outside into thick white branches of ice. Whether snow was falling or not, I didn't do a stroke of work, and Greek and I dropped each other after a couple of terms. In that time I managed to provoke the gentle Oink into hitting me, which must be some kind of record.
I wanted to get into the old main school buildings somehow, and ventured past a Staff Only sign to try doors, but everything seemed locked. As I started to walk away, a guy seeming to be a janitor called after me. When I told him I was taking a nostalgic wander round, he let me in without question and left me to my own devices.
The Hall was locked, and I passed through various offices up to the first floor. On a wall I saw something that didn't feel at all familiar, and yet should have been well known to me: a model in a glass case of a merchantman, the SS Pixie, "... presented by Col. Savage in 1936. The hull is hollow and contains engine bearers. It may be fitted with an engine at some future date and sailed in the swimming bath." The modern caption explains that the swimming bath was demolished in April 1993. I wonder if the Pixie was ever sailed in it.
Looking in from the south through the windows on the first floor, I found that the Hall doesn't really exist any more. It's been entirely taken over by a library. I could see nothing but book cabinets and tables. The classrooms leading off from the Hall, the lairs of John Cooksie, Ernie Gladwell, Oofy Priestland and the rest, have been turned into reading bays. I couldn't see what had happened to the stage on which Doc Freeman had led morning assemblies, coughing his heart out at the last.
It looks as if a new function has been forced on an unwelcome and ungainly old relic, the price exacted for permitting it to survive at all. That's rather what I feel about the whole 'campus'. The old and inconvenient part of it is there on sufferance, and will gradually be cut out as the years go by.
And even though I was never very happy at the school, and for years after leaving spent a lot of energy on detesting it, I shall be sorry about the school's death. Because the place is also an old and inconvenient part of my heart, but one that can't be cut out.
David Friedman's site is a gold-mine. David is the son of the better-known Milton, and carries his dad's freedom project to lengths that the old boy might find disconcerting.
My attention was caught by what he describes as his latest project (though I imagine he dreams up several new projects every week), The Journal of Interesting Economics:
" …. It consists of a page of links to webbed articles with recommendations by volunteer referees. Anyone can publish, anyone can referee. Whether people read what you publish will depend on your reputation and the reputations of the referees who recommend your article.... When deciding whether to publish an article in the journal, ask yourself whether it is something that readers, in particular economists, would read for pleasure or only for duty."
The handful of articles that are up at the moment are:
The Paradox of Choice: With an Application to Free Will Versus Predestination
by Douglas W. Allen
The Measurement of Inequality, Concentration and Diversification
by Fred Foldvary
"Economics and Evolutionary Psychology"
by David Friedman
"Contracts in Cyberspace"
by David Friedman
"Nuclear Proliferation : a Blessing or a Curse?"
by Bertrand Lemennicier
Other topics that appear on his home page give a flavour of the site:
· Living Paper: An Open Source Project to produce computer programs that teach economic ideas.
· My Books
· Work in Progress: My Recent Drafts
· My Courses
· My Kid's School
· Products I Would Like to See
· Me
· Miscellaneous
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My current writing project is Future Imperfect, a book about technological change in the near future and its consequences. A partial draft is webbed; comments welcome..
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My latest book is Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters, published by Princeton University Press. It is accompanied by a book web page, which contains images of the entire book along with an extensive system of links--think of them as virtual footnotes--to additional material. An earlier draft is also webbed, in a somewhat more readable form, but without the links.
… and much more. A nice feature is that he posts up the entire draft of whatever book is in progress at the time. He has amenable publishers… .
> Does anyone seriously think that the imperial system
is easier to understand than the metric system?
I think 'ease of understanding' is mostly a matter of familiarity.
> If you were starting from scratch would you design a
system where sub-units were sometime 1/12,
sometimes 1/14 and sometimes 1/16 of a unit? Or
possibly a multiple of 144? Why is there some mad
number of yards in a mile?
If I were starting from scratch I would certainly want to be able to halve a quantity repeatedly, so I'd consider multiples of 2, 4, 8, 16 ...
I might also want to be able to divide evenly by 3, so that would suggest 12 = 3 x 4
But it's strange that the same multiple isn't used all the way up a chain of units: eg, 16 drams make an ounce, 16 ounces make a pound, but 14 pounds make a stone, 8 stones make a hundredweight, 20 hundredweights make a ton ... It suggests that the units originated as being of useful sizes in different trades (the ounce for grocers, the hundredweight for millers, etc), and were then standardized and connected with each other by some unsung rationalizers unknown to history.
Having 14 pounds in a stone is pretty hard to explain, I admit. 14 is as inconvenient as ... well, 10.
> Is it easy to remember how main grains in an ounce?
How many ounces in a ton, how many pounds in a stone,
how many fluid ounces in a gallon?
Once again: just a matter of familiarity...
The lesson I draw from the complexity of the traditional systems is that such complexity is largely irrelevant to their usefulness. As shown by how reluctantly people give them up.
And also that it's very hard for social engineers (such as designers of systems of weights and measures) to know everything that's going to be important to the users of their creations.
It's interesting to speculate how successful the metric system would be in everyday life given fair competition with traditional systems, rather than receiving massive state promotion and coercion. Not very, I suspect. (In scientific uses, the case is different.)
I'm reading A C Grayling 's The Meaning of Things (Weidenfeld, 2001). I was attracted by the title, and I knew his name from Radio 4's discouragingly titled weekly think-in The Moral Maze. I must have been more than usually somnolent during his contributions, because I had no clear picture of his attitudes. I got the book and found that it's a collection of articles based on contributions to The Guardian. But it was too late then.
The cover photo shows Grayling with flowing hair, cravat, tweedy jacket – every inch a Fifties Fabian intellectual. His feet are not visible, so we have to guess at the sandals.
They're very short pieces. I've just read the one on fear.
Talk about prissy! Of horror films, roller-coaster rides, drug trips and so on: "These internal and external stimuli are rather like the salt and pepper that some folk sprinkle on food; ... " Some folk, indeed! I read this while feasting on salt-sprinkled chips in a Woolworth cafeteria.
He writes:
"In addition to paralysing effective action, fear is the source of many social ills. It gives rise to superstitions and religions, to feelings of racial and tribal antipathies [sic], to hostility to the new or different, to rigidity and conservatism, to adherence to outworn practices and beliefs whose only recommendation is their familiarity. ..."
A Guardianesque recitation of pet evils.
Now, Grayling does not actually say that nothing other than fear can give rise to superstitions (for example, humanity's excessive talent for pattern-making); or to religions (for example, a sense of awe or humility); or racial and tribal antipathies (such as a well-founded sense of differences in sentiments and interests); or to hostility to the new or different, etc (such as an accurate perception of the virtues of the old and the harmfulness of the new). He does not say this, and he would claim not to believe it. But his words show what he thinks about those who do not love the Guardian view of the world. They must be scared. There can't be any other explanation.
I think Grayling could provide me with a fair few texts for sermons in the days to come.
I try to ensure that my speaking and writing are politically correct. Since my politics are completely different from those of most of the people I meet, it means that my usages are very different from those of 'PC'.
---
I like my dictionaries old-fashioned. They help to build plenty of inertia into my usage of words. They defend me against would-be populist linguists and usage pundits who practise shameless reverse snobbery against all notions of Received English.
My preferred dictionary is a 1972 edition of Chambers. In it my favourite definition, for its concentrated political incorrectness, is that for 'umiak':
> an open skin boat, manned by women [Eskimo]
A definition composed by someone who would have thought no-one crass enough to believe that the verb 'to man' cannot help but mean 'to crew with a man'.
In 1972 feminist linguistic superstition and revisionism played no part in Chambers' choice and ordering of definitions for 'man':
> a human being: mankind: a grown-up human male: ...
If the feminists had checked this definition they would have realized they had no excuse for forcing the bloated use of 'person' and 'he/she', etc. on us. (That would have made no difference to them, of course.)
---
I've heard Brian Micklethwait say recently that PC is often just a matter of politeness. Yes, it can be, Brian. It can also be a matter of insult. As when someone insults me by declaring that I'm guilty of insulting Eskimos by using the traditional English name for their people. The function of the exercise is not to defend the sensibilities of Eskimos but to insinuate a political view of the history of white–Eskimo relations. Fine: but nothing to do with politeness.
---
The Encarta World English Dictionary (1999) has a huge problem with 'man', of course. Since everyone's opinion is equally valuable, it has to proceed like this:
> 1. ADULT MALE HUMAN an adult male human being
Which of course is false for the minority who read a lot of literature more than 30 years old. Dictionaries should put the interests of this elite first.
> 2. PERSON a person, regardless of sex or age (often considered offensive)
> 3. PARTICULAR TYPE OF MAN ...
> 4. HUMAN RACE the human race in general (often considered offensive)
> 5. MODERN OR EARLIER HUMAN BEING (sometimes considered offensive)
...
And so on and so forth. The most amusing string of words generated by this formula is:
> be your own man to have the resources or confidence to be responsible for yourself or your actions (often considered offensive)
Encarta's usage note at 'person' includes these question-begging phrases:
> In combining forms: terms that are not gender-specific have increasingly grown in prominence ... [The only such term cited is '-person'.]
> ... the powerful trend towards inclusive terms ...
But the issue is whether '-man' (in 'fisherman', 'chairman') is really gender-specific. And the answer is: it's not if you don't mean it that way. Meanings belong to users.
So why shouldn't the ideologues say what they like? (After all, I'm an ideologue.)
They're allowed to. It's a free country. But it's a hell of a bad idea deliberately and tendentiously to render the language of the past alien and incomprehensible.
And here 'bad' can sometimes mean 'evil'.
---
On the same page of the Encarta dictionary as the 'person' usage note, I see the definition of a 'Personal Digital Assistant' (quaint capitals included):
> a small handheld computer with a built-in notebook, diary, and fax capability, usually operated using a stylus rather than a keyboard
Unaccountably this isn't labelled '(sometimes considered offensive)'. Don't the feelings of us Psion users, who regard anything without a keyboard as a toy, count for anything?
Friday, March 22, 2002
Chris Cooper as a pundit on the stock market: what a jest!
Posted today to the LA Forum:
___
[CC] I dare say the list is bored with this topic by now, but having just noticed
this post from Patrick [Crozier], which I'd inexplicably missed, I feel I should
respond as best I can. Which is strictly amateurishly (my wife will tell
anyone who's interested that my free advice about getting rich is worth
precisely what you paid for it).
>
[PC] One objection to the idea that you can't beat the market (I hope that is
indeed the idea here) is that there are clearly lots of people who ARE being
beaten by the market. That tends to imply (in a generally rising market)
that there others who are doing the beating.
>
[CC] You can beat the market (or be beaten by it) by chance, and a statistically
fixed proportion of people will - just as will a fixed proportion of
coin-tossers. It's whether you can do better than chance that's the issue.
>
[PC] But I suppose my real objection is that at the end of the day these are
real
businesses, making real decisions about real products and selling them to
real people. And shareholders (although many forget this) are real owners.
Shareholders are making judgements about managements and some people have
better judgement than others. If that wasn't the case then, hell, we might
as well allocate jobs by lottery.
>
[CC] It's true I'm accusing the customers of those funds that claim special skill
in the market (as opposed to index-tracking funds, say) of being deluded and
irrational. And that makes me sound like some socialist busybody slavering
for new regulation to save the children from themselves. Naturally, I don't
advocate that, but I do believe in the possibility of sustained
irrationality. It seems to have been demonstrated in human behaviour in the
area of judging probabilities and risks.
After all, there's a flourishing business in gambling on horse-racing; it's
irrational to take that seriously, but an entire industry is built on the
people who do.
Friday, March 15, 2002
The saga continues. Today's posting to the LA Forum:
I wrote:
> And the whole voodoo practice spreads the notion that
> there's such a thing as having the skill to beat the market.
And Patrick Crozier wrote:
> Well, Warren Buffett seems to have been doing it rather well for about 30
years now. He even managed to avoid the whole dotcom hysteria.
'dot.com hysteria' was a vice of people who thought you *can* predict the market. I recommended buying and selling randomly - the opposite of following a craze.
However, I don't know about Warren Buffett, Patrick. I'd like to be enlightened by others before I start believing in his magical intuition.
But I was prompted by this challenge to look for some academic underpinning for my somewhat plonking assertion, dredged up from dimly remembered economics textbooks that I read in the distant past. I found a useful book review from 1999 on Business Week Online, reproduced below. (Sorry, I've lost the URL.)
Its bottom line seems to be that my position - that you can't beat the market - is academic orthodoxy, and is owed to 'A Random Walk Down Wall St', by Burton G. Malkiel, 1973. It's sufficiently orthodox to now be challenged by Andrew W. Lo and A. Craig MacKinlay, who rather desperately title their counterblast ' A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street'.
They point out that patterns in share prices might appear that are too subtle for the ordinary investor to detect, but which strenuous efforts by PhDs with supercomputers could tease out. I'm sure it's true, and could temporarily benefit the wealthiest top players in the markets, but to emphasize a couple of telling quotes in the article below:
"Lo and MacKinlay actually agree with Malkiel's advice to the average investor. If you don't have any special expertise or the time and money to find expert help, they say, go ahead and purchase index funds."
" At times in their book, he and MacKinlay sound just as diffident about beating the market as Malkiel, their elder"
>>
BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : MAY 31, 1999 ISSUE
FINANCE
Can You Really Beat the Market?
A new book reopens the debate over whether it's possible to predict the movement of stock prices
Andrew W. Lo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology remembers the excitement of reading A Random Walk Down Wall Street when he was in high school in the 1970s. In it, Princeton University economist Burton G. Malkiel made the case that stock prices are unpredictable--as random as the lurching of a drunk. Says Lo: ''That was one of the first books that got me interested in economics. It was an eye-opener.''
An eye-opener, maybe, but hardly a guiding light. Today, as a finance professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, Lo is working to prove that Malkiel and his fellow random-walkers are wrong--that shrewd investors can beat the market after all. He and collaborator A. Craig MacKinlay of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School have even written a book called A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street. It was published in March--two months before Malkiel came out with a thoroughly revised seventh edition of his own book, which has sold more than 500,000 copies.
FAIR REWARDS. Random-walk theory says that investors can't beat the stock market because news travels too rapidly. When a new bit of information emerges, investors react to it almost instantly, bidding a stock's price up or down until it reaches a new equilibrium. Therefore, the only things that the market hasn't taken into account are things that haven't happened yet. Those events are, by definition, random. You can count on making money in the long run only because prices generally trend upward, in line with economic growth.
But markets don't know everything, say the authors of A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street. People who devote enough time, money, and brainpower can beat the market by finding undervalued companies or discovering persistent price patterns, say Lo and MacKinlay. Their profits are ''simply the fair reward to breakthroughs in financial technology,'' they argue.
This is no sterile academic debate. Investors are taking sides every time they select a place to put their money. Random-walkers buy index funds. Disbelievers in the random walk are more likely to play the market--whether successfully, like Warren E. Buffett, or unsuccessfully, like your average small-time day trader.
When Malkiel wrote the first edition of A Random Walk Down Wall Street in 1973, he was the one challenging the conventional wisdom. At the time, random-walk theory was a scholarly notion unfamiliar to the average investor. Malkiel infuriated Wall Street brokerage firms by writing that their expensive advice was pretty much worthless. Index funds that match market averages didn't even exist in 1973; he wrote that they should. Here's a quote from the first edition: ''Whenever below-average performance on the part of any mutual fund is noticed, fund spokesmen are quick to point out, 'You can't buy the averages.' It's time the public could.'' Malkiel was ahead of his time: Today, about 20 cents of every retail dollar going into mutual funds goes into index funds.
SLOW RETREAT. By the time Lo and MacKinlay began collaborating, random-walk theory was catching on with the general public--and remained a shibboleth of academic finance. Their book recounts how in 1986, when they presented their first academic paper statistically rejecting the random walk, their discussant--''a distinguished economist and senior member of the profession''--assured them that they must have made a programming error. Ever since, random-walkers in academia have been forced into a slow but steady retreat.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Lo and MacKinlay actually agree with Malkiel's advice to the average investor. If you don't have any special expertise or the time and money to find expert help, they say, go ahead and purchase index funds. Where Lo and MacKinlay part company is over Malkiel's insistence that even the top investment professionals can't do better than garden-variety index funds, because any edge is wiped out by the costs of research and extra trading. Malkiel points out that a Standard & Poor's 500-stock index fund with annual expenses equaling 0.2% of assets has outperformed 90% of actively managed mutual funds over the last 3, 5, and 10 years. What's more, funds that beat the S&P over one time scale may not beat it over another.
True, acknowledge Lo and MacKinlay. But they insist that the best pros can still beat the market by analyzing the data and exploiting the subtle regularities that they discover. Evidence of that, they say, is that Wall Street firms continue to pour money into supercomputers and PhDs.
One big difference, of course, is that you can't (for now, anyway) protect the profits from a successful trading strategy by patenting it. Others will soon duplicate your strategy and, by so doing, take the profit out of it. The January effect, in which small stocks consistently rose in January, disappeared when it started getting too much publicity. Random-walkers say this process occurs so quickly that extra profits are a mirage. Not so, Lo and MacKinlay argue. Says MacKinlay: ''As different trading strategies emerge, new anomalies can appear, or past anomalies can reappear.''
Where are today's exploitable anomalies? Lo and MacKinlay argue that fast computers, chewing on newly available, tick-by-tick feeds of market-transactions data, can detect regularities in stock prices that would have been invisible as recently as five years ago. One example: ''clientele bias,'' in which certain stocks are popular with investors who have certain trading styles. A case in point that doesn't take a supercomputer to detect is day traders' current enthusiasm for Internet stocks. Lo says that day traders tend to overreact to news--whether that news is positive or negative--so it should be possible to profit by taking the opposite side of their trades.
DIFFIDENCE. Lo is even open-minded about technical analysis--that is, calling turns in the market by studying patterns in price charts such as ''head and shoulders formations'' and ''resistance levels.'' To Malkiel and most other professors, technical analysis is about as scientific as palm-reading. In his book, Malkiel calls it ''anathema to the academic world.'' Yet Lo, a bona fide academic, is working with some of his MIT colleagues on computer software that identifies some of the chartists' favorite formations in a consistent way. His next step is to determine whether these patterns have any predictive value. Says Lo: ''It could be that technical analysis summarizes in a very compact way the influences of supply and demand.''
But Lo is hardly advocating that you turn over your savings to chartists. Or to fundamental stock-pickers, for that matter. At times in their book, he and MacKinlay sound just as diffident about beating the market as Malkiel, their elder. ''Indeed,'' they write, ''although there are probably still only a few ways to make money reliably, the growing complexity of financial markets has created many more ways to lose it, and lose it quickly.'' That's a sentiment that random and nonrandom walkers can agree on wholeheartedly.
-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Crozier [mailto:patrick_crozier@cableinet.co.uk]
Sent: 14 March 2002 19:45
To: libertarian-alliance-forum@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [LA-F] Doing scams scientifically
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Cooper" To: Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2002 7:03 PM
Subject: RE: [LA-F] Doing scams scientifically
> Right on, Boris! Our keyboard Rambo has blasted the bad guys right between
> the eyes.
>
> Essentially the same scam is practised by *any* financial institutions or
> market tipsters who trade on a string of successes to advertise their own
> superior forecasting skill. You might see some unit trust being commended
> for beating the market six years in a row; but you'd expect 1 in 64
> coin-tossers to do equally well.
>
> In the same way, fund managers get bonuses and promotions on the strength
of
> their runs of luck. And the whole voodoo practice spreads the notion that
> there's such a thing as having the skill to beat the market.
>
Well, Warren Buffett seems to have been doing it rather well for about 30
years now. He even managed to avoid the whole dotcom hysteria.
