Poor Richard on piety

Ben Franklin's amigo François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire (1694-1778). Image courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero has been combing through Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac lately in search of bloggable nuggets. I found a few items on the subject of religion that seemed worth a look.

Franklin, like many people in his generation, tended towards Deism, a rationalist outlook that believed that God figuratively speaking wound up the world's clock and then got out of the way (although he tried not to antagonize those with more traditional beliefs).

Most Deists rejected miracles and any revelation other than reason, although they tended to support rational moral virtues and many believed in some kind of afterlife. They tended to believe that God did not intervene in the world's affairs, other than by giving people the use of reason. As Voltaire put it,

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

Deism can be seen in part as a rejection of the dogmatism and fanaticism that led to so many of the wars and religious persecutions in European history. This quote from the Almanac pretty well expresses that:

Many have quarreled about Religion
That never practiced it.

Ain't that the truth?

Here are some more:

A good example is the best sermon.

None preaches better than the ant,
and she says nothing.

(Ben had the Protestant work ethic out the wazoo...)

Here's one for the road:

Don't judge of men's wealth or piety
by their Sunday appearances.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BUDGET BATTLE from those waged during the Bush administration looms. The NY Times reports that President Obama's proposed budget will call for closing tax breaks for the wealthy to expand health coverage and a serious approach to climate change.

ECONOMISTS TALKING SENSE. Thirty-nine prominent economists have signed on to a statement in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. They also took out a full page ad to that effect in the Washington Post.

BANK ON IT. El Cabrero is a fan of the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Here's his take on the banking mess. And here are his words of wisdom:

Indeed, the incentive system put in place by financial companies has produced the worst possible economic system mankind can imagine: capitalism for the profits and socialism for the losses...

No incentive without disincentive. And never trust with your money anyone making a potential bonus.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE. The economy may be tanking, but shark attacks are down.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Story time

These dogs are arguing about politics.

El Cabrero's late father, the bad joke magnet, used to tell one about a rural resident who called the sheriff's department because there were 20 dogs carrying on in his yard.

"Are they mad?," the dispatcher asked.

"Well, 18 of 'em seem pretty upset."

No matter what happens tomorrow, some dogs are going to be upset. And one thing that will undoubtedly happen is that the post-mortem explanation industry will kick into gear to explain WHY THINGS HAPPENED THE WAY THEY DID. Most of them will be absolutely convinced of the validity of their explanation.

We can't really help it. Ever since people have been able to talk, they have made up explanations or stories--mythological, logical or otherwise--to explain things. We are driven to come up with a narrative or story that sounds good and connects events together in a way that makes sense.

That is to say, we torture the data until it confesses.

The problem is that while we're addicted to our narratives, there is absolutely no necessary connection between our explanations and what really happened.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, calls this the narrative fallacy, which

is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. It severely distorts our mental representation of the world; it is particularly acute when it comes to the rare event.

Once again, a little skepticism is called for, not only about the stories we hear from others but our own as well.

That's my story and I'm sticking with it.

BY THE NUMBERS, here's a look at the current US economy, courtesy of the Economic Policy Institute.

WATER could be the new oil.

A GREEN NEW DEAL? Why not?

WHY DO WE BELIEVE in weird stuff?

GEORGE ORWELL gets a tip of the hat here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Maps and territories

Medieval map of the world. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

One way that people can get in big trouble is by falling in love with their theories (or believing their own propaganda). In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to this as Platonizing or Platonicity.

For the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, Ideas or Forms were more real than the world of the senses. Most people wouldn't go that far these days, but there is a persistent tendency for people to take their model of the world for the world itself.

It's an all too human thing to construct working models of how the world works. In fact, most of the time, these models may work pretty well. But the tricky thing about our world is that it is under no obligation to act in a way that meets our expectations.

As the Polish-American scientist Alfred Korzybski famously put it, "the map is not the territory." The Gentle Reader may have discovered this for him- or herself while attempting to drive to a new destination with a map downloaded from the internet.

As Taleb puts it, Platonicity

is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined "forms," whether objects, like triangles, or social notions, like utopias (societies built according to some blueprint of what "makes sense"), even nationalities. When these ideas and crisp constructs inhabit our minds, we privilege them over other less elegant objects, those with messier and less tractable structures...

Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do...Models and constructions, these intellectual maps of reality, are not always wrong; they are wrong only in some specific applications. The difficult is that a) you do not know before hand (only after the fact) where the map will be wrong, and b) the mistakes can lead to severe consequences. These models are like potentially helpful medicines that carry random but very severe side effects.

Some healthy skepticism is called for, even about our most cherished ideas.

OH GOOD. Wall Street securities firms still have plenty on hand for executive bonuses.

SHOP TILL WE DROP? That may have just happened, according to the latest reports on consumer spending.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's economist Dean Baker's take on the data.

THE BIOLOGY OF HATE. Scientists may have identified the brain's "hate circuit." Meanwhile, lots of people seem to have already found it.

URGENT ANCIENT PHOENICIAN UPDATE here. Short version: they got around.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Black swans

Cygnus atratus, courtesy of wikipedia.

Every so often, a reader may have the good luck to stumble on a book that articulates things he or she has been musing about.

That happened to me a while back when I listened to a recorded version of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb's background is part philosopher, part trader. While I don't know if I'd be on the same page with him on every economic policy issue, I'm totally down with his general view of how the world works--to wit, randomly and unpredictably.

The title in itself is significant. For centuries, it was an article of faith in the western world that all swans were white--until a species of black ones was discovered in Australia. Actually, though, it would only taken one mutant black swan to falsify that whole dogma.

Taleb goes from there to talk about Black Swan events, i.e. unexpected happenings that have big consequences. Such an event has the following attributes:

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to the elements of our own personal lives...

Think about it. What were the odds that a giant meteor 65 million years ago would have ended the dinosaur's winning streak? Life and history are full of low probability/high impact events. These can be either good or bad but they can't be perfectly anticipated

I guess you could say that's what makes things interesting. It also means that we need to recognize that there are a lot of vitally important things we just don't know.

NOT A BLACK SWAN EVENT. Who could have known about the Wall Street bubble? Lots of people, argues economist Dean Baker. While we're at it, here's another item by Baker that takes a broader perspective on the crisis.

IT'S ONLY MONEY. The Bank of England estimates the cost of the August financial meltdown to be $2.8 trillion. So far.

THE NEXT WAVE of the economic crisis is likely to hit credit cards.

THE FIRST DIXIE CHICKS. Here's an item from the Smithsonian about the Salem Witch Trials.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED