Old People & þe Fox-&-Allies Brain Eater
& BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-01-17 Mo
CONDITION: Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.:
Martin Luther King, Jr. (December 18, 1963): Address at Western Michigan State University: ‘Now the other myth that gets around is the idea that legislation cannot really solve the problem and that it has no great role to play in this period of social change because you’ve got to change the heart and you can’t change the heart through legislation. You can’t legislate morals. The job must be done through education and religion.
Well, there’s half-truth involved here.
Certainly, if the problem is to be solved then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart.
But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated.
It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless.
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.
So there is a need for executive orders. There is a need for judicial decrees. There is a need for civil rights legislation on the local scale within states and on the national scale from the federal government…
LINK: <https://web.archive.org/web/20111101083523/https://wmich.edu/library/archives/mlk/transcription.html>
First: Old People Whose Brains Have Been Eaten by the Brain Eater
Paul Campos has a net-friend on the eve of a nervous breakdown:
Paul Campos: But Family Cannot Be Helped : ‘A long time Internet friend wrote three days ago: “My Dad just called me freaking out, warning me not to get the booster. Something about ‘extremely reputable sources’ claiming the booster was killing people all over the world, with over 100k dead…. I don’t need that shit in my life so I think I may be skipping the festivities this year. Fun times. Didn’t think there was anything that would make me choose not to visit home for the holidays but these certainly are extraordinary times. Feels horrible…. Imagine my surprise that my dad’s TV medical education doesn’t hold up to a real doctor. Truly shocking…”
So I hope he’s making it home for Christmas after all. The initial topic of this thread is the question of how to negotiate relationships with family and friends who have gone crazy, in a world in which Fox News is now the “reasonable balanced” voice of the American right wing (My friend’s father started really flipping out when he decided that Fox had gone soft on the stealing of the 2020 election, and so he started mainlining some stronger stuff)…. I’d like to acknowledge this whole community here as a refuge from a broader world that increasingly seems to have gone mad…
LINK: <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/12/but-family-cannot-be-helped>
Next to nothing of EvoPsych replicates or will replicate. It is all staring at a mirror of one's own prejudices and assumptions and projecting them back onto us back in the environment of evolutionary adaptation.
But.
What if the principal function of human communication and reason is not so much to sharpen one’s own thinking as to reach agreement? We want to quarry Flint for hand axes, and the question is whether to quarry them at site Ogg or site Uma or site Thrag. We want to go down to the waterhole at the 10th or the 11th or the 12th hour. In both cases a group that realies on cooperation for its productivity in the division of labor and on numbers for safety against predators is much more likely to be successful in the long run if the discussion leads to agreement rather than if the discussion leads to the most people holding the correct view as to what would be the optimal decision. In the case of the water hole visiting or the handaxe making, everyone has a stake: nobody wants to be thirsty, everybody wants the group to have good tools, and nobody wants to be eaten by the leopard.
But Fox News works for the leopard. Indeed, Fox News is the leopard.
Thus I find Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s rather hopeful takes on all this greatly suggestive and intriguing but also greatly inadequate. There is no way that our brains for reason and communication could have become wired to deal with ConMan: those whose individual status that they seek to enhance would be greatly aided by group failure.
Cf.:
Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber (2017): The Enigma of Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University) <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Enigma_of_Reason/zc-WDgAAQBAJ>: ‘People reason lazily… because, in typical interactions, this is the most efficient way to proceed. Instead of laboring hard to anticipate counterarguments, it is generally more efficient to wait for your interlocutors to provide them (if they ever do). Reason properly understood as a tool for social interaction is certainly not perfect, but flawed it is not…. Reason… evolve[d]… as a tool for social interaction… to justify ourselves and to convince others…
And:
Hugo Mercier (2020): Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe (Princeton: Princeton University) <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Not_Born_Yesterday/g1SoDwAAQBAJ>: Cues telling us to change our minds… [as we] ascertain goodwill, recognize expertise, and exchange arguments… are typically absent from mass persuasion contexts…. Misconceptions… [are] intuitively appealing…. Vaccine hesitancy surfs on the counterintuitiveness of vaccination. Conspiracy theories depend on our justified fear of powerful enemy coalitions…. They are reflective beliefs with… limited effects…. Most of those who accused Hillary Clinton’s aides of pedophilia were content with leaving one-star reviews of the restaurant in which the children were supposedly abused…. [When] belief and action, even costly action, go hand in hand… beliefs follow… behavior…. People who want to commit atrocities look for the moral high ground…. The take-home message… is: influencing people isn’t too easy, but too hard…. Misconceptions… persist because people refuse to believe those who know better. False rumors and conspiracy theories survive long after they have been debunked. Quack doctors and flat-earthers ignore all the scientific evidence thrown at them…
I do wonder if, at the level of pure rational reason, the quickest way to make progress on this would be through investigation of the exclusive monotheistic world religions. Polytheistic paganism—well, we do tend to personify everything, and thinking that everything around us might be or might be driven by a human level intelligence with goals we can grasp is rarely a fatal error, and there is powerful evidence for the powers: Nobody who has seen the lightning hit a hilltop will quarrel with the idea that one should hide in a low place during a thunderstorm. And why not creatively and poetically personify that force—as a very large red bearded man with serious anger management problems and a magic hammer driving a cart pulled by two goats?
Exclusive monotheism, however—the transformation of the Storm God of the Semites into the absolute Lord of the Universe, and analogous movements. It should run up against the questions: Why is your conception of this Absolute so different from that of the priest over the hill? Where did your knowledge of the 𝚨 and the 𝛀 come from, and why is it more solid than those other guys’ knowledge? And what the f—— could “proceeds from the son” or “eternally begotten” possibly actually mean? Cautious tolerant ecumenical agnosticism would seem to be the inescapable conclusion that should be reached by everyone. '
But not so.
There is also something to be done on the issue of age and gullibility as well…
One Video:
Yuen Yuen Ang: China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom & Vast Corruption<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kaItpDD_Hs>:
One Picture: How to Win the Herman Cain Award:
Very Briefly Noted:
Aaron Carroll: To Fight Covid, We Need to Think Less Like Doctors<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/opinion/covid-america.html>
Lauren Wilson: ’I use this photo in a talk I give to medical students on childhood vaccinations. Five siblings killed in one week from diphtheria. Vaccines are an incredible gift…
Dorothea Baur: ’Exactly. See also this quote from David Gerard: “Who wants smart contracts anyway?” “Entrepreneurs who have come into conflict with the traditional legal system previously, and would like something deterministic enough that they can take your money and escape through the cracks”…
Nicholas Weaver: ’If I can walk up to a smart contract, say “give me all your money” and it says ”yes”, is it even theft? After all, it is allowed in the contract, and code is law, no?…
Daniel Litt: ’I call it “silicon valley”
Andrew Davenport: ’January 15… 195 years ago, when executors of Thomas Jefferson’s will sold 130 enslaved people from Monticello. This is how they advertised the devastation they would bring…
Timothy Burke: The Re-Watch: The Three Musketeers (1973): ‘This is easily one of my top ten favorite films. We re-watched over it this last holiday season. I never get tired of it. Fortunately my family feels the same way…
Scott Lemieux: The Fox News Court: ‘The core argument made by the Republican majority in its opinion striking down the mandate was, literally, that the OHSA cannot regulate a grave threat in a workplace if it also a grave threat outside of the workplace… <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/01/the-fox-news-court>
Paragraphs:
Let me say, as a centrist, that this makes me really, really mad. Centrism deserves to be managed by people other than the cowards and clowns Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, & c.. Their ideas of what centrist policies should be are not likely to be good ones:
Matthew Yglesias: The Bad Vibes of American Political Institutions: ‘We… take-slingers… can do… is play national therapist…. If, as a progressive, you think of Joe Manchin as “negotiating the terms of a centrist coalition government” rather than “blocking the Biden agenda” and as “junior partner in the coalition” rather than “the real president,” you’ll be a lot less mad. And if, as a moderate, you think of the country as being governed by a centrist coalition government thanks to the pivotal role of Joe Manchin (and Kyrsten Sinema, Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, etc.), you’ll also be a lot less mad…
LINK:
It wasn’t Trotsky’s arrogance that sank him: it was that he was Lenin’s #2. Thus until Lenin’s death Lenin was punching down to make sure Trotsky did not unseat him, while everyone else was punching up, thinking that while they agreed on nothing else they agreed that none of them had a chance of becoming #1 unless Trotsky was removed. And they were all ambitious:
Branko Milanovic: Trotsky on the Class Structure of Soviet Socialism: ‘I wrote recently about the very negative view that Kolakowski had of Trotsky. I find that view largely justified (on the topics Kolakowski criticized Trotsky), but there is no denying qualities of Trotsky as intellectual, writer, organizer and military leader. It was his arrogance and hubris that did him in, but that’s a different topic. So, how does Trotsky approach the Stalinist state in “The Revolution Betrayed”?… The Soviet state is a proletarian state because private ownership of means of production has been abolished…. Bureaucracy has built itself into a new stratum that has vitiated the original (“democratic”) objectives of the revolution in its superstructure (politics), but has not fundamentally managed to alter the infrastructure…. [As] Caesarism… changed politics in Rome but did not affect the underlying slave-owning relations of production… [as] the Thermidorian reaction in France… did not erase economic gains (e.g. distribution of land to small-holders)…. In some parts of the book he celebrates the achievements of the “Stalinist Thermidor”… enormous increases in industrial output… the new system as self-evidently more productive than the old…. He calls only for the revolution in politics… overthrow the new ruling stratum (Trotsky avoid the term “class” because he believes that the term should be reserved for societies with private ownership of capital), and to reestablish the original pristine character of the revolution…. Trotsky… following Marx, believes that in a non-class-based society work will become the expression of our desire to do things well, that the homo faber has the need for self-realization in his work, and that that need can be expressed freely only when he is not a hired labored ordered around by capitalists…
LINK:
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSM) Q4 2021 Earnings Call Transcript: ‘During the fourth quarter, we generated about NTD378 billion in cash from operations, including NTD80 billion prepayment from customers, spent NTD236 billion in capex…. In U.S. dollar term, our fourth quarter capital expenditures totaled $8.46 billion…. We are witnessing a structural increase in underlying semiconductor demand, underpinned by the industry megatrends of 5G related and HPC applications. In 2021, we spent $30 billion to capture the strong demand, and support our customers’ growth. In 2022, our capital budget is expected to be between $40 billion to $44 billion. Out of the $40 billion to $44 billion capex for 2022, between 70% and 80% of the capital budget will be allocated for events, process, technologies, including 2-nanometer, 3-nanometer, 5-nanometer and 7-nanometer. About 10% will be spent for advanced packaging and mask making, and 10% to 20% will be spent for specialty technologies…
Carter Sherman: Some Washington Post Editors Maybe Should Stop Tweeting About Sexual Assault: ’Months after Felicia Sonmez sued the Washington Post for banning her from covering sexual misconduct stories after she came forward as a sexual assault survivor, a tweet by one of the editors…. Lori Montgomery attacked a column about the NFL player Ben Roethlisberger. “The only interesting thing about this column is how easily disproven and completely FOS it is,” Montgomery tweeted about the column—which mentioned the fact that Roethlisberger has been accused of sexual assault on multiple occasions. That original tweet has been deleted, and Montgomery has tweeted out an acknowledgement that “Roethlisberger was credibly accused twice of sexual assault.” (She’s since gone private on Twitter.) But Montgomery’s tweet, and how Post leadership will ultimately handle its fallout, arrives amid a public reckoning over how the Post and other newsrooms treat sexual assault and the people who survive it…. Montgomery told Sonmez that “she was always taught that a woman should ‘just say no’ if a man tries to assault her.” The Post has moved to dismiss Sonmez’s lawsuit and in the months since its filing, many of the named defendants have ascended the Post’s professional ladder. In July, Montgomery became the Post’s business editor. An October promotion for Cameron Barr—who, according to Sonmez’s lawsuit, accused Sonmez of having “taken a side on the issue” of sexual assault—essentially made him “second-in-command in the newsroom’s hierarchy,” in the newspaper’s own words. And just last week, national editor Steven Ginsberg was named managing editor…
Zeynep Tufekci (August 4, 2021): When the New Was Actually Old: ‘“Be first, be right, be credible,” are among the most important principles for health authorities to follow in a crisis, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shared in a pamphlet on crisis communication in 2018…. Last week, as agency officials announced new mask guidelines and set the nation on edge, I had to wonder if they had swapped their “do list” and their “avoid list.”… Here’s what’s still been bugging me a lot. I’m just not seeing that much new to report on all this compared to June. I’m not sure we have that much new profound data. It’s just the process became a lot more visible to more people, because it’s further along—and that just means we’re reacting late…
LINK:
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Possible Grand Narratives:
I settled on the “von Hayek vs. Polanyi refereed by Keynes” Grand Narrative for Slouching Towards Utopia because it was the least false Grand Narrative I could think of, and I needed a Grand Narrative. Why did I need a Grand Narrative? Because we can rarely think—and never remember—without one. And once I had decided that 1870 to 2010 was the period, the Polanyi-von Hayek-Keynes one was the one that imposed itself as by far the least false to as much of the history as possible.
But there are other Grand Narratives I could have chosen to write about. In a self-indulgent passage I did manage to sneak by development editor Thomas LeBien and Basic Books editor Brian Distelberg and into the book:
Two currents of thought emerged after World War I that sought not just alteration but fundamental transformation of the pseudo-classical semi-liberal order. They were to gain flesh and rule, bloodily and destructively. They were Vladimir Lenin’s version of really-existing socialism, and Benito Mussolini’s fascism, both of which you will see later at great length.
But there were others thinking hard and trying to work to find and implement a better system. If I may digress for a moment: If my editor would allow this book to be twice as long, I would trace many of these currents of thought and the actions that flowed from them.
I would trace the current for which Joseph Schumpeter, born in 1882 one hundred miles away from Vienna in the primarily Czech-speaking part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is a convenient marker: society needing to be altered to elevate the role of the entrepreneur and provide space for the “creative destruction” of economic and other patterns of organization he set in motion to counterbalance growing bureaucratization brought about by the increasing scale of capital intensity needed to deploy technological advances.
I would trace the current for which Karl Popper, born in Vienna in 1902, is a convenient marker: society needing to double down on liberalism and freedom in all their forms to create a truly “open society.” I would trace the current for which Peter Drucker, born in Vienna in 1909, is a convenient marker: how freedom, entrepreneurship, cooperation, and organization could never be reconciled by either the laissez-faire market or the really-existing socialist plan, but instead required persuasion, in the form of managers and management, to reconcile points of view and actually get humans to, you know, work cooperatively semi-efficiently.
Moreover, I would trace the current for which Michael Polanyi, born in 1891 in Budapest, is a convenient marker: society needing not just the decentralized mercenary institution of the market, and definitely not needing comprehensive central planning, which can never be more than a fiction, but needing decentralized fiduciary institutions focused on advancing knowledge about theory and practice, in which status is gained by teaching others—such as in modern science, communities of engineering practice, communities of legal interpretation, honorable journalism, evidence-based politics, and others—and in which people follow rules that have been half-constructed and that half-emerged to advance not just the private interests and liberties of the participants but the broader public interest and public liberties as well.
But as there is neither time nor space for all of that, In this book I can only trace two currents of thought and action: first, the current we have seen before, for which Friedrich von Hayek (born in Vienna in 1899) is a convenient marker (that all that needed to be altered was that market-economic institutions had to be purified and perfected, and supported by an anti-permissive social and cultural order) and the current we have seen before for which Michael Polanyi’s older brother Karl, born in Vienna in 1886, is the convenient marker (that the market recognized only property rights, and a society made up of humans who insisted that they had more rights for that would react—left or right, sensibly or stupidly, but powerfully—to that failure of recognition). And I will trace how they could be shotgun-married to each other, with the blesser of the wedding being John Maynard Keynes. That, I believe, is the principal grand narrative.
Or at least it is mine…
Those other books would also have been wonderful to write.
The Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Brezhnev-Kosygin, with Kosygin being the road not taken when the military-industrial complex outweighed him in the late 1960s would have been a blast. Might Kosygin have been the Deng Xiaoping of the USSR? Quite possibly. But the person who should write that book would be a person who reads Russian very, very well, and has long thought hard about the Soviet experience,
Then there is the Mussolini-Hitler-(Bolsonaro, Modhi, Trump) book: it also would have been great fun to write. And somebody should really do it—although almost surely not me.
I would still love to write the Schumpeter book: a Grand Narrative of creative destruction, technology, and entrepreneurship vs. bureaucracy as the terrain on which 20th-century history played itself out would be a great addition to the world’s knowledge base. I could write that book. Indeed, I did write large pieces of it, now on the cutting-room floor. Perhaps I have an Entrepreneurship, Enterprises, & Organizations, 1500-2020 book project in my future?
Then there are the two books that I am least qualified to write: the Management as the Key to the Riddle of History Peter F. Drucker book, and the Dialogue & Division of Labor Between Mercenary & Fiduciary Institutions Michael Polanyi book. I would love to read either. I cannot think of who could write either, however.
" if the discussion leads to agreement rather than if the discussion leads to the most people holding the correct view as to what would be the optimal decision. "
Pretty much also sums up how we run court cases, doesn't it?