Thoughts: 9 November 2021

 

From mitochondrial function to the functions of Big Food & Big Pharma

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

First of all, most pundits in the field (of nutrition) aren’t bench scientists or clinicians; they tend to be nutritional epidemiologists, and nutritional epidemiology has significant limitations. Epidemiology means correlation, not causation. Like John Snow’s cholera/Broad Street pump exercise . . . nutritional epidemiology studies are discovery, and discovery can be very important in posing the questions that truly need answering. However, it almost never answers the questions by itself; you need to design a proper study to answer them (see below). Just because A is associated with B, does that mean that A causes B? Or could it be reverse causality (B causes A)? Or could it be intermediate causality (C causes A or B)? Could it be irrelevant (C is associated with B and D, and D causes A)? As an example, ice cream consumption correlates with frequency of drownings. Does that mean eating ice cream causes you to drown?

The above insight is not limited to the subject of nutrition.

The Gardens of Democracy

Eric Liu & Nick Hanauer

In our first book, The True Patriot, we argued that putting self above community and country was morally wrong. In this book, we argue that it is stupid. We aim to show that in theory and in practice, self-seeking is now a counterproductive instinct and that we need a bigger idea of what freedom means in order for our country to remain great.

Weigh this insight in light of the current status of vaccination and mask use.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman

And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

Laughter as resistance to the mechanization of life has political implications. The stasis that Bergson’s élan vital opposes occurs in the institutions of society, schools, universities, government offices, corporations. Freud considered stasis — like Demeter’s stuckness and Norman Cousins’s immobility — to be a sign of the death drive, the thanatos principle.

Thoughts: 8 November 2021

 

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

History shows that just because we want a problem solved doesn’t mean the problem will be solved.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

But persuasion is analogous to compromise in that negotiators must ultimately reach accommodations—settle on something—in order to make a new law or establish new knowledge.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

ARENDT: I do not believe that there is any thought process possible without personal experience. Every thought is an afterthought, that is, a reflection on some matter or event. Isn’t that so? I live in the modern world, and obviously my experience is in and of the modern world. This, after all, is not controversial. But the matter of merely laboring and consuming is of crucial importance for the reason that a kind of worldlessness defines itself there too.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

An election cannot establish a unitary National Will. The belief that it does so leads to the belief that the Nation is deciding whatever Richard Nixon decides should be done, with American bombs and American lives, in Vietnam.

“The nature of illusion is that it’s designed to make you feel good. About yourself, about your country, about where you’re going – in that sense it functions like a drug. Those who question that illusion are challenged not so much for the veracity of what they say, but for puncturing those feelings.”

— Journalist/activist Chris Hedges

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” — Epictetus

Thoughts: 7 November 2021

 

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Recall Charles Sanders Peirce’s dictum: “It will appear that individualism and falsity are one and the same.” And: “Unless truth be recognized as public—as that of which any person would come to be convinced if he carried his inquiry, his sincere search for immovable belief, far enough—then there will be nothing to prevent each one of us from adopting an utterly futile belief of his own which all the rest will disbelieve.”

Or we might paraphrase this: "N=1 isn't a reliable source for knowledge."

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

Absent sophisticated and responsible gatekeepers, public discourse is subject to Gresham’s Law. Bad ideas and information drive out good; saner voices are drowned out by a digital mob of charlatans, schemers, extremists, and trolls disgorging misinformation, disinformation, and venom. Yes, “elite” gatekeepers have biases, blindspots, and axes to grind, but these can usually be kept in check by competing gatekeepers. To expect a good result from throwing the crooked timber of humanity together into one giant arena, instead of allowing the truest timbers to set standards and make rules, is a kind of madness.

Compare Rauch/Peirce above and think about, for instance, Facebook today.

The Soul's Code

James Hillman

Our republic should learn this lesson from Hitler, for we might one day vote into power a hero who wins a giant TV trivia contest and educate our children to believe the Information Superhighway is the road to knowledge. If one clue to psychopathy is a trivial mind expressing itself in high-sounding phrases, then an education emphasizing facts rather than thinking, and patriotic, politically or religiously correct “values” rather than critical judgment may produce a nation of achieving high school graduates who are also psychopaths.

Compare to Rauch/Peirce and Ophuls above: do you discern a trend here? Worth considering?

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

...even the great golden calf itself, the national economy, lost its power to organize the national polity.

Although with less context than I normally like, isn't the phrase "the great golden calf itself, the national economy" spot-on? Think of the Texas lieutenant governor who wanted us old folks to self-sacrifice to this idol.

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

Economic development as we know it started with Europe’s conquest of the New World, a bonanza of found wealth. Before the conquest, European societies were politically, economically, and socially closed. But once flooded by a surge of new energy from the Americas, they began to open and develop. All the philosophies, institutions, and values characteristic of modern life, above all liberal democracy, slowly emerged. Over time, as the New World bonanza was supplemented and then supplanted by fossil fuels, economic and political development proceeded in tandem to transform the world and to create the luxuries and freedoms we enjoy today. With a return of ecological scarcity, however, what abundance has given will be taken away—to what extent and how rapidly remains to be seen, but we can hardly expect liberal democratic institutions fostered by abundance and predicated on abundance to survive in their current form.

Perhaps why we're so loath to deal with climate change and other concurrent ecological disasters.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

Man lives in this in-between, and what he calls the present is a life-long fight against the dead weight of the past, driving him forward with hope, and the fear of a future (whose only certainty is death), driving him backward toward “the quiet of the past” with nostalgia for and remembrance of the only reality he can be sure of.

The Wedge

Scott Carney,

Indigenous medicine takes a different tack. Experience takes precedence. Instead of reducing symptoms, medicines like ayahuasca accentuate them. Psychotherapy in the Amazon involves facing, not suffocating your demons. It can be unpleasant and uncover ugly things that you’d rather not look at, but if you weather the experience, you have access to the root of the issue. To put it another way, if we bury our symptoms in the West, then in the Amazonian tradition, we expose the symptoms to sunlight in the hope of burning them away altogether.

Isn't this what psychotherapy is supposed to do? But we do prefer drugs don't we?

The Wedge

Scott Carney

In the battle of man versus nature, nature always wins.

Yup. Always.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

From its beginnings Real America has also been religious, and in a particular way—evangelical and fundamentalist, hostile to modern ideas and intellectual authority. The truth will enter every simple heart, and it doesn’t come in shades of gray.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Beginning in the 1960s, America’s “culture war” effectively dissolved the political consensus that had prevailed since the end of the Second World War.

Thoughts: 5 November 2021

 

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

The upshot [of Say's Law]: Depressions are impossible. The very act of producing forecloses the possibility that a society will be unable to afford the fruits of production. The overall standard of living might be high or low, but it depends on how efficiently the society makes use of its resources. Unemployment cannot be a significant factor. 

But depressions are real, and Say’s Law is wrong. People don’t spend all of their incomes, and what they save is not automatically converted into other spending by anyone, now or later. In the classical worldview, banking was supposed to ensure that savings aligned with investment through the establishment of interest rates ensuring that the money people wanted to save would be profitably invested in new projects. [Keynes's] A Treatise on Money had tasked central banks with handling this duty. By cutting interest rates, central banks could make it more attractive for firms to borrow the money needed to expand production and discourage people from putting money in the bank, where it would earn a lousy return. Keynes argued that although this might work—he remained to the end of his days an advocate of low interest rates and cheap money—it very well might not.

Carter, Zachary D..The Price of Peace (pp. 261-262). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Implicit here is the idea--or at least my idea--that depressions make no sense. They are creations of the system and not of Nature. In the Great Depression, the U.S. had not lost factories or suffered great crop failures, etc. It was a failure of the human-created system, not of some "law." My thought anyway, but I think Keynes was there way ahead of me. 

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

The North Vietnamese were not hooked on the idea of economic growth determination (which was one of the great hang-ups of Rostow), but were determined to extend their regime’s control to the entire country rather than maintain their industrialization. That was what motivated them, and that was what they considered their unfinished business. They had invested a great deal in it and they would continue to invest in it; no North Vietnamese government could afford to do less.

If you don't understand your adversary's incentives--or more fundamentally, your adversary's values--you don't understand your enemy & you'll surrender your ability to persuade, and even to coerce, your adversary.

Lila

Robert M. Pirsig

Without Dynamic Quality the organism cannot grow. Without static quality the organism cannot last. Both are needed.

A polarity? A dialectic? Being & Becoming? Many possibilities but a basic insight with any label.

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.

We need more courage.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

Modern Medicine and Big Pharma remain caught in a vicious cycle: doctors need Big Pharma because they’re taught to treat rather than cure or prevent; but the reason they don’t know any better is because medical education has been co-opted by Big Pharma itself. And so the cycle repeats.

How to break the cycle?

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

The [G. K.] Chestertons and [Patrick] Deneens of the world, insisting that liberalism destroys values, tend to overlook the overwhelming liberal assertion of the primary human value of pluralism because to them pluralism is simply not a value.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Another related speculation has even less evidence to support it but has a certain a priori likelihood. Nearly all writing about chance before modern times was in terms of fortune, fate, the goddess Fortuna, and the Wheel of Fortune.

And while numbers and quantification are useful, those metaphors and personifications are still of value. In a sense, we don't know (unknown unknowns) and can't know (known unknowns) some things.

Ultrasociety

Peter Turchin

When we survey the biological worlds, we find only two groups of organisms that practice large-scale warfare: human beings and ants.

Ants aren't that bright; what's our excuse?

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

The French Revolution, Tocqueville wrote, was like Islam in that it ‘flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles and martyrs’.

In short, the modern ideology of the Revolution (and its successors) are function in some ways very much like a religion.

Thoughts: 4 November 2021

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

It’s a grim reality today that many of humanity’s emerging global problems— like climate change and biodiversity loss— produce the conditions for market failure in stunning abundance.

In other words, markets aren't self-sustaining or perfect. If the conditions--cultural, social, political, or natural--aren't aligned & operative, markets will fail.

The Landscape of History

John Lewis Gaddis

The best you can do, whether with a prince or a landscape or the past, is to represent reality: to smooth over the details, to look for larger patterns, to consider how you can use what you see for your own purposes.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

“The best that we have from history,” Goethe says, “is the enthusiasm that it stimulates.”

Disagree, Goethe. Per Collingwood, the highest use of history is self-knowledge.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

For Samuelson and his followers, physics was the foundation of knowledge, and mathematics was its language. Where The General Theory had proclaimed “uncertainty” to be the bedrock analytical concept for economic thinking, Samuelson and his protégés sought not only certainty but precision.

Excessive physics-envy is the bain of the social sciences.

Z

Trust and the Competition Delusion - Griffith Review

griffithreview.com

THE OUTRAGES OF financialisation provide a specific example of a more general tendency that’s always been problematic in our culture, but it’s now accelerating with frightening speed. Knowledge and information throughout our economy and society are being degraded on an immense scale.

From Australian economist Nicholas Gruen. This suggests that information & knowledge are forms of energy that suffer from entropy. They need constant inputs to remain valuable.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

On October 27, within hours of Trump declaring that it would be “totally inappropriate” if ballots were still being tallied after election day, eight business organizations, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, took the unusual step of issuing a joint statement, rebutting the president and calling for “peaceful and fair elections,” the counting of which might, quite legitimately, extend over “days or even weeks.” Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, emailed the bank’s staff, stressing the “paramount” importance of respecting the democratic process. Two hundred and sixty leading executives signed a statement “warning that the health of the US economy depended on the strength of its democracy.”

I derive some hope that even Wall Street, with its infatuation with the bottom line, realizes that it, too, will lose of democracy & the rule of law go down the drain.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

Once upon a time on the family farm, the feed was made on site (dried grass called hay), and cow manure was a combination fertilizer/pesticide—essentially a GHG break-even process. But now, with monoculture farming, the feed is on the factory farm in Iowa, and the manure is left on the concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) in Kansas (there’s triple the animal manure versus human feces produced each day in the US). Furthermore, on the CAFO, the manure isn’t repurposed as fertilizer. Instead it decomposes into methane and other pollutants—including nitrogen, phosphorus, antibiotics, and metals—which leech into groundwater when manure storage facilities inevitably leak.

We don't need to kill all the cattle; we need sustainable agriculture.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Self-organizing systems are intrinsically stable and resilient—but only up to a point. Chronic, low-grade stress sickens them, and once stressed beyond a certain threshold (sometimes called a tipping point), they can fall out of equilibrium and enter a regime of positive feedback in which a self-destructive process feeds on itself.

See my comment on the Homer-Dixon quote at the beginning.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

A number of these themes come together in some remarks of Guicciardini, which explain why legal thinking is a natural matrix for a wide range of conceptual advances in applicable reasoning. “Common men find the variety of opinions that exists among lawyers quite reprehensible, without realizing that it proceeds not from any defects in the men but from the nature of the subject. General rules cannot possibly comprehend all particular cases. Often, specific cases cannot be decided on the basis of law, but must rather be dealt with by the opinions of men, which are not always in harmony. We see the same thing happen with doctors, philosophers, commercial arbitrators, and in the discourses of those who govern the state, among whom there is no less variety of judgement than among lawyers.”

Take it from a lawyer: so true.

The Soul of the World

Roger Scruton

If there is anything that could be called progress in the religious history of mankind, it resides in the gradual preference for the self over the other as the primary sacrificial victim. It is precisely in this that the Christian religion rests its moral claim.

I believe that Scruton is channeling Rene Girard here.

Beyond the Robot

Gary Lachman

[Colin] Wilson felt something of the same [transported to a different time & place] while writing his book on Shaw. Writing of Shaw’s breakthrough after years of overwork as a music and theater critic, he [Wilson] had a “sudden feeling of intense joy,” as if his “heart had turned into a balloon” and was “sailing up into the air.” He had become aware, he said, of the “multiplicity of life.” He was back in Edwardian London, as the hero of The Philosopher’s Stone was back in Shakespeare’s day or Proust back in Combray. But he could just as easily be in “Goethe’s Weimar or Mozart’s Salzburg.” The experience, he points out, was not one of empathy; it was, as William James had said of his own mystical experience, perceptual. It was not merely a matter of feeling but of seeing, of perceiving a reality of which we are usually blind, or toward which we are usually indifferent. It was a moment of seeing from the bird’s-eye view rather than from our usual close-up perspective. Or, in other words, it was a moment of non-robotic consciousness.

Such moments are important because they renew us. They connect us to our source of power, meaning, and purpose, and fill us with new vitality. As Wilson came to see, the right brain is in charge of our power supply. It holds the purse strings on our strength.

Wilson knew that it was precisely such moments as these that the Romantics craved: the sense that distant realities are as real as the present moment—more real, in fact—and that life is infinitely interesting.

A sort of deja vu experience?