Category: How to think Page 10 of 22

The world is human. Most humans live in cities, artificial environments created by us. We walk on streets laid out by humans, work and sleep and cook in buildings, drive in cars or take buses, trains and planes. We talk on cell phones and use the internet. Even those who live in the country live on land which has been altered by agriculture and the pasturing of animals domesticated by humans. The farmer grows wheat which was bred over millenia (or genetically altered recently). The farmer raises animals humans have been raising for thousands of years. We eat the meat of cows and pigs and chicken, we dine on rice or wheat or vegetables we have tended for millenia and which we have bred to suit us.

As individuals, we did not create almost any part of this physical world. We did not invent the techniques for caring for domesticated animals, growing vegetables, or making smart phones.

We live in a physical world created by humans, many of whom are dead. Human life is human in a way that animal life is not animal. Animals have an effect on the environment, but it is minor compared to what humans have done to the world.

And this is just the physical side of the world. Just as important is the world of ideas, of social facts.

Look at the words you are reading right now. You didn’t invent writing, typing, any of these words, or language itself. You spend your life thinking most of your thoughts in a language or languages created by humans, for humans, and mostly by dead humans.

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You almost certainly receive your daily food in exchange for something called money which is probably either plastic woven to look like paper or electronic bits. Money has no intrinsic value, a million dollars in the middle of Antarctica would do nothing for you, most money isn’t even paper any more; you couldn’t even burn it for heat. Yet most of us spend most of our waking days working for someone who gives us “money” and exchange it for most everything else we want.

In times of war and famine, money may lose most of its value. Food, cigarettes, or sex may be worth more. Money’s value is a social fact.

When someone is killed by another human being, whether it was murder or not is a social fact. In war, if a soldier kills someone it is probably not murder. If the state is executing someone it is not murder. When police kill someone it is usually not considered murder. Social facts.

The quality and amount of health care provided to individuals is a social fact. It depends on where they live. In some countries, it depends on how much money they have. In other countries, it depends on how much power they have.

The amount of melanin in someone’s skin is a physical fact. That having a “black” name in America leads to half the interview requests for an identical resume compared to someone with a “white” name is a social fact(x).

Cannabis is almost certainly less physically harmful than tobacco or alcohol, but selling or possessing cannabis is far more likely to get you thrown in jail. In the US, during alcohol prohibition, this was not true. Alcohol is alcohol, its legal status is a social fact.

Social facts rule most of your life. They are layered on top of physical facts and tell you how to understand those facts, and how to act towards them. There are few more consequential decisions than “When should I kill someone?” or “When should someone receive health care and how good should it be? or “Should I hire someone and for how much?”

Not all ideas are social facts. You may believe something “ought” to be true, but often other people do not agree. You think your girlfriend shouldn’t cheat, she doesn’t agree, the state doesn’t care. But if you act on that idea, and so do other people, it’s a social fact. They may call her a cheater, ostracize her, and so on. If no one acts on it, it is not a social fact.

A gang or mafia may believe that their members shouldn’t inform, and they may enforce this as best they can, but obviously the state does not. It is still a social fact if they can make it one, however.

You may also believe in ideas which are contrary to the ideas currently enforced by the state or other people. Perhaps you do not believe in intellectual property. Perhaps you think confessions obtained by torture shouldn’t be used in criminal proceedings. Perhaps you believe that women should or shouldn’t be able to have abortions.

These ideas may fall short of being social facts if no one acts on them. They are just ideas about how the world “ought” to be.

But while social facts are not just ideas, they are still ideas. Unlike the rules of the material universe, they can be changed.

And because they rule our lives, and our societies are built upon them, to change social facts is to change everything.

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The Role of Character and Ideology in Prosperity

By Ian Welsh

On October 2, 2017

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(First of two collections of important articles published 2014 or earlier. Read the second.)

I want to take readers through some of my previous writing on ideology and character, and how they help form the societies in which we live. Taking the time to read these articles (a short book’s worth), should vastly improve your understanding of the world and the articles to come. It should be worth your time, even if you read the articles when they were previously published, as, at the time, they lacked both context and commentary, and were not collated to be read together so that the connections were obvious.

(I have a lot of new readers, so I’m going to kick this back to the top. These are some of the most important articles I have written–Ian)

Baseline Predictions for the Next 60 Years

While not an article about ideology, the above is an article about where our current ideology and character are going to take us: To the brink of disaster and possibly beyond, while continuing to impoverish and disempower larger and larger segments of the human race. This might be a slightly optimistic piece; there’s some reason to believe our actions in the world’s oceans could destroy the oxygen cycle, and if this is so, events will be much, much worse.

What Is an Ideology and Why Do We Need a New One?

Too many people think ideologies are some airy-fairy nonsense, while they themselves are “pragmatic” men and women operating on common sense and facts. Such people are amongst the greatest of all fools: Our entire society is based on interlocking ideologies; the primary of which are neoliberalism, capitalism, human rights, and socialism. It is not obvious, nor was it obvious to most societies that have ever existed, for example, that food should be distributed based on money, nor that ideas could be property. How we organize things, our particular ideas about markets and their role, and our ideas about who should lead us, are ideological. If we want to change society, we need to be able to control markets so they aren’t producing a world that makes us sick, unhappy, and, in increasing numbers, dead.

How to Create a Viable Ideology

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)

We may look at current trends and realize that if we don’t reverse them–and reverse them fast–billions will suffer or die; but creating an ideology which can reverse these trends requires us to understand what makes an ideology viable and powerful. An ideology which does not create believers willing to die, and to kill, on its behalf, will lose to those that do. An ideology which cannot prevent people from selling out, from betraying, will definitely lose in the current world, where there is so much money available at the top to simply buy out (for billions) those who create something new, so that anything new can be neutralized into nothing but a monetization scheme.

Our Theory of Human Nature Predicts Our Policies

The ideas of an ideology determine how our society is run, and, of those ideas, none is more important than what we make of human nature.

A Theory of Human Nature Suited to Prosperity and Freedom

If we are trying to create a prosperous, free world, our policies must be based in a theory of human nature that is both true (enough) and which leads to policies that create widespread affluence and human freedom.

Character Is Destiny

Ideology and character are intertwined. Character determines what we do, what we don’t do, and how we do it. The character of large numbers of people determines the destinies of nations and of the world itself. If we want to make the world better (or worse), we must change our own characters. Those who fail to understand how character is created (and changed) will never change the world–except accidentally.

How Everyday Life Creates Our Character

Along with, as noted, our destiny. I always laugh at radicals who want more schooling, because schooling is where people learn to sit down, shut up, give the approved answers, and do what they’re told. Working life, as an adult, continues this process of learned powerlessness and acquiescence, and even in our consumptive and political lives we continue the trend; choosing from the choices offered, rather than producing what we actually need for ourselves.

How Everyday Life Creates Sociopathic Corporate Leaders

Those who lead our corporations control most of our lives, even more so than the government, because they set the terms by which we live, die, and can afford the good things in life. Our daily lives are prescribed by these people, from how we work to what we eat, to what we entertain ourselves with. We need, therefore, to understand the character traits for which our leaders are chosen, and how the process of choosing works. If we can’t learn to create and choose better leaders, we will never have a better world.

The Difference Between Ethics and Morals

If we want an ideology that tells us how to create both a better world and the people with the character to create that world, we must understand what sort of people they should be. To accomplish this, we must first understand how they treat other people–the people they know, and more importantly, the people they don’t.

The Fundamental Feedback Loop for a Better World

The shortest article on this list, this is also one of the most important and speaks directly to how money directs behaviour and how that directs our choice in leaders.

Living in a Rich Society

It’s been so long since parts of the West were truly prosperous that people have forgotten what it’s like, and they’ve forgotten that it creates a different type of person than a scarcity society.

Late 19th and Early 20th Century Intellectual Roots

Lived experience creates character and character feeds into ideology. It’s worth looking at how various themes of the Victorian era were created by those who lived through that time and the time that came before it.

What Confucius Teaches Those Who Want a Better World

Amongst those who have created powerful ideologies, Confucius is in the first rank; Confucianism has been the most important ideology of the most populous and advanced region of the world for most of the last two thousand years–or more. Confucius was very aware of what he was trying to do, had a theory of human nature, and a theory of character. We would be fools not to learn from him.

Concluding Remarks

I hope that those who are interested in creating a better world will read the articles linked above. What I’ve written amounts to a short book, and the ideas are interrelated. If you have read a few of my posts, or even read all of them, but not thought of or read them with each other in mind, you cannot have the full picture of how these ideas work together, and why the different parts are necessary.

Ideas are often destroyed in practice by those who do not understand the reasons for the various pieces of the puzzle and prescriptions. These people feel they can pick and choose without that understanding. Character and ideology and ethics and every day life are all intertwined; you cannot pick one and say,”This is supreme.” They create each other.

Of course, the above is not a complete intellectual package. Large chunks are missing. My next piece will be a review of some key economic articles, specifically concerning why the world is as it is today: Why we lost post-war liberalism, why we have austerity and neoliberalism and so-called free trade. That piece comes after this one because without understanding our own characters, the characters of our leaders, and how ideology works, we cannot understand our current circumstances.

I will then be moving on to new articles that focus on technology, geography, the environment, and their effect on societies though the ages, with an emphasis on those technologies and environments which create prosperity, freedom, and egalitarian cultures and explore why they do so. There is an important trend today, an argument, about changing our technology to improve society, but it will only work if we understand how technology changes society.

Originally published Oct 2, 2014. Republished July 28, 2015, March 6, 2016 & October 2, 2017.

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Screw Optimism and Screw “Sanity”

By Ian Welsh

On September 29, 2017

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An older post, reborn.

I recently stumbled across a book on the link between leadership and what we call madness. From the Amazon review:

Take realism, for instance: study after study has shown that those suffering depression are better than “normal” people at assessing current threats and predicting future outcomes. Looking at Lincoln and Churchill among others, Ghaemi shows how depressive realism helped these men tackle challenges both personal and national. Or consider creativity, a quality psychiatrists have studied extensively in relation to bipolar disorder. A First-Rate Madness shows how mania inspired General Sherman and Ted Turner to design and execute their most creative-and successful-strategies.

Ghaemi’s thesis is both robust and expansive; he even explains why eminently sane men like Neville Chamberlain and George W. Bush made such poor leaders. Though sane people are better shepherds in good times, sanity can be a severe liability in moments of crisis. A lifetime without the cyclical torment of mood disorders, Ghaemi explains, can leave one ill equipped to endure dire straits. He also clarifies which kinds of insanity-like psychosis-make for despotism and ineptitude, sometimes on a grand scale.

Now, I’m not depressive, strictly speaking. I don’t stay in bed all day, and so on. But the Welsh family motto, no kidding, is this:

An optimist and a damn fool are the same thing.

Ordinary people, those whom we call “sane” in our society, are really shitty analysts. Really, really shitty analysts. Their bias to the upside is tiresome, predictable and makes them wrong, over and over and over again. They don’t know what real threats are, they constantly are confused about what is really dangerous. They think stranger pedophiles are a bigger danger to their kids than their own family members or their own driving. They think terrorism is dangerous, when almost no one dies from it; as opposed to crossing the street or eating too many Big Macs. They fear “Osama” when the men who are most likely to cause their death or impoverishment have names like Bush, Paulson, Geithner, Obama, and so on.

I walked through Calcutta’s slums, as a teenager, by myself. I know what’s actually dangerous, and what isn’t. But my parents didn’t coddle me; they didn’t think their job was to make sure I never faced any danger, no matter how minor. So when I was released as an adult, I knew how to evaluate threats. They also didn’t think my self-esteem should outrun my ability.

Of course optimism is wonderfully adaptive as long as optimists aren’t your leaders or analysts, and don’t run your nuclear power plants, or plan your economies, or make any decisions about anything which if it goes wrong can go catastrophically wrong. Optimists are happier, they live longer, they’re healthier, they “get up and go,” blah, blah, blah. Optimism is good for optimists and, hey, they’re generally more pleasant to be around, too. There are time periods when they’re even right a lot (say during the 50s). But, basically, they’re blind. One imagines conversations between cows. “Hey, they feed us every day, we get free health care, no real responsibility! The dog makes sure the wolves don’t bother us. This is great! I do wonder what happened to Thelma and Fred, when they took them away in that truck? But I’m sure it wasn’t anything bad, and if it was they must have deserved it, and anyway, that’d never happen to me, because I’m a good cow and this is the best herd in the whole world!”

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And you can tell people what will happen, in advance, and be right, over and over and over again. And what that will do is get you marginalized. “Oh, he’s so negative! Such a downer. He should make us feel good about ourselves and our future, and if he doesn’t, we won’t listen. Let’s watch some TV!”

The stuff that makes you a good everyday person, a pal at the pub, the best husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend, mother or father, does not make you a good analyst or a good leader. Choosing other sheep to lead you, to guide you, gets you what you’re getting right now–good and hard.

And the medicalization of every bad mood, as if we’re supposed to never experience negative emotions is more psychotic than the “diseases” they are intended to treat. Yes, some people are so insane that they need big time help, and being drugged, but way more people than that are being drugged.

Likewise, I am beyond tired of the excessive stigmatization of anger and hatred. It is appropriate to hate some people. If you don’t hate a man who has killed tens to hundreds of thousands of people (you don’t know because he refused to count) for a war based on lies, while gutting your civil rights, you are either a saint or your values are so fucked up I don’t even know what to say. You hate some people (yes, you do, don’t deny it), why don’t you hate the people who are actually doing evil on an industrial scale and who directly threaten your prosperity and your good life? And why, exactly, aren’t you angry? Again, don’t tell me you don’t get angry (unless you’re a saint), so why aren’t you angry at the people who are destroying your future and the future of your children?

Oh, right, because most people suck at threat analysis. They don’t even know what or who is really dangerous. They don’t /want/ to believe that people who look like they’d be great to have a beer with, or Uncle Fred, or driving their beloved automobile, or the food that they eat, is what’s actually going to kill them, make them sick, or hurt the kid they profess is just the most special and important person in their life, except when it comes to making sure the kid will have a world worth living in.

So folks. Hate can be awful, it can lead to awful crimes. But you’re going to hate someone, so learn who to hate. Anger can be terrible, few people know that better than I do, as my father’s temper was the terror of my youth, but you’re going to be angry, so know when and with who to get angry with, and stop displacing your anger.

And screw hope. Screw optimism. Really, seriously. Hope is like pride, you should have exactly as much hope as the circumstances dictate, and no more.

But you can’t live that way. I know. You need your hope. You need to believe.

Okay. That’s fine. I understand. Variety is good.

But don’t insist that everyone else be like you. And understand your own weaknesses. Know what you suck at. Find the people who don’t suck at those things, figure out which ones to trust (that’s a whole other essay) and listen to them. No one is good at everything (I sure as hell am not), but a wise person knows what they are bad at.

Who is mad? The pessimist, the depressive, who accurately understands the world around him, or the hope-filled optimists who are blind to real threats, can’t predict the future worth a damn, and who select their leaders based on “wouldn’t it be great to have a beer with him?”

I don’t know, and I don’t even really care. But I do know that when I want to have good time at a party, or I need a good salesman, I look for different abilities than I do in good analysts and good leaders. That the person who runs my nuclear plants should not be Mr. Fucking Sunshine, saying “It’ll all work out for the best!”

Just, no.

And stop drugging your kids en-masse. Okay? Just stop.

Originally published August 29, 2011. Ironically I now see reasons for hope (not optimism, optimism is never appropriate in an analyst. Also, I was, errr, somewhat angry and bitter back in 2011.

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How to Think

By Ian Welsh

On September 24, 2017

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If there is something this blog is about, it’s how to think. There’s an entire category, but it’s most of what I write about.

Thinking well isn’t about always being right, because you can’t be. It is about having models of the world that are:

Right often enough
When wrong, fail with the least harm possible and ideally with benefit.

Models are never true, they are always abstractions from the truth. Most of our models of the world are not reasoned, they are emotional and experiential. Science is a special form of experiential. The world turns out to be a very odd place indeed: It is not intuitive that there is action at a distance, that there is no transmitting medium (ether) in space, that gravity warps time and space, or that observation changes the results of quantum experiments.

There are two sets of knowledge, overlapping: knowledge of the external world and knowledge of humans and our society.

Society creates reality: The fastest way to get dead, from stone age hunter gatherers to today, is through your fellow humans beings, whether by violence or neglect. We are deeply attuned to the fact that ostracism equals death, and we will do almost anything to stay in with our group, whoever that group is. If that means believing patent nonsense, if that involves kowtowing to cruel leaders, if that involves becoming cruel and deranged ourselves, we will do it.

We will believe what we need to believe to stay with the group we identify with, to identify with the group that supports us, and be damned the consequences to anyone outside the group–or, indeed, anyone inside the groups. Norms will be maintained.

None of this is to deny change in norms over time, but only if those norms move towards greater kindness and greater truth, is changing of norms beneficial.

And only if successful regimes fail with least harm, and ideally beneficial side effects, are their claims to be better to be entirely believed.

The decision-making humans of our society almost all run a particular set of beliefs best called neoliberalism, a particularly harmful strain of capitalism. They believe in it, because they have benefited from it, and because everyone around them believes in it. If you don’t believe in it, you don’t get into power, with rare exceptions.

This set of beliefs has led to catastrophe after catastrophe, starting with the Russian transition from Communism, including the financial collapse and austerity, and certainly including ignoring the last chance to limit climate change to acceptable levels.

Because capitalism is fundamentally based on greed and selfishness, and because its metaphysics says that price is equal to value and should be used to guide behaviour, it is failing damagingly–despite however much it has otherwise accomplished.

It is not that these failures were not predicted by many, they were. But they were not accepted as failures and no action was taken to prevent them because to accept and act, in too many errors, was to make oneself unfit for power.

Not of the group. Unclean. Unclean.

Not serious.

World models have consequences. How people think has consequences. Our tribal nature and ability to identify with virtually anything has consequences.

Because our power over the natural world has increased so much, errors and characteristics which were adaptive during most of our evolution are now catastrophically dangerous. Extinction level dangerous. Not just for us, but for all too many other species with whom we share the globe, many of whom are more than capable of immense levels of suffering.

So how we think, matters. And figuring out how to think better, not just for a few, but for the many, matters.

And because feeling is most of thinking, this means figuring out how to feel better, more accurately, and more kindly, as well.

More on this soon. In the meantime, read this model of the role of reason and emotion.

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Review of Descarte’s Error, by Antonio Damasio

By Ian Welsh

On September 22, 2017

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This book is a bit long in the tooth now, having been published in ’95. The role it suggests for emotion in the use of reason is, in generalities, no longer controversial. But it was a landmark book for me, when I read it, and it’s still relevant and worth reading.

There’s been a LOT of work around how reason and emotion work together, or don’t. One popular model is “thinking fast and thinking slow,” with emotion as primary in the first, and reason the second.

There’s truth to this, but it’s only a partial truth. In complicated situations, reason does not work alone and can’t.

The human mind is limited, it simply cannot hold a lot of information at one time. Working memory holds about seven bits of information. Some people have a little more, some a little less, and there’s some variation on how much can be held based on the complexity of what is held.

Impressive memory tricks are mostly a result of clumping information into meaningful bits. One strategy for memorizing numbers is to do them as times, for example, making each bit longer.

Logic can work in two ways: sequentially and in parallel. In parallel it can only work up to the limit of working memory. Sequentially we can work through logical chains, but long chains run up against the working memory limitation in their own way–after a time, we don’t really remember the chain.

Humans, for all that we pat ourselves on the back a lot, are fundamentally stupid. It’s just that most other animals are terrible, and those who might be about as good as us or even better are, in some ways, handicapped otherwise, in terms of hands, and/or language, and/or lifespan (octopi), and so on.

Damasio notes that the realm of pure reason is very limited. Most decisions are not obvious. One example he gives is of a patient who has lost the ability to feel emotions trying to decide when his next appointment should be. It’s not obvious, and he can’t do it, he can spend hours trying to decide.

This same patient, however, in a potential motor vehicle accident where there is an obvious solution, has no problem. Because he feels no emotions, he does the right thing and it’s no big deal for him.

Emotions are really body-states. You feel all emotions in your body. If you don’t, you don’t feel an emotion. (Meditation will show this to you experientially, if you wish.)

We remember emotions and we re-create them as necessary. (Remember the last time you hugged someone you love, feel the emotion. To enhance it, stand and physically mimic hugging them.)

We assign these emotions even to very subtle things, like logical propositions and thoughts on subjects.

When a problem is too hard to deal with using pure reason, when it’s not important enough to subject to pure reason, or when there is no time for pure reason (because logical thinking is, indeed, SLOW), we refer to our feelings, and we go with the one that feels best (or least worst).

Thinking is rarely divided into “pure reasoning” (slow) or “pure feeling” (fast), most complicated decisions use both.

More to the point, most hard decisions are hard because they aren’t clear: There isn’t an obvious logical choice. They’re close calls, and, in such decisions, we will go with the decision that feels best.

So pure reason is rare, slow, and usually only used for decisions that are, actually, clear cut.

This has a lot of implications, but the one I want to end with is this: Your emotional map of reality is most of your intelligence and if your emotional map of reality (or any decision space within reality) is not accurate, you’re going to make a lot of bad decisions.

This, though Damasio does not go into it, is where ideology and identity come into things. Through those two methods (and anyone who doesn’t think they have an ideology is a fool), we build emotional maps we then layer on top of reason. If our identities or ideologies are screwed, we make bad decisions.

This is an important book to read. Even if all details are not accurate, it is a necessary antidote to a lot of foolishness about how thinking and decision-making actually works.

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How Society Creates Ability

By Ian Welsh

On August 7, 2017

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Let’s start with biological sex and the differences between men and women.

There are obvious differences, in size and upper body strength. There are large differences in some of the senses, such as taste and smell (women tend to be far more acute).

Other differences appear biological, but this is not as clear cut as it seems, because socialization feeds into biology.

A simple example is that people raised under constant stress have differences in their brains from people who aren’t raised under constant stress.

So let’s take a simple claim: Men are better at math. Seems straightforward, quite robust, but it turns out that in Iceland, which is very egalitarian, young women are now outperforming young men.

There is a well-known effect in the social sciences that runs as follows: People who feel inferior, perform worse. This is quite robust. Tell someone they suck, or that they are lower on the totem pole, and they will do worse by pretty much every metric.

So, if you live in a society where men are widely considered superior to women (and let’s not pretend our societies aren’t like this), then that will have an effect. If this goes on as people grow up, it’s unlikely that this effect won’t get baked into brain and body.

Take another standard observation: Women are more prone to anxiety and neuroticism.

The problem with this is that women live in societies where they are less powerful than men, have less money, and are less violently proficient, when violence is often used as coercion.

Put more brutally: They live amongst a bunch of potential rapists who are larger and stronger than them.

So, they’re under constant stress, a point which I don’t think many men truly understand. That constant fear has effects on the brain and body; again, if you’re constantly exposed to stress, you actually become more sensitive to it.

The point here is that it is very hard to determine what is “natural” and what is “social.” We can say, “This is natural in this sort of society,” but that can’t be used as a reason not to change society.

What we do know, I hope, is that it sucks to be scared and it sucks to be told you’re inferior, and that underperforming not because you are inferior but because you’ve been told you are, is unfair and a stupid way for us to run our society.

This feeds into a lot of different things, but the simplest is the misunderstanding of fitness to mean “winning in the current scheme.”

IQ correlates well to success in our society, so we say, “They’re smarter, they deserve success.” But IQ correlates well to success in society because it correlates to two things: (1) academic success, which gates almost all the good jobs in our lives, and; (2) verbal and cultural fluency in the dominant culture, which are necessary to get ahead as well.

In other words, we’ve created a society which says, “If you have a high IQ, we will let you have good jobs.” Well yes, that’s how we made it, it’s not independent. (The getting along with the dominant culture may always be with us, but that doesn’t mean we should always approve of it as a necessity, nor try not to mitigate it.)

Fitness, in racial terms, is actually about being able to survive changes in the environment. Fit species are diverse, and able to adapt, and if a species loses diversity, it is less likely to survive changes.

Much of our environment, as humans, is social. But society changes. The cluster of skills which make up IQ weren’t always highly valued, rather the contrary. Brave-to-the-point-of-insanity dunderheads were what many feudal and aristocratic societies wanted (reading 19th century British colonial military biographies makes this clear). Right now, geeks rule, but when I was growing up they sure as heck didn’t (and their rule, today, is somewhat exaggerated).

These periods come and go. There was a time in the 19th and early 20th century when geeks (actual engineers and scientists) did very well, seeming to rule the roost. Edison is a good example. But as the industries they had invented became mature, they were forced out and down. This took time, but basically after about 40 to 80 years, the engineers become nothing but tools of management: The money men and social glad-handers will eventually take over.

What you’re good at is at least 50 percent due to a simple luck of the draw (arguably entirely, as you didn’t choose your parents, and thus when or where you were born). At that point any genetic endowment you may have (innate ability) meets the environment, and the environment has the final say, in almost all cases, about how well that endowment flourishes, and certainly about how well it is rewarded.

Most of what seems like merit, in other words, is luck. If you have it, be grateful. If it’s rewarded, be even more grateful.

And don’t assume you know exactly which is which.

Those who have been lucky, and thus have merit in a society or environment, should recognize their luck, and be humble, knowing how little it had to do with them. And if you want a metric upon which to measure your life, perhaps it could be how much good you have done divided by how much “merit” you have.

By this measure, the rich are rarely worth saving, because as studies show, the poor give more compared to what they have than the rich do.

That fact should be chewed on very carefully.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Why Relying on People’s Vices Backfires

By Ian Welsh

On August 4, 2017

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Image by [rom]

There are, roughly speaking, three views of human nature: We’re either 1) inherently good; 2) inherently bad, or; 3) about neutral.

Those on the left tend towards “good” and those on the right tend towards “bad.”

In addition there is a dispute about how one gets the best from people: treating them badly (punishment) or treating them well (encouragement). Are happy people better, or are scared people better? Machiavelli’s, “Is it better to be loved than feared?” may come to mind, though he was discussing a different issue.

Christianity has generally gone for “bad” and “punishment.” Humans are fallen, they are innately sinners, and one should not spare the rod, lest one spoil the child.

Different kinds of Confucians have had different views, though the master seems to have been in the “neutral” camp and Mencius was definitely in the innately “good” camp. (Others have been in the “bad.”)

Obviously, we can do this exercise in general terms, where we mean “most people.” If there are, perhaps, a few bad or good seeds, it wouldn’t change things, mostly.

Modern economics and economism has a world view which basically comes down to: “People are bad–selfish and greedy, but you can use their badness to get good stuff done by using incentives.” Economics tends to prefer positive inducements, the negative ones are there: homelessness, deprivation, even death for those who do not fit into the system.

My own view is that most people are neither good nor bad; but weak. They conform to the world around them, particularly their peer group and their masters. They bend. A small number are good pretty much no matter what (5 to 15 percent) and a small number are bad pretty much no matter what (5 to 15 percent).

As for incentives, they work, but they get only the behaviour they reward, and that usually leads to very perverse outcomes. If surgeons are paid more for certain types of surgery–or for surgery rather than non-surgery–then cut they will, whether it is needed or not.

As a result, I believe incentives should be used sparingly: Most jobs shouldn’t use them at all, and those that do should key them to general metrics. If you wanted to give politicians metrics, you might give them a lifetime salary, disallow them any other income, and tie it to increases in the welfare of bottom five percent and the median (the rich can take care of themselves). Then, of course, the politicians will start corrupting the indices, so they metrics would have to be as simple as possible.

Similar schemes can be done for various companies; in most cases, they shouldn’t be, and people who are responsible for human welfare should never get much or any of their salary from specific incentives.

It’s hard to argue that greed can’t get things done: It has. The problem is that greed gets the wrong things done, or it does too much, more than necessary–to the point where it’s harmful. Global climate change is the obvious example, but examples of this are innumerable.

The other issues is that means are ends. If you believe humans are bad and need to be treated badly to get stuff done, then your society will primarily run on meanness, and that will be the flavour and feel of everyday life. (Most of our current regime operates this principle. though most of the population is now motivated more by fear more greed, as almost all the gains go to the top one percent or less.)

The advantage of treating people well is that you’re treating them well. Even if it doesn’t always work (as greed and selfishness and punishment don’t always work), well, at least you’re doing something good anyway.

If you want to do something bad, or rely on bad motives to get something done, the onus is very high to prove that treating people well can’t get the job done just the same–because your method is polluting. It is, in itself bad, happens all too regularly, and makes life worse for people.

And making people unhappy is contagious: Unhappy people make other people unhappy.

It is for this reason that I believe in defaulting to kindness when it comes to policy. If it fails, well, you’ve still done good.

When times get worse we can get meaner or we can get kinder. FDR, in the 30s, chose kinder. For the last 40 years or so, ever since the oil crises and inflation, we’ve generally chosen meaner–and certainly since 2008, when Europe adopted austerity.

There is another choice. I think it can be defended as more likely to work; but we know that being mean isn’t working, so we might as well be kind. At least then, we’ll be doing some good.

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On Stubborn Facts and Partisan Identification

By Ian Welsh

On July 23, 2017

Comments

There is vast confusion in the more active left about this, so let’s clear it up by way of Bernie Sanders.

Clinton was more popular with POC and women than Sanders was. She was also more popular with old people.

However, Sanders is well-liked by POC and women. Every survey I have seen shows him with approval ratings in the 60s to 70s from POC. His approval ratings from women are usually 50-something, and higher than with men, but within the margin of error.

Sander is not unpopular with women and people of color, and people of color, in fact, are much more likely to approve of him than whites.

Whites and males are the people most likely to NOT approve of Bernie Sanders.

In absolute terms Sanders is liked by POC and women. In relative terms, it depends on who you’re comparing him to.

None of this is in question, and people who run around pretending Sanders is hated by black people and women are either lying or ignorant. In group terms, he is not.

Next: Clinton did better with Democrats and Bernie did better with independents, BUT Sanders is well-liked by Democrats, this Hill poll had his approval rating by Democrats at 80 percent.

Again, relative vs. absolute.

Another fact, because we have the DNC emails, is that the DNC, run by a Clinton loyalist, put his thumb on the scales for Clinton. This is a fact.

I am not a partisan for Sanders in the same way I am for Corbyn. I strongly approve of Corbyn; I think Sanders was good enough to rate an endorsement, but his stands on, say, Israel, are awful. Corbyn has opposed Israeli apartheid right down the line, just as he did South African apartheid.

I think the best President in American history was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But I think that locking up Japanese Americans was abominable.

My judgments of fact, as much as I can manage it, are not determined by my partisanship. My ethical judgments are not determined by my partisanship.

Rather, as best I can, I seek to have my partisanship determined by the facts combined with my ethical judgment.

This should not be a problem. If you have good reasons for supporting Hillary Clinton, you should be able to acknowledge her actual record and actions and still have reasons for supporting her.

If you must lie about a politician’s record in order to support them, or if you must pretend that evil acts they have committed or endorsed were not evil (Sanders’ Israel Support, Clinton’s Libya adventure), then you have gone deeply wrong, and you are a part of what is wrong with your country and the world.

One can support the lesser evil, or the greater good, and admit that. One can support someone who is more good than bad and still acknowledge the bad.

If one cannot, one is making decisions based on delusional fantasy.

You should be able to do this even for people you love or hate. I hate Obama and Bush, Jr. and Reagan, but where they did something right, I acknowledge it. (Reagan’s work on nuclear disarmament falls into this category.)

If your tribal identification is running your determination of right or wrong, please check yourself out of politics until it isn’t.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.