Category: Philosophy
Good sentences
Our social and political life is awash in unconsciously held Christian ideas broken from the theology that gave them meaning, and it’s hungry for the identification of sinners—the better to prove the virtue of the accusers and, perhaps especially, to demonstrate the sociopolitical power of the accusers.
That is from Joseph Bottum, via PW.
The rsvp and livestream for my conversations with Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Sachs
You can sign up for rsvp or the live stream here, the chat with Peter Thiel is March 31, 2-3:30 p.m. EST, held at the Arlington campus of George Mason University. It is part of a new event series Conversations with Tyler.
The chat with Jeffrey Sachs is April 7, 3:30 to 5 p.m., again EST in Arlington. There will be more to come in the Fall.
I will host and talk with guests, but without formalities. I won’t ask “So tell us about your new book,” or any of the usual soporific chit-chatty questions. I will try to replicate the conversations I would have with these same individuals in a private setting, except that you all get to listen. That means launching into substance immediately and seeing how far the back and forth can be pushed. It also means asking questions that not everyone listening will understand and willing to let parts of the audience suffer in their confusion. I want these dialogues to be as smart as possible, based on the premise that each guest, no matter how renowned he or she may be, is nonetheless a radically underrated thinker.
The goal is to be never hostile or combative, but always probing. I’m aiming for the chat to be 1/3 me vs. 2/3 guest, more or less, but about the ideas and contributions of the guest most of all.
*Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling*
There is a new version of the Mahabharata, in blank verse rather than prose, translated/created by Carole Satyamurti. I’ve only read an initial sliver of it, but dramatically and linguistically it is very effective. This is a beautiful edition, and deserves serious consideration as a purchase for just about every library. I have yet to see any significant reviews of the work.
To where should you vote with your feet?
If voting with your feet was your preferred method, what would be the best country to immigrate to from the United States for: A) Progressives B) Social Conservatives C) Libertarians
As a follow up, a common expression in the US among adults as I was growing up was “its a free country”. That expressed both disdain of the expressed course of action and a willingness to let the fool do what he wanted. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are literary representatives of that, what should I call it, frontier freedom? Are there countries that even if the official line is restrictive, the feeling of liberty might be much greater? Am I nuts to feel that in many ways the US is less free than it was a couple of generations ago?
For Progressives I’ll pick Denmark. They have high taxes and ultimately they are not too friendly toward immigration, instead preferring to keep their social policy comprehensive and expensive. Sweden may not quite manage the same, although they are still a fairly high pick on this list. Another direction to look would be Australia, where government spending is most likely to actually be redistributive.
For Social Conservatives, I say Singapore. They are tough on drugs and the citizens are expected to work and required to save. Parents are treated with respect, at least relative to the West, and when it comes to births at the very least they are trying hard with subsidies and ads on buses. An underrated pick here would be France, by the way.
For Libertarians, I say the United States. For all of the statist intervention in this country, it remains the place where markets are capable of exercising the most power for the better. And it is no accident that such a huge chunk of the world’s libertarians are also Americans, or at least heavily American-influenced. Singapore is in the running for this designation, with its government at eighteen percent of gdp, but so many things there are planned so comprehensively and the attitude of the country is more technocratic than free market per se. Hong Kong is no longer such a free economy, having come under increasing Chinese influence not to mention law-enforced cartelization, and that is on top of their government-supplied housing stock and single payer health care system.
As for the last part of this question, the relatively peaceful parts of Mexico, in my view, very often feel freer than the United States. But I am never sure how much that is worth.
*Chappie*, or Emile
This Neill Blomkamp (“District 9”) movie has received only lukewarm reviews, but while highly imperfect it is more interesting than most critics seem to realize. The initial premise is that in a few years’ time South Africa resorts to AI-driven, robot policemen. I see the film as revolving around three key questions:
1. What will a robot be like, if he grows up under rather brutal conditions? This is first and foremost a movie about education, and it could have been written by John Gray. Don’t assume that people (robots) have an irrevocable tendency to support liberal values, at least not when the chips are down and they have been beaten up. The gang motive is both popular and enduring.
2. Can a society dependent on robots for law enforcement become/remain a liberal society? Or will the “arms race” between the law and the criminals result in brutality and a loss of liberty?
3. How robust is a robot society to the eventual possibility of human error and depravity?
Along the way there are references to Asimov, “Silent Running,” Blade Runner, Verhoeven of course, and other android sources. I can’t endorse every angle of the ending, or every character decision, but still I didn’t consider leaving this one.
Does suffering make Russians happier?
And can happiness research be trusted?:
According to the latest opinion survey in Russia, the share of people who are happy with their life has increased to 52 percent, from 44 percent in December 2014, and from 41 percent in December 2013. The survey results were published at the end of February by the state survey agency VCIOM. This is quite a spectacular finding, suggesting that despite Western sanctions and the recent ruble devaluation, life in Russia is going well.
Except these attitudes are hard to square with some facts.
Fact #1: Between January 2014 and March 2015, the price of food products has increased by 29.3 percent. After the sanctions, prices of fruit have shot up by 45 percent, vegetables by 41 percent, fish by 30 percent, and meat by 28 percent. All this, according to Rosstat, the state statistical agency.
Fact #2: January 2015 saw a 51 percent fall in the number of Russian traveling abroad, relative to January a year earlier. Fewer Russians go skiing in Europe: Russian tourism dropped by 27 percent to Austria, by 52 percent to Finland, and by 43 percent to France. And lest one thinks that most Russian skiers now go to Sochi, it is worth pointing out that the numbers from last summer also show a significant decline in the tourist visits to Thailand, Bulgaria, Spain, Dubai, and other beach destinations.
Fact #3: 115,390 cars were sold in Russia in January 2015, down from 151,000 in January 2014, and 163,000 in January 2013. In other words, about one quarter fewer new cars have been sold so far this year.
That is from Simeon Djankov, via www.macrodigest.com. And if current trends continue, maybe the Ukrainians will end up happier yet.
*The Paradox of Liberation*
That is the new Michael Walzer book, with the subtitle Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions. The stated paradox is fairly simple, yet worthy of sustained attention:
Why have the leaders and militants of secular liberation not been able to consolidate their achievement and reproduce themselves in successive generations? Over the past several decades, Indian intellectuals and academics have been debating this question in its local version: “Why is it,” one of them asks, “that the Nehruvian vision of a secular India failed to take hold?”
Other cases considered include Israel, Palestine, and Algeria, as well as the Middle East more generally. Walzer doesn’t much try to answer his own question, but this book is very stimulating and worth the short amount of time it takes to read it. I would modify the paradox however: I see various European nations which do consolidate and maintain largely secular nationalist movements. How about Denmark or France? If you find those examples troublesome, try Serbia or for that Vietnam or China. There may be a more general issue of morphing, above and beyond the religious vs. secular issue.
Soumission — Submission — Unterwerfung
The only version of the new Houllebecq novel I can read now is the one in German, Entwerfung., as the English edition does not come out until September. I am about halfway through and can report it is excellent and a fun read as well, most of all when it makes fun of the vulnerabilities and vacillations of the West.
Here is an Anthony Daniels review, with lots of plot summary (and spoilers), part of the last paragraph shows he understands the work:
This novel is far from a crude anti-Islamic polemic, however, as many might have supposed it to be from its pre-publication publicity (Houellebecq has expressed himself very unfavorably on Islam elsewhere). It is rather a meditation, admittedly using all the author’s habitual tropes which fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, are susceptible to an infinite number of bitterly amusing variations, on the state of Western civilization and what makes that civilization vulnerable to attack…In other words, it is an implicit invitation to us to look inwards, to think of what is wrong with us rather than with them. Whether we or they will read it like this, I rather doubt…
This is one of the novels of the year. Here is a good Adam Gopnik piece on Houllebecq and the book.
*The Age of the Crisis of Man*
That is the new book by Mark Greif, and the subtitle is Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973. I very much enjoyed grappling with this one. One of my more recent views is that the thinkers of the mid-twentieth century are in fact, as a whole, extremely underrated. They are not old enough to be classic and not new enough to be trendy or on the frontier. Their world faced problems which seemed totally strange to us in the 1990s, but which are starting to sound scarily relevant and contemporary. Yet our world is largely ignorant of their wisdom and creativity, in part because they often sounded dumb or schlocky or maybe they even were in some ways.
This book is sprawling, and while clearly written at the sentence-to-sentence level, it assumes some fair degree of background knowledge. Nonetheless for an intellectually-minded reader it is an excellent way to jump into the world inhabited by Karl Jaspers, Ortega y Gasset, Flannery O’Connor, and Thomas Pynchon.
Leon Wieseltier has some interesting remarks on the book. Here is another interesting (if overlong) review, by Richard Marshall. Here is an excellent Adam Kirsch review, the best review as review.
What if everyone lived like Mr. Money Moustache?
Over at Vox, Mr. Money Moustache notes:
The first trick is to remind yourself that buying something — pretty much anything — is very unlikely to improve your long-term happiness. Science figured this out for us long ago, but not many people got the memo. Go to your junk electronics drawer and look at your old flip phones or your dusty iPad 1. Look at the clothes you’ve recently pruned from your closet that are now headed to the Goodwill. You traded a lot of good dollars for those, not very long ago at all. Are they still making you happy today?
And:
…I try to get people to think of things in 10-year chunks at a minimum and then move on to a lifetime perspective. For example, spending $100 per week on restaurants equates to a $75,000 hit to your wealth every ten years, compared to keeping that money and just investing it in a conservative way.
If I understand him correctly, he recommends a very high savings rate and very early retirement.
From an individual point of view, my worry is that happiness may not go up much in this early retirement and in fact it may go down; people seem to enjoy working, which is good for their health and their social involvement. Perhaps Mr. Money Moustache derives a sense of purpose from spreading this gospel, but most people would end up bored and indeed frustrated if they retired at age thirty as he has (apparently) done.
From a social point of view, if everyone did this, productivity would collapse. Workers over the age of thirty make the world go round, and teach and pass down skills to others. When you retire involves an external cost or benefit, and retirement can come either too early or too late.
I’ll note in passing that my “dusty iPad 1” gave me an enormous amount of pleasure, as does my later iPad. And I wish my old flip phone still worked! Sadly, it is no longer still making me happy today.
Addendum: Ryan Decker comments.
Hayek on Mill and the Mill-Taylor Friendship
That is the newly published volume 16 of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, edited by Sandra J. Peart. Of course this is splendid from beginning to end, including Peart’s introduction, the letters, Hayek’s commentary, and assorted documents, and the book even contains three very nice poems written by Harriet Taylor.
Is Hayek here blaming Taylor for moving Mill in a collectivist direction? Is that the Straussian reading of this book and the reason why Hayek did it?
If there were a phrase for “one step above and beyond self-recommending,” this volume would get it.
Is teaching about instruction or selection?
That is the title of a short essay by Gary Davis, here is the essay in toto:
Teaching is commonly associated with instruction, yet in evolution, immunology, and neuroscience, instructional theories are largely defunct.
We propose a co-immunity theory of teaching, where attempts by a teacher to alter student neuronal structure to accommodate cultural ideas and practices is sort of a reverse to the function of the immune system, which exists to preserve the physical self, while teaching episodes are designed to alter the mental self.
This is a theory of teaching that is based on the inter-subjective relationship between teacher and learner. This theory posits that teaching does not, as is commonly assumed, take place via instruction from teacher to students, but rather through a process of selection in the learner’s brain, stimulated by materials and activities utilized by the teacher. In this theory, the mechanism that drives the selection process in learners’ brains is co-regulated emotional signaling between teacher and learner. From this perspective, the power of formative assessment is that it intrinsically carries with it emotional aspects for both learner and teacher, in that it provides a feedback relationship between them both, and so, according to the Greenspan & Shanker theory of cognitive symbolic development, promotes cognitive development.
That is from the Journal of Brief Ideas, a new and worthy web site, and for the pointer to the site I thank Michelle Dawson.
An economic model of the mystery novel, and are sports suspense-optimal?
Those questions are considered by Jeffrey Ely, Alexander Frankel, and Emir Kamenica in their new JPE paper “Suspense and Surprise.” Here is one to the point excerpt:
In the context of a mystery novel, these dynamics imply the following familiar plot structure. At each point in the book, the readers thinks that the weight of evidence suggests that the protagonist accused of murder is either guilty or innocent. But in any given chapter, there is a chance of a plot twist that reverses the reader’s beliefs. As the book continues along, plot twists become less likely but more dramatic.
In the context of sports, our results imply that most existing rules cannot be suspense-optimal. In soccer, for example, the probability that the leading team will win depends not only on the period of the game but also on whether it is a tight game or a blowout…
Optimal dynamics could be induced by the following set of rules. We declare the winner to be the last team to score. Moreover, scoring becomes more difficult as the game progresses (e.g., the goal shrinks over time). The former ensures that uncertainty declines over time while the latter generates a decreasing arrival rate of plot twists. (In this context, plot twists are lead changes.)
There are ungated versions of the paper here. Note that at the very end of the paper…well, I’ll just let you read it for yourselves.
The Valentine’s culture that is Japan against the romantic-industrial complex
On February 14th, Kakumei-teki himote doumei (革命的非モテ同盟) — literally, “Revolutionary Alliance of Men That Woman Are Not Attracted To”– will gather in Shibuya, an area of Tokyo popular with young couples, to protest Valentine’s Day and its roots in what they call “romantic capitalist oppression.”
The group, known as Kakuhidou for short, was started in 2006, when its founder, Katsuhiro Furusawa, returned home one day after being dumped by his girlfriend and began reading the Communist Manifesto. He quickly came to the realization that being unpopular with girls is a class issue.
Since then, the group has held several demonstrations each year, all coinciding with holidays that are associated with romantic love in Japanese culture, such as Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and White Day .
Kakuhidou’s slogans combine Japanese internet culture with classical Marxism, and its origins in cyberspace can be charted through its choice of language. For example, one frequent target of the group’s admonitions are the so-called “riyajuu” (リア充）, a neologism frequently used in online communities such as 2chan to refer to those who experience fulfillment in their offline lives (riyajuu is a portmanteau that combines “real” with “jyuujitsu”, the Japanese word for fulfillment).
The release posted on Kakuhidou’s website for this year’s anti-Valentines parade says “the blood-soaked conspiracy of Valentine’s Day, driven by the oppressive chocolate capitalists, has arrived once again. In order to create a brighter future, we call for solidarity among our unloved comrades, so that we may demonstrate in resolute opposition to Valentine’s Day and the romantic industrial complex.”
At previous events, leaders of the group have yelled slogans such as “I hope all riyajuus explode! But we’re still a little jealous!” while wearing shirts that say, roughly, “sex is useless.”
There is more here. By the way, the group’s official vehicle is a Mercedes-Benz.
For the pointer I thank Andrea Castillo.
Who are the people I most admire?
Last I looked, Elon Musk was a clear winner of the MR readers’s poll for “most admired.”
Personally, I admire successful creators, scientists, and entrepreneurs a great deal, and Musk fits into those directions very well. Still, the very top of my personal list would be shaped more by how much individuals had sacrificed. Let me throw out a few options:
1. The members of the Mexican judiciary who have stood up to the drug gangs, often at the expense of their lives. They believed in a better future for Mexico and I think eventually they will triumph.
2. Public health professionals who work under great hardship in difficult places, for years, to limit malaria or the spread of Ebola. In addition to questionable living conditions, they often face high health risks themselves.
3. How about Aun San Suu Kyi, who endured about fifteen years of prison to help bring greater liberty to Myanmar?
4. At a smaller scale, how about individuals who volunteer to work in the burn unit at the hospital? That has to be fairly icky labor, yet as medical care it can be effective.
You can do variants on my 1-4, but I would start with examples such as those. Not at the very top of my list, but I also would think about good parents who work as primary caregivers.
If we are restricted to political/public figures, I would opt for Ben Bernanke.
Overall I was surprised how few of you approached the question the way I have, rather as a group you picked too many nerdy white guys. Now I don’t like to play “the PC card,” and if a process generates a lot of nerdy white guys, I don’t then assume that process is necessarily biased or requiring correction. Still, the fact that my list creates so much room for women (and non-whites) suggests it reflects the universality of human experience more than what most of you came up with.
It is also notable how few of you picked entertainers or sports figures, as such individuals have figured prominently on such lists in the past (see my What Price Fame?). In 1971 a lot of people would have said “John Lennon,” and in his day Ted Williams placed high in such surveys. These days, for better or worse, the tech world and politics seem to exercise a stronger hold on our imaginations, all the more among MR readers I suspect.
Addendum: Here is Noah Smith’s list.