[FRIAM] ideas are lies
thompnickson2 at gmail.com
thompnickson2 at gmail.com
Mon Sep 28 14:12:30 EDT 2020
EricS,
Not stray at all. I am glad we are having this discussion.
As to the supreme ct pick, I thought that this interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yjTEdZ81lI&feature=emb_rel_end
might be a little consoling, Focus on the last part where there is back and forth between her and the moderator. She LISTENS. Well, at least she nods and gives eyecontact. As somebody who has a hard time doing either of those things, I admire it.
Nick
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Monday, September 28, 2020 11:17 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ideas are lies
Yeah, agree with Pat, agree with Glen.
I will say it in a way that seems inevitably to be ruder, though I don’t wish to be rude. I find libertarian thinking, in any forms I have encountered that have agency in the world, to be willfully disingenuous about the things that actually cause problems.
A lot of this would not occur in a world where people have to build something that operationalizes whatever they say in words. Nod to Marcus’s comments about the virtue of cashing out thoughts in algorithms.
For years I wanted to write a paper called “There’s no such thing as a free market”, but I couldn’t find anything new to say that wasn’t already quite well said, and deliberately ignored, in extant discourse. Define a “free market”, with the intended Chicago-economists’ notion of “free of coercive or more generally intrusive power”, which I will hold them to since they want to invoke Arrow’s and Hahn’s and Debreu’s existence proofs of optimal allocations. Build me the social algorithm by which every action that I take, in each small moment of any day, that will ever have effects on me or anybody else anywhere, has all those consequences fully known to us all, and fully and fairly negotiated, before the next action I take (turn on the tap, throw a piece of plastic in the trash, start the engine of the car, eat food produced in a way that degrades land, use a battery with materials mined in Mongolia.) The absurdity of the concept is so overwhelming that I can’t help but respond to people who treat it as existing as if they mean to be dishonest. Everything else that isn’t within that perfect-costless-contract model is “externalities”. Those include, ignorance, power, non-responsibility for consequences, non-existence or unenforcibility of laws, and on and on and on.
That, to me, is where the problems occur, and a good-faith conversation engages with all the clarity we don’t have to deal with them.
I also think Adam Smith’s name is taken in vain, again in a sleight of hand that switches intents of words that sound the same. One can read his arguments, made in the context of his time and the power structures most active then, as an argument that decentralized optimization can do many things that centralized planning can’t, or that deliberately oppressive power structures such as churches or church/state complexes actively degrade. As I understand it, Smith made all sorts of conditions about morally grounded societies, some kind of mechanism for regulation against abuses, etc. Not to mention it was mostly agrarian, pre-financial, and the power all but the fewest people could accumulate was extremely limited. Much of Smith’s argument has a similar flavor, as a problem-solving analysis, to Walter Bagehot’s later writing in Lombard Street, about the better performance of decentralized banking with fractional-reserve lending. In context, they make a lot of sense. Quoted as scripture in contexts where the words would represent quite different choices, they can be given all sorts of meanings that a counterpart to Smith, suffering under today’s abuses, would not espouse.
I bother to write that because, with the question of how to handle the Coney Barrett appointment, there is a thing I don’t know how to A) think through, or B) express properly, and I don’t know which of those it is.
By the accounts of people who follow such things professionally, she is a capable jurist and a decent person. I can believe that. Interestingly, having had some of the old interviews of Scalia and Ginsburg played for me in the past week (great watching if you want to hear an advocacy of originalism and living-text made by people with skin and brain in the game), Scalia seems to stand for many not only sensible, but even decent positions.
However, in the creep that destroys the world, what are the arguments about how it should play out and how it does?
I can see one argument for “originalism” as being that those who ratified the constitution in 1788 had suffered more, risked more, and thought more, than an average modern judge, and what they intended things to mean should not lightly be discarded by whoever comes along in each new generation. I think that would be Scalia’s argument, to the effect that the power of judges to re-architect the country should be limited by the constitution, which it is the job of congress to amend (come back to that in a minute).
But then how does that work? There was all kinds of stuff that didn’t exist in 1788. So how does it work out that the right-aligned jurists consistently come down on the side of rulings that give those who have excessively concentrated power the collaboration of the law in concentrating that power — I take this to be Pat’s assertion, and I agree — no matter how destructive the means (here I mean citizens united, nullification of the pre-reporting requirement in the voting rights act, whatever that was, but probably lots more that I would know if I knew this area), while those who do not have concentrated power do not have the law as protection from oppressive use by those who do have it? I don’t see how one gets from “originalism” to Citizens United.
And to the extent that ACB is considered a studious adherent to Scalia’s originalism, but with less than Scalia’s originality in recognizing important times to deviate, she is expected to be more mechanical in driving the style of decisions people expected from him. But the mismatch between the rhetoric, and the cumulative effects on the role of law in the society, seem drastic after these many decades.
Which brings us to the wider question (which a scientist would not pursue, knowing that he needs to focus on refining the accuracy of one point of data): What the hell is taking place in the large-scale play of power in this country around this period?
Here are some things I have heard that seem valid, granting that I don’t have expertise to judge.
1. For a party to control congress requires the coordination or coercion of some 260 or so people, which even the more corrupt and authoritarian societies can struggle to achieve.
2. An organ like SCOTUS has 9 people and votes by majority. The control role may be more limited, but the numbers are certainly a lot smaller.
3. I heard yesterday from Durbin that the senate passed 22 pieces of law last year. Certainly none of them addressing important ways in which our society has changed since 1788 that would reflect a new role for law. I think the big one was the tax cut for the rich. There were probably also some farm bill things, which from my reading of the farm columns involve some extraordinary debt-financed bailouts to try to buy republican votes for this election. MMcC calls himself “the grim reaper”, to boast that he allows nothing to be done.
4. So it seems to me not unfair to say that the R position these days is to do no work themselves, and to block any work the Ds try to do, so that the congress does as close to nothing as possible.
5. This means that legislating has now been bounced to the courts, with SCOTUS as the court of last appeal. Rather than write laws to address needs, the judges are asked to issue “interpretations” of ancient law for modern problems, and thus de facto define what the modern law is, bypassing congress.
6. No wonder it is such an ultra-high priority for Rs to stack every court they can, and perhaps also explicable that it is less of a priority for Ds, since they wouldn’t mind using the congress to do things, and so are not so exclusively focused on SCOTUS as a locus of control. What “the voters” think is not something I find organic, as there is a highly sophisticated machinery to install what “the voters” think.
So if one wanted a senate hearing on the ACB appointment that meant no disrespect to the person, but was about the substance of both her judicial method, and the context of power dynamics in which it will be applied, the above list seems to me to be where the causality lies.
Even if there were politicians who could speak plainly (rather than in the ultra-sterilized talk that is required these days), I can’t imagine a conversation’s being transacted in that frame. Yet, short of that frame, I don’t see what else meaningfully addresses important sources of near-existential problems for the governance of the US.
I guess that wandered off the strict thread.
Eric
> On Sep 28, 2020, at 11:42 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Pat's comments are interestingly powerful as a response to EricC's comments. I don't remember getting this sense from the recent thread on meritocracy. But my main objection to the existence of meritocracy is its assumption of linearity/orthogonality, a lack of friction between the various sliding dimensions of life. EricC talks mainly [⛧] about disagreeing with individual sentences, regardless of Fix's compoisitonal *narrative*. And the other thread about economic mobility assumes the same materially open, formally closed, permanent underclass required by capitalism.
>
> It all seems to point to this tendency/ability of libertarians to "separate concerns" ... e.g. one's attendance to a PTA meeting is assumed to be decoupled from one's status as a wage slave ... or the artificial separation between, say, one's ability to vote despite not being able to take the day off. Or even questioning why Joe Sixpack would prefer to watch The Voice and drink Budweiser over inventing mouse traps in his basement, after having spent the last 8 hours being ordered around by someone half his age in a flourescent lit cubicle.
>
> I don't agree that libertarianism is nonsense. But the sense it does make is false, at odds with reality, primarily because reality is replete with cross-terms and couplings ignored by its assumptions.
>
>
> [⛧] I think the "free-market thinking promotes power relations" is a mere lemma in the argument. The thesis seems to be that free market thinking limits market freedom. That paradox is what makes it so insidious.
>
> On 9/27/20 8:43 PM, Patrick Reilly wrote:
>> In my experience, Libertarian ideas when offered at any level above the most basic are almost always justifying the interests of those who control wealth. The key myth of Libertarianism is that those who control wealth on any given day MUST be morally worthy of this control. Which is nonsense.
>>
>> The model that any action to disempower the powerful, i.e., the wealthy, and redistribute their power, i.e., share wealth that essentially has fallen under the control of a small group of "elites" little regard to justice, is morally bankrupt is advanced only by ideologues who are (often intentionally) blind to actual economic history.
>>
>> Just one case in point, the standardization of computer Operating Systems was inevitable. Gates was a clever and hard working industrialist, but the key business opportunity that he rode to billions was almost purely created by his ruthlessness married with both an unforeseen timing of technology development and conditions not of his making. In other words, if he had failed to be an ambitious and smart creep, he would have been defeated by a smarter creep . . . someone had to end up in the lead position in this "winner take all" nature that we still find ourselves in . . .
>>
>> Libertarianism is nonsense.
>>
>> ---- Pat
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 7:51 PM Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> This article is absolutely fascinating! I think that if we just took each sentence individually, I would disagree with around 60% of them. That is being generous and assuming the author is accurately reporting what other authors are saying. If you allow for my disagreeing with those cited (while not disputing the citation itself), that could easily bring me as high as disagreeing with 80% of the individual sentences. That is making it very hard for me to assess what I think of the overall argument. It seems quite plausible that "free-market thinking promotes power relations" in a particular historic context, which seems to be one of the main theses of the argument... but the author is covering at least a dozen deep topics that are in no way necessary to make that argument, and is not demonstrating a deep understanding of any of them.
>>
>> Here are some example sentences from throughout the paper that seem confused. Some might merely be massive overgeneralizations, but even that seems pretty problematic in the context of the argument being made:
>>
>> * Free-market ideology claims that to help society, we must help ourselves. If we all act selfishly, the thinking goes, the invisible hand will make everyone better off. So here we have an ideology that promotes selfishness in the name of group benefit. It’s a Machiavellian lie that should be caustic to social cohesion.
>> * According to the theory of multilevel selection, there is /always/ a disconnect between the interests of a group, and the interests of individuals within the group.
>> * So for groups to be successful, they must suppress the selfish behavior of individuals. There are many ways of doing this, but the most common is probably /punishment/. To encourage altruistic behavior, groups punish self-serving individuals.
>> * But while punishing deviance is universal to all social organisms, humans have developed a method for suppressing selfishness that is unique. To promote prosocial behavior, we harness the power of ideas. We /lie/ to ourselves.
>> * According to evolutionary theory, Rand’s Machiavellian lie ought to be caustic to group cohesion.
>> * /power relations/ qualify as a type of altruism. In a power relation, one person submits to the will of another. Bob submits to Alice. By doing so, Bob sacrifices his own fitness for the benefit of Alice. That’s altruism. But if Bob’s subservience only benefited Alice, it would be an evolutionary dead end. The Bobs of the world would die out, having given all their resources to the Alices. Since power relations have not died out, something more must be going on.
>> * On the face of it, freedom and power seem to be opposites.
>> * Business firms, you may have noticed, don’t use the market to organize their internal activities. They use hierarchy. Firms have a chain of command that tells employees what to do. Given this fact, the growth of large firms is as much an assault on the free market as is the growth of government.
>> * To measure the growth of private hierarchy, I’ll use the size of the management class — the portion of people employed as ‘managers’. Here’s my reasoning. Managers work at the tops of hierarchies.
>> * Anthropologists Carla Handley and Sarah Mathew recently found that cultural variation between human groups is far greater than genetic variation. Put simply, this means that ideas matter. What we /think/ probably affects our behavior more than our genes.
>> *
>>
>> The reason is that human life is marked by a fundamental tension. We are social animals who compete as groups. For our group’s sake, it’s best if we act altruistically. But for our /own/ sake, it’s better to be a selfish bastard. How to suppress this selfish behavior is the fundamental problem of social life. The solution that most cultures have hit upon is to lie.
>>
>> * The alternative is that free-market ideas /do/ promote altruism … just not the kind we’re used to thinking about. They promote altruism through power relations. And they do so through doublespeak. Free-market ideology uses the language of ‘freedom’ to promote the accumulation of power.
>>
>> Just for a taste of why this all seems so weird: "Free market ideology" is not the promotion of selfishness writ large, it is the idea that people should look for beneficial deals when buying and selling goods. Like, if you could buy a car for $15,000, or get an equivalent car for $12,000, you should buy the cheaper one; but if you are selling, and you could sell for $12,000 or $15,000, you should sell for the higher price. That's it. Free market ideology has nothing to do with whether you should support the local PTA or whether you should invest in your children beyond the time-corrected dollar value you expect them to give you in return. And similarly, my manager's ability to tell me what to do at work has little to do with whether I buy rice in bulk at the asian grocery where it is cheaper. (And if you want to talk about Ayn Rand as promoting selfishness writ large, then we would need a separate conversation about what "selfish" means in an "Objectivist" context, and
>> how that has only a loose relation with "free market ideology".)
>>
>>
>> Eric C
>> <mailto:echarles at american.edu>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 5:24 PM ⛧ glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Why Free Market Ideology is a Double Lie
>> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fevonomics.com%2fwhy-free-market-ideology-is-a-double-lie%2f&c=E,1,d2TnMVUh7KVPhp7lLOjPS60gXNNEZz6qiD8G3plDleoUYApuONZKAEuZlWeuhTTYFPFEb1-lRiWwHFw2gWpRDcvIRibx9tM6OuExB8uwHyCGDI8ucukQCaEx&typo=1
>> "So yes, free-market thinking is a lie. But it’s not the lie you think it is."
>> --
>> glen ⛧
>>
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