Month: June 2019

The Fatuous David Brooks Rides Again

I haven’t toyed with David Brooks’s earnest offerings in a long time (perhaps not since “Babbling Brooks” in 2016). But it’s hard to resist a pot-shot at a sitting duck, which is what Brooks simulates in his encomium to the “liberal world order” (which is the subtext of this post and this one). Specifically, Brooks writes tearfully that

Americans take a dark view of human nature and withdraw from the world. Wolves like Putin and Xi fill the void and make bad things happen, confirming the dark view and causing even more withdrawal.

Americans (conservatives, at least) rightly take a dark view of human nature, but what does that have to do with “withdrawing from the world”? What serious (conservative) Americans want isn’t withdrawal, it is two connected things: security from military blackmail and defense of legitimate overseas interests, the most important of which is trade with other countries (on legitimate terms).

Those things don’t require meddling in other people’s business, which is what most Americans rightly reject. They require robust military forces, and a demonstrated willingness to apply them. Brooks, in his usual way, omits the obvious and correct view of what (most) Americans want because he is “conservative” only by the standards of The New York Times.

Knot for Me

I was amused by this photo of Jeff Bezos sporting a Full Windsor knot:

(A compensatory device, perhaps?)

When I first learned to tie a necktie, more than 60 years ago, I used what is properly called a Half Windsor Knot (though it is often called a Windsor Knot). The Half Windsor is neater and more elegant than the Full Windsor, which looks like a chin-cushion.

But when I began working in a professional setting, where necktie wearing was then (early 1960s) de rigeur, I adopted the Four-in-hand knot, which is faster and easier to tie than either of the Windsors. The article linked to in the preceding sentence alleges that the four-in-hand is “notably asymmetric”. But it isn’t if one is careful about pulling the knot up into the “notch” between collar points, and sticks to straight-collar shirts (which also lend a more professional appearance than spread collars and button-downs).

In fact, a properly tied four-in-hand is more elegant than its cumbersome Windsor rivals. For one thing, the four-in-hand knot doesn’t overwhelm the long part of the tie, which (if one has good taste in ties) is what one wants to show off.  In addition, the four-in-hand lends itself to a neat dimple, which can be achieved with the Half Windsor but not the Full Windsor.

The neat (centered) dimple says: “I am a fastidious person” — and I am.

Justice Thomas Throws Down Another Gauntlet

In connection with the overturning of Roe v. Wade (see this), I noted here Justice Thomas’s

concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc., [which] is devastating in its revelations about the racist motives of Margaret Sanger, a founder of Planned Parenthood, and of abortion’s “disparate impact” on blacks. For a synopsis of Thomas’s opinion, see “Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Margaret Sanger Walk Into a Segregated Bar…“, by John Zmirak, The Stream, May 29, 2019.

Now, from Fox News, comes this:

In a concurring opinion in a Supreme Court case announced Monday, Justice Clarence Thomas issued a lengthy call for his colleagues to overturn “demonstrably erroneous decisions” even if they have been upheld for decades — prompting legal observers to say Thomas was laying the groundwork to overturn the seminal 1973 case Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion.

Thomas’ blunt opinion came in Gamble v. United States, a case concerning the so-called “double-jeopardy” doctrine, which generally prohibits an individual from being charged twice for the same crime. But both pro-life and pro-choice advocates quickly noted the implications of his reasoning for a slew of other future cases, including a potential revisiting of Roe.

“When faced with a demonstrably erroneous precedent, my rule is simple: We should not follow it,” Thomas wrote.

Hear, hear.

But will Roberts and Kavanaugh heed Thomas? Roberts is erratic and Kavanaugh may have sold his soul (on abortion) to win the vote and endorsement of Susan Collins.

Beware of Muslim Airline Pilots

Fox News has a story about Maylasia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared over the Indian Ocean. The details are in the story. Here’s the gist of it:

The night the aircraft went missing, control was seized in the cockpit during a 20 minute period between 1:01 a.m. and 1:21 a.m. and radar records show the autopilot was probably switched off, according to [aviation specialist William] Langewiesche….

When the report by a 19-member international team was released last July, Chief investigator Kok Soo Chon said during a media briefing there was no evidence of abnormal behavior or stress among the two pilots – Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah and co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid – that could lead them to hijack the plane.

Langewiesche notes that while the co-pilot had nothing but a bright future ahead and no red flags in his past, Zaharie’s life raised multiple concerns. After his wife moved out, the captain, who was reported to be “lonely and sad,” also “spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms” and obsessed over two young internet models.

Forensic examinations of the pilot’s simulator by the FBI also revealed he experimented with a flight profile that roughly matched what’s believed to have happened to MH370, and that ended in “fuel exhaustion over the Indian Ocean.” New York Magazine reported in 2016 that the simulated flight was conducted less than a month before the plane vanished.

That’s not all. The story goes on to remind readers of

a similar incident, [in which] EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed off the coast of Massachusetts in October 1999 on its way from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York to Cairo. Audio captured by the co-pilot caught pilot Gameel Al-Batouti say 11 times in Arabic, “I rely on God.”

Two years later, the National Transportation Safety Board determined Al-Batouti had been suicidal and purposely crashed the plane while the first pilot was out of the cockpit.

Yes, there’s also mention of

Germanwings Flight 9525, which crashed into the French Alps in 2015, [and] was also determined to be a case of suicide-by-pilot. Officials determined co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies, flew the airliner into the mountains on purpose.

The case of Lubitz notwithstanding, there’s more to fear from the likes of Zaharie Ahmad Shah and Gameel Al-Batouti — suicide flying as a substitute for suicide bombing. I’m glad that my days of international air travel are long over.

The “Candle Problem” and Its Ilk

Among the many topics that I address in “The Balderdash Chronicles” is the management “science” fad; in particular, as described by Graham Morehead,

[t]he Candle Problem [which] was first presented by Karl Duncker. Published posthumously in 1945, “On problem solving” describes how Duncker provided subjects with a candle, some matches, and a box of tacks. He told each subject to affix the candle to a cork board wall in such a way that when lit, the candle won’t drip wax on the table below (see figure at right). Can you think of the answer?

The only answer that really works is this: 1.Dump the tacks out of the box, 2.Tack the box to the wall, 3.Light the candle and affix it atop the box as if it were a candle-holder. Incidentally, the problem was much easier to solve if the tacks weren’t in the box at the beginning. When the tacks were in the box the participant saw it only as a tack-box, not something they could use to solve the problem. This phenomenon is called “Functional fixedness.”

The implication of which, according to Morehead, is (supposedly) this:

When your employees have to do something straightforward, like pressing a button or manning one stage in an assembly line, financial incentives work. It’s a small effect, but they do work. Simple jobs are like the simple candle problem.

However, if your people must do something that requires any creative or critical thinking, financial incentives hurt. The In-Box Candle Problem is the stereotypical problem that requires you to think “Out of the Box,” (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?). Whenever people must think out of the box, offering them a monetary carrot will keep them in that box.

A monetary reward will help your employees focus. That’s the point. When you’re focused you are less able to think laterally. You become dumber. This is not the kind of thing we want if we expect to solve the problems that face us in the 21st century.

My take (in part):

[T]he Candle Problem is unlike any work situation that I can think of. Tasks requiring creativity are not performed under deadlines of a few minutes; tasks requiring creativity are (usually) assigned to persons who have demonstrated a creative flair, not to randomly picked subjects; most work, even in this day, involves the routine application of protocols and tools that were designed to produce a uniform result of acceptable quality; it is the design of protocols and tools that requires creativity, and that kind of work is not done under the kind of artificial constraints found in the Candle Problem.

Now comes James Thompson, with this general conclusion about such exercises:

One important conclusion I draw from this entire paper [by Gerd Gigerenzer, here] is that the logical puzzles enjoyed by Kahneman, Tversky, Stanovich and others are rightly rejected by psychometricians as usually being poor indicators of real ability. They fail because they are designed to lead people up the garden path, and depend on idiosyncratic interpretations.

Told you so.

“Local Control”

I have written before about the hypocrisy of local control:

[T]he ultimate in local control is the freedom to do as one wishes with one’s own property — barring actual criminality, of course. Dictation by … left-wing city council[s] and the[ir] hired hands in … various bureaucracies isn’t that kind of local control — it’s local tyranny.

I omitted to mention that the very left-wingers who cry “local control” to justify local tyranny are also proponents of national control in a long list of matters ranging from retirement and health care to the suppression of the freedoms of religious exercise, association, and speech.

True local control is at the personal and interpersonal level, not in a city hall dominated by tax-gobbling hacks.

Power Is Power

Most libertarians and conservatives have a reflexive — and negative — reaction to proposals for government intervention to “fix” private-sector problems. The attitude is well-founded, in that many serious private-sector problems (e.g., soaring medical costs, dependency on tax-funded subsidies) are the result of government intervention.

But there are times when government intervention –were it politically feasible — could alleviate serious private-sector problems. Consider two such problems: (1) suppression of conservatives and their views on campuses and in public fora owned by private companies (e.g., Google, Facebook, Twitter); (2) soaring prescription-drug prices caused by Big Pharmacy (not the drug makers of Big Pharma, but the middlemen like CVS who manage prescription-drug plans for the insurance companies with which they are often entangled).

The academic-information and prescription-drug complexes — to name just two — are already exerting government-like power. In fact, it is far more power than was actually exercised by the “trusts” wrongly targeted for government intervention (“trust-busting”) during the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s. (They were providing new and invaluable products at low prices, thanks to economies of scale.) Contemporary trusts, unlike the ones of yore, are in fact the products of government interventions on behalf of powerful private interests, which is why it will be hard to bring the academic-information and prescription-drug complexes (and others) to heel.

It won’t be easy, but it is possible. And badly needed.

Friendship and Personality

This post at Neo made me think about friendship. Or, rather, it led me to collect some thoughts that have been wandering loose in my mind for many years.

I have no friends, other than my wife and my son, who has become a friend to me as we have settled into middle and old age. I had many friends over the years, but I stopped having them in the mid-1990s, when I made my final break from “liberalism”. (And it is hard to find anything but a “liberal” in quasi-intellectual stratum of the D.C. area, where I then lived and worked.)

I am a kind of reverse anti-Trumper. I eschew close affiliations with those who are on the left or who sympathize with its duplicitous agenda, and thus enable the enemies of liberty. (I make an exception for my wife, to whom I am deeply attached by a long life together.)

It is easy for me to do without friends. I can’t remember a friend who became such through casual social contact rather than through school or work. My friends, in other words, have been friends of the moment, and I am still in touch with only two of them — but I don’t consider them friends. All the rest — dozens of them — faded from my emotional radar soon after I ceased to have regular contact with them at school or work.

My lack of friends outside my nuclear family simply reveals an innate psychological condition: emotional self-reliance. It is also seen — and not wrongly so — as emotional aloofness or coldness, which is consistent with assessments of my personality.

It takes all kinds … but I have little time for them.

Real Americans

Many years ago, in the early 1960s, when the civil-rights movement was in its heyday, an older woman of my acquaintance objected to the idea that blacks are Americans. Americans, to her, were whites of European origin. Bill Vallicella offers a more nuanced view:

There has to be a broad base of shared agreement on all sorts of things….

No comity without commonality….

… “[O]ne people” should not be understood racially or ethnically. An enlightened nationalism is not  a white nationalism.  America is of course  ‘a proposition nation.’ You will find the propositions in the founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence.

I don’t give a flying enchilada whether you are Hispanic or Asian.  If you immigrated legally, accept the propositions, drop the hyphens, and identify as an American, then I say you are one of us. I’ll even celebrate the culinary diversity you contribute.

But…

That being understood, it is also true that whites discovered these America-constitutive propositions and are well-equipped to appreciate and uphold them, and better equipped than some other groups.

My money is on commonality — in language, in culture, in a deep attachment to the view that liberty is incompatible with a government that does more than protect citizens from domestic and foreign predators and leeches.

Thus, as Vallicella puts it:

Do not think of leftists and ‘progressives’ as fellow citizens; they are merely among us as disorderly elements and domestic enemies.  There can be no peace with them because they represent an ‘existential threat.’ Not to our physical existence so  much as to our way of life, which is of course more important than our mere physical existence as animals.

I would add that those who give aid and comfort to the left by consistently and overwhelmingly voting for Democrats are not fellow citizens. In that sense, the vast majority of blacks (but certainly not all of them) must be excluded — not because they are black, as my acquaintance would have it, but because they abet the destruction of liberty. They are far from alone, however, and most of their accomplices are white.

(See also “The British Roots of the Founding, and of Liberty in America“.)

Through a Glass Darkly

In yesterday’s post I touched on epistemology, “the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief”. I have been touching on the subject for a while. (See, for example, “Rationalism, Empiricism, and Scientific Knowledge“, “Further Pretensions of Knowledge“, “The Fragility of Knowledge“, “Deduction, Induction, and Knowledge“, “The Pretence of Knowledge“, and especially “Words Fail Us“.)

The most compelling writer on the subject is Alfred North Whitehead, whose concept of the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” I apply in “Diminishing Marginal Utility and the Redistributive Urge“. The fallacy, as described by Wikipedia, is this:

[O]ne commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when one mistakes an abstract belief, opinion, or concept about the way things are for a physical or “concrete” reality.

What, then, is physical reality? According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Whitehead sees it thus (citations omitted):

Whitehead was dissatisfied with Hume’s reduction of perception to sense perception because, as Hume discovered, pure sense perception reveals a succession of spatial patterns of impressions of color, sound, smell, etc. (a procession of forms of sense data), but it does not reveal any causal relatedness to interpret it (any form of process to render it intelligible)….

Whitehead rejected Newton’s conception of nature as the succession of instants of spatial distribution of bits of matter for two reasons. First: the concept of a “durationless” instant, “without reference to any other instant”, renders unintelligible the concepts of “velocity at an instant” and “momentum at an instant” as well as the equations of motion involving these concepts. Second: the concept of self-sufficient and isolated bits of matter, having “the property of simple location in space and time”, cannot “give the slightest warrant for the law of gravitation” that Newton postulated….

In Whitehead’s eyes, however, the development of Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism constituted an antidote to Newton’s scientific materialism, for it led him to conceive the whole universe as “a field of force—or, in other words, a field of incessant activity”. The theory of electromagnetism served Whitehead to overcome Newton’s “fallacy of simple location”, that is, the conception of nature as a universe of self-sufficient isolated bits of matter. Indeed, we cannot say of an electromagnetic event that it is

here in space, and here in time, or here in space-time, in a perfectly definite sense which does not require for its explanation any reference to other regions of space-time.

….

Whitehead … noticed that, in a sense, physicists are even more reductionist than Hume. In practice they rely on sense data, but in theory they abstract from most of the data of our five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) to focus on the colorless, soundless, odorless, and tasteless mathematical aspects of nature. Consequently, in a worldview inspired not by the actual practices of physicists, but by their theoretical speculations, nature—methodologically stripped from its ‘tertiary’ qualities (esthetical, ethical, and religious values)—is further reduced to the scientific world of ‘primary’ qualities (mathematical quantities and interconnections such as the amplitude, length, and frequency of mathematical waves), and this scientific world is bifurcated from the world of ‘secondary’ qualities (colors, sounds, smells, etc.). Moreover, the former world is supposed, ultimately, to fully explain the latter world (so that, for example, colors end up as being nothing more than electromagnetic wave-frequencies)….

Whitehead’s alternative is fighting “the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness”—the “error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete”—because “this fallacy is the occasion of great confusion in philosophy”. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is committed each time abstractions are taken as concrete facts, and “more concrete facts” are expressed “under the guise of very abstract logical constructions”. This fallacy lies at the root of the modern philosophical confusions of scientific materialism and progressive bifurcation of nature. Indeed, the notion of simple location in Newton’s scientific materialism is an instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness—it mistakes the abstraction of in essence unrelated bits of matter as the most concrete reality from which to explain the relatedness of nature.

Inasmuch as human beings are incapable of knowing the true essence of reality, true knowledge is beyond our ken. We can only see the world through a glass darkly.

Is Race a Social Construct?

Of course it is. Science, generally, is a social construct. Everything that human beings do and “know” is a social construct, in that human behavior and “knowledge” are products of acculturation and the irrepressible urge to name and classify things.

Whence that urge? You might say that it’s genetically based. But our genetic inheritance is inextricably twined with social constructs — preferences for, say, muscular men and curvaceous women, and so on. What we are depends not only on our genes but also on the learned preferences that shape the gene pool. There’s no way to sort them out, despite claims (from the left) that human beings are blank slates and claims (from loony libertarians) that genes count for everything.

All of that, however true it may be (and I believe it to be true), is a recipe for solipsism, nay, for Humean chaos. The only way out of this morass, as I see it, is to admit that human beings (or most of them) possess a life-urge that requires them to make distinctions: friend vs. enemy, workable from non-workable ways of building things, etc.

Race is among those useful distinctions for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who has actually observed the behaviors of groups that can be sorted along racial lines instead of condescending to “tolerate” or “celebrate” differences (a luxury that is easily indulged in the safety of ivory towers and gated communities). Those lines may be somewhat arbitrary, for, as many have noted there are more genetic differences within a racial classification than between racial classifications. Which is a fatuous observation, in that there are more genetic differences among, say, the apes than there are between what are called apes and what are called human beings.

In other words, the usual “scientific” objection to the concept of race is based on a false premise, namely, that all genetic differences are equal. If one believes that, one should be just as willing to live among apes as among human beings. But human beings do not choose to live among apes (though a few human beings do choose to observe them at close quarters). Similarly, human beings — for the most part — do not choose to live among people from whom they are racially distinct, and therefore (usually) socially distinct.

Why? Because under the skin we are not all alike. Under the skin there are social (cultural) differences that are causally correlated with genetic differences.

Race may be a social construct, but — like engineering — it is a useful one.

“Catch 22”

There’s a new, six-part, made-for-TV adaptation of Joseph Heller’s overrated “classic”. My wife, who found the novel funny on her second go it, finds the TV version boring. I, who found the novel boring on my first (and only) go at it, find the TV version mildly entertaining because of the production and acting. But, on the whole, I begrudge the $12.95 that I paid for a one-month subscription to Hulu, which is airing the series as a “Hulu Original”. (I opted for no ads, so couldn’t avail myself of a one-month free trial of Hulu.)

So the new version of Catch-22 suggests a variant of Catch 22: Sometimes you have to pay for something in order to learn that you wouldn’t have paid for it.

Idealism Is Dangerous

Leftists and libertarians are deluded idealists. Deluded, because they imagine a world that cannot be, given nature and human nature. And so they promote causes that are doomed to fail, at great cost in treasure and something far more important: mutual trust, respect, and forbearance. Those are the pillars of true liberty, which is peaceful, voluntary, mutually beneficial coexistence.