In I Were In Charge

Dangerous idea, that.

If you were in charge–if you were King–what would do? What would fix? What would you ignore?

The Socratic ideal is the philosopher king, whose first act upon accession to the throne is to abdicate. The idea being that a truly ethical thinker would refuse to accept the responsibility to rule a nation.

Pity the world doesn’t work that way.

The problem with such systems–and there are many, including those proposed by certain self-proclaimed Libertarians–is that human nature refuses to cooperate. There’s a kind of Malthusian coefficient involved–population growth always outstrips the potential for ideal behavior. All such utopian systems are based on one fallacy that keeps gumming up all the works of any system anyone cares to name.

The fallacy is that We’re All Alike.

It’s a widely touted formula–the things that we have in common outnumber those that divide us; underneath we’re all the same; people are people. The Libertarians believe as an article of faith that if government got out of everybody’s way, we’d all be fine because people basically know what’s best for themselves and their immediate circle of intimates. Socialists believe (mostly) that without class structures, everyone would get along quite nicely. Communists like to assume avarice is an aberration that can somehow be bred out of the species.

If only.

It’s not so much that we’re so very different–but that we’re alike in such individualized ways.

The fact is, we come in all shapes, sizes, talents, capacities, points of view, …

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Sometimes I myth people

Sometimes we get it, sometimes we don’t. We’re only human, after all. In my life journey I have beliefs that sometimes conflict with observable reality. The issue, then, is whether to conform my beliefs to observable reality. Too often, I don’t. I assemble the facts and weigh them, often discarding compelling proofs that what I hold are mythical beliefs.  But we all do this. 

I will cite an example: my belief in the fundamental goodness of human beings.

I didn’t begin to drive until I was 40. I had lived in St. Louis 35 years before that and my friends either didn’t know or didn’t care that I didn’t drive (to be honest, I had occasionally operated a car but, only in emergency situations where my lack of skills was outweighed by other more pressing concerns). I also lived or spent time in Washington, D.C., New York City and Boston, where there’s real public transportation. But here in St. Louis I used public transit.  Or I rode a bike, ran or walked, if traveling less than two miles. For most of that period I got around St. Louis (and the rest of the country) by hitchhiking. After high school, I hitched around the country and stayed in various places–I’d call home collect to let my family know I was alive. My most frequently traveled routes were between home and Colorado and home and Chicago.

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Onward Christian Soldier

I saw a bumper sticker the other day. “Caution: Christian On Board”

I thought, yeah, I’ll be careful. These days christians can be dangerous.

What follows may be a bit on the intolerant side, but I’m sometimes convinced our condemnation of intolerance makes us too unwilling to be simply impatient.  We “tolerate” a lot of nonsense because we don’t want to be accused of intolerance. 

Rumsfeld is gone now, and I’ve been thinking about unanswered questions, assumptions made on our behalf which led to a holy mess.  I remember when Abu Ghraib broke.  I’m thinking about the obscenities from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. People expressed shock, outrage. The president, Rumsfeld, the generals, they were all duly unhinged. They did not approve this. They did not order it or condone it. Congress has them answering questions now as to how such things could happen.

Frankly, the wrong questions were and are being asked. Senators wanted to know who to blame for either condoning it or for “allowing it to happen”–a phrase I find ludicrous in practical terms. It’s like the phrase you hear lawyers and legislators use, you know the one “You failed to do such and such.” Every time I hear that phrase I think “No he didn’t. He didn’t fail. To fail implies that at some point an attempt was made to do something. The attempt failed. He didn’t fail to tell the truth–he simply didn’t do it. He succeeded in not doing it. Failure was entirely part …

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It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a coincidence

Jason’s post about conspiracies reminded me of several books that support Jason’s argument. 

The first book is How We Know What Isn’t so: the Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, by Thomas Gilovich (1991). Gilovich points to a number of experiments demonstrating that people strive to find order in the world where there is none.  We don’t find random distributions easy to process.  Rather, we allow our imaginations to run wild on randomness:

With hindsight it is always possible to spot the most anomalous features of the data and build a favorable statistical analysis around them.  However, if properly trained scientist (or simply a wise person) avoids doing so because he or she recognizes that constructing a statistical analysis retrospectively capitalizes too much on chance and renders the analysis meaningless. . . . unfortunately, the intuitive assessments of the average person are not bound by these constraints.

Here’s another good example of people finding order where there isn’t, on Mars.  

People are also “extraordinarily good at ad hoc explanations.” Our motives and fears ignite our imaginations:

Once a person has misidentified a random pattern as a “real” phenomenon, it will not exist as a puzzling, isolated fact about the world.  Rather, it is quickly explained and readily integrated into the person’s pre-existing theories and beliefs.  These theories, furthermore, then serve to bias the person’s evaluation of new information in such a way that the initial belief becomes solidly entrenched. . . . people cling tenaciously to their beliefs in

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Conspiring To Theorize

I've seen a couple of those independantly produced DVD "exposes" about the 9/11 disaster--you know, the ones attributing sinsister intent to the United States government, that, in fact, we "knew" and did nothing in order to promote subsequent insanity.  I've been taking these things with large grains of salt for…

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