The Economist reports gravitational anomalies:#

"ASSUME nothing" is a good motto in science. Even the humble pendulum may spring a surprise on you. In 1954 Maurice Allais, a French economist who would go on to win, in 1988, the Nobel prize in his subject, decided to observe and record the movements of a pendulum over a period of 30 days. Coincidentally, one of his observations took place during a solar eclipse. When the moon passed in front of the sun, the pendulum unexpectedly started moving a bit faster than it should have done.

Since that first observation, the "Allais effect", as it is now called, has confounded physicists. If the effect is real, it could indicate a hitherto unperceived flaw in General Relativity—the current explanation of how gravity works.

Alexander Tabarrok linked to A Comparison of the Cell Phone Driver and the Drunk Driver.#

We used a high-fidelity driving simulator to compare the performance of cell-phone drivers with drivers who were legally intoxicated from ethanol. When drivers were conversing on either a hand-held or hands-free cell-phone, their braking reactions were delayed and they were involved in more traffic accidents than when they were not conversing on the cell phone. By contrast, when drivers were legally intoxicated they exhibited a more aggressive driving style, following closer to the vehicle immediately in front of them and applying more force while braking. When controlling for driving conditions and time on task, cell-phone drivers exhibited greater impairment than intoxicated drivers. The results have implications for legislation addressing driver distraction caused by cell phone conversations.

Douglas Adams gave a speech at Digital Biota 2 with the title, Is there an Artificial God? It deals with the questions of life, God, meaning, and bottom-up design.#

He first attempts to ask the question, "What is life, and how do we identify it?" He compares with handwriting recognition:#

Compare that with handwriting recognition. In the end you are trying to say "is this an A or is it a B?" People write As and Bs in many different ways; floridly, sloppily or whatever. It's no good saying 'well, it's sort of A-ish but there's a bit of B in there', because you can't write the word 'apple' with such a thing. It is either an A or a B. How do you judge? If you're doing handwriting recognition, what you are trying to do is not to assess the relative degrees of A-ness or B-ness of the letter, but trying to define the intention of the person who wrote it. It's very clear in the end—is it an A or a B?—ah! it's an A, because the person writing it was writing the word apple and that's clearly what it means. So, in the end, in the absence of an intentional creator, you cannot say what life is, because it simply depends on what set of definitions you include in your overall definition. Without a god, life is only a matter of opinion.

He also mentions tautology and, in particular, a tautology related to evolution. This is actually something that Murry N. Rothbard mentioned in his article on Praxeology. (Search for "self-evident.")#

I want to pick up on a few other things that came around today. I was fascinated by Larry (again), talking about tautology, because there's an argument that I remember being stumped by once, to which I couldn't come up with a reply, because I was so puzzled by the challenge and couldn't quite figure it out. A guy said to me, 'yes, but the whole theory of evolution is based on a tautology: that which survives, survives' This is tautological, therefore it doesn't mean anything. I thought about that for a while and it finally occurred to me that a tautology is something that if it means nothing, not only that no information has gone into it but that no consequence has come out of it. So, we may have accidentally stumbled upon the ultimate answer; it's the only thing, the only force, arguably the most powerful of which we are aware, which requires no other input, no other support from any other place, is self evident, hence tautological, but nevertheless astonishingly powerful in its effects. It's hard to find anything that corresponds to that and I therefore put it at the beginning of one of my books. I reduced it to what I thought were the bare essentials, which are very similar to the ones you came up with earlier, which were "anything that happens happens, anything that in happening causes something else to happen causes something else to happen and anything that in happening causes itself to happen again, happens again". In fact you don't even need the second two because they flow from the first one, which is self-evident and there's nothing else you need to say; everything else flows from that. So, I think we have in our grasp here a fundamental, ultimate truth, against which there is no gain-saying. It was spotted by the guy who said this is a tautology. Yes, it is, but it's a unique tautology in that it requires no information to go in but an infinite amount of information comes out of it. So I think that it is arguably therefore the prime cause of everything in the Universe. Big claim, but I feel I'm talking to a sympathetic audience.

He then deals with the assumption that the universe exists for humans and demonstrates how this is a fairly ridiculous idea by going through many examples and speculating on how the idea initially developed.#

Next is a discussion of the development of science and the desire of man to know how things work. With emphasis on the abstract manner in which they do--an abstract manner that cannot easily be observed.#

Now there are all sorts of entities we are also aware of, as well as particles, forces, tables, chairs, rocks and so on, that are almost invisible to science; almost invisible, because science has almost nothing to say about them whatsoever. I'm talking about dogs and cats and cows and each other. We living things are, so far, beyond the purview of anything science can actually say, almost beyond even recognising ourselves as things that science might be expected to have something to say about.

I can imagine Newton sitting down and working out his laws of motion and figuring out the way the Universe works and with him, a cat wandering around. The reason we had no idea how cats worked was because, since Newton, we had proceeded by the very simple principle that essentially, to see how things work, we took them apart. If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have in your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was god given—and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well. But also, we have no opportunity to see this stuff at work. In a sense Darwin was like Newton, in that he was the first person to see underlying principles, that really were not at all obvious, from the everyday world in which he lived. We had to think very hard to understand the nature of what was happening around us and we had no clear, obvious everyday examples of evolution to point to. Even today that persists as a slightly tricky problem if you're trying to persuade somebody who doesn't believe in all this evolution stuff and wants you to show him an example—they are hard to find in terms of everyday observation.

Ultimately, he resolves that the world is best explained by as a bottom-up phenomenon. There are certain ground rules and axioms that give rise to different dynamic configurations, and an externally imposed order is not one of them. This fits well with a free-market philosophy of individual action. And one can use Bryan Caplan's ideas about irrationality as a private good to explain the "artificial" development of the God concept.#

Nonetheless, there is still the problem of where did these base conditions and rules come from--i.e. where did the Universe come from? I don't have any answer, but I do say: While it may not be ideal, at least its not resting on turtles.#

James Ostrowski writes in Chomsky's Economics about what Noam Chomsky is for.#

Why should we care what Chomsky, or any critic, is for? Simply because if we get rid of that which the critic criticizes, and install the critic's favored form of regime, it just might be worse! To so conclude does not and would not justify the status quo; it would merely point us away from a particular alternative to the status quo.

It turns out that figuring out what Chomsky is for is not easy. He just doesn't say much about it. He doesn't like what we have now. He disfavors Stalinism and fascism. He despises the libertarian alternative to the present regime, which he calls American libertarianism. So he is not for a minimal state, anarcho-capitalism, or a free market.

He describes Murray Rothbard's vision of a libertarian society as "so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it." (I will not attempt to dissect this insane remark here except to note how the "anti-authoritarian" Chomsky purports to speak for all human beings.) He is against any form of capitalism. It goes without saying that he is not a political conservative. But he has repeatedly denounced "Marxism"[1] and fiscal Keynesianism and protectionism as well[2].

What is left? Not much.

The resolution is that Chomsky supports "Anarcho-Syndicalism."#

Critical to understanding Chomsky and the syndicalists is the fact that their favored mode of production—worker-owned cooperatives—can lawfully exist in a free market system. They are inefficient of course—dilettantes cannot compete with specialists. They will be limited to those who have an ideological or philosophical commitment to them. Even then, the adherents will be mostly students who, like those who worked for the co-op restaurant I frequented in college, will eventually burn-out from the long hours, the low pay and the hassles of co-owning a business with thirty other amateurs while competing with professional managers and entrepreneurs.

Will the syndicalists do likewise and tolerate capitalists? They rarely talk about this, which is one of the problems with syndicalism and Chomsky. Yet, a reasonable conclusion can be reached. First, if syndicalists will respect private property and capitalism and merely try to compete by setting up their own co-ops, then they might as well be "American libertarians", which they most definitely are not.

Read the rest for laughs.#

Nathaniel Branden writes in The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand of his teacher and friend.#

The problems are: "Confusing reason with "the reasonable"";#

Reason is at once a faculty and a process of identifying and integrating the data present or given in awareness. Reason means integration in accordance with the law of noncontradiction. If you think of it in these terms — as a process of noncontradictory integration — it's difficult to imagine how anyone could be opposed to it.

Here is the problem: There is a difference between reason as a process and what any person or any group of people, at any time in history, may regard as "the reasonable." This is a distinction that very few people are able to keep clear. We all exist in history, not just in some timeless vacuum, and probably none of us can entirely escape contemporary notions of "the reasonable." It's always important to remember that reason or rationality, on the one hand, and what people may regard as "the reasonable," on the other hand, don't mean the same thing.

The consequence of failing to make this distinction, and this is markedly apparent in the case of Ayn Rand, is that if someone disagrees with your notion of "the reasonable," it can feel very appropriate to accuse him or her of being "irrational" or "against reason."

"Encouraging repression"#

We must be guided by our conscious mind, Rand insisted; we must not follow our emotions blindly. Following our emotions blindly is undesirable and dangerous: Who can argue with that? Applying the advice to be guided by our mind isn't always as simple as it sounds. Such counsel does not adequately deal with the possibility that in a particular situation feelings might reflect a more correct assessment of reality than conscious beliefs or, to say the same thing another way, that the subconscious mind might be right while the conscious mind was mistaken. I can think of many occasions in my own life when I refused to listen to my feelings and followed instead my conscious beliefs — which happened to be wrong — with disastrous results. If I had listened to my emotions more carefully, and not been so willing to ignore and repress them, my thinking — and my life — would have advanced far more satisfactorily.

[...]

The solution for people who seem over preoccupied with feelings is not the renunciation of feelings but rather greater respect for reason, thinking, and the intellect. What is needed is not a renunciation of emotion but a better balance between emotion and thinking. Thinking needs to be added to the situation, emotion does not need to be subtracted from the situation.

"Encouraging moralizing"#

Another aspect of her philosophy that I would like to talk about — one of the hazards — is the appalling moralism that Ayn Rand herself practiced and that so many of her followers also practice. I don't know of anyone other than the Church fathers in the Dark Ages who used the word "evil" quite so often as Ayn Rand.

Of all the accusations of her critics, surely the most ludicrous is the accusation that Ayn Rand encourages people to do just what they please. If there's anything in this world Ayn did not do, it was to encourage people to do what they please. If there is anything she was not, it was an advocate of hedonism.

She may have taught that "Man's Life" is the standard of morality and your own life is its purpose, but the path she advocated to the fulfillment of your life was a severely disciplined one. She left many of her readers with the clear impression that life is a tightrope and that it is all too easy to fall off into moral depravity. In other words, on the one hand she preached a morality of joy, personal happiness, and individual fulfillment; on the other hand, she was a master at scaring the hell out of you if you respected and admired her and wanted to apply her philosophy to your own life.

And:

To look on the dark side, however, part of her vision of justice is urging you to instant contempt for anyone who deviates from reason or morality or what is defined as reason or morality. Errors of knowledge may be forgiven, she says, but not errors of morality. Even if what people are doing is wrong, even if errors of morality are involved, even if what people are doing is irrational, you do not lead people to virtue by contempt. You do not make people better by telling them they are despicable. It just doesn't work. It doesn't work when religion tries it and it doesn't work when objectivism tries it.

If someone has done something so horrendous that you want to tell him or her that the action is despicable, go ahead. If you want to tell someone he is a rotten son-of-a-bitch, go ahead. If you want to call someone a scoundrel, go ahead. I don't deny that there are times when that is a thoroughly appropriate response. What I do deny is that it is an effective strategy for inspiring moral change or improvement.

I was trying to refer to this in a recent letter.

"Conflating sacrifice and benevolence"#

"Overemphasizing the role of philosophical premises"#

"Encouraging dogmatism"#

Ayn always insisted that her philosophy was an integrated whole, that it was entirely self-consistent, and that one could not reasonably pick elements of her philosophy and discard others. In effect, she declared, "It's all or nothing." Now this is a rather curious view, if you think about it. What she was saying, translated into simple English, is: Everything I have to say in the field of philosophy is true, absolutely true, and therefore any departure necessarily leads you into error. Don't try to mix your irrational fantasies with my immutable truths. This insistence turned Ayn Rand's philosophy, for all practical purposes, into dogmatic religion, and many of her followers chose that path.

The true believers might respond by saying, "How can you call it dogmatic religion when we can prove every one of Ayn Rand's propositions?!" My answer to that is, "The hell you can!" Prior to our break, Ayn Rand credited me with understanding her philosophy better than any other person alive — and not merely better, but far better. I know what we were in a position to prove, I know where the gaps are. And so can anyone else — by careful, critical reading. It's not all that difficult or complicated.

This may sound like a trivial example of what I mean, but it's an example that has always annoyed me personally. I would love to hear some loyal follower of Ayn Rand try to argue logically and rationally for her belief that no woman should aspire to be president of the United States. This was one of Rand's more embarrassing lapses. If we are to champion the independent, critical mind, then the philosophy of objectivism can hardly be exempt from judgment. Ayn Rand made mistakes. That merely proves she was human. The job of her admirers, however, is to be willing to see them and to correct them.

Bryan Caplan writes in Rational Ignorance vs. Rational Irrationality on a possible new way of thinking about public choice economics.#

Beliefs about politics and religion often have three puzzling properties: systematic bias, high certainty, and little informational basis. The theory of rational ignorance (Downs 1957) explains only the low level of information. The current paper presents a general model of "rational irrationality," which explains all three stylized facts. According to the theory of rational irrationality, being irrational - in the sense of deviating from rational expectations - is a good like any other; the lower the private cost, the more agents buy. A peculiar feature of beliefs about politics, religion, etc. is that the private repercussions of error are virtually nonexistent, setting the private cost of irrationality at zero; it is therefore in these areas that irrational views are most apparent. The consumption of irrationality can be optimal, but it will usually not be when the private and the social cost of irrationality differ — for example, in elections.

The paper takes the one idea--that irrationality is an economic good--and sees what comes out when it is examined.#

Wittman points out that "If voter misinformation were an important reason for poor policy choices, then we should be able to observe more informed voters making better policy choices." (1989, p.1401) But in fact, more educated voters seem as likely to support e.g. "pork-barrel" spending as anyone else, even when they do not directly benefit. Stark, Iannaccone, and Finke (1996) and Iannaccone (1998) make a similar point about the rationality of religious belief: Religiosity has not decreased as education levels have risen, and for the most part religious participation and education are positively, not negatively correlated. If all mistakes were the result of ignorance, one would expect intelligence and education to make errors smaller and less likely. But if mistakes are the result of tastes for irrational beliefs, the connection between intelligence, education, and error is less clear-cut. The cognitive elite may get passionately attached to beliefs about topics that most people never even think about. Even the "experts" may be highly informed about nothing other than their profession's shared illusions if employment and pay bear little relation to the correctness of the expert's opinions. As Orwell (1968) smartly put it, "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

The conclusion:#

The political scientist Gaetano Mosca laid down a powerful challenge to economics: "Economic science has penetratingly investigated the laws that regulate the production and distribution of wealth. It has as yet done little with the relations of those laws to other laws that operate in the political organization of human societies. Economists have not concerned themselves with those beliefs, those collective illusions, which sometimes become general in given societies, and which form so large a part of the history of the world - as has been well said, man does not live by bread alone." (1923, p.328) While some economists argue that irrationality cannot be reconciled with the economic approach to human behavior (e.g. Becker 1976b, pp.11-13), the application of the economic way of thinking to irrationality can also be seen as a striking vindication of economic imperialism.

In Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics, Murry N. Rothbard explains his school.#

Praxeology rests on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act, that is, on the primordial fact that individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals. This concept of action contrasts to purely reflexive, or knee-jerk, behavior, which is not directed toward goals. The praxeological method spins out by verbal deduction the logical implications of that primordial fact. In short, praxeological economics is the structure of logical implications of the fact that individuals act. This structure is built on the fundamental axiom of action, and has a few subsidiary axioms, such as that individuals vary and that human beings regard leisure as a valuable good. Any skeptic about deducing from such a simple base an entire system of economics, I refer to Mises's Human Action. Furthermore, since praxeology begins with a true axiom, A, all the propositions that can be deduced from this axiom must also be true. For if A implies B, and A is true, then B must also be true.

His reply to disagreement with this fundamental axiom:#

The action axiom, in particular, should be, according to Aristotelian philosophy, unchallengeable and self-evident since the critic who attempts to refute it finds that he must use it in the process of alleged refutation. Thus, the axiom of the existence of human consciousness is demonstrated as being self-evident by the fact that the very act of denying the existence of consciousness must itself be performed by a conscious being. The philosopher R.P. Phillips called this attribute of a self-evident axiom a "boomerang principle," since "even though we cast it away from us, it returns to us again." [24] A similar self-contradiction faces the man who attempts to refute the axiom of human action. For in doing so, he is ipso facto a person making a conscious choice of means in attempting to arrive at an adopted end: in this case the end, or goal, of trying to refute the axiom of action. He employs action in trying to refute the notion of action.

This methodology is then used for different purposes:#

In brief, praxeology consists of the logical implications of the universal formal fact that people act, that they employ means to try to attain chosen ends. Technology deals with the contentual problem of how to achieve ends by adoption of means. Psychology deals with the question of why people adopt various ends and how they go about adopting them. Ethics deals with the question of what ends, or values, people should adopt. And history deals with ends adopted in the past, what means were used to try to achieve them — and what the consequences of these actions were.

Praxeology, or economic theory in particular, is thus a unique discipline within the social sciences; for, in contrast to the others, it deals not with the content of men's values, goals, and actions — not with what they have done or how they have acted or how they should act — but purely with the fact that they do have goals and act to attain them. The laws of utility, demand, supply, and price apply regardless of the type of goods and services desired or produced.

From here, he primarily focuses on economic history, eventually describing the Austrian problem with econometrics:#

Mises's radically fundamental opposition to econometrics now becomes clear. Econometrics not only attempts to ape the natural sciences by using complex heterogeneous historical facts as if they were repeatable homogeneous laboratory facts; it also squeezes the qualitative complexity of each event into a quantitative number and then compounds the fallacy by acting as if these quantitative relations remain constant in human history. In striking contrast to the physical sciences, which rest on the empirical discovery of quantitative constants, econometrics, as Mises repeatedly emphasized, has failed to discover a single constant in human history. And given the ever-changing conditions of human will, knowledge, and values and the differences among men, it is inconceivable that econometrics can ever do so.

In a response to Richard's interview with Joel Bakan, a commenter named RanXerox left the following comment:#

"corporations are responsible and accountable in the absence of government--they are accountable to their customers."

Wrong.

Fundamentally, legally and historically incorrect.

Corporations are responsible to shareholders, NOT to customers. Thats the LAW.

Since this person (Jay McCarthy) apparently doesn't understand that the role of a corporate entity is profit - for its owners; which by implication, is a group of persons owning shares in said enterprise - what's left of their argument?

Corporations are legally responsible ONLY to their shareholders. Not "stakeholders", not your grandmother getting shafted on energy bills because she happens to live in California, and NOT anyone else but shareholders.

This guy and other dimwits often fail to note that a lot of "government" exists BECAUSE of businesses history of screwing its customers, employees and the general public in the name of profit. ie: Ministry of Labour, Ministry of the Environment, Consumer and Corporate Affairs - all these came about because this dimbulbs beloved 'market principles' failed to protect the public - and his precious customers.

Mr. McCarthy's got bupkiss for an "argument"- let him try again - this time with more facts and less juvenile naivete.

Til then - his grade stands at F.

I replied:

Firstly, I agree with Richard that ad hominem gets nowhere in debate, so I will refrain.

Secondly, consider the following string of logic:

A corporation is legally responsible to their shareholders. These shareholders desire profit. The corporation seeks to engage in some sort of profi-maximizing trade. On the other end of this trade is a customer, who supplies the money that is more than the cost to produce the good or service, thus provides a profit.

Thus, the only way a corporation can produce the profit that its shareholders require is by having customers. Thus, the corporation owes its survival to its customers. If ZERO Microsoft products were bought from August 30th, 2004 until the end of time, would the company still be around? No. Thus, corporations are responsible to their customers in a fundamental way.

Lastly, some of the problems you reference are caused by either un-enlightened consumerism or government intervention.

For example, the only reason your grandmother is being "shaft on enery bills because she happens to live in California" is because the California government protects a monopoly on energy power, under a truly free market economy these monopolies would not exist and corporations would have to compete more for customers--and thus try harder to please them.

The other instance of problem is that of a consumer not fully researching their options or understanding their bargaining position. If I only look at one store before buying something, is it the store's fault that I didn't save 10% by going to the next store, or is it mine? If I do understand my bargaining power at the car dealership and buy the car for the list price, is it my fault or is it due to untrustworthy car salesman? Do you or do you not accept responsibility for your actions? The answer to that question will provide the answer to these questions.

Holy Trepanation Batman!#

Tyler Cowen writes about the performance of Mexico and ponders what went wrong.#

Mexico is slated to grow at somewhat over four percent this year (this popped up in the Mexican edition of the Miami Herald last week, no link handy). It has responded to the Chinese challenge by retooling its export base toward higher quality and quicker response times; the maquiladoras are once again growing. Higher oil prices do not hurt either. Of course four percent is a rate that most countries in the world would envy.

In the twentieth century Mexico grew at a rate above what the U.S. did (sorry, my exact figures are at home!). Mexican performance would be even better if we take out the disastrous 1980s. And in early colonial times, at least once Mexico recovered from various plagues, Mexico was arguably richer than the British colonies to the north. As late as 1820, Mexican GDP per-capita was in the same ballpark as that of the United States ($1287 U.S., $893 Canada, $760 Mexico, in 1990 dollars as estimated by Angus Maddison). So what went wrong?

Grant writes about anti-Americanism in Canada.#

Really, there is no comparison. The US leads in scientific accomplishment (see Nobel lists and patents awards), athletics (see Olympic wins), education (see Ph.D.s produced), business innovation, technological innovation, and cultural innovation. Oh, Canada. Poor Canada. Your neighbor outstrips you on every dimension.

But I have never heard a Canadian admit to admiration or even acknowledgement of this difference. Instead, the strategy is to claim moral superiority. Canadians are better, they suppose, because they have better social programs, pay more taxes, and do not go to war. Why is that, I wonder? The reason that Canada does not go to war is because it lives within the protection of the US. This is the reason it has an Armed Force that would be hard pressed, if transplanted to Eastern Europe, to defend itself from an attack by Estonia.

And this brings us to the question of terrorism and Ms. Parrish's conviction that a missile defense treaty with the US would expose Canada to an attack. It is hard to know whether this is naiveté or cowardice. But it certainly smacks of ingratitude. To accept American protection and then, in the American hour of urgency, to refuse to do what little we can, is wrong. It compounds the error made by former Prime Minister Chrétien when he refused to send Canadian troops to Iraq. Chrétien claimed that there was insufficient evidence of weapons of mass destruction. What in God's name prompted him to think this was the point? Plainly and simply, our neighbour needed us to close ranks, show solidarity, and present a single face to the dithering world community. If friendship was not enough, surely the opportunity to repay the "protection debt" should have been. If you can't act from honor, you might at least think about acting from reciprocity.

Chip Gibbons links to John Kerry: "The truth, which is what elections are all about, is that the tax burden of the middle class has gone up while the tax burden of the middle class has gone down."#

Cthulhu links: Cthulhu and Christ, Tales of the Plush Cthulhu, FAQ, and the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu.#