Stupidity

Why is there less variance in the opinions held by stupid people?

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

"Understand it for me."

Anamnesis and Education

From the derivation of 'education': "The Romans considered educating to be synonymous with drawing knowledge out of somebody or leading them out of regular thinking."

There are two antithetical meanings in this derivation. Depending upon whether one considers the object to be drawn is the knowledge, or the student. In my day, it was clearly stated that knowledge was the object of education. These days the student has become the object., The deliverable product of institutional education has increasingly become more quantifiably and concretely 'the graduate' and no longer an abstract 'knowledge.'

Anamnesis is to recollect what one already always knew.

Chomsky, in a public lecture I attended in the 1990s, suggested that we all know what is right and fair, in social interaction. He further stated that the state has worked on its populace for hundreds of years to convince us that we don't.

Without wishing to fall into the trap of 'truthiness,' my gut tells me Chomsky's right. I think humans have an inbuilt theory of mind which permits (but does not materially entail) empathy. I think we are innately imbued with a facility to projectively imagine the position, feelings, available options and disposition of the Other in any interaction. I think there is sufficient reason to suppose that 'a fair go' is an optimal goal in societal interaction, if only because the iterated prisoner's dilemma suggests it. Without recourse to 'truthiness', I think it is true to say that if we live in a society whose values turn our stomachs, we are right to respond viscerally.

(I exempt from this consideration people who are autistic (whose ability to projectively imagine the Other appears to be undeveloped or absent) and sociopaths (who don't value the Other) but for the most part, people know what it is to be fair to another, and people have a sense of what's right. It would seem to be a neat exercise in deconstructing 'empathy' to learn to empathise with the unempathic.)

Hypothetically: this sense of what is right can be drawn from anyone by a structured enquiry into their values, into what matters to them, and empirical consideration of the implications of the expression of those values. It may be drawn from what Python (after Gurdjieff called) a process of guided self-observation. Python's reading of Gurdjieff goes on to say that such developments are "rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia." Current educational policy departs from a process of guided self-observation to focus on trivial 'attainment of learning outcomes.'

These 'learning outcomes' (we are told) render graduates for economic life, and as Nietzsche said (in "The Eulogists of Work")

At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work -and what is

invariably meant is relentless industry from early till late- that such work is the best policy, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one's eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions. In that way a society in which the members continually work hard will have more security: and security is now adored as the supreme goddess.

Education which "always sets a small goal before one's eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions" is the antithesis of the guided self observation prescribed by Gurdjieff. It is consistent with education in which the student is drawn along (like a donkey in harness) and antithetical to an education which draws out knowledge, or leads the student to anmnesis.

I understand the societal goal of primary and secondary education in a democracy to be, rather, to provision the populace with necessary and sufficient means of participation in the government of the society. To the extent that this goal has been subverted to serve the production of a skilled workforce, society is being asked to socialise costs which ought properly to be borne by the consumers of the skills imparted and is being robbed of its ability to perpetuate itself as a democracy.

I once had the privilege of speaking to an elected representative, one Michael Photios, when he had the slimmest of paper-thin majorities. Michael put it to me that without 'leadership' by elected representatives we would still have capital punishment. In this, I think, he was seeking to distinguish an elected elite value system from a broad societal one. He was asserting that the long and hard-fought campaigns of people like Koestler (Reflections on Hanging) and Orwell (A Hanging) hold no value except insofar as they might influence that elected elite.

It seems to me that if Michael Photios' assertion is correct, it means that the masses of people, the population as a whole, are incapable of understanding the case against capital punishment, or that the case is not entirely made. I think that this implies a systemic failure of education in its presumed goal of giving the masses an ability to meaningfully participate. Michael appealed to my prejudices (that capital punishment was unethical) to prove to me that direct democracy couldn't work.

It's taken me twenty years to see it, but I think I have my rebuttal: If he and I can conclude that capital punishment is wrong, yet the masses can't, this means our system of primary and secondary education has failed them. If we, as a democracy, cannot provide the masses with the means of their own proper government, we have no right to the name. If we, as presumed elites, sit satisfied with our right to overrule the baser instincts of the people, to protect them from themselves, then we have failed to govern democratically.

It may be a pious and unevidenced belief, it may be false, but I suspect that what leads the masses to desire their own repression is a systemic programme of education to that end.

The Problem with Probability is that we don't teach it to everyone, although it's a minimally necessary life skill ... so people build in flood plains, they embezzle to put the proceeds (and presumably their life savings) through poker machines.

Michael Photios supported his assertion that the masses support capital punishment by reference to polls. Polling suggested that capital punishment was popular. Reminds me of John Cooper-Clarke's "Suspended Sentence" in which a tabloid stampede makes capital punishment mandatory.

Is Michael Photios' blithe acceptance of polling as evidence of the immutable will of the people acceptable in a politician? What of Paul Keating's statement that he didn't seek popularity, but the "regard of serious people?"

In a democracy, we're supposed to educate people enough so they are able to hold a valid opinion. Remember?

If you're so smart, how come you're not Machiavelli?

We live in a world where the adjective 'Machiavellian' connotes material success gained by unscrupulous means. How is it, then, that Machiavelli spent time in jail? I don't know the answer to this, and it's a question that's been plaguing me for years. So I thought I'd muse aloud, here.

If you haven't read Machiavelli's The Prince, I strongly recommend you do. It's Free. Ok, back now? Good book, isn't it.

Machiavelli wrote that book in the tradition of Mirrors for Princes, seeking to influence the Medici rulers of Florence. My learned mother-in-law says The Prince is an example of a style of literature called 'de Regimine', but whether this means 'on Ruling' or is a shortened form of 'de Regimine Principum' and means 'on Ruling Kings' I cannot say.

What is clear is that (through his writing) Machiavelli sought influence over his Prince through reason, which could be considered a pretty noble aim (or if you're an unreconstructed Nietzschean, a ruse by which Sklaavenmorale sought to undermine then overpower its more noble oppressor.)

I'm assuming that Machiavelli wanted to govern by proxy, by dint of reason, through articulation of principles, under the precept that the pen is mightier than the sword ... and given that he's pretty confident and unequivocal in his assertions in the book ... how come he was first suspended from a ceiling like some kind of highly literate chandelier?

Why did Machiavelli find himself being tortured in prison?

Sun Tzu says the greatest general is not he who fights the most battles, but one who wins every battle he fights. So why did Machiavelli lose the battle when the Medicis came to power, and find himself subjected to the medieval version of waterboarding?

Is it rather that something was revealed to him as he hung from the rope by his wrists? Some kind of epiphany-in-mortification? They showed him the instruments of torture and he suddenly realised he needed a whole new career?

I don't know Machiavelli the man, can't know his innermost thoughts, but still I want to understand his mistake, so I'm going to present some cases:

Was his book an attempt to re-narrate his own part in history, sublimating his rage and explaining to himself and his new boss why he'd been cast down from his walk-on part as military diplomat. Was he sharpening himself as a willing tool, to be bent to whatever purposes his Prince desired. Was it an apologia for the cruelty of the Prince? Was it a Resume, a desideratum, a memoir?

Or was his imprisonment due to a last ditch personal resistance to the new Medici rule, akin to Thoreau's

if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America.

Or was The Prince a big old 'Told you So!' to the people to whom he'd been loyal? Perhaps he'd given the previous regime advice that'd been ignored, and he now wanted to get it down on paper.

Or was Machiavelli just not quite as clever as he thought he was?

Or was it just a new broom sweeping clean? The Medici came to power, Machiavelli was on the wrong side and was tortured as a matter of course?

Or are we entitled to summarize Machiavelli's mistake as "It's all about the capricious exercise of power, Stupid!"

Adventures in Terraforming 1

This is a story about the only thing I learned from HS Geography.

Way back in the 1980s some friends and I went off to see the Leonid meteor shower ('a celestial event' says wikipedia, and so it is) from a place of power called Diamond Head. You know the kind of place I mean ... imposing, spectacular, unusual, a place you'd revere.

We wandered along the beach to the South (Kylie's beach, named after Kylie Tennant) and could see a sandmining operation in the hinterland (rutile mining, to the West) and came to a creek which was intersecting the beach. I say 'intersecting' but what the creek was really doing was eating away the beach. As we watched the bank or dune was falling into the creek and being washed to sea. Sections were sliding away, the bank was being eroded and destroyed.

It just didn't seem right to us children.

So we hove-to, and determined to fight the creek with our boyish enthusiasm and testosterone. Three of us shoveled with our hands, trying to bank up the sand ... with more sand. Of course it washed away as fast as we could dump it. So we set our sights higher and dug with our feet, bringing down half the bank in the process, piling it onto the fast-eroding bank of the creek. Where it washed away as fast as we could pile it. Doubling, redoubling our efforts made no difference. As fast as we could shovel, the creek carried our new dike away.

Eventually, common sense and the noon-day sun made us see the futility of our war on moving water. The creek had won, it would always win, it would work ceaslessly to undermine the dune. The beach would inevitably wash away. It was history, that dune.

Then I looked at it dispassionately, and saw that the creek was curved, its outer curve was the cutting edge, and deeper than the side opposite our bank. I'd seen that before ... in HS Geography. Rivers are dynamic things, and over time they whip about. Their outer curves are deeper and faster than their inner curves and they take material from the channels they dig to deposit on the next inner curve.

What we needed to do to protect the dune was to dig a channel in the opposing side! We had a go at it, and it seemed to work, but the creek is far more powerful than even three gung-ho guys on a mission.

Then I saw ... the long flat rock lying nearby, less than half a meter long, with a definite airfoil shape! I reasoned that by placing the larger side lower we would get something like the equivalent of lift, but pointing down, by action of water over the surfaces, thus digging a channel and redirecting water away from the dune. We placed it properly, and went off to do something else.

The Leonid shower was pretty. I don't remember much about it, but there were lots of lights. We slept in the car (the things you can do when you're young) and woke up hungry next morning. Then, for some reason, we traipsed down to the creek to see what'd happened.

The creek had rotated nearly 90° about the point where we'd placed the airfoil (waterfoil?) and was no longer touching the dune bank. I was gobsmacked. We had used the nature of flowing water, and the passive properties of a simple rock, to make tons of water move itself. I have always considered this experience a metaphor for general problem solving.

Another possible interpretation is: if you have a problem you can't solve, try dropping a rock on it.

So we went to Laurieton to drink beer and eat cheese, feeling like we'd made this.

Update: One of my co-terraformers snapped a recent this photo of the creek. It's still there, so we didn't move it too far.

Why Emperor Constantine has no Armani Suit

Borrowing from John Ralston Saul, some excellent economist, and some excellent and scholarly work on the late Roman Empire, we bring you the first in a collective-noun of Panchrestons concerning The Corporate State.

Large corporations are inefficient. That's not news. They don't really or fully satisfy the requirements of a modern 'post industrial' economy, they are maladaptive but present everywhere. They can't really innovate to adapt to change, so they parasitize smaller, more innovative organisations - buying them, sucking out the creative juice, and discarding them in a later 'restructure.'

Large corporations don't create, they market (although some of them are so large they create their own weather.) If there's any way to do it, they collude and monopolise and charge rent. Increasingly, they are given wide latitude to do this, even though it is considered to be bad for the 'conomy.

Large corporations don't follow the law, they create it. They lobby continually and if that fails they finance attack ads.

Small and Medium Enterprises are far more agile and innovative, they employ more people, they get stuff done. But SMEs aren't really fostered by the state.

How come?

I think some insight may be gained by considering this fascinating fact: Tax Recovery Rates from employees of corporations runs over 90%, but for independent contractors it runs at around 30%. (cite excellent economist here.)

Emperor Constantine became a Christian, reportedly because he saw a miraculous vision which vouchsafed him victory in battle. It was a cross, so he said, and who am I to gainsay that? People see crosses, and arches, and UFOs everywhere. Maybe he was having a migraine.

Coincidentally, at the time Constantine became a Christian, and declared it the official state religion, he had recently reunited the Roman Empire, which had been bifurcated with an Augustus in the East and one in the West. It wasn't easy to control the empire, it was very difficult to collect taxes over such a wide geographic area with the social organisation of the time.

Enter the Bishops. They had a nice efficient decentralised tithe-collection system, they had efficient hierarchal comms, they could collect taxes for Constantine. The price was wholesale conversion, and the establishment of Christianity as the state religion.

Not bad, huh? From being sacrificed as atheists (they didn't believe in enough gods) to holding the imperial purse strings.

This kind of strange inversion, I think, has occurred in the lifetimes of some living today. Was a time when corporations were aggregations of human beings, formed to get something done then to distribute their earnings and dissolve. A convenient way to collect enough capital to cooperate on big jobs. That was the Joint Stock Corporation. Nice concept. Then corporate personhood was surreptitiously inserted into the law.

So corporations could sue, be sued, own property in their own right, generate new corporations, own them as property, avoid taxation on those things needed for a corporation to survive, and most importantly: live forever. Wow. Where do I get a gig like that? Under US law, it's not legal to discriminate against a corporation, 14th amendment or something.

From being the representative of a collection of persons, corporations became persons collecting people for their own ends.

John Ralston Saul said that modern state leaders changed their attire from military uniform to business suit as economic power became more important than military power.

Summary: It is my considered opinion that the State colludes with the Corporation because otherwise it would be unable to collect taxes, anything but corporate serfdom having fallen into disfavour a couple of hundred years ago.