Sarah Palin fascinates me as a person, personality type, and behavioral specimen. As a ‘psycvhological’ screen for a certain type of ‘main street’ resentment, she’s obvious ideally configured.
Sarah Palin’s ego and ambitions are breathtaking. People have told me: “Palin isn’t qualified to be President!” My reply: “It’s a popularity contest.” A lingering question would be: what kind of brain trust would she put together? How would she be manipulated? What kind of wreckage would be realized given her modest mental talents?
But Palin is not much like Eva Peron. The point of comparison is presumably Peron’s magical hold on her public. But Eva Peron was altogether a more complicated character. Palin obviously isn’t a creature of left populism as was Peron, even if Peron married into something much darker.
“This is not rocket science. We’re talkin’ about going back to the basics of America.”
Of course, the documentarian has the ability to shoot a lot of film, select the most appalling clips, and assemble the horror show above. Similar takes were produced during last year’s campaign to highlight the lack of thoughtfulness of some Obama supporters.
On the other hand, Palin’s core constituency, it would seem, is: the ignorant. Point me in the direction of thoughtfully articulated belief in her capabilities, and I’ll come back tail between my legs.
Among several elements which pop up for me is how Palin seems clueless about both being overmatched, and, about her not getting to specify the terms and context for her encounters with the media. Her reflections to Bill O’Reilly about her being annoyed by Katie Couric, are close to being the most psychologically revealing video of a politician since the time when Dubya froze when asked if ‘there was one mistake he most regretted.’
Yet, just because Palin’s own ‘theory of mind’ is—evidently—completely reflexive, (because she believes everyone is but her foil,) this plugs directly into the circuit of populist paranoia about a pointy-headed elite conspiring to “strip away their freedoms.” So: Palin herself gets to carry that collective projection forward and battle against the dark forces arrayed against so-called real Americans. She’s in way over her head, but that’s an advantage right now in the current, paranoid-delusional environment.
Never mind that Sarah Palin has obtained her own elite status in the scheme of Alaska success stories and is busily working to be a millionaire. Her main street bona fides are modest but her iconic stickiness lives large. In a way, Palin is a celebrity genre unto-herself.
As it is for other celebrated public figure and pundits, I wonder whether, in fact, he or she actually believes their own bullsh*t. Does Glenn Beck really read American history closely? This same reading engenders grandiose delusions such as his “100 Year Plan” to “re-found America.” Likewise, does Palin really think that her restoration of messianic Reaganism will in turn restore real American’s freedoms? In both cases, it could be said that it doesn’t work that way—since it hasn’t worked this way in the past.
Meanwhile, the Republicans once again get to flesh out the imago of a victimized main street, and mount the resentments of a white anti-elite, anti-intellectual, populace gasping for air. Their propositions are incoherent, but it hardly matters because it’s simple work to feed the embittered with talk of their loss of freedoms, the spectre of incipient socialism, and the rise of the personally irresponsible, (i.e. immigrants and minorities.)
It should go without saying that this is only the gambit of the Republican political elite when they’re out of power. Once they come back in power they morph back into Tories, social Darwinists, and go onto to laugh all the way to the bank. Reagan, Bush I, Bush II., didn’t deliver squat to their sacred silent majority. You can look it up.
I try to imagine the most cynical and dangerous Republican ticket in 2012. Easy: Palin/Petreaus. Still, the deranged possibilities are hilarious.
An Economic Agenda for the GOP
Republicans need to be pro-market, not pro-business.
Luigi Zingales, City Journal, Autumn 2009
The success of the Republican platform went well beyond the voting booth, of course. The war against the evil empire brought the collapse of Communism and the democratization of the Soviet Bloc countries. During the Reagan years, the battle against the state led to a negative real growth rate in nondefense public spending. Deregulation freed the economy from excessive constraints and, together with tax cuts, sparked enormous entrepreneurial and creative forces. A golden era of economic growth began in the early eighties and continued, aside from a few minor recessionary interludes, until 2007—a quarter-century of unparalleled prosperity. After the Reagan economic reforms kicked in, the United States grew by an average of 3 percent each year, against Germany’s 1.9 percent, France’s 2.1, and Italy’s 1.8.
Not only did this revolution allow the U.S. to outpace Europe in income and productivity; it also transformed the country from a manufacturing economy into an innovative, high-powered service economy. Today, America does not produce iPhones, but it generates the technology and the design that permit a piece of plastic to sell for $300. It does not manufacture microchips, but it creates the technology that lets some wafers of silicon sell for thousands of dollars apiece. It does not build computers, but it develops the operating systems that run them. This transformation has enabled the United States to face the competition of emerging countries from a position of strength.
Let’s line up just three points.
(A) republican policies had successes too:
1. Deregulation and tax cuts sparked enormous entrepreneurial and creative forces
2. …transformed the country from a manufacturing economy into an innovative, high-powered service economy.
If we overlook the two recessionary bookends (1979-1984 / 2007+) and also overlook the crucial monetary policy—and its consequences—Reagan supported to wring out stagflation after he took office 1981, and, if we don’t know anything about supply side economics, still, #1 and #2 distinguish themselves to be, potentially, bald mythologizing about what ‘economic glories’ Reagan(ism) actually accomplished.
The truth of the matter revolves around another term, trickle-down economics. It’s employed to get at what a true narrative might make explicit: what actually resulted; who were the winners and losers. Is there, from this analysis, anything left of the twin assertions #1 and #2?
Now City Journal has long carved out its position in the rightward intellectual spectrum: seemingly sophisticated conservative cant.
I’ll forgive Zingales his ideological economic control panel, where, if you dial factors in just right, the economy booms. Business cycles exist on large scales and so to isolate ideological adjustments and simply assert. ‘this is how it should work,’ runs into various counterfactual, and the falsifying history. Such as, when the economy comes to boom, yet income tax rates are sky high. Ummm, this has happened.
Zingales’s narrative isn’t about either what happened between 1985-2007, or, what caused those happenings. You could set yourself to the task of figuring out what an accurate narrative would state to be the actuality of economic Reaganism.
I guarantee this accurate narrative would be troubled to serve ideological goals. But, it would be true enough compared to the seemingly sophisticated, anti-intellectual, garden variety posturing and mythologizing Zingales has somehow extracted from the facts.
(Ha. I doubt Zingales gave any consideration to the facts.)
Rates of taxation and regulation may vary, but trickle down remains, for the time being, the core commitment of our executive economic policy making ethos, irrespective of party.
fyi
“innovative, high-powered service economy” didn’t reach Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Toledo, etc.. Economic myth-making can come to instrumentally serve vast money-making regimes, as when it was recently supposed that housing prices would rise forever; that hedges can be perfected; that randomness itself can be mathematically purged from predictions…on and on.
The reasoning in “Outliers,” which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. -Stephen Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, Eccentric Detective
Stephen Pinkers ripped Malcolm Gladwell in a November 7 review of Gladwells new book in the New York Times Sunday book review. Gladwell deserves a few rips; for me he’s the king of presenting half arguments as whole one. Outliers is a laughably bad presentation of social science research wrapped around a silly premise. Post-hoc sophistry captures Gladwell’s aesthetic.
Yet, Gladwell is a fine writer. And, he manages to give Pinker some hard whacks over the subject, raised by Gladwell, of NFL quarterbacks.
Gladwell: In one of my essays, I wrote that the position a quarterback is taken in the college draft is not a reliable indicator of his performance as a professional. That was based on the work of the academic economists David Berri and Rob Simmons, who, in a paper published in The Journal of Productivity Analysis, analyze 40 years of National Football League data. Their conclusion was that the relation between aggregate quarterback performance and draft position was weak. Further, when they looked at per-play performance — in other words, when they adjusted for the fact that highly drafted quarterbacks are more likely to play more downs — they found that quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top 10 positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.”
I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a market research background who is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl. Pinker’s second source was a blog post, based on four years of data, written by someone who runs a pre- employment testing company, who also failed to appreciate — as far as I can tell (the key part of the blog post is only a paragraph long) — the distinction between aggregate and per-play performance. Pinker’s third source was an article in The Columbia Journalism Review, prompted by my essay, that made an argument partly based on a link to a blog called Niners Nation.
Pinker: Gladwell is right, of course, to privilege peer-reviewed articles over blogs. But sports is a topic in which any academic must answer to an army of statistics-savvy amateurs, and in this instance, I judged, the bloggers were correct. They noted, among other things, that Berri and Simmons weakened their “weak correlation” (Gladwell described it in the New Yorker essay reprinted in “What the Dog Saw” as “no connection”) by omitting the lower-drafted quarterbacks who, unsurprisingly, turned out not to merit many plays. In any case, the relevance to teacher selection (the focus of the essay) remains tenuous.
Pinker does face plant in New York Times? Yessiree!
“in this instance, I judged, the bloggers were correct”
Wow, Pinker appeals to his own authority in lieu of responding to the merits of Gladwell’s cited sources?
Maureen Tkacik, writing in The Nation, gives Gladwell and his critics, a real going-over.
But in examining Gladwell’s success concurrently with his prescriptions for achievement, even his harshest reviewers damned themselves with faint criticism. When Michiko Kakutani dismissed Outliers for employing the patented Gladwell “shake-and-bake” recipe “in such a clumsy manner that it italicizes the weaknesses of his methodology,” she still granted him a coherent method; when The Economist embraced the book’s “engaging” and “intriguing” case studies while wryly enclosing the overarching “big idea” in quotation marks, it overlooked Gladwell’s refusal to engage meaningfully with the world of ideas at all. Gladwell For Dummies
C. Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity. They are rare, much rarer than you think. Remember that positive Black Swans have a necessary first step: you need to be exposed to them. Many people do not realize that they are getting a lucky break in life when they get it. If a big publisher (or a big art dealer or a movie executive or a hotshot banker or a big thinker) suggests an appointment, cancel anything you have planned: you may never see such a window open up again. I am sometimes shocked at how little people realize that these opportunities do not grow on trees. Collect as many free nonlottery tickets (those with open-ended payoffs) as you can, and, once they start paying off, do not discard them. Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters—you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity. The idea of settling in a rural area on grounds that one has good communications “in the age of the Internet” tunnels out of such sources of positive uncertainty. Diplomats understand that very well: casual chance discussions at cocktail parties usually lead to big breakthroughs—not dry correspondence or telephone conver sations. Go to parties! If you’re a scientist, you will chance upon a remark that might spark new research. And if you are autistic, send your associates to these events. Nassim Nicholas Taleb – p208-209 – The Black Swan. The Impact of the Highly Improbable
“They are rare, much rarer than you think.”
Hypothesis central to Transformative Anthropology (my term): people’s development with respect to their crucial relationships, work life, interests, and, location, much more often than not present necessary developmental events that are happenstance, serendipitous, random.
Such events, I term strategic serendipity.
They’re rare in the sense that a person may identify several key events in their life story. but, they’re common were it overwhelmingly true that almost all persons are advantaged by strategic serendipity.
In the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.
Universal Religion has been found in societies at every stage of development. Catholic Bishops as they filed into St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 2008, and at a temple in South Korea, Buddhist monks paid homage to the Buddha.
During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. – The Evolution of the God Gene, Nicholas Wade, New York Times, Nov.18,2009
Of the several biases I’m happily locked into, this one is second to no other: as the one steps back through time and its human events and facts, eventually, each and every event and fact falls away. In effect, it “all” disappears.
The brightest ideas go poof! Religion? Poof!
I came to this bias when I—one day— realized that the sophist’s stock response to the foundationalist of any kind, was true. To whit:
What came before your first principle?
The downside to comprehending the slow stripping away of the accretion of all things human is having to expend effort to suppress my urge to remind any and every holder of a-historic and universalist and foundationalist and natural law fundamentalism that if you walk back far enough not even a single prototype for any of it exists.
(How far back? Probably 75,000 years is more than enough.)
“The replacement model of Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews proposes that modern humans evolved from archaic humans 200,000-150,000 years ago only in Africa and then some of them migrated into the rest of the Old World replacing all of the Neandertals and other late archaic humans beginning around 60,000-40,000 years ago. If this interpretation of the fossil record is correct, all people today share a relatively modern African ancestry. All other lines of humans that had descended from Homo erectus presumably became extinct. From this view, the regional anatomical differences that we see among humans today are recent developments–evolving mostly in the last 40,000 years.” Evolution of Modern Humans – See also C.D.Kreger, Homo Sapiens
Questions about what early humans believed, are encumbered at such point when the mental functions having to do with the human organization of human experience can’t certainly be spoken of as including—what we understand to be—belief itself.
The general problem is knotty. Although it could be a concern of regular philosophy to consider what is the historical prototype for a specific attribution of mental function that is itself the prerequisite for an actual philosophical concept, in fact this lies almost entirely in the portfolio of philosophical anthropology, or, meta-anthropology. In other words, what was ‘belief’ before it was ‘belief’ is a practical question, is a question about human practice.
For very roughly 245,000 years, NO philosophers. However, it’s rather difficult to extract, using cultural forensics, cogent knowledge about both what was the epistemic repertoire of early humans, and, what were the milestones in the available (so-to-speak,) terms via which those same humans came to conceptualize this repertoire.
Still, it cannot be the case that one day, somebody said, in effect, “Oh, what we’re doing is religion!”
This is an ontological problem too. What exists as a description of human function, and when did it come into existence? When did religion-as-a-function fade to black?
Nicholas Wade, who authored the short news piece excerpted above, also wrote The Faith Instinct.
The Faith Instinct presents a novel approach to religion. It explores the evolutionary origins of religious behavior in early humans, and traces the cultural development of religion from its origins up until to the present day.
The book does not challenge the central belief of either atheists or people of faith, since it offers no opinion as to whether or not God exists. It’s about religious behavior and its value to the first human societies and their successors.
Based on evidence from anthropologists’ studies of religion, and new findings from genetics and archaeology, The Faith Instinct concludes that religious behavior was favored by natural selection because of the survival advantage it conferred on early human groups.
The religion of early peoples, who lived as hunters and gatherers, underwent a profound cultural transformation as the hunter gatherers formed the first settled societies. The form of religious observance shifted from all-night communal dances, to the spring and harvest festivals of early agricultural societies, to the forms of religion more familiar today. The Faith Instinct retraces the historical context in which Judaism, Christianity and Islam arose, and analyzes how religion has retained many of its ancient roles even in modern secular societies.
I haven’t read Wade’s book. I will; it’s on the short list. But, this description showcases the basic problem of employing modern conceptions retrospectively. We will not ever know what conceptions would have been contemporaneous with proto-religious behavior. It was case that the most primitive social organization elicited as a consequence of human ‘being’ came about prior to language, thus came about prior to the ability to name and articulate what was ‘coming about.’ In light of this, it is, I feel, an error to speak of gestural, danced, rhythmic expression as “religious observance.” Better: ecstatic communion?
It may turn out to be the case that evolutionary advantage accrues only to communal music, movement, and other communal behaviors, and, that religion may be an inessential overlay–kind of the evolutionary ‘psychological’ equivalent to epiphenomena.
But, all this is something more than proto-structures, something more, and enough upon which, to hang later behavioral (and adaptive,) artifactual acquisitions.
My thinking about terminology, having passed through the former term, has come, next, through the keep it simple stupid phase, and arrived at Strategic Serendipity.
Strategic Serendipity: in the context of individual human development, a chance event that comes to completely alter the course of a person’s development. Among the many kinds of change such an event impacts, the common kinds result in changes in: key relationships; career; location; interests.
We’re still playing Free Play softball every Sunday at 10am. Last Sunday the overcast but mild day saw 23 players show up. This was by far the biggest November turnout I’ve observed in the nine years I’ve playing with this group.
In 1984 or 1985, my friend Pilch hauled “The Macintosh” out of his closet and gave it to me. It was to me, at the time, a fancy typewriter; enough so that I could shelve my actual typewriter. It’s specs? 128k of RAM, no hard drive, 400k floppies, an 8″ x 6″ screen. I had no reason to use a Windows machine until 1989, when I started working for a seating (i.e. ergonomic chairs,) company. Soon enough into my job there I came to grapple and sort of master MS-DOS, mostly as a way to solve various computer glitches. I have come to use Apples at home, and Windows at work, for over twenty years.
Anybody who was a dual system user as I was back in the late eighties, will state today the obvious: Microsoft was going to converge on the Apple Mac user interface and experience one way or the other. This is irrespective of the fact that Apple turned itself into a boutique computer maker even as it continued to raise the bar, Still, I remember mousing around a DOS shell at work, while the fun user experience awaited for me at home.
That Mac users are said to be smug seems to be a projection for the most part. If asked today, I would tell a newbie that I use a Mac, recommend it, and, “But, suit yourself.” I wouldn’t also tell: “I’m using a six year old Mac, desktop while at work we’re on our third generation of Wintel in six years.”
Apple trades at around 24 times forward earnings estimates, as does Google Inc., which has a similar market capitalization and is viewed as another potential challenger to Microsoft.
Microsoft trades at roughly 16 times forward earnings.
Apple’s last quarterly results blew past Wall St. estimates and sent its shares to a record-high $208.71.
While the stock has retreated in recent weeks in a broad market pullback, analysts have a price target as high as $280 on Apple, which would give it a market value of $250 billion.
Following its quarterly report last month, analysts also boosted their price targets on Microsoft to as high as $36, which would take its market cap to $320 billion.
Apple’s shareholders have been handsomely rewarded over the past decade, with its stock up close to 900 per cent. Over the same period, Microsoft’s shares have fallen around 35 per cent.
There’s something scarily efficient and agile about having a market cap 70% of your leading competitor when your market share is 20 times smaller. Zune, anyone?
A longtime and friendly intellectual adversary gave me reason for the umpteenth time to briefly consider my so-called metaphysical positions, each of which is fuzzy and none which entertain much of a so-called commitment.
I’m listening to the unabridged The Black Swan. Its author Nassim Taleb offers a term new to me: skeptical empiricist. I have already appropriated it. Years ago, Guy Hutt, offered that he was a heuristic whore. I appropriated it too. I’d like to say I’m a methodological agnostic, but, alas, I’m too passive-aggressive. So, I settle for the time honored participant-observer.
Yet, these are labels, not positions. The map is not the territory!
While purging my active RSS opml, I noted a feed from the Mind & Culture blog (@Mind&Culture.Net.) “This is a blog for students who are taking the course in Mind and Culture at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, in the University of Oxford.” From there, it’s a skip via the link roll to Cognition & Culture Net. On the blog there is a memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss by Scott Atran. Lévi-Strauss passed away October 30, a month short of birthday 101. The brief memory is diamond-like. Read the whole piece.
In 1974, when I was a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University, I wanted to organize a discussion of universals with people whose ideas I wished to know more about than I thought I could get from their writings. At the time, I was working for Margaret Mead as one of her assistants at the American Museum of Natural History, so I asked her how I might go about getting my wish. She said “talk to these people and see if they’ll meet.” So I went to see Noam Chomsky in Cambridge, Jean Piaget in Geneva, and Jacques Monod in Paris, and they agreed; but I wondered if Levi-Strauss would because he seemed so aloof . Margaret licked her lips and laughed: “Well, that’s his look, aloof and frail, but he’s more playful than he lets on and he’ll outlive me by thirty years if a day. Just tell him I sent you.” Scott Atran: A memory of Lévi-Strauss (Cognition & Culture Net)
About half way through Mad Men‘s third season, I decided the show had joined my slim TV pantheon. Mad Men joins: Homicide: Life In the Streets; The Sopranos; The West Wing; NYPD-Blue; ER, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; Firefly; True Love; MI-5. All but the last two, are sadly missed. Shows have their runs, sometimes falling slowly downward, like NYPD-Blue, ER, and DS9 did. One came to a sudden halt–like Firefly. (As did a candidate for highest honors, The Sarah Connor Chronicles; idiots!) The West Wing fizzled out like a dying sparkler. And, another tried to wrap itself up: Homicide. Homicide remains the most enjoyable viewing experience of a serial ‘drama hour’ I’ve had in front of a TV, since I started watching TV as an adult in 1993.
Yet, with my praises noted here, Mad Men is second-to-none for one reason: the Sally Draper character is about the same age I was in 1963. I was nine. Not only that, my mother was a Bryn Mawr graduate (’48,) as is Betty Draper. And, might as well admit my father had Hollywood good looks, was not in anyway introspective, and, about at Don Draper’s level of non-mastery of relationships. So, I’m part of the particular cohort of Mad Men fans who can resonate with the show on a personal, historical level; say of those fans born before 1956.
Given this fact of memory, it is the story arc of Betty and Don that grips me the most. Betty, is the ambivalent, lonely, stern child-woman, who yearns to be fathered, but cannot also name this same yearning. Where her estranged husband’s self-deceptions serve a purpose, Betty Draper’s are threaded in an inaccessible-to-her weave of her personality. For me, she’s the most complicated and saddest character in the story.
At the same time, Betty Draper is the character who could find her way to her full self in surprising, intriguing ways. She’s the most self-estranged at the same time her possible aspirations are the most undefined. Obviously, Betty has yet to figure out what she’s cut out to master. I hope we get to see.
Betty is not like my own mom, who was a college professor in 1963, and was in the vanguard of self-realized women of her generation. Betty Draper is not very popular among the show’s fans. I note how much of this negative view is inflected by prejudices about mothers that seems to me to issue from a contemporary conflict between idealization of the nuclear family, and, the benefits of being insightful about one’s self. The latter strikes me as a recent psychological development to which the dull workmanlike housewife is the problematic predicate.
That Mad Men inches toward, first, the cusp, and later, realization of cultural evolution that will mightily impact the generation of the Draper’s children—yes, Sally—will be especially, and eventually poignant. That is, if Mad Men can carry on through the late sixties. I hope it does, because the differentiation between the parents of the greatest generation and their kids, was dramatic, and would make for great TV drama.
All the Madison Avenue striving in Mad Men, to me, seems secondary to the subtext of family. And, it’s the family that will be shook up by the coming cultural tremors and quakes of the late sixties. We’ll hopefully see if Mad Men’s auteur, Matthew Weiner also sees it this way.
Lessee: selfish social darwinist nihilism–wrapped in self-aggrandizing ‘personal responsibility-with-exceptions pieties, or, help your neighbor, Christian ethics?
That’s easy.
H.R. 3962 squeaks by in the House, with one brave Republican vote. The loner was Joseph Cao, R-La. He told a reporter, “But I felt it was important of me to support the president in this matter because, like I said before, based on my own conscience, it was the right decision for my district.”
Conscience. Compare the existence of Joseph Cao’s conscience with that of Steve King, D-IA. His understanding is that everybody has health coverage because of the existence of emergency rooms! Then all you do is add his prescriptions:
Better ideas for health care reform include full deductibility of medical expenses for all Americans, medical malpractice reform, an increase in Health Savings Account contribution amounts, giving consumers the ability to purchase health insurance across state lines, allowing small businesses to band together to negotiate lower costs for themselves and their employees through Association Health Plans and fixing Medicare reimbursements to raise reimbursement rates for states like Iowa that have high quality care at a low cost. These are real solutions that will protect the relationship between patients and doctors and improve the quality of health care in America without raising taxes.
Oh, and protect insurance company profits. After all, isn’t that written somewhere in the bible…? How many Republicans congresspersons have opted out of their own health insurance benefit?
‘Tis the song, the sigh of the weary.
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.
Sometimes, while channel surfing, my attention latches onto one of the religious channels. I call it ‘doing research.’ Well, it is a guilty pleasure–watching theocrats. (See Frank Schaeffer: Spaceship Jesus Will Come and Whisk Us Away for a good take.) Glenn Beck provides another guilty pleasure, although I depend on Crooks and Liars and MediaMatters to pluck the ripest insanity out of a sea of lunacy.
Beck is a masterful architect, but of what, I’m not sure. He’s not really a polemicist or propagandist in the sense that both those dispositions usually presume coherency. His basic argument is structured as a sort of daft hermeneutics, connecting dots, but doing so incoherently across domains. It all ends up, usually, in the same place: a cabal of Marxist elitists are planning to take over the country and “control every aspect of your life.”
The aspect that evokes cognitive dissonance is Beck’s appeal to freedom from control, while offering at the same time, an analysis that could only be practically powerful were persons to accept it uncritically ‘en mass.’ For Beck, America is free when there is a monotheism of individuality, and if you’re so individuated as to disagree, well then, you’re helping to destroy the country.
What would be the nature and inherent cognitive complexity of someone who would buy Beck’s binary paranoia, who would follow his connected dots to their satisfying conclusion: slaughter or ark? Decades ago I wondered the same thing about who possibly could find Ayn Rand’s insipid version of logical rationality reasonable.*
Jason Richwine, unintentionally unleashing silliness in The American, the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute, Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?, ponders anecdotal counter-factuals, while missing the point of Lazar Stankov’s research, Conservatives and Cognitive Ability. Heck, Richwine misses the point even though it’s pointed to in the paper’s title.
Richwine does mention that conservatism isn’t defined deeply enough in Stankov’s research. I’d love to see a factor analysis of policy-oriented beliefs meshed with a meta-analysis of several orders of cognitive complexity and personality constructs. For example, is there a correlation across the range of the former beliefs with binary attitudes? How does ideological certainty correlate with tendencies having to do with reducing complexity, anxiety, and dissonance? I don’t think Richwine read the paper though, because Stankov’s work is not primarily concerned with ‘smarts’, and is, in fact, focused on a very complex meta-analysis, very close to my intuition about what I’d like to see.
In our work, conservatism is captured by a score — usually a factor score — obtained from several scales that were not developed specifically for the measurement of conservatism. Thus, it incorporates measures of Personality (Big Five from IPIP), Social Attitudes (Saucier, 2000; Stankov & Kneževi?, 2005), Values (Schwartz & Bardi, 2001), and Social Norms (GLOBE; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004) — a total of 43 different subscale scores.Nevertheless, ouranalyses show the presence of a factor of Conservatism that has loadings from subscales from all these domains and captures many constructs that are included in the nomological net of Jost et al. (2003) and Wilson (1973). This factor is expected to correlate with cognitive ability for reasons outlined above. What are the other factors that emerge from the analysis of 43 subscales? Are they also expected to correlate with cognitive ability? Stankov (2007) found three domain-related factors. They are quite different from the Conservatism factor in that they show very little overlap between the domains.
These are:
• Personality/Social Attitudes. This is usually a bipolar factor contrasting Personality traits on the negative side and Social Attitudes on the positive side. Loadings of Personality traits on this factor are typically lower than loadings from the Social Attitudes measures. In some of our analyses, this factor splits into a separate Personality factor representing “good” evaluative processes (or perhaps social desirability) and a Social Attitudes factor representing anti- or amoral attitudes towards social objects (Stankov & Kneževi?, 2005). • Values. See Method section for the interpretation of this factor.
• Social Norms. Several Social Norms scales from GLOBE study (House et al., 2004) load on this factor. In this paper I report the analyses based on a smaller (22) number of variables that correspond quite closely to the solution obtained with the full set of 43 measures. Smaller number of variables is employed in order to carry out simultaneous (i.e., multilevel) structural equation modelling of individual- and country-level data that has not been reported in the past.
There is no empirical evidence or theoretical arguments in the literature that suggest a relationship between cognitive ability and Values or Social Norms.2 Thus, it is reasonable to assume that these two constructs do not correlate with cognitive measures. The situation is different with the Personality/ Social Attitudes dimension. Jost (2006) reports that Conscientiousness (positively) and Openness to Experience (negatively) correlate with Democrat/Republican voting preferences of the states within the U.S., interpreted as reflections of liberal/conservative tendencies. Openness to Experience is also known to correlate about .30 with measures of intelligence (Stankov, 2005; Stankov and Lee, 2008). The other side of this bipolar factor, Social Attitudes, captured by Toughness, Maliciousness, and Betaism (i.e., non-PC motives for behavior), have qualities reminiscent of Dogmatism and Authoritarian personalities that are often seen as components of conservatism (see Jost et al., 2003). Since in our work they define a factor that is separate from conservatism, it is reasonable to assume that there is a separation between thuggish and rough Social Attitudes trait and Conservative syndrome that captures not only social attitudes but also Values, Social Norms, and Personality traits. These rough social attitudes are also likely to be related to cognitive ability—they often reflect difficulties or disinclination to make fine-grained analysis of a problematic situation (see Wilson, 1973).
Snap! Maybe the article was so complex it caused Richwine anxiety? I wonder what Glenn Beck would think?
Glenn Beck: “I really like our Constitution, I’d like to see it enacted. Let’s fix it and get back to where our founding fathers are.”
Loony, yet, “crazy ass sh*t, but. But, more than a few people do agree with Beck. This is so even if such people couldn’t tell you anything intelligent about what the founding fathers actually thought; what they contested among themselves; and what were their various radically liberal principles.
Here’s a conjecture (of mine) about ideology and history. There is no extant or past example of a form of governance for which it could be demonstrated that it’s procedures of governance wholly and absolutely are realized solely as a matter of adherence to ideological principles. This is falsifiable if it can be shown that there exists or has existed a form of governance for which, in its application of its principles, every instance was/is entirely consistent with principle.
Let’s imagine there are people who are committed to some set of principles in the following, narrow way:
Our endeavor is to instantiate a set of principles. We believe this for two reasons. First, because this set of principles is the best of all possible set of principles. Second, that the principles are best, is verified by the fact that their truth is the most reasonable truth upon which any possible set of principles could be based.
News for social, fiscal & national security conservatives who believe in God, family & country. We seek to uphold the rights of citizens under the U.S. Constitution, traditional family values, Republican principles / ideals, transparent & limited government, free markets, liberty & individual freedom. The ARRA News Service is an outreach of the Arkansas Republican Assembly. However, all content approval rests with the ARRA Editor. While numerous positions are reported, our beliefs & principles remain fixed.mission
Our political climate in the U.S. is very interesting in this year, unfolding now, after the election of Mr. Obama. Several developments have taken me by surprise. Obama surprised me by not partnering his financial system bailout policies with policies aimed to help right the economy of main street from the bottom up. It was also surprising that he didn’t articulate in concrete, instrumental, terms what kind of reform he would endorse, and insist upon, to end the depredations of the speculation-driven shadow economy.
Then, he moved to reform health care and laid it in the laps of his congressional majorities.
In light of these developments, I’m not in any way surprised that people have been stirred to reactionary and (called by me,) restorative activism. Nor was it surprising that they oriented their dissent positively around their patriotism, and, negatively, around their primal fear that the government is posed to strip from him or her so-called freedoms.
But the worst part? It allows the federal gov’t to be in charge of every aspect of your life. Every decision you make on a daily basis can be linked to “healthcare.” You drive an SUV? You’re contributing to pollution & that increases asthma…..you need to pay more! Since we have direct access to all of your accounts we know you own a 4-wheeler. That’s dangerous………you need to pay more! We see that you eat at McD’s twice a week. That’s bad for you……you need to pay more! YOU OWN A GUN??? THAT’S DANGEROUS! YOU NEED TO PAY ALOT MORE!!
These liberal fanatics will most DEFINITELY use the federal gov’ts financial stake in your everyday lifestyle choices to CONTROL THEM. Your decisions will no longer be your own, they will be decisions that will be for the “collective good.” And they will be MANDATED & CONTROLLED by the gov’t. And in order to “nudge” you into compliance with their ideology of how you should live your life, they will simply put a financial burden on you if you choose differently.
The paranoia surprised me. How does one square paranoia with a normative conservative ethos that holds its funding principles to be both first, and, last, and to be foundational, and also holds these principles are the only possible enlightened goal granted by reasoning through the problem of governance? Where does paranoia fit in? Is it possible that such foundational principles are, in fact, extremely fragile?
I don’t think so. President Obama has offered a mild liberalism. The bank bailout was extraordinary, yet a Republican would have had to have done the same thing. (Creative destruction is a notion one can practically hold only when the bombs aren’t falling on your own head.) All such bailouts tend to occupy uncertain spots in any ideology. A bailout is above all expedient and unhooked from conventional, ideological morality. They’re grotesque too.
So far Obama’s maneuvering hasn’t been much like anything we associate, historically, with truly radical presidents; especially those with very novel views of the Constitution—such as Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Reagan, and Bush II. Nevertheless, the ideological principles survive, and this suggests underlying principles, aren’t at all fragile. This includes freedom given to be a result of, contingent upon, application of, ideological principles.
So why is paranoia evoked?
My tentative view is: affect is consequential in the current ‘social psychological framed’ ecology. Forged in the magical bake shop of projective identification, specific affect-laden estimations are on offer. So: a messianic leader is scapegoated so as to be the cause of knowing (i.e. unconsciously feeling,) that what is possessed, “freedom,” is to be stolen by the conspiratorial Other, (i.e. an alter.) This inflated threat is to be met and defeated by, ironically enough, the collective personal power of freedom-loving individualists. It’s worth noting that in some quarters, this evil goat is assumed to have super powers, or, alternately, is assumed to be the servant of hidden masters.
Putting the participation mystique aside–may Levi-Strauss rest in peace–what are the embedded chain-of-being regimes supposed in a clash between the red-in-blood red-tending-to-blue meme, and, the blue-tending-to-orange meme. These, given by Grave’s Spiral Dynamics, and, given by me in my deployment of a shadow dynamics* supposing the red shadow of blue conservatism’s ‘traditionalistic’ paternal chain of being comes to clash with the neoliberal paternal chain-of-being of Orange. Pre-modern, the red shadow of blue, collides here with the post-modern orientation toward technocratic problem-solving.
(Or, the atavistic self and identity, is felt to be threatened by the spectral, post-modern selves and identities. Perhaps, were one to dig into the narratives, one would find at their core a clash between the production of certainty and productions of uncertainty.)
Among many curious aspects of this clash, is the gravity given to an emotionalized, largely unconscious, sense of freedom. (I’ve written about this before.) What is it about a notional freedom that one can be dispossessed of, versus, other less vulnerable notions about freedom? Isn’t it interesting that the conservative concept of freedom-under-constraint, a necessary consequence of the pessimistic view of human nature, is subsumed in the shuffle through the emotionally-charged libertarian bake shop!
Then there is the conspiratorial tenor of magical narratives. Of course, it’s long-standing that the government is anthropomorphized to be a kind of beast, capable of devouring freedom. In this respect the conspiracy mongering of Ron Paul, or Michelle Bachman, comes to be of a piece with the extreme supernaturalized conspiracy advocates, David Ickes, Alex Jones, and Michael Tsarion. In turn, the current extremes are merely the contemporary waves of olden conspiracy theories. And, heck, why not share some air time with the truly deluded?
“they’ve been positioning…” they, theY, thEY, THEY!
*I have yet to go into this in detail. However, roughly, my proposal is that the vertical scale of Spiral Dynamic is configurable as a dynamic, oppositional scale. This is able to depict how higher and lower memes serve as descriptive categories, and schema, for shadow dynamics. For example, by such a dynamic scale, the shadow dynamics for the Blue Meme are discoverable as aspects of Red (below) and Orange (above). In my novel (or idiosyncratic,) view, the shadow dynamics then tend to fall (or regress,) toward the lower, more archaic order, while this unconscious propensity is galvanized by fear of the upward pull toward the newer, more complex order.
My notion here supposes that a concept of Blue freedom, will come to be defended at the lower, unconscious level of Red. Similarly, this defense is waged against a super-charged (by way of ‘social cognitized’ projection,) ‘controlling’ Orange. Grant this phenomenology, and the result is that fear of bureaucracy regresses to fear of collective control, control formulated to the scale conspiracy; “conspiracy” being the shadow concretization of Orange—in its worst form.
This is consistent—well, at least it is to me—with the mental procedures via which contested, soft conceptions–such as freedom–are reduced, reified and objectified. Then the reified conception’s opposite, in this case anti-freedom, is realized and nailed to the alter. Thus, a collective complex is constellated.
One thing I’ll give the Muslim creationist Harun Yahya credit for is that he states his sense of the facts of the matter courageously, whereas, the stateside Intelligent Design crew has come to do everything but state clearly, or do research directly about, their central hypothesis. (born as Adnan Oktar-wikepedia)
I.
Therefore, the process from initial conception to production is quite extensive. In fact, the Sole Owner of all designs is One Who has power over all things. Allah creates all creatures flawlessly through a single command: “be”. This is in the verse: The Originator of the heavens and earth. When He decides on something, He just says to it, ‘Be!’ and it is. (Surat al-Baqara:117) The faculty of creating from nothing and without precedent belongs to Allah alone. Humans just copy these examples. Furthermore, the human designer is himself a wonderful creation. Allah created creatures and humans from nothing and bestowed on humans the skills for designing.
II.
All of these laws of physics are clear proofs that the universe, just like all the creatures within it, is a product of divine design. In fact, the laws of physics are nothing but human explanations and descriptions of the divine order that Allah has created. Allah has created the unchanging laws of order in the universe and put them in the service of humans so that man will reflect upon and understand the Sovereignty of Allah and give thanks for His blessings. One can continue giving countless examples in illustration of the order in the creation of Allah. Every created thing since the formation of the universe millions of years ago has been brought into existence by nothing other than the Omniscience and Sovereignty of Allah.
For Harun there’s no reason to do any research on the facts of the matter of creationism, but at least he identifies the cause of creation. He also has never met an element in the pseudo-science of ID, he didn’t incorporate into his industrial media operation.
On the other hand, Yahya/Oktar is also a garden-variety loon.
After 20 minutes of sound checks, Adnan Oktar made his grand entrance. He’s a burly man with slicked-back hair and a carefully trimmed beard, and he wore his trademark white suit with a black T-shirt. Oktar was gracious throughout our hourlong interview, but the weirdness of the evening quickly emerged. When I asked how so many evolutionary biologists could be wrong, he replied, “We need to talk about the Masons’ role because Masons manage the world through a scientific dictatorship.” When I suggested that scientists would be surprised to hear this, he said that’s because the Masons’ “essential characteristic is that they act secretly and they are invisible.” Meet Harun Yahya. Steve Paulson – Slate Magazine Oct.21.2009
The Integral movement is based upon principles of compassion, clarity, and inclusiveness. A willingness to step beyond our personal and cultural points of view while remaining true to our own unique perspective; to sanctify the common ground between different sciences and different spiritual traditions while fully honoring and celebrating the differences between them; to hold all the contradictions and paradoxes of knowledge gently in one hand while cutting through the confusion and fragmentation with the other—these are precisely the sorts of qualities that define the Integral movement as a whole.
The Integral movement is already beginning to sweep across the world. Though it is no longer just a revolution of the mind (ours is a revolution of the “body, mind, and spirit in self, culture, and nature”) and though it is still in its very early stages of emergence, its influence is rapidly beginning to gain traction, right now at this very second. The very same currents of growth and development that set the initial stage for the sixties revolution—vertical and horizontal growth through stages and states of consciousness—have begun to flow together once again, creating an upswell of consciousness, care, and creative novelty that has not been seen in decades.
The Integral Revolution: the result of an unstoppable force meeting an unmovable subject.
When do you think the Integral movement will reach its “tipping point”?
Forced choice poll. I selected: Centuries, if at all.
This kind of marketing pitch doesn’t move me at all. I’m not much of a joiner, and, feverish and grand appeals never inspire me. But, that’s just due to my own disposition. On the other hand, appeals which thread incoherent stuff together fascinate me!
The very same currents of growth and development that set the initial stage for the sixties revolution—vertical and horizontal growth through stages and states of consciousness—have begun to flow together once again, creating an upswell of consciousness, care, and creative novelty that has not been seen in decades.
is a doozy. No, it’s a double doozy. Talk about a personal and cultural point of view… But, what stopped the flow? Why is it flowing again?
As it turns out, over the past weeks I’ve been reflecting upon the cultural history that was the context for Ken Wilber’s first appearance as a thinker, writer, and cultural critic. This refers to the late seventies and eighties. If I ponder just the thin slice of my closest cohort, and briefly unpack where this small sample was, say, in 1982, ten years after graduating from high school, my conclusion would be: revolution over, making a life—toggled on.
In this personal respect, I really have no idea what current of growth and development in days of yore this pitch is referring to. It would make more sense if names were named. “The very same currents of growth and development” implies precision (via the word ‘same,’) about precedents. Which same currents?
(Let me leap to an idea: in other schools of self-realization, might one discover that their properly applied experiential applications strip away sentimentality–completely?)
By the time the Reagan era rolled into the village, cocaine-fueled hedonic nihilism was the cosmopolitan rage, and the self-realization movement struggled to restore itself after lots of revolutionary bad psychedelic mojo had gone down. Oddly enough, politically, the southern strategy had yet to morph into the southern baptist strategy, yet, a religious call-to-arms emerged at the time to—the dour religionists hoped—beat back the coming ‘new age.’ Think of this as the reaction to Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980) and John Naisbett’s Megatrends (1982), both books were more lucrative and widely distributed annunciations of revolutionary hope and transformation than anything published in the sixties.
But, I get why, as a marketing position, it’s better to channel nostalgia back to the sixties, rather than back to the more contradictory eighties. Still, the actually “same” currents are to be found circa 1980, not circa 1968.
One way to while-away the time during my short commute, and, errands, is to listen to unabridged audiobooks. If the experience proves worthwhile as a moment of learning, I’m next compelled to work against my learning style (aural-kinesthetic) and read the verbal-visual edition, so-to-speak.
Now I’m driving through Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s The Black Swan. It provides a gripping journey for a Jamesian fallibilist such as myself. Also, Taleb’s so-called skeptical empiricism circles around my own current central concern that is also strongly skeptical about, as Taleb terms it, narrativity. The interesting difference is I’m looking at ubiquitous hidden chance events, (in ordinary human development,) whereas Taleb deals with rare hidden chance eventsin large-scale domains. I too am similarly fascinated by how linear narratives clothe non-linear events as a matter of post-hoc rationalization, but, again the domain I’m interested in is different than those of Taleb.
There is a funny moment in the book where Taleb blows off a causal assertion about this domain I’m interested in. I’ll return to this after I finish the book.
116- Fooled by Rationalism; Lecturing Birds How to Fly [From Tinkering]
The greatest problem in knowledge is the “lecturing birds how to fly” effect.
Let us call it the error of rationalism. In Fat Tony’s language, it would be what makes us the suckers of all suckers. Consider two types of knowledge. The first type is not exactly “knowledge”; its ambiguous character prevents us from calling it exactly knowledge. It a way of doing thing that we cannot really express in clear language, but that we do nevertheless, and do well. The second type is more like what we call “knowledge”; it is what you acquire in school, can get grades for, can codify, what can be explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, provable, etc.
To make things simple, just look at the second type of knowledge as something so stripped of ambiguity that an autistic person (a high functioning autistic person, that is) can easily understand it.
The error of rationalism is, simply, overestimating the role and necessity of the second type, the academic knowledge, in human affairs. It is a severe error because not only much of our knowledge is not explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, etc., but, further, that such knowledge plays such a minor life that it is not even funny.
We are very likely to believe that skills and ideas that we actually acquired by doing, or that came naturally to us (as we already knew by our innate biological instinct) came from books, ideas, and reasoning. We get blinded by it; there may even be something in our brains that makes us suckers for the point. Let us see how.
TYPE 1
TYPE 2
Know how
Know what
Fat Tony wisdom, Aristotelian phronesis
Aristotelian logic
Implicit , Tacit
Explicit
Nondemonstrative knowledge
Demonstrative knowledge
Tëchnë
Epistemë
Experiential knowledge
Epistemic base
Heuristic
Propositional knowledge
Figurative
Literal
Tinkering
Directed research
Bricolage
Targeted activity
Empiricism
Rationalism
Practice
Scholarship
Engineering
Mathematics
Tinkering, stochastic tinkering
Directed search
Epilogism (Menodotus of Nicomedia and the school of empirical medicine)
Inductive knowledge
Historia a sensate cognitio
Causative historiography
Autopsia
Diagnostic
Austrian economics
Neoclassical economics
Bottom up libertarianism
Central Planner
Spirit of the Law
Letter of the Law
Customs
Ideas
Brooklyn, Amioun
Cambridge, MA, and UK
Accident, trial and error
Design
Nonautistic
Autistic
Random
Deterministic
Ecological uncertainty, not tractable in textbook
Ludic probability, statistics textbooks
Embedded
Abstract
Parallel processing
Serial processing
Off-model
On-model, model based
Side effect of a drug
National Institute of Health
Nominalism
Realism
My intentionally idiosyncratic interpretation of Taleb’s usage of the term ludic, is: it names the error found when people believe that their management of known simple fixed probabilities is identical to management of complex dynamic uncertainty. The latter is, of course, impossible to actually manage.
It was great to see paper ballots being used at my local voting place. This is even better than the punch-the-chad method. Sometimes the ancient technology is the least troublesome.
In Cuyahoga County there came to collide in this election two neoliberal fever dreams: issue #3, casinos, with, issue #6, new county charter. The latter implements a new techno-bureaucratic structure for the county. The former is neither a terrible idea or a great idea. But it is a mediocre idea.
It will be interesting to see if a casino sucks the long odds irrational lottery fan to its better odds. If this comes about, then its possible an unintended consequence will also be realized, a hit to education funding.
The new county charter is likely a new gain over the putrid rot of the current set-up, yet its promise rides on the citizenry becoming engaged enough to vet the new executive personnel. Under the box for the failed issue #5—it would have established a charter commission to write a future charter—was a slew of candidates for said commission. Who were they?
Playing playfully under the pseudonym Kamelmauz, I have made available as both streaming mp3s and downloadable Apple lossless, a new recording of experimental dark ambient music, Slidemare. It’s basically a proof-of-concept-record: how to render sound worlds using steel guitars run through effects chains. Verdict? Although I lashed the record together in two months, using materials recorded over four years, the sonic directions some of these sound worlds represent will get more rigorous attention in the near future.
Kamelmauz’s earlier record, In Khorasan, is available as a stream too.
Here’s a taste; the closer, Carapice J, dedicated to Neil Young.
The tricker treaters came in waves. I asked a group including two Jedi masters to step back and pose for a group portrait.
By my count the Free Play Softball League has notched 28 games, going back to April. It’s something like a warrior ethic that inspires a turnout in November. We close off a section of the outfield, and play six-on-six. (We played seven-on-seven today–huge turnout!) In a few weeks Dave K. leaves for warmer environs, passes the equipment on, and, the final test is passed when at least 10 show up for a post-Turkey day softball game. It’s happened once in 9 years. I’ll be there.
