Analects

A theory of autocratic bad-decision-making (pdf):

Many, if not most, personalistic dictatorships end up with a disastrous decision … they typically involve both a monumental miscalculation and an institutional environment in which better-informed subordinates have no chance to prevent the decision from being implemented … repression and bad decision-making are self-reinforcing. Repressions reduce the threat, yet raise the stakes for the incumbent; with higher stakes, the incumbent puts more emphasis on loyalty than competence

On handling people, when everyone is the main character.

Interesting piece—normal people becoming killers.

What happens, then, when large and powerful states, along with the transnational institutions and corporations they promote and protect, are all driving towards the same goal: the universalisation of an American-style “global economy” and its associated culture? … The expansion of this system has created problems — ecological degradation, social unrest, cultural fragmentation, economic interdependence, systemic fragility, institutional breakdown. The system has responded with more expansion and more control, growing bigger, more complex and more controlling … Modernity can best be seen as a system of enclosure, fuelled by the destruction of self-sufficient lifeways, and their replacement with a system of economic exploitation, guided by states and exercised by corporations. The disempowering of people everywhere, and the deepening of technological control

This seems a little alarmist, but the increasingly hydraulic nature of our modern way of being is superficially quite obvious. I was more impressed by the author’s idea to adopt James C. Scott’s ‘shatter zones’ to ameliorate it:

In his 2009 book The Art of Not Being Governed — subtitled, “an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia” — the historian James C. Scott … The “hill tribes” and “barbarians” living outside civilisation’s walls, he says, are neither “left behind” by “progress”, nor the “remnants” of earlier “backwards” cultures; they are in fact escapees. “Hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labour, epidemics and warfare.”

Scott’s thesis is that throughout history, escaping from the reach of oppressive states has been a popular aim, and that in response, some cultures have developed sophisticated ways of living in hard-to-govern “shatter zones”, which allow them to avoid being assimilated. Standard-issue historical accounts of “development”, he says, are really the history of state-making, written from the state’s point of view: they pay no attention to “the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness”. Yet that history — whether of hill tribes, runaway slaves, gypsies, maroons, sea peoples or Marsh Arabs — is global and ongoing. Taking it into account, says Scott, would “reverse much received wisdom about ‘primitivism’”. Instead, we would read a history of “self-barbarisation”: a process of reactive resistance, of becoming awkward, of making a community into a shape that it is hard for the state to absorb, or even to quite comprehend … localised, potentially dispersed cultures can be tough to conquer.

Then some ideas about how to go about it, with the obvious focus on the internet as a convenient place to create ‘shatter zones’. I must be honest though—the internet corresponds to an alarming rise in loneliness, so whatever the internet is theoretically capable of in terms of connecting people, the practice leaves much to be desired. This constant recourse to it as a solution needs to become a bit more sophisticated.

The fake neuroscience of God. A neurosurgeon-cum-prophet tells of heaven after a near death experience. The legitimacy of the account relies entirely on his authority as a doctor, but he talks about nothing but anecdote. And as the reporter reveals, even that is flimsy. The best part is when the Dalai Lama, a co-speaker at an event attended by the neurosurgeon makes the aside:

that Buddhists categorize phenomena in three ways. The first category are “evident phenomena,” which can be observed and measured empirically and directly. The second category are “hidden phenomena,” such as gravity, phenomena that can’t be seen or touched but can be inferred to exist on the basis of the first category of phenomena. The third category, he says, are “extremely hidden phenomena,” which cannot be measured at all, directly or indirectly. The only access we can ever have to that third category of phenomena is through our own first-person experience, or through the first-person testimony of others.

“Now, for example,” the Dalai Lama says, “his sort of experience.”

He points at Alexander.

“For him, it’s something reality. Real. But those people who never sort of experienced that, still, his mind is a little bit sort of…” He taps his fingers against the side of his head. “Different!” he says, and laughs a belly laugh, his robes shaking. The audience laughs with him. Alexander smiles a tight smile.

“For that also, we must investigate,” the Dalai Lama says. “Through investigation we must get sure that person is truly reliable.” He wags a finger in Alexander’s direction. When a man makes extraordinary claims, a “thorough investigation” is required, to ensure “that person reliable, never telling lie,” and has “no reason to lie.”

It does seem rather unlikely that God would be a butterfly, even without investigation.

Neuroscience shows that spiritual experiences are correlated with brain states that we can all aim for, religious or not. See also speaking in tongues.

Machine in the ghost.

the central cultural conflict for religion in this century … [will not be] the old touchstones that configure ideological divisions between the orthodox and heterodox, the mainline and the fringe, conservatives and liberals, with arguments about abortion, birth control, gay rights and so on dominating our understanding of cultural rift … By the end of the century, there could very well be debates and denunciations, exegeses and excommunications about whether or not an AI is allowed to join a Church, allowed to serve as clergy, allowed to marry a biological human … ‘AI may be the greatest threat to Christian theology since Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species.’ … it could equally be argued that, just as evolutionary thought reinvigorated non-fundamentalist Christian faith … so too could artificial intelligence provide for a coming spiritual fecundity

Particularly poignent given the recent obsession with ChatGPT.

The gossip trap: How civilization came to be and how social media is ending it. Interesting enough exploration of our ‘silent years’—the huge gap between modern physiology and modern civilisation. The thesis: when society is small enough for each of us to know each other, society is organised through social pressure. When we exceed that, natural social hierarchy breaks down and we are forced to use other tools (i.e. civilisation). ‘Gossip’ is posed as a constraint on innovation. The outro suggests that social media has brought back the ‘gossip trap’.

It is not clear precisely to me how this is entirely a bad thing, although the author things so:

The gossip trap is our first Eldritch Mother, the Garrulous Gorgon With a Thousand Heads, The Beast Made Only of Sound.

I’d be more likely to agree that this modern form of the gossip trap is a bad thing, and point to the loneliness epidemic, the hydraulic trap and the amusement trap as examples. But I’m inclined to suspect the gossip trap facilitated not by social media but by actual connections to people brings many benefits we are quick to dismiss or ignore.

On applying Quakerism to the Effective Altruism movement (?) for betterment. More broadly a case for religion as a framework for doing good.

On the value of reading dead philosophers.

What credence should we assign to philosophical claims that were formed without any knowledge of the current state of the art of the philosophical debate and little or no knowledge of the relevant empirical or scientific data?

For example, Plato’s critique of democracy as we have discussed was not based on modern or developed democracies, nor “formal theorems regarding collective decision making and preference aggregation, such as the Condorcet Jury-Theorem, Arrow’s Impossibility-Results, the Hong-Page-Theorem, the median voter theorem, the miracle of aggregation, etc.; Existing studies on voter behavior, polarization, deliberation, information; Public choice economics, incl. rational irrationality, democratic realism” and so on.

Perhaps we should discount them more than we do?

On the accuracy of futurist predictions (usually not very accurate).

In particular, people who were into “big ideas” … generally fared poorly, whether or not their favored big ideas were correct .. Another common trait of poor predictors is lack of anything resembling serious evaluation of past predictive errors … By contrast, people who had (relatively) accurate predictions had a deep understanding of the problem and also tended to have a record of learning lessons from past predictive errors.

Perhaps unsurprising. But the detail of the analysis provides very interesting insight into what kinds of things are predictable.

Solving Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’ with commitment.

In a culture addicted to endless choice, vows offer a higher freedom.

Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To “be modern” means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just “to be,” … but forever “becoming,”

A vow is a declaration not of independence but of a bond. When we vow, we are giving up our future freedom … Our liberty is given us so that we in turn can freely dedicate ourselves to something greater.

Taleb on Christianity. Interesting ideas on the moral authority of religion as bound up in the mystery of the thing. There is an adage, ‘beauty is truth’. Perhaps things are less true when they are less beautiful and they are less beautiful when we can understand them better.

Effectively, Catholicism lost its moral authority the minute it mixed epistemic and pisteic belief –breaking the link between holy and the profane … For once religion exits the sacred, it becomes subjected to epistemic beliefs.

Thaler speaks about his nudges. He compares his version of libertarian paternalism to giving directions when asked, but of course no one is asking and who is to say his directions are the right ones. He is right that everything is a choice architecture though, so perhaps it doesn’t matter so much whether we like it. Also fun critique of old-school econ theory—rational actors posed as unscrupulous ‘Econs’.

The long history of association between God and unusual smells.

some scholars believe that the English language suffered from the “cultural repression and denigration of smell” during the Enlightenment, as improvements in hygiene and objections to “superstition” transformed the lived environment into one less sensorially confrontational.

Beliefs may withstand the pressure of disconfirming events not because of the effectiveness of dissonance-reducing strategies, but because disconfirming evidence may simply go unacknowledged

A rebuttal to the classic ‘cognitive dissonance’ account of why believers continue to believe after the failure of a prophecy. In this case, the culture makes the failure less salient. One wonders whether this kind of surrender to a culture that protects you from dissonance is not simply another mechanism for reducing cognitive dissonance.

cults involve the social recognition of a leader’s charisma [which though it] can be sincere, it can also be hypocritical or deceptive … cult artifacts make recognition of the leader’s charisma normative, and thus transform it into authority … Insofar as people follow the social norm to worship or venerate the leader then the leader will have some charismatic authority, regardless of whether this recognition is sincere or not.

Successful prophets are successful when the people transform flattery into ritual. This is the basis of the cult leader’s charismatic authority, not the actual charisma of the leader.

Radicalization isn’t really the product of the ‘radicaliser’, but the culture the radicalised are opposed to.

The book of the Revelation of John, a messiah figure in his own right prior to his allegiance to Jesus, maps a pattern of predicted apocalypses that both preceded and succeeded him.