Plato’s weekend suggestions

readingsHere it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:

The economy as a traffic system, not a market. Brilliant!

Someone paid to be a public intellectual criticizes generic public intellectualism by constructing an easy-to-burn strawman.

Is the idea that life can be treated as a narrative dangerous? Maybe, but I didn’t see an argument in this essay by Galen Stawson.

And here comes a pretty seriously misguided essay “against sustainability.”

Astronomer Arthur Eddington probably didn’t fudge data in order to support Einstein’s theory, contra to what alleged by a pair of sociologists of science.

Misunderstanding Ockham: “The value of keeping assumptions to a minimum is cognitive, not ontological.”

198 thoughts on “Plato’s weekend suggestions”

  1. Robin Herbert

    The fact is that no one knows what is the minimally complex arrangement of parts that could constitute a working mind. I can see no reason to suppose it would involve vast complexity, but on the other hand it couldn’t be trivially complex.

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  2. Robin Herbert

    With the Butman piece on sustainability, he hits a target or two. There is no doubt that there is a significant portion of the enviroment lobby who are stuck in 18th century romanticism about nature (or even 16th century pastoral romanticism, which was already the object of ridicule in the early 17 century).

    But really, “sustainability” as it is used in the mainstream has nothing to do with that. It means just what it says – a way of living or organising society which could be kept up indefinitely, without anything running out or becoming too degraded to sustain said mode.

    I don’t know whether sustainability or anything close to it is realistically achievable, but it has nothing to do with a “perfect ordered nature”. As for adaptability, the two things are not incompatible – we must certainly adapt. But we should not put too much faith, as the conservatives do, on the ability of the human race to adapt. Adapting to major climate change or the loss of some resource on which we rely might involve a massive number of us dying. We want to try to avoid that kind of adaptation.

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  3. Philosopher Eric

    While I’ll concede that a traffic system could be a useful metaphor in some regards to help us think about economics, the term simply isn’t generic enough to replace the “market” term, as Evans and Lebovic seemed to imply. Notice that “traffic systems” are markets for the movement of people (or fish or whatever) given the resources required to do so. And while “traffic system” is used here as a mere metaphor, the larger concept behind it happens to be “market.” Thus I’d need to enter a traffic system market in order to travel to a computer store, though this would not be because I was in a “traffic system” for a new computer, but rather a “market” for one.

    It would take an amazingly daft modern economist to think of the economy (as suggested in the article given our “market” perspective) as “a featureless plane, with no entry or exit costs, little need for regulation, and equal opportunity for all.” Any economist worth their salt knows that markets are subject to chaotic and irrational behavior which thus requires government oversight.

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  4. Robin Herbert

    As Eric says, no competent economist thinks of a market as a featureless plane.

    And I don’t think that “market” is a metaphor, it is simply a reference to the activity – trading one thing for another. The roots of the word from words about trading, buying.

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  5. marc levesque

    Massimo,

    I’ve always found most market analogies of economic activity seriously flawed. Traffic systems feel like a step in the right direction. I wonder what Krugman would have to say about it.

    The sustainability article, I’m not sure. I really liked the conclusion, not so sure about how he got there, and I don’t get replacing ‘sustainability’ with ‘adaptability’. I tend to think of sustainability in opposition to non sustainable activities, like setting up an outhouse that drains into your source of drinking water. So I guess I don’t see how speaking of adaptability instead of sustainability would help us with things like that.

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  6. synred

    One might think Botlzman’s brain might rise from the dead when a ‘universe’ enters the infinitely long heat death phase (an infinite space for an infinite time full of nothing but photons in thermal equilibrium and the quantum ‘foam’ which is always with us).’
    Likely the universe would look quite different to any brains observing such a universe.. More likely they’d not observe anything as they’d be random collections of neurons and the world they think they observe would rarely resemble the world where they formed in. It might ‘randomly’ resemble a young universe where they could plausibly have evolved. It’s worse than the brain in the vat of late night BS and philosophy…

    While Occam Razor is just a rule of thumb, it might rationally be deployed here. If you get it wrong, it won’t matter. You’ll be gone in a few nanoseconds.

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  7. Massimo Post author

    The reason I didn’t like the article on sustainability is because I took it to be an easy way out of the crucial task of managing the environment with a look toward both future generations and the other species with which we share it.

    I’m not wholly environmentalist who thinks that there was a Golden Age of Earth (though if there were, it would definitely be the age of dinosaurs!), but to say that, you know what we do is natural so it’s okay is utter bullshit.

    Yes, human beings are “natural.” But what we do is so quantitatively outsided compared to what any other species can do — and, unlike other species, we can reflect on it and do otherwise — that to play that card seems either naive or disingenuous.

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  8. SocraticGadfly

    Massimo, yes, even if only indirectly, the piece seemed to give a nod to what I call “salvific technologism” on my blog. Well given things like deliberately introduced invasive species, I am definitely not so sanguine.

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  9. synred

    It’s ‘natural’ for species to go extinct. Happens to most of ’em. It could happen to us (well more a question of when than if, of course). We’re just ‘smart’ enough to take the rest of ’em with us,

    Adaption sounds like libertarian hogwash. There are a lot of very clean pigs on the ‘street’.

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  10. michaelfugate

    I think the climate change issue clearly brings up “is/ought” – humans can decide what we ought to do. Humans are none to good at sustainability, burning forests for fuel or building without planting trees, killing whales for oil, mining fossil fuels, etc., but we can get better. Small-scale wind, solar, hydro can do tasks like in the past – pump water, grind grain, saw wood, etc. or even natural lighting – wouldn’t that be novel? Reusing, recycling and conservation are easier than mining or large-scale electric generation.

    We need to think as an organism acts to survive and plan accordingly. It is hard work, but it can be done.

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  11. brodix

    Massimo,

    I’m not sure why you see Lind’s argument as a straw man. It seems to me an elemental fact of life on so many levels, that it is very difficult to see through others eyes. That “public intellectuals” have a job description that assumes some broader perspective doesn’t change this and often leads them beyond their preferred view. This presumption of objectivity often leads to dismissing the subjective views of any they disagree with as provincial, or worse.

    We all have our strengths. To make up a metaphor, the big city lights blind you to the actual stars.

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  13. brodix

    Michael,

    The problem is that we do think as an organism. We need to think like an ecosystem. That is where the larger circularity comes in. We are players in the market and those with more control tend to think as predators and take advantage of their advantages, not as more objective managers of the system.

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  14. michaelfugate

    Same thing brodix. Both are systems with input and outputs. Predation is the only interaction among organisms functioning as a negative feedback loop leading to stability.

    A simple thing to do is to simply internalize costs of goods and services. Make people pay up front for waste to encourage recycling and reduce waste.

    As per Lind’s article, you have to discount everything he says because he says that people like himself are out of touch with reality. It is quite damning actually.

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  15. Philosopher Eric

    One of the things which we enjoy doing around here, is to identify when someone stands up and then knocks down “a strawman argument.” It’s a healthy practice, I think, since this sort of informal fallacy does seem both common, as well as destructive. I suspect that most don’t even realize when they’re effectively “strawmaning,” since they don’t actually understand the argument of their interlocutor well enough to instead present legitimate commentary — understanding can be hard. Regardless, we have been asked whether the elite in academia happen to be, (instead of “freaks” I’ll say) “excentric,” and if so, is this a problem? Has Michael Lind set up a strawman to knock down, or does a worthy question exist?

    Beyond his empirical observations, yes of course academia houses excentrics — and quite necessarily so! People with amazing minds have been crucial for this sort of work to be done, and we’ve housed them in a special environment that’s informally known as “the ivory tower.” Otherwise (and with engineers to effectively utilize the power of science), humanity would surely still be “middle aged” in effect, and so powered by donkeys and such.

    While the ivory tower has served “hard” science well, however, the same simply cannot be said for “the soft.” Why? Well perhaps because excentrics from less successful fields should naturally be motivated to defend the conventions which have produced them? It may be that while mathematicians needn’t understand much about people in order to do their jobs, the work of sociologists remains quite vulnerable to being so removed from the object of their study.

    Though perhaps in the past our soft sciences have seen a “Galileo” or two, it would seem that a “Newton” has not yet been produced. (If anyone disagrees however, then please provide a name!) Why else would something as fundamental as “consciousness” remain so ill defined and speculative for the modern cognitive scientist? I salute Michael Lund for having the balls to say that the system from which he emerged… well it just ain’t right. While I don’t believe that having these excentrics flip burgers for a while would help much (or whatever), I do expect blogs to. Thus in this regard I must also salute both Massimo Pigliucci and Daniel Kaufman.

    In the end I would hope for us to remember how young the institution of science happens to be, and so given this quite new chapter of human history, I think we should expect the soft side of science to prevail soon enough.

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  16. Seth Leon

    The ‘anti-sustainability’ piece seems to me to attack the wrong target. I certainly agree with the author that nature itself is better described in terms of change and flux than as some divine unchanging source. When I see advocates promoting sustainability I see them questioning how our current culture and it’s energy consumption practices can be sustained. In other words I see them arguing to take a long range view in the interest of our species. I think sustaining our species is a pretty important goal and our current rate of consumption is not sustainable barring some game changing new technology.

    I also agree with others who have noted that sustainability and adaptability need not be concepts placed in antagonism towards each other. The basic way we stay alive is through both homeostasis (sustaining a few central & vital life processes within narrow range ), and allostasis (the adaptive capacity of peripheral systems in response to environmental change and stress). That adaptive capacity is not unlimited and be overwhelmed when environmental changes come to rapidly. Adaptive systems improve through gradual exposure, and basic human needs for sustenance aren’t going to change much anytime soon so we better take them both into account as we consider our consumptive practices going forward.

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  17. synred

    “…barring some game changing new technology.”

    Nuclear power? While given human nature (greed and carelessness) community destroying accidents are inevitable, they’re not going to destroy humanity (well bombs yes) [a], so Nucs would be sustainable ..

    [a] Fukashiman(sp) and Chernobyl are pretty localized, with some global effects on cancer rates, but nothing that’s going to make the planet uninhabitable. Whole towns where made uninhabitable for a long time…

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  18. Daniel Kaufman

    The apocalyptic rhetoric that one finds on the part of activists in the public discourse on climate should make it quite clear that much of the environmentalist movement retains its Romanticist roots.

    And the language more generally with which we talk about human relationships to the environment most definitely reflects an under-the-surface Cartesianism, something that is true of both environmental activists and their opponents. With respect to the latter, its the reduction of nature to a mechanical, value-neutral system, and with respect to the former, its a persistent subtext that humans and human activity are somehow alien to or separate from nature.

    The author’s comments on attitudes towards extinctions and other forms of “destruction” and the values they implicitly presuppose and express also strike me as absolutely right. To deny that there is a strong environmentalist version of the “noble savage” myth strikes me as being impossible if one even pays minimal attention to the public discourse on the subject.

    So, I found the article neither disingenuous nor naive, but really excellent, an opinion that has only been reinforced in reading it again.

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  20. synred

    So the extinction of humans might be ‘good’ for other animals. At Chernobyl initial reports were that animals were thriving presumably because of the relative absence of humans offset the effects of radiation.

    Late reports (likely better) showed problems do to the residual radiation. It’s unclear to me whether the original reports where incorrect (sloppy, biased, antidotal) or whether it just took awhile for the consequences of radiation to manifest themselves, so I don’tdraw any conclusion from the ‘experiment’.

    As human’s can do things that other animals can’t and can be more destructive than most of them, it does not seem unreasonable to call that ‘unnatural’ even all we mean is ’caused by homo sapiens.’ Idealizing the unknown distant (sometimes not so distant) past is long standing bad habit. There’s likely not much to learned from how hunter-gathers lived about how to sustain our species.

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  21. Daniel Kaufman

    Eric:

    “Soft” science masters, who are as great as their “hard” science counterparts.

    Max Weber
    Emile Durkheim
    Edward Sapir
    Benjamin Lee Whorf
    Noam Chomsky
    John Maynard Keynes
    Friedrich Hayek
    John B. Watson
    B.F. Skinner
    Sigmund Freud
    Carl Jung
    Franz Boaz
    Margaret Mead

    And this is just a few, off the top of my head.

    As for your rhetorical question, regarding consciousness, it’s been answered about 10 thousand times. You just don’t want to hear it is all. Hence the somewhat broken-record sensation of conversing with you.

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  22. Daniel Kaufman

    One thing on format. The new format of the blog seems to have entirely messed up the order in which comments appear. It’s very hard to follow any line of argument, because comments appear out of temporal sequence.

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  23. Seth Leon

    Dan,
    I have a family member that is employed in work that concerns environmental causes. I see some of what you speak to in relation to various causes. In specific relation to the issue of sustainability I see less of an idealization of nature itself and more of a recognition that humans exist as part of nature , and that our current role in that relationship is unsustainable. I happen to agree with that assessment. If the assessment is correct than we certainly should be talking about sustainability. I’m not fond of any kind of extreme rhetoric, but the climate science reports are not exactly presenting a rosy picture either.

    I’m not disagreeing with the author on many points with regard to how some idealize nature. The relation of those arguments to the issue of energy consumption, and the value of changing our concept of idealization to adaptibility was at best unclear to me. I just don’t see how it helps to put down the idea of working towards a more sustainable energy consumption by pointing out that some environmental advocates idolize nature, or how substituting the concept of adaptation in place of sustainability will better solve our problems, or why we can’t use both concepts in tryng to adress our problems going forward.

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  24. brodix

    Michael,

    How I would differentiate between organisms and ecosystems is that organisms have fairly linear input and output, while ecosystems are masses of organisms, where the various inputs and outputs tend to achieve some overall stability. Though there is the input of sunlight and output of accreting organic matter, though we are recycling significant amounts of that stored energy back into the system and raising the temperature.

    Humanity, as a singular organism, is overwhelming the ability of the larger ecosystem to recycle its output in any sustainable fashion.

    As per my first comment about markets versus transportation, as effective analogies of how societies function, what I see as our most conceptually resolvable issue, even if the practical implications are much larger, is how we conceive of the mechanism of money.

    From the Roman Salaria, to gold, to bitcoin, we view money as a commodity that can be mined or manufactured and the present system of a government debt backed currency as somehow fraudulent. Yet the reality is that it does function as a large social contract, in that every asset is backed by an equivalent obligation.

    As such, it serves as a reliable medium of exchange for societies too large for personal knowledge and reciprocity to function. It really is a public utility and you own money about like you own the section of road you are using. If you think otherwise, just try printing some up and see how seriously they treat the copyrights.

    The problem is that we do think of it as property. Essentially a commodity that can be hoarded, but in basic practice, this would lead to booms and busts, as people would try to save and thus pull it out of circulation, requiring ever more to be injected, to keep the system functioning. Which would eventually reach the point of saturation and then people would try to dump their stored money, flooding the system.

    So we are encouraged to “store” it in banks, rather than in a pot. This allows it to be loaned out and kept in circulation. The problem there is that there is often more money trying to be saved, than can be profitably loaned out.

    To make a long story short, it then behooves the government to run deficits in order to store this excess wealth. Think government savings bonds, etc. Yet it is politically useful for politicians to rail against the government debt and the ways it is often spent. Remember that there are practical limits on how much investment the economy can absorb and this is generally considered the reserve of the private sector. So the government often spends money in ways which don’t have any viable return, though much of it does serve to support large sectors of the private economy and their search for profits.

    Then those with the most stored amounts of private wealth use it to leverage even more out of government and the larger society. So the reality is that while government debt is viewed as the most reliable form of savings, especially for the US, much of it is being wasted to keep the system functioning. The output has to be destroyed to keep the system moving.

    There are ways around this though. First off people have to understand that money is a public utility and not private property and then they will learn to be more careful what resources and relationships they are willing to sacrifice, in exchange for units of this social contract. Basically to store wealth in stronger societies and healthier environments, not just as paper assets.

    The advantage of a functioning financial system is the ability to save our own private wealth and not have to share it with those around us, as without this system, the carrying costs would be much larger, so wealth would be much more of a community function, to generate and save. Consequently this makes us less reliant on the people we know and more reliant on this global financial system.

    Now most of us save for the same general reasons, from housing and raising children, to health care and retirement. If we couldn’t save for our own discrete needs, then it would have to go back to being more of a community effort and the bonds of trust and reciprocity would be more organic, than monetary. It would be back to the commons as the basis of community.

    What this would entail would be for the government to threaten to tax excess wealth out of the economy and not just borrow it out. Then people would have to find other ways to invest for their future, such as into their own communities and environments.

    As for the government, it doesn’t really even budget, which is to prioritize and spend according to ability. Instead it puts together those enormous bills, adds enough goodies to get the necessary votes and the president can only pass, or on very rare occasions, veto the result. It’s a bit like bribing a kid with candy bars, to eat their spinach.

    Years ago, there was a political ploy, called the line item veto, which would presumably allow the president to strike any item from a bill, but it was nothing more than crowd food, because it would have eliminated the power of the congress over spending. To use this premise and actually budget, they could break these bills into all their various items, have every legislator assign a percentage value to each item, put the bill back together in order of preference and have the president draw the line. As Harry Truman might have put it, “The buck stops here.”

    This would keep the power divided, with the legislature prioritizing and the president as the point of responsibility for deficit spending. Yet it would completely destroy our current financial system, but that is in the process of self destruction anyway.

    Whole government functions as the central nervous system of civil society, finance is its economic circulation system. There was a time when government was a form of private enterprise, as what we call monarchy. The argument was that mob rule could never work, so the costs had to be borne. Eventually though, it proved to ineffectual anyway and so government, through fits and starts, because a public function.

    We are reaching that stage with the financial system. As a circulation system, money and finance are like the blood and arteries of the body and it doesn’t work to have excess blood. How the body stores energy is as fat and that does not store well in the circulation system. In fact, it works best to store it as bone and muscle, but that is a function of motion, not storage.

    As a public utility, government works best by pushing power to where it is most effective, not centralizing it. Similarly finance as a public utility would be a similar, ground up structure, with local banks serving their communities and as shareholders of regional banks. Profits generated would go to community infrastructure.

    There was a time in this country that banks often issued their own currency and were rewarded with he profits of managing it effectively. Though much of their investment was in the stock markets and so there were financial crises, as those markets were not very regulated. This was replaced by the creation of the Federal Reserve and a fully national currency, in 1913. Now some view this as the government capitulating to the banks, as the system makes the government responsible for a stable currency, while the banks reap the rewards from it. Yet I suspect that in hindsight, it will be viewed as the first step to making finance a public function, as the system undermines itself with unpayable public debt. So either we would have to go back to a situation where the banks are responsible for their own currencies, or move forward to where banking becomes a public utility.

    Which would make finance a fully functioning economic circulation system, not a method for siphoning wealth out of the larger economy, society and the environment on which it is all based.

    While socialism is offered up as the only alternative to capitalism, it is little more than the loyal opposition, given its just about redistributing the extracted wealth more broadly, than learning how to keep it organically functioning.

    Society does have its private and public aspects and while this distinction fluctuates, neither can exist without the other.

    Even the very wealthy, when they get old, realize they have to give it all back somehow and so it does get recycled. We just have to accept we can’t beat nature and not pay the consequences.

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  25. michaelfugate

    Dan, of course, the two views outlined in the article are true of some individuals, but there are many, many views of which those are only two. I didn’t find the Butman article a help at all; it doesn’t provide a way forward – changing words isn’t going to do squat.

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  27. Daniel Kaufman

    Brodix wrote:

    “First off people have to understand that money is a public utility and not private property.”

    Uh, no. The money that I and my family earn for our labor and from our investments is not a “public utility.”

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