Asymptosis

Jonathan Haidt asks on his blog:

“Can anyone understand Avatar who lacks all intuitions of purity/sanctity?”

He’s talking about the sanctity of nature, and of spirituality, as against corporate, consumerist, and militarist values.

My answer is “Yes.”

I (a devoted liberal with a “Liberal Purity” score of 1.0–compared to Libs’ 2.7 and Cons’ 2.1) understand it as a brilliantly Machiavellian corporate vehicle to extract cash from those souls who embrace that purist intuition — and from the other groups that are so successfully, simultaneously, pandered to:

1. America haters worldwide who love watching military/corporate America get its ass kicked;

2. Uneducated militarists (who nevertheless love their mommies), and who want to believe that only their like can save the world;

3. Those with contempt for pointy-headed academics who can’t get anything done on their own (at least they’re not depicted as bad — just ineffectual); and

4. Teenage boys who think they’re going to be the next Luke Skywalker, Neo, or Jake Sully: The One.

There’s something for everyone! (Except, yes, Mr. Burns and Colonel Killgore.)

And while extracting that cash, insidiously propagandizing all those groups for the superiority of #2.

Yes, it’s beautifully produced. But re-read The Republic (and The Prince) — that’s the whole point.

Asymptosis Politics, Rhetoric

Or: The Seven Habits of Highly Efficient Economies

Republican economic policies are widely perceived (especially by Republicans) as being pro-growth and pro-prosperity, even though All. The. Evidence. Demonstrates. The. Opposite. (How dare they call themselves “conservatives”?) Even the rich get richer under Democrats — though not at the expense of the poor and the middle class.

Instead of pointing out that Democrats deliver more prosperity and less debt, Democrats’ main response is “Yeah, but…uh…Equality!” To which many Americans respond by reaching for the remote control.

If — as all the pundits proclaim — Democrats need a coherent, unifying, and compelling narrative (like the profoundly effective though sadly false narrative that is Reaganomics), how about this:

The Party of Prosperity

Democrats deliver more prosperity. They deliver it to more people. And they do it without busting the budget.

How do they achieve all that? Through the miracles of economic efficiency–policies that make the markets actually work — and work better — for the greater prosperity of all (including the rich).

Wisdom of the Crowds. Democrats’ dispersed government spending — education, health care, infrastructure, and social support — puts money (hence power) in the hands of individuals, instead of delivering concentrated streams to big entities like defense and business. Those individuals’ free choices on where to spend the money allocate resources where they’re needed — to truly productive industries that deliver goods people actually want.

Preventing Government “Capture.” Money that goes to millions of individuals is much less subject to “capture” by powerful players, so it is much less likely to be used to then “capture” government via political donations, sweetheart deals, and crony capitalism.

Labor Market Flexibility. When people feel confident that they and their families won’t end up on the streets — they know that their children will have health care, a good education, and a decent safety net if the worst happens — they feel free to move to a different job that better fits their talents — better allocating labor resources. “Labor market flexibility” often suggests the freedom (of employers) to hire and fire, but the freedom of hundreds of millions of employees is far more profound, economically.

Freedom to Innovate. Individuals who are standing on that social springboard that Democratic policies provide — who have that platform beneath them — can do more than just shift jobs. They have the freedom to strike out on their own and develop the kind of innovative, entrepreneurial ventures that are the true engine of long-term growth and prosperity (and personal freedom and satisfaction)–without worrying that their children will suffer if the risk goes wrong. Give ten, twenty, or thirty million more Americans a place to stand, and they’ll move the world.

Profitable Investments in Long-Term Growth. From education to infrastructure to scientific research, Democratic priorities deliver money to projects that the free market doesn’t support on its own, and that have been demonstrated to pay off many times over in widespread public prosperity.

Power to the Producers. The dispersal of income and wealth under Democratic policies provides the widespread demand (read: sales) that producers need to succeed, to expand, and to take risks on innovative new endeavors. Rather than assuming that government knows best and giving money directly to businesses, Democratic policies trust the markets to direct that money to the most productive producers.

Fiscal Prudence. True conservatives pay their bills. From the 35 years of declining debt after World War II (until 1982) to the years of budget surpluses and declining debt under Bill Clinton, Democratic policies demonstrate which party deserves the name “fiscal conservatives.”

Labor and Trade Efficiencies. (This is an update — I can’t resist adding a #8.) The social support programs that Democrats champion — if they truly provide an adequate level of support — give policy makers much more freedom to put in place what are otherwise draconian, but efficient, trade and labor policies. If everyone is guaranteed a decent wage by an excellent program like the Earned Income Tax Credit, we have less need for the economically constricting effects of unions and protectionism.

(These aren’t actually “The” seven reasons that Democratic policies are more efficient. There are many others. But the definite article made for a catchier post title.)

If you’re noticing that these talking points capture and co-opt the Republicans’ very own most cherished talking points…well yeah. (As my teenage daughter would say, “No duh.”) There’s a darned good dose of rhetorical jiu-jitsu at play here. It’s downright Machiavellian in its appeal to “Reagan Democrats,” Independents, and Republicans who are disaffected by their party’s thirty years of profligacy, malfeasance, and hypocricy.

But that doesn’t make it any less true. (If you don’t believe that it’s true, return to the first sentence of this post and start clicking links. Then come talk to me.)

And Democrats, in all their fecklessness — Obama in particular — could use a good helping of Machiavel.

Our president took all sorts of heat from his base during the campaign when he said that “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” But he was profoundly correct. FDR did as well. And their means were decidedly Machiavellian. (Here repeating the David Stockman link from above.)

Now Obama’s got his chance to change the trajectory. And there’s a narrative that can effect that change.

The Party of Prudence. The Party of Prosperity.

Use it.

** At risk of ending this post on a wild tangent, I can’t resist citing the passage I was thinking about in writing those last two words. In M*A*S*H (the movie) there’s a football game in which one of the M*A*SH team’s players is being harassed by an opponent. Here’s the dialog:

Bastard 88 called me a coon.
Called you a what?
Coon.
OK, that’s an old pro trick to get you thrown out of the ball game. Why don’t you do the same thing to him?
What, call him a coon?
No, the boys in camp used to talk about his sister. Her name was Gladys. Use it!

Without revealing what (hilariously) ensues, I’ll just say: it worked.

My new favorite title for this post: “Gladys!”

Asymptosis Economics, Health Care, Politics, Rhetoric, Social Security

Damn I’m busy today. I came across yet another great Wikipedia page that I really had to share: National debt by U.S. presidential terms.

I’ll just share a little top-line data. There’s much more over there.

Who are the true conservatives here?

Feel free to snark at this table. It’s just one slice out of millions that are possible, quite possibly cherry-picked. But make sure to also take down all the evidence you’ll find here and in the ensuing links. (There’s really no way to spin the data any other way without spectacular efforts at cherry-picking and statistical contortion.)

Then come back and talk to me.

Asymptosis Economics, Politics, Rhetoric

In digging around for the previous post, I came across  this beaut on Wikipedia (can’t believe I’ve never seen it before), and just can’t resist sharing it:

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted that supply side economics was not a new theory. He wrote, “Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.“^[45]

I’ve always said “trickle-down only works with urine and semen,” but I think Galbraith has embraced a superior excretion.

Asymptosis Economics, Politics, Rhetoric

You remember David Stockman, right? Reagan’s “whiz kid” budget director? He’s the man who engineered the last thirty years of Republican dominance by implementing The Reaganomics Strategy: borrow money from our children and from abroad to buy votes at home with the “I’ll cut your taxes” pander.

Stockman has never been the type to twirl his finger in his cheek and actually proclaim that Reagan’s economic vision had any roots in reality (aside from the political reality that “deficits don’t matter”). He’s repeatedly acknowledged–even as early as ‘81–that the whole thing was a scam. (That’s not exactly the word he used, but…) Check out this Wikipedia page for details, and links to more.

Well now–after years as a top Wall Street private-equity and hedge-fund hotshot who’s very, very clear on how the world works–he’s demonstrating that clear-eyed side once again. Here he is on February 5, on PBS News Hour with Paul Salmon, commenting on “Starve the Beast”:

The lesson of the last twenty five years is that it doesn’t work.

Here’s the whole video. (Start about 6:30 to skip the fairly predictable indictment of the too-big-to-fail financial institutions and somewhat more surprising endorsement of Obama’s proposal to tax them.)

Stockman continues:

You can keep cutting taxes until you reach the point where this year, the year just ended, we spent 3.6 trillion and we only collected 2.2. We are now so far out of kilter that it’s irrelevant. Taxes are going to have to be raised. The beast needs to be trimmed back, but it can’t be starved enough to even begin to cope with our fiscal problem. And this is where I think all the politicians are faking, in both parties but the Republicans especially. The Republicans think their mission in life is to cut taxes. Sorry, game over. We’re now in the tax raising business, and we’re going to be in the tax-raising business for the next decade.

The bill is due. And yes, Virginia, there is a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. The Democrats have certainly used and benefited from the pander (Clinton: “The era of big government is over”), but today’s Republicans still either believe or choose to pretend to believe in what Reagan’s own VP, the first George Bush, so aptly called “Voodoo Economics.”

Today’s Republican politicians are either 1) craven liars, or 2) intentionally self-deluded zombies, while most Democratic politicians are just limp-wristed, politically motivated collaborators. It’s pretty obvious which is worse. (I won’t get into the voters except to say that Democrats who vote against their own best interests do it because it’s the right thing to do–economically and morally–while Republicans who vote against their own–and everyone else’s–best interests do it because they’re idiots.)

It’s damned unfortunate that we have to raises taxes now, during a downturn that shows every sign of lasting for years, because raising taxes hurts economic growth over the short term. But after thirty years of magical thinking, it’s time to pay the bills.

The good news–for those of patient merit—is that in the long run, paying for the amount of government that’s necessary to maintain and promote prosperity results in (surprise) more prosperity.

Saving the best for last, there is this remarkable interchange in the Stockman interview, at about 2:00:

Salmon: Listening to you I’m struck by the fact that I can imagine critics on the left saying exactly the same thing.

Stockman: I’m mortified by that thought. But at some point you have to ask, what’s good policy?

Here’s one aggrieved citizen who wishes that point had arrived–that David had asked that question–oh, about thirty years ago?

Asymptosis Economics, Politics, Rhetoric

My sister just sent me the link to this discussion by Razib Khan on reason and intuition–timely, because it refers to Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter, who I just saw (and spoke to briefly) when he spoke at University of Washington last week on his book tour. (I found him engaging, interesting, and well-armed with fascinating facts and anecdotes, but he didn’t deliver any aha! moments for me–I’m definitely the choir, and he’s definitely preaching.)

My sister thinks Khan “gets it just about right,” and I certainly hesitate to question her sagacity. (She is older hence certainly wiser, after all.) But I came away from the post distinctly less satisfied. My basic problem: Khan–like almost everybody else that I hear discussing this subject–doesn’t seem to have any idea what he actually means by “intuition.” It’s tossed around generally in contradistinction to logical, syllogistic thinking (which is often referred to–in another example of poorly or un-considered thinking–as “linear” thinking).

To put the parenthetical aside first: logical thinking about any reasonably complex subject or problem is rarely linear. While portions of the thinking will certainly include “A leads to B which leads to C,” it also almost always includes some type of recursion and (I haven’t studied this so can’t give a good list) a variety of other decidedly nonlinear cognitive tools.

Returning to intuition, though: a definition by negation (“it’s non-logical, non-linear thought”) is useless even if “logical” and”linear” were accurate and clearly understood, because intuition can then encompass anything that isn’t that one thing. Khan exhibits this in spades. He suggests that intuition might be:

• Innate knowledge: “These stances encapsulate the wisdom of evolution (e.g., aversion to sibling-sibling incest) and/or society (again, aversion to sibling-sibling incest).”
• Surmise based on casual observation: “folk physics”.
• Easily understandable explanations that are in accord with everyday experience: “Science allows us to stand on the shoulders of giants, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive their theories are.”
• Knowledge so ingrained through practice as to feel automatic: “Specialists in technical fields often develop domain-specific intuitions through long experience.”

There are almost endless other possibilities. (Ones you hear often involve “humaness,” “empathy,” “holism,” etc., all of which seem to grope toward something that does seem right for the definition.) Some may stand up as good definitions of intuition. But if the writer/thinker hasn’t done the thinking to even know what he’s talking about when he uses the word–or has only employed wooly, half-hearted noodling without nailing down what he means–the writing doesn’t yield much light.

I’ve always thought of intuition–in an almost equally useless definition–as “back-brain processing.” It’s the stuff we’re all familiar with, embodied in the phrase “lemme sleep on it.” We know that the mind (and the brain, though in a different way) is made up of a whole lot of semi-autonomous modules that are good at particular things. Consciousness–which is sometimes (inaptly) called “the executive function”–is only one of those modules. The operations of those modules are most often completely opaque or downright invisible to other modules–including the “conscious thought” module. For instance, we can’t perceive or much control the modules that handle various types of visual or spatial processing, even though (see Pinker’s How The Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought) those very modules and a whole lot of others are being turned to task for us (even) when we think we’re thinking consciously and “logically.” A lot of thinking, of any type (including logical thought), is farmed out to the back brain.

And those back-brain modules are no slouches. They use the same kind of complex, recursive, and yes, linear cognitive techniques that the “logical” mind does. (They may only use one or two techniques each–some use this a lot, some use that…there’s a big toolbox to draw from.) All that processing may emerge in the consciousness module with the appearance (to us) of logic and linearity, or it may appear as a flash of “intuition.” But it’s the same mass of modules that’s doing the grunt work down deep.

Now maybe “intuitive thinking” refers to a method that employs particular mind modules more, or in different ways from, those that are used for “logical thinking.” Fair enough. But I don’t know what those methods and modules might be, and I’m quite certain that 99.999% of people who talk about “intuition” don’t know either. Also fair enough–you shouldn’t be required to know intimately how the mind works to think about the issue–especially as we (even cognitive scientists) still have very little understanding of how the mind works.

But scientists are, finally, learning a hell of a lot these days–actual knowledge, tested by controlled experiments that can overcome our innate predilection for self-delusion, as opposed to the armchair surmise that has constituted the stuff of psychological “knowledge” since Freud started the courageous effort to plumb our deepest mystery. (As Steven Pinker has pointed out, the brain/mind is actually going from the status of “mystery” to the status of “problem that can potentially be solved, at least in parts.”)

It was some of that experimental knowledge–delivered in a talk by Jonah Lehrer that I attended, and in his book How We Decide–that started to crystalize the fuzzy notion I’ve always had of intuition as back-brain processing. He explains that we learn through a dopamine-feedback system. We make predictions and when they turn out right, we get a little dopamine hit. Feels good. When we get them wrong, though, the pusher holds our fix, and it feels really bad. (This goes a long way toward explaining why humans will go to such extraordinary lengths–destroying relationships with loved ones, etc.–to avoid [the self-perception of?] being wrong.) Our decisions are always based–at some fundamental level–on how something feels. (This is not an endorsement of “just trust your feelings”; see “fundamental level” in the last sentence.)

Lehrer also points to a set of experiments that seem to show that when we think we’re making a decision in our frontal cortex, in fact the decision has already been made, milliseconds before, elsewhere in the brain. (Though Daniel Dennet does a fairly convincing job of discrediting these experiments in Freedom Evolves.) The message that goes to our so-called “executive function” is not in the form of a thought, it’s a feeling: feels good, or feels bad. That’s how the back brain communicates the already-made decisions to the front brain–through pleasure and pain. (How else could we possibly know what we “want”? How could a nematode know that it wants food, or learn how to get it, aside from a pain/pleasure feedback system?)

In short, what feels like conscious decision-making really isn’t. We feed the problem back into our back brain, and ask it, essentially, “how do ‘I’ feel about this?” It responds with a “Tarzan feel bad” or “Jane feel good” signal strong enough to emerge into, be felt by, our consciousness module.

This does not negate the value of logical thought, but it casts our control over that process in a very different framework. We don’t (just?) control our “impulses” on their way out of the back-brain/id/reptilian brain/whatever you want to call it, as in the Freudian and other psychological models. Quite the opposite really: Our real power is in what we feed back into that massively multimodular brain. We can deliver it the information, experience, and experimental results (including feelings that emerge from that back brain itself, further processed consciously) that it needs to make smart decisions, or we can feed it pablum and pap, well-processed or not. It’s a true garbage-in-garbage-out situation. We can, to some extent, manage the process that sometimes looks (to us) like logic and sometimes looks like intuition, but that is mostly made up of the very same back-brain stuff.

In other words: intuition is reasoning. And logical reasoning–except of the simplest sort–inevitably relies on intuition.

At this point I think I should throw the baton to a writer who has done his thinking damned carefully (though without the benefits of experimental knowledge that we have). In a long-favorite passage of mine, Milton in Paradise Lost has the Angel Raphael (speaking to the as-yet-unfallen couple of their blissful state) comment on two types of reason:

Discursive, or Intuitive; discourse
Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours

Raphael knows: humans aren’t very good at intuitive reasoning. It’s the stuff of angels. (Partly because we’re forever polluting it with various combinations of the stuff that Khan vaguely thinks of as “intuition.”) We should should stick to the the lowly, earthly discursive stuff that our measly frames are fit for.

But when we do achieve it, that divine intuitive reasoning, the results are downright angelic. Even heavenly.

This is all still feeling like pretty loosy-goosy thinking to me. But I hope it at least shows an effort towards actually knowing what I mean when I talk about “intution.” I think I’m gonna have to sleep on it.

rothsf Evolutionary Psychology, Oddities, Religion, Rhetoric

As an attack term, “socialism” packs a lot of wallop. But that’s mainly because it’s used to attack things that aren’t actually socialism.

Socialism, defined: “various theories of economic organization advocating public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production.”

But when attackers go after “socialistic” policies, they’re usually imprecating against something else entirely: government redistribution of wealth and income. (Via education, health care, infrastructure, direct transfers, etc.)

“Look at the USSR,” they say. “Socialism failed!” And it did. Government ownership of the means of production has been soundly discredited by history.

But they’re not attacking such systems. They’re attacking redistribution. And that policy has been resoundingly endorsed by history. Of all the thriving, prosperous countries in the world, there is not one that does not have massive doses of redistribution.

By their very usage, the attackers define the “socialism” that they’re attacking as redistribution. But their evidence for its perfidy? Another “socialism” entirely: government ownership of the means of production.

I wish I could redefine words:

“Communism” is government ownership of the means of production.

“Socialism” is government redistribution.

But I don’t think I’m going succeed in revising all those dictionaries out there.

What’s a better word for an economic system that includes significant redistribution? One that doesn’t include the word “social”?

Financial services, by the way (including insurance, including health insurance), are not a “means of production.” They’re a (necessary) catalyst to production.

Asymptosis Economics, Politics, Rhetoric

Okay, so the week happened to be more than two years ago. But it’s the best line of my week:

The old formulation defined conservatism as the desire to protect traditional values from the intrusion of big government; the new one seeks to promote traditional values through the intrusion of big government.

Asymptosis Politics, Rhetoric

In my earlier post I didn’t give Jim Manzi sufficient credit.

He argues that a systematic government policy of torture (as distinguished from the torturous acts that Americans have engaged in over the centuries) is 1. a radical break with American tradition, and 2. because of 1, is quite possibly (I would say definitely) damaging to American strategic interests.

Here’s the money quote, which I endorse wholeheartedly:

I am looking to tradition, settled practice and the wisdom of our forebears for guidance in a difficult situation. Among other things, this strikes me as the obviously conservative approach.

Asymptosis Foreign policy, Rhetoric, constitution, iraq

Some people think the McCain bailout/debate maneuvering has positioned him to trap Obama:

So here:

Checkmate.

Asymptosis Politics, Rhetoric