Category: Philosophy

Jane Galt, who is (was?) down, later argued:

So probabilistically, the chances that something good will happen to me right now are, I assume, about the same as they always were.

Holding quality of type constant (an important qualification, as some people are simply prone to bad events, and receiving another bad event signals as such), I more readily expect reversion to the mean.  Good economies grow rapidly after wartime, often because they find it easier to reassemble preexisting pieces than to press forward from full employment.  Much of the human capital is still there and rebuilding can occur quickly once in motion.  The personal analogy is that once you start recovering from (some) catastrophes, the process is speedy.  You already know where you need to go, and you might sample more randomness to court additional good events.

There is also a "naive" evolutionary argument for bad things getting better.

When things go badly, your body borrows resources from the future.  It pumps adrenalin, eats stores of fat, in some views it mobilizes the (only temporarily available) placebo effect, etc., all of which restore better states of affairs and make up lost ground.  More psychologically, a setback may cause a person to try harder.  If a computer crashes and wipes out a page I wrote, I can write it again at an especially high speed and with the energy of anger and adrenalin.

Of course those short-run compensations can herald a problem for the longer-run future, a’la Long and Plosser.  You are digging into your capital stock.  At some margin pumping more adrenalin brings a long-run health cost.  The computer crash means that I write lots today but tomorrow I feel a bit burnt out, and so on.

So if there is anything to worry about, it is the day after tomorrow.  The immediate future appears quite bright.

Hegel also is supposed to have died with the words that no one understood him except one person, who misunderstood him.

That is from Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientiific Postscript.

What is to prevent repentance and love from becoming habituated as a routine?

When a man applies for a permit to go into business as an innkeeper and the application is turned down, this is not comic.  But if it is turned down because there are so few innkeepers, it is comic, because the reason for the application is used as the reason against it.  For example, there is a story about a baker who said to a poor woman, "No, mother, she does not get anything; there was another one recently who didn’t get anything, either.  We can’t give to everybody."  The comic aspect lies in his appearing to arrive at the sum total "everybody" by subtracting.

That is from Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscripts.  I will ponder this question as I fly to Denmark…

On my first trip to adopt in China, I happened to sit at a table
next to another adopting couple from the United States. They were
older, with no prior children, and had been assigned a three- or
four-year-old girl. If memory serves me correctly, the father was a CEO
of a large firm in New Jersey. They seemed like very nice people. The
child that was assigned to them was very headstrong. She did not want
to go with her adoptive parents and proceeded to throw tantrums,
screaming, throwing things and spitting on and punching them for
several days. They decided they couldn’t go through with it, and the
girl was returned to the orphanage. My understanding is that she would
not be eligible for adoption (at least, not internationally) in the
future.

The next day, the couple told me, another three-year-old was brought
over from an orphanage. The first thing she did when she met them was
say, in English, “I love you, Mommy. I love you, Daddy.” The person
who had transported the child from the orphanage had taught her the
words. She had no idea what she was saying, but it didn’t
matter. Needless to say, this little girl went home with them to New
Jersey.

That is from Steve Levitt, in one of his best posts.

Over at CatoUnbound, Dan Klein writes:

In 2006 there appeared a “raise the minimum wage” statement signed by 659 economists. I wanted to know why they favored the minimum wage, so I wrote up a questionnaire and sent it to them. But I also used the occasion to get their views on a very important matter: Did they view the minimum wage law as coercive?

Ninety-five graciously completed the survey. Very few of them simply accepted that the minimum wage law is coercive. More than half said the law is not coercive in any significant sense.[1]

But the minimum wage law (and concomitant enforcement) threatens the initiation of physical aggression against employers who pay less than the minimum wage. It threatens physical aggression against people for engaging in certain kinds of voluntary exchange. To me, that is coercion. Just imagine if your neighbor decided that he would impose a minimum wage law on us. Wouldn’t we all agree that he was coercing us? If it is coercion when he does it, why isn’t it coercion when the government does it?

Coercion is not always bad, all things considered, but surely Dan is correct.  Ed Glaeser, Richard Epstein, and others are due to respond.

From Megan Non-McArdle, here and here.  Sorry, but there is no meaningful way to excerpt these.

"[I]f you eat and wear animals and agree that it’s O.K. to torture them in the name of science and beauty, what’s the big deal?"

Here is the context.

My view, simply put, is that "Libertarian Liberty" (to be specific with the terminology) is for the most
part an instrumental value subordinate to the enhancement of positive
capabilities.  When the two conflict, I opt for the capabilities, and
in that sense I admire the philosophical premises of many contemporary
American liberals.  I also believe in a governmental safety net, unlike many of the people at Cato, and partly for this reason.

On the other hand, I favor zero taxation of capital income, deregulation of the medical sector, cuts in government spending, no special privileges for labor unions, and I reject the philosophy of egalitarianism.  So I’m not quite ready to be writing for The American Prospect and competing down the wages of Matt and Ezra.

Here is a bio.  Here are obituaries.  It is easy enough to attach his apparently outrageous claims and paint him as a postmodern nihilist.  Looking past the surface, virtually all of his books have at least five startling and insightful sentences.  Here is one:

“Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price”

Or try this:

“At male strip shows, it is still the women that we
watch, the audience of women and their eager faces.  They are more
obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.”

Here are many others.  I always read him as a moralist.  None of the summaries do him justice.  Baudrillard was a major thinker of our age, and I am sad I can no longer look forward to new books from his hand.

Suppose you wanted to establish whether children’s height increased with age, but you couldn’t measure height directly.

One way to respond to this problem
would be to interview groups of children in different classes at
school, and asked them the question Don suggests “On a scale of 1 to
10, how tall are you?”. My guess is that the data would look pretty
much like reported data on the relationship between happiness and
income.

That is, within the groups, you’d find that kids who
were old relative to their classmates tended to be report higher
numbers than those who were young relative to their classmates (for the
obvious reason that, on average, the older ones would in fact be taller
than their classmates).

But, for all groups, I suspect you’d
find that the median response was something like 7. Even though average
age is higher for higher classes, average reported height would not
change (or not change much).

So you’d reach the conclusion
that height was a subjective construct depending on relative, rather
than absolute, age. If you wanted, you could establish some sort of
metaphorical link between being old relative to your classmates and
being “looked up to”.

But in reality, height does increase
with (absolute) age and the problem is with the scaling of the
question. A question of this kind can only give relative answers.

Here is the link.

Addendum: Here is Will Wilkinson on same.

John D. Freyer decided to sell everything he owns — yes everything — on ebay.  Stage two is to visit those objects in people’s homes around the country and record their tales.  Stage three is to publish this book. 

When Oh When will people appreciate how deep Seth Roberts’s self-experimentation concept runs?  Descartes started with the idea that we know only ourselves, Seth realizes that the self is often the last thing we know and discovering the self is the highest stage of science not to mention performance art.  The innovation of hermeneutics (as found say, in Paul Riceour) was to set the self apart from the social world and trace the implications of a dualistic and indeed interpretative social science.  Seth reestablishes methodological monism by turning the world-self distinction on its head, relocating the self in the world of science.  Add to that mix a working knowledge of experimental psychology, insights from neurodiversity (the meticulous recording of self, the focus on detail, plus the deeply autistic speak of the self in the third person as an external object to be observed; are they so wrong?), and sugared water, for a potent mix.

Virtually all of you — that’s right you — underinvest in self-experimentation at the relevant margin.  Status quo bias is one reason, plus we fear negative feedback about who we are and what we are doing.  Who wants to learn that his or her **x life (family blog!) could have been 63 percent better for the last fourteen years?   

Scientists should spend at least one-third of their time with self-experimentation.  Robin Hanson lectures us on bias, favoring one’s self excessively, failing to agree with smarter or better informed others, and intellectual hubris.  We need to correct for these flaws, just as we might wipe the dirt off the lens of our microscope.  Good luck.

A’la Heisenberg, measuring the self does not differ in degree from constructing the self.  Seth thus solves the age-old problem of avoiding the collapse of German Idealism into German Romanticism and then into complete subjectivity.  The construction of the self is brought squarely into the realm of science; this integrates the two sides of early Wittgenstein, namely the affinity for the mystical and the analytics which gave birth to logical positivism. 

Did I mention politics?  Wilhelm von Humboldt, a descendent of the Romantics and forerunner of Mill, portrayed self-experimentation as the essential outcome of freedom and the ultimate justification for a free society.  Plato saw the same in Book Eight of The Republic, where it is argued that the life of a philosopher (i.e., critical self-examination) can flourish only under democracy.  Dan Klein’s paper is called "Go Ahead and Let Him Try."

Of course it was Goethe who understood most of this, and even put it into verse, but that is another post altogether.  Nor are Jung and Nietzsche irrelevant.  Seth Roberts is my new ersatz Continental philosopher.

Here is my previous post on Seth, you can use Google for Alex’s posts too.  Here is Seth’s blog.

Addendum: Seth responds

"Playboy Archives Go Digital," so read The Wall Street Journal headline from last week.  That’s right, 636 issues, on six discs, $100 per disc.

Have you noticed that storage is really, really cheap these days?  Have you studied the durable goods monopoly problem?  Once you’ve accumulated a stock of durable material, at some point you will sell off successive units very very cheaply.  Have you noticed that costs of electronic reproduction — call it marginal cost — are really, really low these days?  Have you noticed there is a massive stock of accumulated pornographic images?

Hmm…try graphing that equilibrium.

Call me clueless, as I have very little direct knowledge of pornography.  But I don’t understand why buyers demand such a regular flow of material.  Why don’t they just buy a single dense disc of images and keep themselves, um…busy…for many years?  I believe also that fetishes are fairly stable and predictable.  You don’t need to see "the new porn" to know what you will want to get off on.

As I observe the sector, buyers cough up new money all the time, and they buy relatively small units of output, and at relatively high prices.

Please "splain" it to me, as they say…

One possibility is the neuroeconomics explanation that buying the material yields more pleasure than "using" it.  Maybe porn and cookbooks have something in common after all.