Is it the fly who dies behind the window pane, or the fly who fears to enter your house, who retains her dignity?
Either flies don’t enter or people open their windows. By dying, which does the fly make possible?
Categories
Author: Ramsi Woodcock
Categories
The Heaven Chance*
You are nought but your fortune, as completely empty as chance, from the color of your eyes to the sharpness of your mind. So do not tell me that gambling lacks substance. You lack substance. There is no greater humility than the gambler’s.
*See Nietzsche.
Categories
The Enchanting System
In what way are mathematical models that validate our intuition different from specious etymologies? History is sexist because it is his story. Dogs are backward gods. Etc.
I don’t need a book; I can figure it out for myself!
Categories
The Naked Sale
The pervasive problem of absence of information on sellers admits only of a government fix. Only government can extract seller information and present it to consumers in a way that maximizes consumer welfare. Buyers can try to unite, but sellers will never volunteer information. Only an agent wielding the scissors of the law can lay sellers bare.
Categories
The Numeracy of Thought
For the humanist, the mathematical rubber hits the road of thought when she understands that almost all of her supposedly qualitative thought, particularly as it relates to the economy, involves ranking or statements of magnitude. “Invading Iraq set the country back to the stone age,” for example, is the statement that Iraq now has fewer cars, or dollar bills, or hospitals, or whatever, than it had before. Or consider “a dictatorship is better than an occupation.” In the first case you are counting, even if you don’t realize it. And in the second you are ranking, and any ranking can be represented as a counting of units of preference. So implicitly you are doing math.
The rub is that if you don’t actually write down functions and equations to describe your implicitly mathematical arguments, you end up doing very rudimentary and crude math. You are stuck with general mores versus lesses. Once you add the tools of math to your statements, you can multiply and divide your mores, integrate and differentiate your lesses, optimize them all, and so on. You explore your theories with much greater precision and insight than if you stick to just > and <. Moreover, you can compare your statements and harmonize them in ways that you cannot do when you lack the compact mathematical notation that allows you to include many complex ideas on a single line of text. And perhaps most beautifully and powerfully, at least for me, you can go out into the world, and get actual numbers that can be input into your mores and lesses, so that you can say, with extraordinary magic, precisely how much more and how much less, precisely how badly Iraq was injured.
The frightening thing for the humanist is that math, far from being an obfuscation and a superficiality, is something one has been doing crudely all along. It is a humbling that a true humanist should welcome to discover that her humanism is just an ignorance, or perhaps an illiteracy. Indeed, an innumeracy.
Unless you happen to fervently believe in a principle itself, and no one ought to, because principles aren’t real, you should never use one to win an argument, because one day something you love will run counter to the principle, and then you will be forced to watch it die. The argument against the Iraq war was that it was a bad war; it should never have been that military intervention is always wrong as a matter of principle. Now we have a relatively non-interventionist President, and the price is the murder of an entire country.
Categories
Progress
When other stars were reached, their civilizations were found to be in various stages of partial industrialization, at levels roughly comparable to those enjoyed on earth in the 18th century. Further examination revealed that this had been brought about in all cases by government fiat. It was for this reason that the stars had failed to respond for so long to our calls.
It is a great provincialism of life in the developed world that we assume that technological progress is unstoppable. Indeed, it is almost a nightmare, in that we see ourselves soon as either becoming something else, infinite-lived, technologically enhanced, engineered creatures, or dead by environmental disaster. In point of fact, one of the great successes of government in the 20th century was its perfection, proved in the blood of millions, of totalitarian governments capable of eliminating all technological progress, all dissent in favor of technology and growth. However horrible the methods of these governments, one must marvel at their ability to stamp out what in freer places seems a tectonic motion toward continual development.
These totalitarian governments failed, and continue to fail, only by the intervention of outside elements. If a totalitarian form were ever to seize control of the earth entire, progress might be stamped out forever, and humanity frozen in its present form.
Our goal should be a mindful technological progress, one that we understand to be under our own control, leading us to a place that we actually desire, or nowhere, if we wish nowhere to go.
Categories
A Sign of Excess
Raise taxes until philanthropy disappears. Why should the unelected rich decide how your taxes are spent on public projects?
Categories
The Upward Surge
The hubris of this age is not that we have dared to be scientists but that we think we had a choice!