deperplex: March 2025

Which is worse, censorship or propaganda? Hugo Mercier observes in Not Born Yesterday, a wonderful and important book, that Hitler and Goebbels were disappointed that their propaganda had no effect on non Nazis. The propaganda was useful for rallying the choir and goading Nazi enthusiasts to act decisively and violently, but didn't persuade non Nazis.

This should not be surprising. We are all inundated with propaganda from many different sides, but given all the options, we choose the propaganda that we want to believe. The NYTimes propagates anti-Trump views, but it has no effect on Trump supporters, and Fox has no effect on NYTimes readers.

Here's the challenge for those who believe that propaganda is dangerous:

on what basis do some citizens read the NYTimes and others watch Fox? If they are choosing one and not the other, then they must already know the poison they desire; they already know what to expect; they already know the outlines of the content.

The reason propaganda seems so effective with its audience is because the audience already believes it. Persuasion is superfluous. It has no role in propaganda.

Why, then are they reading or listening to their preferred resource?

To confirm their bias. To get more bullet points to defend their bias. To get aroused and enraged by what they already are angry about. To feel triumphant in how right they are. To revel in the flood of evidence that arouses and excites and justifies their views and strokes them as right and good and better than their opponents and more insightful and in all ways superior. It's an orgasm of self-righteousness.

That's the purpose of news media, folks. That's why it sells. It's all spin and propaganda, and it's effect is not to inform and change minds, but to justify and arouse the already formed, closed mind.

And what happens when propaganda is presented to the opposed mind? Resistance, rejection, dispute, disgust, dismissal, outrage and anger -- a leveling up of one's bias to 11, an increase in emotional commitment to that bias stirred into a wild frenzy of anger, and a joyous sharpening of critical thinking against the propaganda.

Propaganda not only fails to persuade, it enrages its opponents. In social interactions, for every antagonistic push there is a greater and opposite pushback.

What about censorship, the absence of information, whether propaganda or fact? Where there is no information, where there is no push, there is no resistance. Where there is no resistance there is no incentive to find contrary evidence. Nothing comes of nothing.

The virtue of censorship is complacency. Ignorance is bliss. The virtue of propaganda is the relentless seeking for evidence in favor or against. The danger of propaganda is not fooling the public, but polarizing the public, arousing it, and the mutual demonization of the polar teams.

So which is worse? Falsehoods and fights, or silent, ignorant distrust? Which would you regret most?

The Great Reset deception and fake

Maybe the most remarkable instance of conspiracy theory hype is The Great Reset and Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum. For years I heard about this Great Reset program to control the world -- the super-rich meeting in secret deciding on how to parcel out the future of surveillance and control.

It didn't seem to matter to this conspiracy theory that the Davos WEF meetings weren't actually secret, that they were often broadcast. I even received videos from the WEF in my email box every couple of weeks. Far from conducting closed meetings to concoct nefarious plots, the WEF and Davos crowd seem to be proud of what they are doing. They want everyone to know as much as possible about it. They seem to want people to engage with their debates and concerns.

What shocked me the most, though, was reading Schwab's own book COVID-19: The Great Reset. To my utter surprise I learned that the Great Reset was not a program or plot at all or even a set of proposals. There isn't a single proposal in it. And that's because The Great Reset refers to the current economy rebounding from the pandemic. That's it. That's all it refers to. Not a plan. Not a proposal. Not a program. It's the economy rebounding however it happens. That's The Great Reset.

Naming the post-Covid economy a great reset was Schwab's prediction or expectation that the post-Covid economy would rebound from the pandemic with novel technologies of unprecedented power growing and spreading with unprecedented speed. His view of this rebound is that society and gov'ts and ordinary people are not prepared. Given the history of economic growth, he expects that unless we all prepare, the rich will get much richer and more powerful, and the little guy is going to be left on the wayside. The Great Reset, far from a program or a set of proposals, it's the expectation that the economy will rebound out of control -- without any plan. And, without any prep, it'll be business as usual, with ordinary people left with the short end of the stick. He thinks we can do better to protect the little guy, prevent further environmental degradation, and rebalance inequalities in favor of the 99%.

His book doesn't contain a single proposal. It's all conditionals to consider: if people are afraid of future pandemics, they will very likely want to work remotely. More remote work will change the character of cities, of real estate and the fabric of social relations. A lot more zoom. But if people are tired of zoom and want to risk the dangers of socializing in person, they'll want to return to dense cities and offices. Is there a proposal here? No, it's just thinking about what the future may hold and how we might want to prepare for it so we don't find ourselves with our pants down while Elon Musk steals those pants and sell them back to us at a monopoly price from Mars.

Notice that the conspiracy theory has got the entire thing all upside down. There is no such program called "The Great Reset". The belief that there is such a program is a fiction invented entirely by the conspiracy theorist. The Great Reset itself is a very real, nonfictional thing: it's the economy that we're currently in, the rebound from the pandemic. But it's not a program. It's the absence of any program!

Were Schwab's expectations borne out? Well, Musk is wealthier than ever and LLMs have been widely embraced. But they haven't made all that much of a difference so far. Overall, no, The Great Reset wasn't very great. President Mump is probably more of a game-changer than the economic rebound from the pandemic, which meant inflation for a while and interest rate disruption and that's about it.

So, yes, Schwab hyped the dangers of the Great Reset. I imagine he was hoping the public would take a greater interest in thinking about how to create a better society for the future. Maybe he got some attention for that program of thinking about prep. His efforts to publicize the debate certainly did fuel a lot of conspiracy theories. Every good deed shall be punished.

It's worth asking who is deceiving whom, what is fake here and what is real. The conspiracy theory is a fiction. It takes a description of what's really happening in society and renames it as a plan, a nefarious plan devised by a cabal. The fakery, the deception and the nefarious conspiracy is the conspiracy theory. The Great Reset itself isn't even a plan and there aren't even any proposals in it.

It's very much a piece with the Gates-Musk paradox, which you may read about here.

In public affairs and in mainstream news media, the focus is on danger. Danger sells, and each news medium peddles its fears to its particular market share of political bias. The Republicans are dangerous to the NYTimes' readers, the Democrats are a national danger to the Fox watchers. Philanthropy, on the other hand, isn't a big seller although it purports to fix a danger. Conspiracy theory does a run around all of it.

Engagement with politics in the news assumes some kind of investment in political affairs -- that voting, for example, for one party or person and not another will actually matter. Suppose you are convinced that it doesn't matter, that the world is not only beyond your control but also in the control of a remote elite. On such a view, philanthropy can only be a deception, and solutions are impossible. You cannot have an investment in political affairs since you can make no difference. That's the conspiracy theory mindset. And there's a lot of truth to it. Does the NYTimes reader's vote actually make a difference? Who is the fool here?

Well, both. The conspiracy theorists are wise to their own political impotence, but have fabricated theories to confirm their own distrust and powerlessness.

The conspiracy theory is the perfect convergence of distrust and fictionalization, Tom Gilovich’s source of bias – must I believe the benign story I’ve been told, can I believe a fiction of fear? Can I make up a story that at once confirms my fear and distrust of information? A conspiracy theory will not only confirm my fear, but because it is contrary to the mainstream story, the fiction will also confirm my distrust of mainstream information. Foolproof. It’s the perfect story.

Monday, March 24, 2025

how the Big Pharma conspiracy theory doesn't get the medical establishment's flaws

Go to any hospital or medical advice website and you'll find this prominent advice on health (the order may differ): exercise; eat lots of fresh fruits, vegetables, legumes, olive oil -- the "Mediterranean diet" -- and fish; don't smoke; avoid drinking alcohol; restrict red meat; don't eat processed meats. Nowhere will you find pharmaceuticals on their list of health recommendations.

I've written elsewhere about the role of the oblivious obvious -- the tendency to ignore the normal, the frequent, the common and the benign in favor of attending only to the harmful and dangerous, to the unusual that is also unusually scary. The Big Pharma-Medical Establishment conspiracy is a case in point.

The conspiracy has a rational principle: "Follow the money". Big Pharma is making big bucks, it colludes with a gov't agency, the FDA, doctors prescribe these pharmaceuticals every day, and the insurance companies and the retail pharmacies are all taking their share. So there's a lot of evidence in support confirming the conspiracy theory.

But there's this disconfirmatory evidence and it's in your face -- the oblivious obvious. No medical website promotes pharmaceuticals for overall health. It's all almost exactly what you'd find among New Agey, down home, no-money-to-follow advice: eat well, exercise, avoid unhealthy addictions.

[I've written elsewhere on how misleading and cheap confirmatory evidence is, and how much more information disconfirmatory evidence provides, so I'm not going into it here.]

It's also true that doctors only prescribe pharmaceuticals and not herbal remedies or life-style prevention. That's very much consistent with the conspiracy theory.

So what's going on? Is there a conspiracy or not?

Consider why people go to the doctor -- the doctor-visit market. Is it to get life-style prevention advice? While some small percent of people go to get regular check-ups, almost everyone who is in a health crisis and needs immediate intervention goes to a doctor, close to 100% of them. The doctor-visit market is filled with exigent cases. And those who go for a regular check-up, if there's no exigency, they are not prescribed anything except possibly the healthy advice listed above.

A friend goes for a check-up, gets an EKG which finds that his arteries are 95% occluded. Without immediate intervention, he's likely to die any moment, in fact, it's a wonder that he's alive. Should the doctor advise him to exercise and eat lots of fruits and veggies and send him on his way?

Why not? Well, for one reason, he'd be sued way up his ass for malpractice. The patient needs intervention. The preventative advice is too late. The Mediterranean diet might be prescribed after recovery from the intervention -- in this case minor surgery to insert stents -- but there is an obvious ethical and legal requirement to intervene, not just provide nice health tips.

The doctor-visit market is determined by these two phenomena: patients visit doctors for intervention, and the intervention must cover the doctor's legal liability. This is also why the doctor can't prescribe herbs rather than pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceuticals are tested and approved by the FDA, so if they fail, it's not the doctor's fault and the doctor cannot be successfully sued for prescribing the pharmaceutical appropriate to the symptoms presented.

And why are the herbs not tested and FDA approved? Because the pharmaceutical -- as the conspiracy theorists accurately explain -- makes money for the pharmaceutical industry, the herb doesn't. So there's little funding for herb testing. Of course that's not a conspiracy, it's just what economists euphemistically call a market failure. It's a big failure.

But it's not the only failure of the medical vocation. As a vocation, doctors have to follow the limits or restrictions of these two phenomena of their market -- patients are there for either testing or intervention and the intervention is either surgery or pharmaceutical. That's all they can offer you. Don't be asking why they don't prescribe herbs or life-style advice or why they don't know about nutrition. It's not their job because they're not in that market. They are in the health exigency market regulated by the FDA and law suits and research funded by Big Pharma.

It's not a conspiracy, and viewing it as a conspiracy doesn't help understanding it. What helps is to understand that when you go to a doctor, don't expect instant, immediate natural cures. Expect either a pharmaceutical that is legally covered, or surgery that, done by someone with experience, is likely to help, provided that the doctor in question isn't just banking on unnecessary interventions.

And there are quacks too. As the joke goes, what do you call a C student in med school? "Doctor."

A friend points out that doctors don't know much about their patients. They don't know the life circumstances that might be causing anxiety or stress. But this is equally true of your acupuncturist who will prescribe based on pulse and a quick look at the tongue. So this criticism of western medicine seems to me to be evidence of an anti-mainstream distrust bias.

What's the source of the bias? Is it that western medicine refuses to acknowledge traditional methods? This might be an overreaction to the constraints on the doctor-visit market. Doctors can't be recommending methods that aren't legally covered. Now some doctors may be unwarrantedly skeptical of traditional medicine, but without the necessary research, that skepticism can't be faulted even if it can be ignorantly biased: the outcome of skepticism and legal cover are the same. So patients have to learn to fend for themselves, research for themselves, assess the risks and take their chances.

the two types of conspiracy theories

We're all familiar with conspiracy theories, but not so familiar with their history and development. Their changes over time should tell us something about either society, politics, or social psychology or all of these.

In 1964, shortly after JFK was assassinated, the historian Richard Hofstadter published a piece called "The paranoid style in American politics" about the history of conspiracy theories running through U.S. politics from the inception of the republic to the 1950's McCarthy era. He finds a continuity and development from the 19th century fears that Catholics are coming to take over our gov't and society, and calls for action before it's too late, to the 20th century fear that the communists are not just coming to take over our gov't and society, but are already infiltrating gov't, and calls to root them out before it's too late.

The common trait of these conspiracy theories are the paranoid "they're coming for us" and "we must act now before it's too late". The conspiracy theories are a call to arms.

In 2014, thirteen years after 9/11, Lance deHaven-Smith published a short book titled Conspiracy Theory in America, in which he identifies the conspiracies that have become familiar in our political discourse, what he calls state crimes against democracy (SCADs), focusing on events perpetrated by gov't itself, not by some group infiltrating the gov't or society. Those conspiracy theories are not about "they are coming to infiltrate our gov't". That alarm is already too late. The agent perpetrating these SCADs is the gov't itself. They control our gov't; they are our gov't.

Setting aside whether any of these conspiracies are true or not, SCAD theory is a radical departure from the older conspiracy style. For one thing, you can't really do much about SCADs, so the alarmism isn't a call to action so much as a call to understanding, drawing aside the veil of truth. It's a confirming of distrust of the gov't but also of any media that endorse gov't propaganda. It's not just a distrust of a particular immigrant population or political ideology or a particular interest. It's a world of paranoia, with distrust of information at its heart. AI arrives at the worst moment in this trajectory towards distrust of information. The prognosis is dark.

In 2023, Naomi Klein published Doppleganger, shortly after the Covid pandemic mania subsided. Although she doesn't mention deHaven-Smith, she finds the deHaven-Smith style of conspiracy thinking rampant in the AltRight in its response to Covid: the AltRight sees a gov't lying to us about masks, about vaccines, about the origin of the virus. (Klein assumes and accepts the Democratic-NYTimes/Atlantic/NPR-blue Covid policies, recommendations and propaganda without question and without any scientific support or citation or any support or citation. Almost all of her citations are of fictional accounts -- novels -- about doppelgangers. Lots of those.) Her criticism of these AltRight SCAD theories is that they are missing the real danger which is not Bill Gates plotting to control the world, but capitalism; not a nefarious cabal that run us, but a profiteering system that is out of control. The immediate fear portrayed in the book is the fear of the AltRight appropriating all activism and criticism of gov't and its capitalist system. The AltRight is replacing the Left's Marxist criticism with fringe deHaven-Smith style conspiracy theories. IOW, the purpose of the book is to call the alarm that the AltRight, full of false fringe SCAD conspiracy theories, is coming for us, is infiltrating our politics and social discourse and we must wake up to their threat before it is too late!!

Full circle. Need I mention that the vaccines, though they seem to have prevented many, many deaths, did not prevent infection or contagion, the virus posed little threat to the younger generation, mask mandates did not work, and the lab leak theory is more probable than the wet market theory. And all of these facts were well-known from the beginning. When the vaccine was first rolled out, those who first got it knew that it would not prevent infection or contagion but would ameliorate symptoms, lowering the likelihood of death by Covid, not saving others from Covid. (I asked the old guys who were the first to be vacccinated, and they were quite clear and candid about it.) Anyone looking at people's masking behaviors, restaurant allowances, flight dinners in crowded plane cabins, use of cloth masks and wearing masks under the nose etc. -- any rational being knew that mask mandates could not possibly work even if masks themselves worked. Contact tracing and forcible quarantining might have worked, but this was not asked of us.

These facts do not, of course validate the AltRight SCAD theories. It doesn't validate any anti-capitalist theory either. The system to blame is not capitalism, but two-party democracy and a body politic divided between rural and urban, progressive and traditional, professional-prestige-class and disparaged-disrespected class, the educated elite privileged NYTimes readers, who reap the many benefits of the society and its gov't, and the non elites who know they are not respected by those elites; a two party system divided between red team and blue team, Us vs Them, distrust of in-group for the out-group. The structure to blame is the polarization within our society, and the politicization of pandemic response very much aligned with MAGA on one side and Trump Derangement Syndrome on the other.

To be fair, the facts do validate the AltRight's distrust of mainstream information, and that's the essence of the deHaven-Smith style conspiracy cultivated on the Right. And the facts do something else as well. They show that Klein's unquestioning acceptance of the Democratic-NYTimes/Atlantic/NPR-blue propaganda was wrong. What she gets right is her Hofstadter paranoid conspiracy "they are taking over". Distrust of information is spreading widely. COVID killed trust for many.

We're living now in a society of conspiracy theories on every side. Social capital -- the trust of one another and of gov't and of gov't for its people -- is waning. Polarization feeds distrust, and liberal democracy -- the engagement of voters in governance and the engagement of government officers in its voter base -- feeds polarization. The erosion of social trust and trust in information may be the great weakness of liberal democracy, its danger and downfall.

PS after the Trump inauguration: the autocratic means of administration may in the long run be healthy for our divided public.

fungible and non fungible fictions: money vs religion in war

Whom do you trust, and why? Would you trust someone who believes in a fiction that you know is a fantasy?

On the neoliberal understanding of international relations, trade fosters international peace since war is an obstacle to trade and wealth creation. Money is transpersonal and transnational -- like math and music, it is a universal language, math a measure, music an emotional manipulation, money a price of value.

Like religion, money is also a kind of fiction based on a faith. In the case of religion, the faith depends a bit more on the individual's investment in the religion than on the coreligionists or their investment. If one's coreligionists all turn atheist, one may maintain one's religion without loss of belief. The faith in money depends entirely on the collective investment. Without that collective faith, no value.

Unlike religion, money is most valuable to those who have the least of it, yet those with a lot of it stand to lose the most if the currency collapses. These paradoxical asymmetries are not only ironic but socially dysfunctional.

(Compare, for example: I have no religion, so I have no use for religion at all, aside from an intellectual curiosity about those who believe and the history of believers. And those who are most invested in their religion are impervious to any attack on it. The contrast with money is stark.)

The classical economic idea is that all people have needs, creating a vast demand for certain kinds of goods. On that view, trade and comparative advantage are the most efficient means of wealth creation for everyone. Religions, however, are not universal needs and don't respond universally to any basic needs they might serve. Some of us believe in multiple gods, others none but ghosts of ancestors, others have only one, some none at all. Religions are like local currencies, except that there's no currency exchange rate, in fact there's no exchange market at all. When you convert someone to another religion, you expect the convert to give up the old religious doctrines and values, and you're frustrated if they don't. On the contrary, currency is not essentialist at all. One of its main purposes is to serve as a medium of exchange. It's anti-essentialist. It serves some other purpose than itself, and it's a universal purpose.

One might conclude that religions, lacking an exchange market, wouldn't interact with money, a medium of exchange. But they do in national contests, especially in war, and despite the universal recognition of trade trust. It's because religion is a non fungible fiction. Both properties -- non fungiblility and fictionality -- are essential to its interactive character.

Suppose I have a carrot and I want to sell it. It's not a fiction, but a local resource -- I have it with me, you don't. It has a value on the market, so anyone can see and understand its price, and so anyone can buy it either to use or to resell. It requires only a little trust between buyer and seller to achieve an exchange.

Suppose I have a religious belief. It has a value to my coreligionists, but it's really a fiction, so not only does it have limited value to the non believers but I know that others don't see its value. Can I trust those others? How can I, when the belief I hold is a fiction that no one else would buy unless sharing that fiction.

The assumption that others will not share the fiction, should incline the believers to justify the fiction to strengthen it. No one is more entrenched in their views than when challenged by criticism. The fact that the religion is an unbelievable fiction doesn't make it any the less believed. On the contrary, its fictionality inspires more steadfastness of belief. The unbelievabilities flourish and multiply in religions -- djinns, angels, devils, ghosts. It's a Pandora's box, an open door to common-fare imaginings (very unlike the extraordinary revelations of science, which are far beyond common imagination, see the post on the mediocrity of art and the unbounded imagination of science).

Religion, like property, leads to conflict. In the case of property, the threat of violence is essential and definitional: "it's mine" means no more nor less than "If you try to take it, imma hurt you" or I'll get someone or some authority to hurt you. But trade, the exchange of resources through money, overcomes this obstacle on the property side. It's the difference between trade and sharing.

Religion has a dual relation to property. If you adopt my religion, I'm none the poorer for it. That's one reason why many are surprised by woke objections to cultural appropriation. You adopt my religion or religious ideas or values, I don't lose; if anything, I win! But if you try to take my religious beliefs from me, then my beliefs are like property, my loss.

It's often observed that money is a fiction. This is misleading. Money is a fungible fiction, so it facilitates exchange. Not so with non fungible fictions like religion.

Sunday, March 23, 2025

The Gates-Musk paradox and the surprising source of distrust

Ever notice that fringe conspiracy theories surround liberal philanthropists but not brazenly selfish libertarians?

Bill Gates, who wants to end malaria, not for himself -- he lives in Washington State for god's sake -- but to help the helpless in the tropics (and yes, selfishly to cleanse his conscience and legacy and yes, he invests in the cures, but he could invest those funds in real estate and earn even more). Gates is the regular target of some of the most nefarious conspiracy theories, among them some of the most absurd ones like promoting vaccines with the intent of inserting a chip in every body to surveil or control us all.

Meanwhile Elon Musk, who shows no interest in protecting the little guy or helping the helpless, whose philanthropic trust gives money to his own enterprises -- iow, it's just a selfish money-laundering scheme -- Elon Musk who believes in libertarian selfishness and promotes selfishness, even taking gov't subsidies to float his business and fatten his wallet, who plainly and publicly buys political influence, who really does seem to be intent on actually controlling the world, and who owns the public square itself under the pretense of ridding it of censorship (although his first act was to restrict criticism of himself), this Elon Musk who actually, physically and literally inserts chips in human brains at Neurolink -- that Elon Musk has not a single fringe tinfoil hat conspiracy attached to him. Ever notice that? Isn't that odd?

I want to call this the Gates-Musk paradox.

I want to be clear at the outset, that I'm not complaining that the conspiracy theorist is treating Gates unfairly and I'm not defending Gates' philanthropy. Gates could be a misguided, arrogant, meddling fool and Musk a brilliant hero of our time (though I doubt that, given other proposals I've written about here). I'm interested only in understanding the paradox to see it if tells us anything about theorizing and theorists, that is, about human thinking.

This paradox, btw, is not just true of Gates and Musk. It is a general character of conspiracy theory, maybe even a law.

Consider Soros, another classic philanthropist spending his money on helping the helpless whether they be despised immigrants or victims of racism or of autocracy. Whatever you think of his goals or his means, they are not selfish. Yes, he wants to influence gov'ts, but to encourage liberal democracy so that all its members have equal access to rule. You can't call that enslaving the world -- forcing people to choose for themselves what they want of their gov't -- but world enslavement is what he's accused of attempting. Meanwhile, Peter Thiel promotes monopoly as the best business strategy -- not to benefit society or the little guy, but to make most money fastest for the monopolist alone. There are no elaborate fictionalized conspiracy theories or wacky conspiracy theorist calls to alarm surrounding Thiel. But Soros? He's second after the Federal Reserve among conspiracy theory targets.

So what's going on with this Gates-Musk paradox? It seems as if the conspiracy theory crowd have purposely chosen the wrong targets, welcoming the dangerous Musks and Thiels and Kochs, while shining light on shadows that they themselves have cast for the purpose of shining a light on the unsuspecting. Crazy, no?

It takes more effort to invent a danger than to acknowledge a public one in plain sight. So why all the attention to the benign philanthropists, embracing all the while the bullying, controlling and even transparently lying self-promoters?

The obvious response is that a conspiracy theory has to have an element of secrecy and deception so they can't attach to Musk and Thiel or Charles Koch or the late Sheldon Adelson. And of course that's true about a conspiracy. But consider what that means about conspiracy theories and the theorists' concerns. Are the theorists concerned about nefarious actions and their dangers or are they concerned about secrecy and deception? Is conspiracy theory about danger or about distrust? The Musks and Thiels also do not inspire trust. The conspiracy theorist is not distrustful of the targets, they're distrustful of reality, of information. The essence of a fringe conspiracy is not just distrust, it's the fictionalization of distrust, the irreality that confirms their distrust.

There's a lot more to be said about this paradox, but I want to stop here with this consequence of it: the paradox means that distrust of reality and information (not of danger nor of conspirators) is the focus of conspiracy theory. It may have been obvious that distrust was the driving emotion or cognitive principle among conspiracy theories. My goal in this post is to provide the evidence that this is so. The paradox is that evidence.

where the future is behind you

Why do we talk about the future as ahead of us and the past behind us?

Among the Aymara, an ancient Andean people, it's the other way around. For them, the past is before them, the future behind. That is, the past, which we know with some certainty having actually experienced it, is like what can be seen in front of us. The future, which we aren't certain of, is the unseen, like what's behind us. Given that our vision is our paramount sense, and, like predator species our eyes are both facing front (unlike vegetarian species like squirrels and goats whose eyes are set to the sides of their faces so they can see the focused predators approaching them), this distribution of information -- certainty of the past before us versus uncertainty of the future behind -- makes perfect sense. It makes so much sense that you wonder why we think the future is ahead of us and the past behind.

A moment's thought provides a good answer. Since we are a predator species, we want to see our prey in order to capture it. We're goal-oriented, desire-oriented. It's all about what we want and how to get it. Our notion of time is a self-interested one. Time, for us, is the answer to what we want.

The common word "progress" -- a basic notion of time for us -- always means future and always good. By definition! It's more than just a deep cultural bias towards time, it's a cultural value.

Think about fashion. Fashion is this progress-value stripped bare of any other good. The latest in clothing, architecture, art, trendy ideas -- they are not improvements in any value except that they are not yesterday's style. In the 50's the coolest ties were thin and skirts were long. In the 60's hip ties were thick and skirts very short. Are thick ties and improvement on thin ones? Is there some benefit to a thick tie? Is there any practical use in these trends? Culture critics like to analyse the meaning of these differences, but they forget that a) what's most important is the mere difference from the most recent past and b) meanings are typically justifications after the fact. Fashion is progress without any other good than newness -- mere difference, to use the semiologic word.

What about the Aymara, then? What is time the answer to, for them?

An odd feature of the Aymara language is its grammatical encoding of degrees of certainty. It's impossible to say "It's raining" without including a grammatical piece on the verb indicating whether you know it's raining because you have direct evidence (like "I see it is raining now"), epistemic conclusion (I see people opening umbrellas therefore "it must be raining") or various degrees of uncertainty ("I think it's raining', "it's probably raining"). Now, obviously, English speakers can express all these degrees and types of certainty too -- look at the glosses I just gave. But they are not grammaticalized. They are separated into individual words like "might", "must", "know", "probably" and "I think" and are included at the speaker's will, optionally. Certainty -- degrees of knowledge and evidence -- are grammatically inseparable in Aymara.

You can see where this is going. It suggests that these degrees of knowledge grammaticalized in their language have a pervasive influence on their perception and maybe their attitudes and culture. For us, information is self-oriented. To the Aymara, information is not desire, but understanding, the gradations from ignorance to belief to knowledge and certainty. To them time is not the answer to what they want, it's the answer to what they can know.

Maybe it's too much to suppose that our time perspective is all about individual wants. After all, there are many cultures that are collectivist and not so individualist as ours in the US, and their view of the future is just as predatory as ours is. Roman architecture showed no sign of fashion or progress. They thought their style was optimal so why change? That was generally their attitude towards their culture: "We're the greatest in the world, we rule, why change anything?" including their agriculture, one reason for their collapse. Hero of Alexandria invented a steam engine around the 2nd or 3rd century, but did the Romans use it to improve their agriculture or their transport? They used it to impress visiting barbarians with statues moving their limbs or wings to all appearances miraculously by themselves. Not a progressive vision. It would be unfair to compare their clothing fashions since production was so much slower than ours. But it does seem that their sense of civic virtue contrasts with our individualism. How many prominent Romans fallen out of public favor chose suicide as a noble and dignified choice? For us suicide is all about individual solitary personal despair. Civic dignity? Does George Bush even hide his face in shame much less sit on a sword?

On the other hand, the Romans did love any new religious mystery and semper prorsum -- always forward -- was a common Latin motto.

Lakoff & Johnson's Metaphors We Live By shows that these orientation 'metaphors' -- time is in a spatial one dimensional line with the future before us the past behind, or good is up, bad is down -- are arbitrary, and their justifications are post hoc. So you might say that the stock market goes up when it's value increases on analogy with a pile of dollars increasing with its height, but on the other hand, if you pile up a pyramid of gold bars, the greatest value will be at the bottom layer and the very top the very least. "Good is up, the stock market goes up when it increases in value" is arbitrary. Hades was the richest of the gods, his realm the deep down source of all precious metals and gems -- wealth is down. "High" frequency mouse squeaks are down and thunder, the "low" frequency, is up. It's all arbitrary and you can find a justification after the fact for any so-called orientational metaphor.

I do wonder, though, how much different we'd be if we spoke Aymara and admitted that the future is unseen and unknown. Our individualist future seems short-sighted and narrow. How many physicians will admit that what's understood today will be tomorrow's ignorance, today's cure tomorrow's harm? How many of us, knowing how foolish we were in the past are willing to admit that given what we'll know tomorrow, we must be wrong and foolish now?

simple way to encounter your unconscious mind

It happened like this. I'm lying in bed having just awakened in the morning. But I don't want to get out of bed. Like every day.

I have no trouble waking up. In the last half century, I haven't used an alarm clock once. I tell myself just before I go to sleep at what time I'll need to wake up, and just like that, I wake up almost exactly to the minute as planned. I learned this in my adolescence from some radio broadcast describing this method. I tried it and it worked. Fifty years later, I still have no trouble waking up when I need to. It's automatic and accurate. Most animals have a kind of accurate internal clock, and this method is merely letting it run a behavior on autopilot.

Getting out of bed once awake, now that's a whole different problem.

It's always a struggle. Here's a way to understand the problem. For every moment when I want to get out of bed I want to stay in bed for just one moment longer, and any each tiny moment is not enough to make me late. It's a sorites paradox (exactly which lost hair made me definitively bald), and I'm stuck in it in real time. I'm not a believer in discipline. I want the exit from bed to be as magically automatic and seamless as waking up is for me. But it's not. It's a struggle and I lose repeatedly, partly because the logic -- that each tiny moment is not enough to make me late -- is inexorable. And even when that logic fails, I'm still struggling with myself, I want to get up but I don't want to get up. Discipline here just exacerbates the struggle. It might help to structure the waking: stop thinking and just get up. But isn't that just as puzzling? Why doesn't "stop thinking and just do" result in staying in bed? It'a real quandary.

The morning I'm describing above, I gave up. I thought, I'm getting nowhere, let me just think about what I'm going to teach today after I get up and dressed and out the door. Thinking about what I'm teaching engrosses me, always. There's so much I want to convey to the class, and I want it to be well-ordered but also comprehensive. It's a lot and I'm devoted to it and I'm soon far away in thoughts about systems and explanations of them and misunderstandings about them and ... then, suddenly, I discover I'm sitting on the edge of the bed. When did this happen?? When did I even decide to get out of bed???

I'm sitting on the edge of the bed, but I don't know when I made this decision to get out of bed. There must have been a decision, and it must have happened while I was thinking about teaching. But I was thinking about teaching, not about getting out of bed.

You can see where this is going. Somewhere in the back of my mind -- to use a locational metaphor that probably will bias my account of what happened -- somewhere some process obedient to the recognized need for me to get out of bed, moved the levers of my motor functions in the brain and I got up and out of bed without my surface awareness. And "I" -- the surface awareness -- didn't learn about it until well after it was all accomplished.

I thought to myself (to my aware self), if this is really how my mind works, then I should be able to repeat this process with intent. And so I did the next morning. And every morning thereafter.

And if I could do this in bed, couldn't I do this with other actions? What action? Some other situation in which I never want to exit but must. The hot shower, of course.

By now you recognize what a hedonist I am. In the shower, I have the same problem. For every moment in the shower I always want to stay just one moment longer. It's like a little mathematical induction. I should stay in there forever or until I drop, wrinkled like a prune. How I ever get out of there, I don't know. Or I didn't know, and now I do. It's when I'm not thinking about the shower. It must be how I always get out of there, but never noticed. So I tried the bed method and, lo and behold, it worked.

Doesn't that imply that all my decisive choices are like this? Done without my awareness?

There's plenty of research that tells us that our awareness is late in the decision process. Christof Koch, in his book The Quest for Consciousness, describes the work he did on this -- but he's just one of many. Deflationary theories of the mind like Chater's also align with this observation, and experiments with split brains confirm that the mind justifies its actions regardless of the sources of its actions, iow, what we, using our folk psychology call our decision-making process -- "I chose to do this because of such and such reason" -- is actually all post hoc: I do; and then my mind invents or figures out a reason convenient to its self-narrative. Descartes got it backwards. Not "I think, therefore I am"; it's "someone's thinking, but it aint me". :-)

What's new here is that I seem to be able to access this process after the fact, and knowing this, I can game it by letting it do its thing without my struggling with it. It knows I need to get out of bed and turn off the hot shower. I don't need to tell it. All I need to do is think about teaching and systems and ideas, or anything that takes me far from the matter at hand.

The more I attend to this, the more I observe it. Watching my decision-making process has become almost a commonplace, as if I had a constant companion, a kind of double within me. I haven't yet explored all its underground activities. Does it run my biases? Is it the one who loses appetite when I'm in fasting mode? Just how much influence does it have over me?

And who is this person? Is he (it?) my obedient self, the responsible one, or the one frightened to be late or diverge from the program? Or does he have a variety of intents depending on his mood or on the circumstances. And if gender is an identity signal system, an interactive language, does it even have a gender? It could be hosted by a male body but with no sense of sexual identity at all, just decision-making in response to worries and needs, or maybe at most the needs for the actions given to male sex bodies in our culture and no more gender-narrative than that -- male body with no gender narrative and no identity signals? Or is it sensitive to my gender-signaling needs? It could be my inner heteronormative man. And how can I test this possibly deflationary, flat unconscious mind, aside from just watching its actions post hoc?

More likely, there are many inner Me's. The eater, the exerciser, the self-punisher, the self-lover, the self-defender and self-slayer. Let's not count.

I observe the automated decision-makers more an more, at almost any moment of action, especially when I'm changing course -- from writing to getting up for coffee or even grabbing for the cup next to me (as I just did), to putting myself together to leave the apartment, check the range to ensure the gas isn't on (post Covid I can't trust my nose to do this anymore). I'm often unaware of these decisions until after I've (one of the other "I"s) made them. And is the other I aware or is it mechanical? Does it have thoughts ever, and insinuate them into my awareness? I intuit that it is immediately connected to the emotions, and the biases that are irrepressibly tied to those emotions. How is that different from having a thought? On a deflationary or flat view of mind, there might be no difference. The Other Me runs the biases, the surface Me merely fictionalizes to itself an identity-signaling Me-story.

And I do see this social Me and the inner Other I. When I first spy someone that I know I have to socialize with but whom I don't really feel comfortable socializing with, I feel a jolt of negative arousal, almost like fear. Surely that must be the Other inner self.

This is all far-afield. I only meant to explain how to wake up in the morning and get out of bed with no struggle, no discipline, automatically like magic. Try it. See whom you meet, or who meets you.

what the invisible hand can't see

Adam Smith early in his Wealth of Nations, explains that where there is a need, capital, seeing opportunity for profit, will go to that need and supply it. For a price, of course. Since the incentive is the profit, the need must be expressed, at least potentially, in money. If there's no money in a particular market, capital cannot see any opportunity.

What Adam Smith didn't observe in his book was what capital couldn't see, and couldn't see it not because it didn't want to see it but because it is simply blind to it. And that invisibility is extreme poverty. In a money economy, where there is extreme poverty -- no money -- there is no market and nothing to draw capital to it.

Poverty is an embarrassing gap in Smith's book.

Smith's book also doesn't see how short-sighted the invisible hand is. Were the employers of labor to raise wages, consumption would in time likely grow, incentivizing more production and more employment and yet more consumption and more production and more employment and...an upwards spiral of increasing wealth from the top to the bottom and back up top. But the market, as we know from the 2008 collapse, is short-sighted, too short-sighted to see the advantage of raising wages now to benefit from the upward spiral later. In the short run, the market incentivizes the producer to keep wages as low as possible. Marx and Keynes saw this alike. There is no immediate incentive to spend more on labor. And that's because of the necessary character of the invisible hand.

The point of the "invisible hand" metaphor -- and its groundbreaking emergent-property insight -- is very much like Darwin's natural selection, emphasis on "natural", and Galton's wisdom of the crowd. Without any intent to do so, it produces a beneficial end-goal for all members participating. "Without intent" means "without intervention" on the part of thought or analysis or theory. The virtuous goal happens all by itself unintended, like natural selection and the wisdom of the crowd.

The focus in natural selection, the crowd and the invisible hand is on their successes -- natural selection yields amazing abilities of phenotypes, the distributed crowd yields accuracy beyond experts and the invisible hand yields consumer surplus and efficiency and wealth creation, all by themselves without any intent to do so. Extinction and starvation not so much -- out of sight, out of mind. Even market bubbles -- the failure of the crowd's distributed information -- is out of sight. Opportunity blinds us with wishful thinking. Unlike soap bubbles that are visible until they burst, a market bubble is invisible to those that make them until they burst. Then they're more than visible, they're felt.

To see beyond the incentives or to breed a species or to prevent a bubble requires thought, theory and the predictive foresight theory affords, and intervention. Maybe Smith could be excused for leaving out the starving if his project were an exclusively scientific one to describe and explain the market, and not to describe or explain circumstances where there is no market, like extreme poverty. If that were so, he would be exclusively analysing the market, not explaining how it should work, but only how it does work. But the latter end of his book is full of prescriptions: educators shouldn't be given salaries but should be paid directly by their students; commercial interests should not be allowed to lobby government lest they intervene in the market. So the book is not just scientific. It has a prescriptive point as well. The poverty gap is not excusable.

public spitting: transgressive pride and autonomy

I've been puzzled about public spitting for decades, too stupid to recognize the obvious. Men who spit, spit on a world that they see is unworthy of them and their basic dignity.

Lemme explain. In American culture, spitting seems to be about pride, masculine autonomy and something akin to solidarity or community: "I'm too proud to conform to norms of a class from which I am excluded. Acceding to such norms would compromise my proud masculine autonomy. My identity of masculine pride is supported by a community of likewise autonomous anti-elite, self-justifying refuseniks, comfortable and even snug and happy in our community of crude habits." That's a lot of lofty language and reasoning, but it comes down to a preference for peer behaviors cultivated during the youthful developmental stage and an indifference to adult elite notions of etiquette, perhaps perceived as effeminate or effete or fay.

While the privileged educated elite respect their world, a world from which they derive so much including and especially respect for their education, their sophistication and career accomplishments, the non elite have little reason to respect their environment. "This degraded and degrading world around me isn't worthy of me and my pride. I spit on it freely and trash it as it deserves. I don't think twice about it. Why should I?"

The knock-off effects of respect also include propaganda beliefs and conspiracy theory beliefs (many blog posts here on this topic). It's evident in the elite cherishing of "proper" English and the respect it gets from high and low. There's been plenty of public attention lately given to privilege -- white privilege, mostly -- and not enough to respect vs lack of respect across the social pyramid. Respect infects our understanding of the world in our theories about it, infects our attitudes about our surroundings and even our perception of language. It also infects our self esteem and our judgments of others. And it is an interactive game -- we get it from others and even from our surroundings and others' perception of our surroundings.

Monday, March 17, 2025

the strange beauty of logical positivism and popular and academic misconceptions about it

There are two common misconceptions about logical positivism. 1. the positivists, like New Atheists, set out to prove that non scientific theories like religion and metaphysics, are false and only science can be true, and 2. Logical positivism fails at its own criterion of meaningfulness.

(1) has got LP backwards. LP allows religions and metaphysical systems as not just true, but necessarily true, while it's the scientific theories that are possibly false, not necessarily true at all.

That's the strange beauty of LP. The difference LP draws between theories is not between the true or the false, but "meaningful" and "not meaningful", using a peculiar definition of "meaning". LP doesn't touch on any other aspect or virtue of non verifiable theories, their aesthetic value, their mystery or charm or inspirational insight, their moral or social value. Just their meaning, where "meaning" in LP is used as a theoretical jargon for "phenomenal informational impact -- how the world of phenomena and events are and are not." The challenge of unpacking their use of "meaning" such that it isn't circular is the reason for (2).

(2) is flatly false. Apply LP to LP and it verifies. (2) also assumes that LP is a theory and not either a definition or description or an axiomatic system or merely a kind of practical advice like Popper's demarcation.

The popular misconception has it that if LP is a theory it should apply to itself, but LP can't itself be verified. I think people who say this must not have tried to apply LP to LP, maybe because "it doesn't apply to itself" is self-reflexive and so clever-sounding that they don't bother to experiment to verify whether the clever is also true. Whatever their reason for why they don't apply it to itself, we can apply it here and now:

LP says that theories are meaningful (in the sense of "tells us how the world is or is not", "what's in the phenomenal world and what isn't") if their statements and predictions about the world are verifiable. Is this assertion verifiable? Sure. God is not a directly verifiable object. It's not meaningful in the LP sense of telling us how the phenomenal world is. Religion is meaningless in that sense. Are the bones of dinosaurs verifiable? Yes. Archeology is meaningful in the LP sense of telling us about the phenomenal world, in this case where to find dinosaur bones. LP is verified by both these cases. LP is meaningful in the LP sense of meaningful, telling us how the world is and is not.

This is all crude and simplistic, but it shows how to apply LP to LP. Let's try again with something more substantial.

Creationism cannot predict the fossil record. There's no book of trilobites and dinosaurs in scriptures, and scriptures don't need them. It doesn't tell us how the world is, phenomenally. That's an unverifiable theory, and notice, it's a necessarily true theory -- no empirical evidence can prove it false. (The New Atheist will complain about it's internal contradictions, but those are logical disproofs, not evidential disconfirmations, and LP is concerned only with evidence. That's a huge difference.) Archeology does predict the fossil record. Treatises on trilobites and dinosaurs belong to science. Biology and archeology tell us what we will and will not find when we dig into the earth and find bones. Are they true? Well, not necessarily. They are the most likely theories of the topic given the evidence currently available. True? Who knows what we'll discover tomorrow? And that's one difference between the religious or metaphysical theories and the scientific theories -- according to LP. What we discover tomorrow could trash our current science. It will never trash the religious or metaphysical theories. Are these differences between creationism and archeology verifiable? Yes, the difference seems to be verified. That difference is the LP criterion, the LP "theory".

You may have already noticed that creationism is strictly ambiguous over verificationism, since it doesn't predict, so you could say verificationism can't apply to creationism. IOW, the problem is not that verificationism doesn't apply to verificationism -- it does -- it's that verificationism doesn't apply to the necessarily true and meaningless (in the LP sense) theories.

Right at the outset, it's important to know that Karl Popper identified an essential flaw in LP. Verifiability runs into the inductive fallacy. Verifying a theory supports the theory but can't prove an explanatory theory, that is, it can't prove a theory that predicts the possible (as compared with post hoc descriptions of a closed set of observations). Popper replaced verificationism with falsificationism -- that a "meaningful" explanation must identify the conditions under which it would be false. The consequence is that scientific theories are never provably true, they are just the ones that haven't yet been proven false. There are weaknesses in falsifiability too, but it was an important advance over LP's primitive verificationism. LP was using its confirmation bias to confirm its theory of confirmationism. It's a typically human failure to use clear Bayesian reasoning.

The weakness of LP is not alone its confirmationism. It also defined "meaningfulness" in terms of verificationism and vice versa. Their criterion of science was circular. That's because LP's use of "meaning" is not a theory at all. It's a definition or axiom or maybe a kind of practical advice. Definitions generally don't apply to themselves. "Blue" is not blue, and it would be irrelevant even if it were blue. "Blue" can be used as a kind of practical advice: you can view these objects as having this common property of being blue. "Look at these -- they all have a kind of similar hue. For convenience let's call them 'blue' so they're 'blue-ish'." That's all there is to a definition. And if you can provide for all or many possible additional individuals ("that thing there should be included in the set") all the better. Most definitions don't apply to themselves, though some do: the set of definitions that define themselves, for example. Not very practical.

Another weakness of LP, most obvious in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, was the belief that there could be atomic facts, indivisible facts independent of any other facts or ideas or theories. But facts are partly theoretical -- they are conjectural, dependent on the likelihood of the theory -- and like theory, their value is their falsifiability. There's a frequency theory of hues that classes navy blue with sky blue although Russians distinguish them as distinct hues. When I was a child I refused to wear anything navy blue so repulsive to me was this color. My favorite color was sky blue. Which fact is relevant -- that navy blue and sky blue are opposite ends of a single color or that they are two colors? Depends on the theory and its purpose. (See "true but wrong" on this blog.) "Whales are giant fish" belongs to a biological taxonomy that sufficed for the deity in the Book of Job, and that book makes effective, memorable use of it. I have no problem with the "whales are giant fish" theory. It's just not useful for science, a predictive theory of what's out there in the phenomenal world and how it got there. People can wear different hats, you know.

The lack of conjectural theory in LP led to Wittgenstein's private language argument, a kind of reductio ad absurdum of his verificationism, applying verificationism to the mind. Can experiential states be verified, he asks. Well, on a verificationsit model of truth, no. Rather than seeing this as a disproof of the verificationist premise, and rather than seek a better conjecture, he oddly, and perversely, embraced the absurd result that the experiential is meaningless, and advocated for a kind of behaviorism that prevailed in philosophy and the sciences until Chomsky in 1956 demonstrated that such a behavioral program couldn't account for the productivity and inventiveness -- the creativeness -- of speech, that the mind played a necessary role in behavior. Chomsky's program was a better conjecture that led to a better understanding of the mind.

The common view holds that Wittgenstein's later views is a rejection of his earlier logical positivism. I think that's another misconception. His later views are, I think, best understood as pushing his earlier views to their extreme and often counterintuitive and even absurd logical consequences, an insistence on biting the philosophical bullets one after another. It's a wonder he had any teeth left.

So much for the strange beauty and the misconceptions.

In sum, "It doesn't apply to itself" sounds like a clever dismissal of logical positivism from those who don't know much about it or don't want to know about it. Unfortunately, they miss everything interesting in it. There were a lot of flaws in logical positivism in its early efforts, but failure of reflexive application is not one. Those flaws are evident in Wittgenstein's early work and in his later work as well, where they produced logical absurdities when applied to the mind, leaving the philosophy of science in an impoverished behavioral model until Chomsky's 1956 Syntactic Structures. That that restrictive impoverishment led to extraordinary behavioral insights -- Ryle's criticism of the Cartesian ghost in the machine, Austin's speech act theory, among many many others -- might be a topic for another post. As Jerry Fodor thought and said, behaviorism was provably wrong, but brilliant.

Sunday, March 16, 2025

the illogic of utopia, the danger of utopianism, and Popper's alternative

If the goal of life were to be happy, no one would have children.

That's if life had a goal.

When I first saw As You Like It, I was rapt by the first scene in the Forest of Arden. A random gathering of refugees of uncertain future, with diverse talents, backgrounds, personalities and dispositions, including at least one of no apparent talent, all making the best of their lot in the now, together. One, of course, has a lute -- someone always has a guitar -- and sings resonant songs, one is a philosopher enthusiastically espousing deep thoughts, another a young impulsive romantic and a bit stupid, and one, talentless and apparently opinionless who sits on a big chair at the center presiding over their little make-shift society, the refugee Duke, of whom nothing is asked and who asks nothing of his pretend-subjects.

It reminded me of my very first job. It was in a retail store in Times Square, 1971, all the night-shift employees randomly thrown together with various talents and dispositions, the lively yet gentle, delicate and beautiful Cecilia and her handsome and dashing boyfriend, his comical and trangressively vulgar brother; and there was a young out-of-towner trying to make it in the Big City, impressed with all the craziness of New Yorkers including the local streetwalker who'd regularly traipsed by to entertain us and just before leaving, pull off her t-shirt to shock the patrons with her bare b**bs then run out the door; and the night manager, a wry, gay composer who wrote musicals for Andy Warhol's transvestite Superstars -- all facing an uncertain future, but facing it in the now together. As the youngest -- sixteen, they were mostly in their mid twenties -- I was treated as the mascot. Despite our limited paycheck means, we spent Saturday evenings after work very late at dinner together in a local bar & grill.

If I had to spend eternity somehow, I'd choose that job. The day-to-day concerns and not knowing what life would hold were enough to engage all of us, and we all cared about each other, not in any programmatic or moral way, but the way kids who hang out together know and care about each other.

I had the same reaction to the old black and white 1937 movie Stage Door and the 1960's L-shaped Room, both about boarding house life in which the characters are thrown together randomly and live their uncertain lives together.

That's my heaven, but it's not happy. The option of perpetual happiness sounds to me in no way different from drug addiction. Is that what people want? Once hooked, maybe, and AI threatens to hook us all into indolence incrementally like frogs in a heating pot, but who would choose that hook aforehand?

Besides the utopian inclination to sacrifice the now for a distant future that cannot be predicted, utopianism is itself a dilemma -- it is either an impoverishment of human well-being (material goods or accomplishments or statuses) or, if it recognizes the richness of human needs, it's not utopian because some of those needs cannot logically be met -- what makes those needs fulfilling is that they are motivating wants, not accomplishments or gains.

I'm sure you all can think of examples of such motivating needs and wants that lead to engagement, absorption and fulfillment. A big part of what makes hunter-gatherer culture -- the culture that homo sapiens were naturally selected for through at least two million years of human evolution -- so idyllic (egalitarian, gender-equal, cooperative, no disciplining of children) is the engagement required to obtain their basic survival needs. And what is most dysfunctional in our society is excess supplying of needs (too much sugar, for example, or convenient transport instead of a healthy walk or climb up the stairs) and the property that follows from the surplus. "To each according to his [sic] needs" has failed us. We have to struggle against our desires now instead of struggling to fulfill them.

Karl Popper proposed an alternative to utopianism: a procedural model rather than the usual policy or top-down planned model. The ideal society, for Popper, is one which is a) highly sensitive to informational feedback of its policies, whatever policies are chosen; has b) the flexibility to learn from its mistakes and the agility to fix them quickly; c) responds to the needs and interests of its constituents. He thought liberal democracy was such a procedural ideal.

Recognizing that the technologies of the future cannot be predicted and since technology is a socio-economic game changer, staunch ideologies and top-down autocracies should have no place in government. Holding onto ideologies will obstruct the responsiveness required of policy-makers.

In this he may have been wrong -- the CCP seems to be more flexible, informationally sensitive and responsive than the US, an ostensibly liberal democracy, is. And the periodic, and apparently global, fashion for fascism and the polarization of the political realm tells us that the members of the society are neither informed nor rational in their understanding of the world. In an autocracy there's little point in holding strong political views so there's less social polarization, and besides, everyone more or less agrees on whether the autocrat is succeeding or not. Egyptians all recognize that their state is ruled by a military dictatorship. This does not produce polarization or rebellion. It produces general agreement, not with the gov't, but with the people who have to get by with their uncertain future, together.

So utopia is a stupid idea. Even an anti-ideological, bottom-up program like Popper's won't work. It's time to accept that the future depends on technology we cannot anticipate and that technology of the future will be a morality and personality and values game-changer. And above all, let's not sacrifice now for a future we can't understand much less predict. Take things as they come. The craziness of now suffices for the day.

It's hard to accept that the future is a foreign country. Doctors seem to have trouble understanding that their knowledge of today will be all wrong tomorrow. Can you blame them? What a sorry profession, dedicated helping and never doing harm, yet doomed to doing harm. It's no wonder that deal has to be sweetened with so much money.

student debt conspiracy theory and the "elites" fallacy

The belief that student debt was created by "the elites" in order to ensure that graduates would become yoked to the workplace as obedient, hard working labor, is not only widespread but is espoused even by prominent public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky. It shares two flaws of bad reasoning: ignoring the obvious and embracing positive evidence uncritically.

[Disclaimer: I don't know whether their theory is true. Truth is almost always a bit of a mystery. What follows is an explanation why anyone who believes this theory hasn't bothered to think it through, and likely embraced it for the sake of some political or ideological bias, since the belief is contradictory and inconsistent in itself. IOW, it's a stupid belief, true or not, so you shouldn't buy it and if you do buy it it's time to reflect on why you're not thinking.]

First, the debtors, by assumption, must use their wages to pay off their debt rather than spend their wages elsewhere. So every dollar siphoned into paying debt is a dollar that is not being spent in the productive economy -- purchases of consumables or assets like a house. This debt servicing certainly benefits the financial interests, but not the interests of the productive economy or vendors of consumables or assets. The theory implies that corporations that make stuff and sell stuff are not among the elites. Musk, Bezos, Cook, the Kochs and the Waltons would then not be included among the elites. It also implies the "the elites" want to suppress the productive economy. No one who holds this theory has ever complained that the theory implies that "the elites" have as their intention to undermine the corporations that make and sell. But that's exactly what this theory entails.

Second, again by the theory's premise, if the debt did not exist, the graduate would simply work less. But is there any evidence that this is true? Would you work less, or would you spend more? Would you find an apartment without roommates or a larger living space or a nicer place in a more interesting neighborhood? Or would you stay where you are, deal with your four roommates, refrain from getting married and have kids, just to work less or take a pay cut for a more relaxed work environment? When choosing a job, which is more important, better pay or less work? Human desires are unbounded. Did the GI Bill result in lower work hours? On the contrary, veterans can't find jobs that match their level of education. They are not choosing to work for less, they're forced to.

Inflation, btw, belies the "more money, less work" prediction. It tells us, "more money, more spending".

The underlying flaw in this conspiracy theory is the assumption that "the elites" are a monolith with a coherent program. That just isn't so. Debt benefits banks, but hurts the productive economy. Rents benefit landowners, but not the rest of the consuming economy -- that's an old Henry George observation. A burgeoning productive economy would benefit the banks, since there'd be more interest in investment and debt, and benefit real estate as well if wages rise. Everyone benefits from the productive economy -- the owners of capital, labor, finance and real estate. But student debt benefits only finance, not real estate, not the productive economy and certainly not wages or labor. So student debt is not a coherent program for anyone except banks, and banks would benefit without it anyway.

The divisions among "elites" extends further. Purchasing from Amazon is a loss to brick-and-mortar stores like Wal-Mart. Does that mean Wal-Mart is not among the elite? Or was it elite but no longer? GE used to be the giant among corporations, not anymore. And where are the railroad magnates today? They are not the owners of auto factories. Schumpeter described this ongoing shift among corporations, creative destruction. That's a good theory. And it's not a conspiracy of "elites". It's an observation of an emergent, distributed property, like the economy itself. Consumers like innovations that benefit them. No "elite" is forcing it on them. The market closely follows consumer desire, rarely the other way around.

When someone blames whatever on "the elites", ask, "Which elites?" There are many. And the conspiracy theorist's favorite advice "follow the money" all too often looks only upwards, ignoring the vast aggregate distributed funds in the consumer's aggregate pocket.

de-mystifying Wittgenstein (and a tribute to Chomsky)

Why is Wittgenstein so idolized? Could it be because he's misinterpreted?

A recurrent theme of this blog is observing, understanding and explaining the draw of the unknown or unpredictable and our drive to understand, explain, and predict and know -- the drive that natural selection gives us and that leads us to great species successes as well as to many cognitive biases and misinterpretations of the world, science and technology among the successes, superstitions among the cognitive biases. Mystery -- what we don't understand -- draws us towards some theory that will explain and predict.

Seems to me that Wittgenstein tapped into this mysteriousness in his later thinking and that's why it remains admired and hyped, even though his later thinking, clearly understood, is unmistakably and merely an embracing of the logical consequences of his previous logical positivism, not at all a rejection of it, and even though Chomsky's 1956 Syntactic Structures disproved and debunked Wittgenstein's behaviorist reductio ad absurdum conclusions.

The Wittgenstein admirers deplore the limitations of logical positivism, the limitations most evident in W's earlier Tractatus, and celebrate what they believe is his rejection of those views. Yet the later views are a drawing of the logical consequences of the earlier views, in the form of a reductio ad absurdum, which normally entails rejecting a premise of the theory, but with contrarian cleverness, Wittgenstein instead accepts the absurdity leaving us a philosophy at once mysterious, illogical, and, well, absurd. Like a religionist, he held to the doctrine, accepting the irrationality rather than accept that the irrationality disproved the doctrine, in W's case, verificationism.

What is the private language argument but a reductio of a behaviorist account of mind, leaving the mind as utterly mysterious? What is the questioning of mathematical method but a reductio of a behavioral account of math, rather than, say, understanding math the way most mathematicians do as just a made-up axiomatic system with well-defined functions?

This was the dispute with Popper. Popper argued that verificationism cannot escape the inductive fallacy. And, truly, verificationism is nothing but induction. What's needed for understanding, explaining and predicting, is what C.S.Peirce called abduction: conjectures that identify the conditions that would falsify them.

You can see already that verificationism is a systematic failure to apply Bayesian reasoning, a case of confirmation bias, and verificationaism is not science at all. What's needed for science is conjectures, tentative theories that stand until proven false. Far from Wittgenstein's contrarian mysteries, Popper offered a straightforward program for theoretical progress. In 1956 Chomsky then demonstrated that the behavioral model didn't even adequately describe language behavior, much less explain it. His conjectures, right or wrong, restored the productive role of the mind that Wittgenstein had effectively banned from science on verificationist grounds no different from the Tractatus, just applying them to the mind. (More on this topic here.)

death so sweet

(...if it's from old age. If it's a disease killing me, I'd feel robbed!)

Looking at suicide rates over the last decade I was touched to see that Covid pushed the rate up for age 85-and-above cohort. Touched, because I'm guessing that some of these are deaths of despair over the loss of a spouse.

That was my first thought, but it's not likely to account for all of the uptick, since at 85, your spouse is likely to have died already before the pandemic. But imagine watching so many others in your assisted living facility dying. No one to talk to, play with, love or entertain. The thought occurs, well, better go, it's time. They are lovelorn.

I don't know whether this is the explanation for the uptick, but the statistic seemed so sweet to me. When I think how hard it would be for me to give up on my life, the thought that one day I'll feel that there's nothing more to love, no one to engage with, and it's time to join the gone, that to me is sweet. 'Cause it's all about love, isn't it? It's all about love.

Forgive clinical talk now: if love is the driving emotion in a social species then why shouldn't we want to give up when there's no one left to love, play and engage with? Anthropologists call it "cooperation" through our hunter-gatherer evolutionary period, but it's really just loving, wanting from each other. Let's be real, hunter-gatherers don't have a cooperation emotion, it's loving and enjoying and playing with and engaging with and endlessly talking to the members of their foraging band that is the emotion that natural selection has given them to keep them all together and survive. This uptick of suicides is the sweetness of our species nature. You ask (or let Lex Fridman the King of Kringe ask) what is the meaning of life? The answer is of course, love (which is probably why the Kringe King always asks it) -- wanting from each other. Even when we argue, we want something from each other, approval, agreement, respect. "Meaning" in "the meaning of life" is an abuse of the language (post on this a-coming), but still. Love and loss, and letting go.

of mathematical beauty, crystals and potatoes: a Darwinian explanation

της τε ταυτου φυςεως και της θατερον (the nature of the same and the different -- Plato, Timaeus)

Potatoes are not pretty. They are also not mathematically patterned, not even symmetric. You may have noticed, they grow in the earth unseen, as if hiding how ugly they are.

Well, that'd be one just-so story of why they grow unseen. Maybe it's not so silly. More reasonable would be the just-so story of natural selection to conclude that they lack mathematical order and its beauty because they grow underground where you cannot see them. Natural selection for patterns would be wasted on potatoes. True of all the roots, btw.

This is, of course, the key to why patterns are perceived as beautiful. Randomness is mostly useless for communication since you can't control the signal -- randomness can only communicate randomness, of occasional communicative value, but quite limited to signaling itself, "random", regardless of context. Only patterns can communicate distinct, controlled signals. To the extent that communication benefits species, patterning should be found throughout the biological realm of visibility. Natural selection has happened upon a means by which to communicate and even attract organisms, a simple means of patterning with simple recursive math. (Language, the quintessential communicative means, itself is a highly recursive mathematical patterning.)

So natural selection, which "had no option" of using randomness for communication, leaves all of us visual organisms susceptible to patterning. It might even explain why we love theorizing to explain patterns. The regularities are the only option for effective communication, and theories are a form of communication. We want patterns because that's all that's worth understanding, as I think we'll see.

Randomness is not only uncommunicative, it's not predictive, and as temporal survival organisms, we want to predict future threats most especially, so we can avoid them. Natural selection again. Patterns, we love 'em. Randomness, not so much. It's nice for a change or a challenge. A mystery novel starts with the random, but we read to the end to bring it all into pattern. Timaeus' alternation of the same with the different, the pattern of the random with the predictable, has a special charm. We seem to be driven for prediction's sake to understand or find patterns in what seems at first random, but once understood, it's boring and we take it for granted. That's why news media leans towards threats and dangers, bleeding ledes. Cognition is not stable, it's a driven process. The familiar knowns are stable, and are soon taken for granted and forgotten, the oblivious obvious (post on this upcoming). The well of distrust seems bottomless: conspiracy theories are more fun than facts.

You object, "crystals are highly ordered and beautiful to our eyes, yet they are mostly in the earth". Ah, but that's the perfect exception that proves the theory. Crystals are not organisms.

They can't intend anything, much less communicate intentions outside themselves. Lacking reproductive DNA, they don't engage in generational natural selection. They're stuck with fixed forms that either survive (continue to exist in their local context) or don't, no chance of evolving better.

That crystals abound in the earth tells us that they are not signaling (and that organisms can, and can use patterning to accomplish this), they don't know what they're doing -- not a clue, and this is important for the panpsychists -- and that we're selected for liking patterns, that we see them as beautiful, or, to use more scientific language, as attractive. It's a natural selection gimmick available only to reproductive generations. On this planet, that's the biological organisms. A distinguishing difference between the organic and inorganic is that inorganic patterns may be entirely unseen for their entire long duration; organic patterns are meant to be seen.

To put it in the plainest terms, if crystals were organismic, they wouldn't be hiding underground, b****. :-)

the gnomiad: the science and sociology of life advice and their paradoxical puzzles

This post is a preliminary stub. I'm still working on the project, but here's a sketch of the science and sociology of gnomes (life advice). It's in three parts: 1) most surprisingly, the contrary pairing of life prescriptions show that they are empty, which implies that the benefit we seek from advice or theories of the world, while psychologically soothing or reassuring, is impractical and unaligned with the realities we actually face everyday; we seek a simplified, confirmatory world of fantasy while we actually make practical choices in reality, 2) the prevalence of one of the pairs, and absence of the other, in the culture raises many questions about cultural values or taboos or public reactions to those values and taboos, 3) most obviously, advice-giving influencers can be conveniently analysed politically and socially through their advice selection of one pair over the other. Finally, since philosophies and religions across the world are not only shot full advice but are often motivated by advice-giving and draw their audience from advice-seekers, the social psychology of gnomes affords a novel perspective on these theories and insights into their audiences' motives.

"...mystery, miracle and authority..." -- the Grand Inquisitor

1. the complementarity of gnomes

Life advice is everywhere on social media. It has obvious appeal, but an objective look at advice -- objective in the sense of not looking for advice but just looking at advice as a phenomenon or set of phenomena -- reveals paradoxes and puzzles. First among them is the pairing of contrary advice. A piece of popular advice and its contrary advice can both be equally useful, wise and true. "Better safe than sorry" is just as good a piece of advice as "carpe diem" (seize the day) or "fortune favors the brave" that is, don't be safe or you'll be sorry. Even more puzzling, why do people find any of these gnomes inspiring, when their opposite should be equally inspiring?

A moment's reflection on this complementarity of gnomes -- their tendency to come in contrary pairs -- shows that gnomes are little more than familiar, even banal definitions. "Better safe than sorry" is little more than a definition of what "safe" means; "seize the day" merely defines, metaphorically, "opportunity". And yet more puzzling, every English speaker already knows the definitions of these words and are familiar with the ideas they denote. Everyone already knows the benefit of safety and when safety is useful, and the same for opportunity and risk. We all know that we must assess risk and safety case by case. So what is the appeal of the advice?? Is it like quoting one's favorite song lyrics instead of using one's own words? Or is there something more going on? More, no doubt, as we'll see.

If life advice adds no useful information in practice, is the appeal purely psychological? Suppose it's just a way to make life seem simpler even though it has no practical value in decision-making. It's a kind of psychological soporific, a soothing reassurance to smooth away anxiety just a little bit. Grasping one of the complementary gnome pairs provides a way through the complexity of everyday life. And choosing that principle no doubt confirms what one wants to believe about oneself and one's place in the world.

I think this is one of the revealing surprises of what I want to call the gnomiad, collecting the range of advice (tongue-in-cheek hat tip to Wolfram), and gnomiology, the study of advice. Gnomiadry -- thinking about gnomes and their world -- tells us that our imagination of life is distinct from the life as we live it and that this imaginary has emotional value even though it has no other practical value. Isn't that what religion provides as well? Could it be that philosophical and political systems supply the same confirmatory reassurance and soothing simplicity? And what about science and its laws dependent on ideal situations? Don't these theories or narratives, understandings and explanations of the phenomenal world reflect a deep and basic species need? Put into predictive mind (Friston, Clark), isn't this what defines an organism -- creating a theory of its environment & itself to predict its future and preserve its free energy? Ironic that for humans, preserving our free energy from the wastefulness of anxiety and stress leads us to false beliefs (like many political beliefs or fringe theories) and partial, one-sided beliefs like life advice.

So the pairing of gnomes lead us to understand them as vacuous, familiar tautologies and then to a question, what's their appeal? Gnomiology has an answer that reaches deeply into our organic nature.

2. asymmetry of gnomes

Here's a second question. Many gnomes have contrary complements that do not have any appeal and are not to be found in the culture. There are dozens of versions for "be yourself", "don't measure yourself by others", "don't live by other's opinions", "don't live your life trying to be someone else", "follow your truth" -- this advice is everywhere. But "conform!", which is, if you think about it, very good practical advice, is nowhere to be found. Why? Does that tell us something about our culture -- that we're narcissistic? Or does it tell us something about our resistance to our culture or upbringing or the oppressiveness of our culture?

There are structural pressures on advice as well. People seeking life advice are for obvious reasons looking for personal solutions, so introspective advice "discipline yourself" , "be yourself", "know yourself" should be more common than say, Chaucer's "out of thy stall!" or Aristotle's "contemplate the universe" by which he meant, learn to understand the world outside yourself. The human inclination to confirm rather than to investigate the full range and experiment predicts that people looking for personal solutions will end up with introspective advice -- "stress is the source of your troubles", for example, not "introspection is a waste of time and a harmful aggravation of one's troubles; engage with the world or with others and you'll forget your troubles soon enough". Advice seeking may be a self-selection of introverted, self-affirming gnomes.

3. advice-givers, the politics of the self-help industry

Finally, there are trends in advice unevenly distributed. So the anti-woke espouse stoicism which seems to be a philosophy constructed almost entirely of personal advice. Aurelius' Meditations is one gnome after another (and people love it for this!). The stoic trend is all very political, or more accurately, politically apolitical: its politics is, "don't be political; attend to yourself." It's consistent with a lot of Christian morality including "give unto Caesar what is Caesar's" and "my kingdom is not of this world", and you can see it in Jordan Peterson's confluence of stoicism and Christianity. And I'm not trying to be clever here. Peterson is quite clear that his apoliticist advice is political, especially when it comes to social justice and Marxism. He is a partisan anti-Marxist and anti-woke. Those are strong political stands, as stubborn as political stands typically are.

So the choice of gnomes culturally and individually tell us a lot. In the case of individual choices we get a picture of our political divides. I'm not sure what the cultural selection tells us, but a sociology of gnomes promises to be revelatory as all sciences are.

4. gnomes vs practical advice

All of the above gnomiadry applies only to life advice. Practical advice doesn't have any of these paradoxical puzzles. This again shows just how strange and useless yet appealing life advice is.

Gnomes can even be empty tautologies. "Be humble" might be the most common advice on how to overcome confirmation bias. It's perfect question-begging rephrasal of the problem to be solved: "if you don't want to prioritize your own beliefs, don't". Here's a post on practical advice to overcome confirmation bias -- use Bayeseian reasoning by looking for the base rate, we tend to be oblivious to the unthreatening normal so don't focus on the rare threat at the expense of the frequent, look for disconfirmatory evidence, not confirmation, question metaphors, assumptions and intuitions. That's a program. List the items and apply. Practical.

An instagram video gives this advice to those who ask "what kind of gloves should I buy for street calisthenics". The answer:

"it doesn't matter what gloves you wear, it's what's in the gloves that matter."

Now, that's a kind of life-advice, frequent among exercisers: it's a form of "just do it!" (It's also a faint hint of an insult: You are asking about trivialities. Be a man and get down to your 6,000 push-ups!) The contrary complementary advice to "Just do it!" might include "discipline -- struggling with yourself -- is a losing battle, but simply structuring your time to include exercise may help you get you to it". But "What gloves should I buy" also has a practical answer without any contrary complement. Here it is:

For calisthenics you should buy gloves with a grippy palm on the outside and also on the inside so the glove will not slip on the bar and your hand won't slip in the glove. Warning: avoid cheap rubber that will degrade quickly into a sticky surface, which will stick the glove to the bar. This can be lethal if you wear them while riding your bike as the gloves will stick to the handlebars whenever you try to lift a hand from the handlebar, and that will unintentionally steer the bike (and you) unpredictably into a truck or over a cliff or other places you'd rather not be.

Such practical advice has no contrary. It's not empty tautologies like 'if you want to do calisthenics, just do it!" It's substantive, if boring, practical advice. It's the kind of good advice you look for in consumer reviews.

What's so interesting about gnomes is their bizarre paradoxical puzzle and appeal. Useless, its opposite just as useless, and yet appealing. It has the mystery of religion, hasn't it? What did Ivan's Grand Inquisitor say, "mystery, miracle and authority"; that's what we're all looking for. Gnomes, not the plain bread of practical advice.

Gnomiology also plays into cultural confirmation and confirmation bias. A lot of calisthenics advice extols discipline -- do it even though you don't like it. The complementary contrary is equally sound and maybe even more practical "discipline is a battle with yourself that you will lose; if you enjoy something, you'll do it; if you don't enjoy it, find something that you do enjoy". Discipline, the strength to overcome one's weaknesses, is consonant with our gender norms. Enjoyment isn't. Discipline plays on the inspiration of being masculine, and, no surprise, that's a lot of what calisthenics is for.

the morality of gnomes?

"Health is wealth", popular among the calisthenics movement, seems undeniable and without contrary until you realize that health actually isn't wealth, and lack of money-wealth statistically leads to poor health, and money-wealth correlates with better health outcomes. But there's no gnome, "wealth is health!"

There's something morally prudish about all of this. "Fortune favors the cut-throat competitor" and "money will bring you health" are too crass and crude, let alone "fortune favors an a**hole". They violate our be-nice morality. The cultural notion of wisdom and sagacity are inconsistent with crassness regardless however practical. Even "Just do it!" doesn't imply any harm to anyone. "Cut in line if you can" might have practical value, but unless you're Peter Thiel, you'd never publicly advise it. It's anti-social. And yet, "be yourself" is hardly social. It's again the self-selection of self-help that underlies much of the gnomiad.

a dynamics of advice?

Contradictory pairs of advice are by nature structured as a decision tree. Go with daring then you've abandoned safe. Since time is unidirectionally always forward, this decision tree looks Markovian -- that is, it goes from one position to another and can't go back without loss of time.

It already seems that the role of time plays a really important one, and generates its own advice. "Time is money." There's no regaining time. And there's no complementary contradiction to that one unless it be the empty truism "live in the present" or "don't fret over spilt milk", both imperfect complements. "There's no regaining time" is itself a truism. Does it imply "choose carefully" or "follow your gut instinct"? "Don't fret over spilt milk" also has a complement, "learn from your mistakes".

But is the tree really Markovian? What if the choice of "be brave" applies only to youth? We need a push-down machine for this tree and a time tracker.

Of course I'm plagiarizing Chomsky and Wolfram, but these are the tools available. Maybe we can discover more as we go along.

You can imagine what's next. Contexts other than youth/age can apply -- "daring" might apply to careers, "safety" in relationships or marriages. What about long-term goals, ends prioritizing all other decisions? And "keep your yes on the prize" contrasts with "be flexible" and "life is what happens on your way to your goal". These also depend on time and context. At what point should you abandon a goal and "cut your losses" instead of "be constant, perseverant, dedicated"?

Work on these contradictions begins to seem futile. All the advice is like conflicting religions. From afar, they all seem foolish since they each purport to be true, but deny each other. "Don't heed advice, learn for yourself!" of course is the paradoxical limit. It seems on the face of it an empty truism -- one can't learn for someone else without learning oneself. But there's always the contrarian "be skeptical" and its paradoxical complement and consequence "be skeptical of being skeptical". Aristotle the Wise: moderation in all things. It sounds like a cop out too good to be true, but moderation has the virtue of being without paradox. But he should have said, moderation in most things. Which things? We still need context.

When asked for life advice in an interview, a famous actor replied, "I don't give advice. People have to face things themselves." Respect.

Saturday, March 29, 2025

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Tuesday, March 25, 2025

propaganda vs censorship: asymmetrical effects in escalation bias and polarization