Vox Popoli

On Macintossers

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:33:00 +0000

And here you thought I hated Macs. But then, the British always do this sort of thing best:

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, "I hate Macs", and then I think, "Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?" Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

Cue 10 years of nasal bleating from Mac-likers who profess to like Macs not because they are fashionable, but because "they are just better". Mac owners often sneer that kind of defence back at you when you mock their silly, posturing contraptions, because in doing so, you have inadvertently put your finger on the dark fear haunting their feeble, quivering soul - that in some sense, they are a superficial semi-person assembled from packaging; an infinitely sad, second-rate replicant who doesn't really know what they are doing here, but feels vaguely significant and creative each time they gaze at their sleek designer machine. And the more deftly constructed and wittily argued their defence, the more terrified and wounded they secretly are.

And here I was only addressing the techno-fascist design philosophy. Far be it from me to delve into the psyches of Macintossers.... Anyhow, I'm a gamer. So, of course I have no use for Apple products. What gamer does? If Steve Jobs ever works his magic and produces the Ultimate Portable Game Machine, then I'll buy an Apple product for my own use, but probably not until then. (Full disclosure: there is a MacBook in the house. And an iPod. I don't use either and my experiences with the former have not altered my opinion of Apple in the slightest.)

But if losing a button feels like losing an arm, imagine how good it would feel to gain 16 more arms! Okay, on the other hand, maybe that is kind of creepy.

The philosophy of design

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:17:00 +0000

One of the interesting things about the reaction to the press release posted on various tech sites yesterday was the way in which it revealed the massive gap between those who are focused on technological style and those who are focused on technological substance. Now, I am in awe of Steve Jobs's marketing abilities and very much admire his ability to sell slick, dumbed-down products to the lowest common denominator while simultaneously convincing the buyers that they are somehow savvy and superior. I despise Windows far more than most, but I would rather use DOS than any Macintosh operating system ever released. I haven't been willing to use any of Mr. Jobs's very pretty, very popular products since I sold my original Macintosh, bought a 386/25, stuck what was then a very high-end 1024x768, 256-color board in it and never looked back. As a libertarian, I despise technological fascism as much, possibly more, than the political variant. After all, as has been pointed out many times before, the Apple "1984" ad is probably one of the most ironic in history.

What few people know is that about twenty years ago, in between my sophmore and junior year of college, I designed a piece of hardware that was even more outrageous. It was a PC sound board that put out two 16-bit, 44 KHz stereo channels and supported 16 simultaneous sounds... back when AdLib still ruled the PC sound waves about six months after the original mono 8-bit Soundblaster was released. We actually got it working, but I couldn't convince the company for which I was interning that there was a market for such outrageously high-end sound. I should have dropped out of college and started selling my sound card, but back then I was still prone to doing things the way everyone was supposed to, like finishing college instead of dropping out to sell sound cards for games.

Anyhow, since introducing the Macintosh, the Apple method has always relied upon limiting your options and controlling your behavior while loudly declaring that they are doing precisely the opposite. The reason Apples have been inferior game machines since 1983 despite the one-time popularity of the Apple II as a gaming computer - I still have my //e - is that the game industry is full of people who like to be at the forefront of technological development and aren't willing to put up with someone telling them that you will be stuck with X video card and Y amount of memory whether you like it or not.

People often get so caught up in the hype of Apple that they fail to see the inferior utility behind the sleek, sophisticated, and superficial design. For example, I think the iPhone would make for a lovely ebook reader, except that it turns out to be far more of a pain to sweep a finger to turn every electronic page than it is to simply click a button on a Treo. And, of course, the inability to insert an SD card is the reason I turned down a free iPhone when my service provider tried to give me one last year. The truth is that Apple products have usually been tailored for technological retards. That's not a bad sales strategy since there will always be more techno-retards than performance junkies and strictly limiting your users' options is a great way to reduce your technical support problems. But I wholeheartedly disagree with the concept of intentionally limiting user flexibility; perhaps many people don't mind not being able to simply transfer data from their computer to their phone without going through the submissive electronic ritual required by Apple, but it was a deal-breaker for me.

As for the mice, well, I quite look forward to seeing someone set up two neophytes with two examples of opposing design philosophies, one multi-touch and one multi-button. It doesn't matter if it's Calc, Photoshop, or Call of Duty, but I would bet that whoever is using multi-button will absolutely smoke the person using multi-touch. Ultimately, I wouldn't be surprised if some combination of the two approaches won out; a flexible multi-touch approach that lets you dynamically determine the "size" of your buttons, although there's still the tactile problem to address. Now, speed isn't everything for everyone, and certainly there will be those who prefer the look of multi-touch to the power and flexibility of multi-button.

But for those who think speed is everything - and you know who you are - the idea of using a buttonless touch mouse looks as ridiculous as an 18-button mouse apparently looks to those who don't believe they need more than one or two buttons.

Double-digits

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:38:00 +0000

Unemployment sails over the predicted high for 2010. The ever-reliable mainstream economists were forecasting an increase to 9.9 percent... and I'd encourage you to stop and think about why they might have assumed that. Remember, Keynesian economics is all based on psychology.

Unemployment Rate Rises to 10.2 Percent
The nation's unemployment rate rose above 10% for the first time since 1983 in October, a much worse jump than expected as employers continued to trim jobs from payrolls.... According to a survey of top forecasters by the National Association of Business Economics last month, the consensus estimate among economists was that unemployment would hit a high of 10% in the final three months of this year and the first quarter of 2010.

Expect a lot of happy talk about how unemployment is a "lagging indicator". Anyhow, the employment-population ratio is down to 58.5 percent and U-6 is now 17.5 percent. I will be very surprised if U-3 does not exceed 12 percent in 2010.

Karl Denninger reminds us that the consensus forecast for 2009 was 8.4% and breaks it down at the Market Ticker with the help of this graph. He's looking primiarly at loan losses while I'm looking at declining bank credit, but the perspective is the same.

In case you're interested

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:58:00 +0000

Some of you may recall that I've been working on something that is not a book for some time. And here is the result of that effort, which was announced this week. As with the books, it's been somewhat of an Ilk-related project, as the firmware and software were written by none other than the infamous Finn, Markku, who as we know had no choice in the matter. DC and Baktrice, meanwhile, put together the web site and the forthcoming online store.

I'll be interested in your comments. All I can say is that it really works, and very well at that.

Is the Rumsfeldian Rubik solved?

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:06:00 +0000

Perhaps the Fort Hood murders are unrelated to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism and it's just another disgruntled postal worker or three run amok, but it would appear that after only eight years, the terrorists have finally figured out the flaw in the clever Rumsfeldian strategy of fighting them there so we don't have to fight them there.

A mass shooting at Ft. Hood military post in Texas has left at least 7 dead and 20 wounded [MSNBC is reporting 12 and 31 now -VD] and one suspected gunman is on the loose, officials told Fox News. A massive manhunt was under way for the suspect at large, Fox News confirmed. One person was in custody. The New York Post said that there were two shooters at the Army post massacre; other reports said there were three.

I wouldn't bet on the postal workers, though.

UPDATE - the attempted PC spin never fails to amuse: "The official said the shootings could have been a criminal matter rather than a terrorism-related attack and that there was no intelligence to suggest a plot against Fort Hood."

Or, it could have been an attack by aliens who have secretly infiltrated the U.S. military disguised as humans as part of their master plan to steal Earth's water. Or perhaps highly evolved land sharks. But surely not Islamic terrorism, since we're, you know, fighting them over there.

UPDATE II - I'm sure we are all shocked: "The suspected gunman was identified as Major Malik Nadal Hasan." More of the joys of multiculturalism.

Errata

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:47:00 +0000

In any book full of statistical minutia, it's highly probable that the author will make the occasional dumb mistake. Sometimes it's a typo, sometimes it's a failure of research, sometimes it's a misstatement, and sometimes it's just an inexplicable error. This doesn't make you feel any better when you catch your own dumb mistakes, or worse, have to rely upon other people catching them for you. But this historical howler, I have to confess, makes me feel rather better about my own 1931-related error. It also may help explain my low opinion of certain mainstream economists for those who think I show insufficient lack of respect for fame and professional credentials. And while I'm inclined to give authors the benefit of the doubt when it comes to statistical citations, I'm not sure this one can be considered an excusable error, especially since it was made by an economist who has often written about the Great Depression as if he knows a great deal about it.

"Back to bank runs: in 1931, about half the banks in the United States failed. These banks were not all alike. Some were very badly run; some took excessive risks, even given what they knew before 1929; others were reasonably well, even conservatively managed. But when panic spread across the land, and depositors everywhere wanted their money immediately, none of this mattered: only banks that had been extremely conservative, that had kept what in normal times would be an excessively large share of their deposits in cash, survived."
- Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics, p. 100 (1999)

I found myself wondering if he'd figured out his tremendous mistake or if anyone had bothered to point it out to him at some point in the ten years between editions. Fortunately, I also happen to have his revised edition. The answer: apparently not.

"Back to bank runs: in 1931, about half the banks in the United States failed. These banks were not all alike. Some were very badly run; some took excessive risks, even given what they knew before 1929; others were reasonably well, even conservatively managed. But when panic spread across the land, and depositors everywhere wanted their money immediately, none of this mattered: only banks that had been extremely conservative, that had kept what in normal times would be an excessively large share of their deposits in cash, survived."
- Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, pp 96-97. (2009)

If you should happen to consult RGD, you'll see that 2,293 of the 20,367 banks in the United States failed. That's 11 percent, which is not even close to "about half". You can also check Banking and Monetary Statistics 1914-1941 or Friedman and Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States 1857-1960 if you don't wish to take my word for it. The problem is that repeating this erroneous historical "fact" twice in ten years isn't merely an error, it tends to suggest that Krugman really doesn't know all that much about the Great Depression, and even worse, hasn't read Milton Friedman.

Going academic

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:30:00 +0000

While my contempt for the present university system, such as it is, runs both deep and wide, I was nevertheless pleasantly surprised to be informed by a professor at a large university of his intention to make use of RGD in one of his upper-level economics courses. So, at least one group of economics majors won't graduate without ever having heard of the Austrian School or learning about the intrinsic unreliability of macroeconomic statistics.

UPDATE - In other book-related news, a Muslim reader has informed me of his intention to translate TIA into Arabic; apparently someone has translated the first four chapters of Dawkins's The God Delusion and he decided to see that the other side was represented. He said he'll send me a PDF when he finishes, and I'll post it here for download. I think it's great, but I have to confess that it never occurred to me that the first language any of my books would be translated into would be Arabic. Go figure.

Letter to Common Sense Atheism V

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:15:00 +0000

Dear Luke,

I fear you have misunderstood the pleasure I take in demonstrating the waywardness of paths that do not lead to the truth for my purpose in seeking the correct one. A path believed to be correct is either so or it is not so. Observing the falsity of your claims to superlative theological knowledge was more than a work of my peculiar art, it was necessary for us to even begin getting at the truth of the matter because what we do not know usually impairs our ability to reason less than our belief in the truth of that which is false. Given that you are contemplating the pursuit of a philosophy PhD, I can safely assume you have read Plato's Apology. If you have, then you will surely recall the way in which Socrates paraphrased the Oracle's reference to him. “He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.” I see no need to dispute your claim to have spent hundreds of hours reading the Bible and various theological texts, because it is irrelevant.

Apes do read theology, Luke, they just don't understand it. Christianity no more concerns a Panglossian world actively managed by a magical omnibenevolent puppet-master where all things work out for the good of everyone than Aristotle was Belgian or the central message of Buddhism is every man for himself.

Before I get to the substance of this discussion, I find myself interested in learning how your belief in desirism is off-topic, given that: a) you up brought the subject and went into a fair amount of detail in describing it, b) this discussion does not only concern my beliefs, but yours as well, and, c) desirism is directly relevant to your definition of evil. You must know that the references to your FAQ don't even begin to answer the very serious philosophical and material problems with desirism that were articulated in my last letter. In addition to the fact that you “answered” by referring to two points that remain unwritten, it is not accurate to say that the references to the answers to {3.20}, {3.21}, {3.22} addressed the problems raised, much less successfully addressed them. Lest I find myself charged with more obscurantism or hand-waving, I will now explain why those three answers are insufficient. I trust the nonexistence of answers {3.23} and {5.31} will serve to demonstrate the inadequacy of your present response to my points about the totalitarian aspects of desirism as well as the way in which desirism resembles a collectivist variant of Maoist ethics.

In {3.20} you answer the desirist calculation problem by asserting that “we can estimate” desires, that “neuroscience will eventually tell us” what desires look like and how to measure them, and that “we may be able to understand” the relationship between desires. This is not an answer, this is just hope and hand-waving. {3.21} is nothing more than another failure to apply the correct definition of the word “objective” to desirism in order to claim that an intrinsically subjective concept is actually objective. This is not only absurd, but it has absolutely nothing to do with my criticism of desirism. Furthermore, I explained the specious nature of this definitional dancing in my previous letter: “While it is true that there are many different definitions of objective and subjective, the philosophers' concept of mind-independence is no more relevant to the subject at hand than the grammatical concept pertaining to the use of a form as the object of a transitive verb.” {3.22} is merely a repetition of the very Knob Metaphor I had shown to be not only flawed, but downright backwards since it led you to an incorrect conclusion. As I wrote, under the desirist moral code, the Nazi extermination program is confirmed to be good and and opposition to it, or even mitigation of it, is a definite evil.

You didn't even make the slightest attempt to address that massive flaw in your reasoning, either in your FAQ or in your letter. Now, I see no need to continue beating a deceased equine, so if at this point you wish to leave off discussing desirism, that's certainly fine with me. My recommendation would be that you abandon it altogether as an insignificant and untenable variant of utilitarianism, but that is your concern, not mine. Still, I don't regret the diversion as I find it fascinating how decent and civilized Western atheists have nevertheless managed to conceive what appears to be a more consequentially disastrous moral ethic than the one that produced the horrors of the Great Leap Forward.

Now Luke, there is a pattern of evasion that is becoming increasingly apparent in your letters, and I fail to see how it is either compatible with your personal search for the truth or can be of any utility to you in this discussion. I am perfectly willing to continue refining our terms in as pedantic a manner as you require until you eventually run out of room to dance around the most relevant dictionary definition and have no choice but to directly confront the matter at hand. I did not declare “that the truth value of a proposition does not depend on the meaning of its terms”, I merely stated that given the context of the question, which your belief in any form of evil. I already knew you didn't believe in my definition of evil because you made it very clear that you did not in your second letter, so it was simply absurd to assert that you needed to be informed a second time of what I meant by “evil” before you could answer the question of whether you believe in it or not. Of course, I could have avoided this by pinning you down more specifically regarding your belief or unbelief in any form of evil and now that I know you require a greater degree of precision on my part in order to respond in a relevant manner, I will be quite happy to provide it. Meta-ethical philosopher Stephen Finlay's belief in evil is of zero relevance here, it is only your belief that is relevant to this discussion. Please note your declaration that “the definition of evil that we are using” cannot be contained by “any form of evil” is illogical; surely you did not mean to assert that the set does not contain the subset!

You finally admitted that you believe in a subjective form of evil in your fourth letter, although your constant wrestling with the objective/subjective issue somewhat muddied the admission. This mildly complicates the discussion, but not severely since it does not affect your ability to discern which of the competing objective standards are most in line with your observations of the material world even though you happen to subscribe to none of them. Speaking of definitions, while I agree that pain, anguish and privation of joy can all be reasonably described as suffering and that suffering is a prominent feature of this fallen world, I cannot accept your suggestion of it as a substitute for evil. This is because for the Christian and the non-Christian alike, suffering can be quite reasonably deemed a distinctly positive good. For example, a Christian is told to rejoice when he suffers for the faith, because he will be rewarded in Heaven for his travails and the testimony his suffering provides will cause others to believe in the gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ. While we cannot confirm the former consequence, there can be no doubting the truth of the latter as it is known to have occurred in persecutions of Christians ranging from ancient Rome to modern North Korea.

And suffering can be a positive good for the non-Christian as well. The pagan mother will embrace the pain of childbirth as gladly as the strong Christian embraces martyrdom; no pain can considered evil when it is an inescapable necessity for such a powerfully desired result. Even the language of the weight room testifies to the non-intrinsically evil nature of suffering: “no pain, no gain”. The suffering is voluntarily chosen and becomes the price of the good. While suffering can certainly be the result of evil, I don't think it can serve as a reasonable substitution for it. We deem it evil for a man to kill 10 people because it amused him, but we do not consider a lethal storm that killed just as many to be evil even if an equivalent amount of suffering is created by the two incidents. Furthermore, suffering lacks the intentional aspect that is usually required to deem an act or an intention evil. So, taking that aspect into account, I suggest that we define ”taking pleasure in the involuntary and unjust suffering of another” to be evil.

I entirely agree with your statement that our arguments will not meet each other if we do not agree upon a definition of evil. This is precisely why I am trying to get you to commit to one. And I also agree that I could quite easily construct a completely circular argument on the basis of my Christian definition of evil; this is precisely why I am trying to get you to commit to an objective and observable one. So, with that in mind, would you be willing to agree to a definition of evil as “”taking pleasure in the involuntary and unjust suffering of another” as a useful metric by which we can compare the competing religious and philosophical accounts of evil? While this is merely one of the broad panoply of theoretical evils from which we could plausibly select, it would at least serve as a reasonable starting point for the proposed comparison of various religious and philosophical accounts of evil.

This was written in response to the 5th Letter to Vox Day

It's over, go home

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:15:00 +0000

If your troops are being murdered by your allies, that's a good sign that you should give up the hearts and minds strategy:

Five soldiers have been shot dead by a "rogue" Afghan policeman in an attack at a police checkpoint. Three Grenadier Guards and two Royal Military Police were attacked as they rested inside a compound. The soldiers, who had removed their body armour and helmets, were shot by an Afghan national policeman who then fled. It is not known whether he was a member of the Taliban or being coerced by the insurgents.

The Afghan and Iraqi occupations are of zero national interest to the United States. They are of even less interest to Great Britain. And one wonders how long it will be before similar attacks happen to British troops and policemen in the UK itself. If you haven't managed to win over a populace after eight years of occupation, give up and go home. It's not going to happen.

Perhaps not the best idea

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:37:00 +0000

It appears that a few of the less intelligent atheist ankle-biters have decided that it's a good idea to attack my writing on economics because they find my opinions on atheism and evolution to be so distasteful. Amusingly, they have decided that my criticism of Paul Krugman proves that I don't know anything. Because, you know, he has a Nobel Prize and all. As it happens, last night I was re-reading Krugman's book The Accidental Theorist, published in 1999 with absolutely no perception of the tech bubble that was about to burst. Instead, he was still worried about currency crises. I rather like the book because Krugman isn't a complete idiot, he's just willfully ignorant and inclined to cling to his defunct Keynesian models. I intend to go through the chapters and highlight various points of interest good and bad, of which this snide slam on the supply-siders, written in the summer of 1997, is a good example of the latter.

Suppose that you had managed your personal finances based on what you heard four years ago from Newt Gingrich, read in Forbes, or for that matter saw on this very page [The Wall Street Journal]. You would have sold all your stocks and probably put your money into gold. If the supply-siders were fund managers, not only would you have fired them, you would have sued them for the lack of due diligence.

This inspired me to take a look at the prices of stocks vs gold since August 1997. Needless to say, there is a very good reason that Paul Krugman admits that he is not a successful investment forecaster.

Gold: +336% From $324.10 to $1,087.45
S&P 500: +9.5% From 954.29 to 1,045.41

And this is not even taking into account the fact that the S&P 500 of today is not the S&P 500 of 12 years ago, as mergers, bankruptcies, and shrinking market caps have caused numerous stocks to vanish. 43 changes were made in 2007 alone! Suppose that you had managed your personal finances based on what you heard 12 years ago from Paul Krugman... unfortunately, a lot of Americans basically did and went heavily into stocks and real estate instead of gold and commodities. You would have done rather better to listen to a non-laureate's advice. And even for the five years from 1997 to 2002, you were better off with flat gold than with your stocks down 15 percent.

I somehow doubt this has caused Paul Krugman to revisit supply-side theory. Not that I subscribe to it either, but if the performance of the stock markets vs gold is your metric of comparison, well, it would appear a serious rethink is in order.

But it must be said that Krugman reaches some very worthwhile conclusions on occasion. Such as when, in the same book, he wrote what are arguably the most relevant words he has ever written: "I am always grateful when influential pundits make such statements, especially in prominent places, for in doing so they protect us from the ever-present temptation to take people seriously simply because they are influential, to imagine that widely-held views must actually make at least some sense."

Mailvox: the materialist writes back

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:15:00 +0000

JS continues the discussion of his previous email:

Thank you for addressing my e-mail on your site. I appreciated your responses and the responses of those who commented on the post. I have to say that much of the naturalist community seems to hold on to what are obviously suppositions on their part. They believe that since their unproven explanation is the best natural one, it is the correct one. Up until very recently, I too tended to believe this, taking a similar approach. As I waxed about a bit in my last e-mail to you, what has chafed me recently about those in the secular web community is the absolute refusal to even allow a line of thinking that goes against their worldview. This growing intolerance is bothering me, as the secularist community seems to be increasingly more defensive and myopic. So, since this question will gain me only ridicule and exile in this community, I will ask you -- what are some good books on the argument against TENS that an inquiring mind such as mine should endeavor to read?

I thought that TIA was one of the best refutations of neo-Atheist arguments I've ever read (they hate you on the secular boards btw, if I didn't know any better, I would say you are made of straw). Here is to hoping that RGD finds continued success.

I've always felt that one is defined by one's enemies as well as by one's friends, so I am pleased to be hated by such a collection of contemptible intellects. Unfortunately, I really can't recommend any good books that make a case against TENS because I have never read one on the subject. This is in part because I have very seldom heard any author making what I consider to be the substantive arguments against TENS, and in part because my interest in the subject is tertiary at best, I've only read pro-evolution books by the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, and Gould. My skepticism of TENS is largely endogenous, with a few bits and pieces that I've picked up on the Internet such as the revised Haldane's Dilemma and the application of Chomsky to the tautology of natural selection.

But, I'd like to open this discussion up to suggestions from others, for books that people feel most effectively defend TENS as well as those that most effectively dissect it. I tend to prefer to read those books that most effectively defend their subjects, because then I can see how easy or difficult it is to pick apart that optimal defense. I'm presently in the process of reading Dawkins's latest, and if it is truly the optimal defense of Neo-Darwinism that its more enthusiastic reviewers apparently believe it to be, I am increasingly inclined to believe it will not be very difficult to demonstrate that TENS is in serious trouble.

I have even discussed writing a book on the subject myself with my publisher, but I'm not convinced that it is necessary. My suspicion is that TENS will eventually implode with or without my assistance in the matter. While there are certainly scientific and atheistic interests who will cling to the Neo-Darwinism in the face of any contrary future evidence, they are neither as powerful nor as powerfully incentivized to hold to it as is the case with political and financial authorities and Neo-Keynesianism.

It's not what you have, but how you use it

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:15:00 +0000

While I disagree with the idea that IQ isn't a reasonable measure of intelligence, I very much agree with the distinction between intelligence capacity and intelligence utilization. From New Scientist:

The problem with IQ tests is that while they are effective at assessing our deliberative skills, which involve reason and the use of working memory, they are unable to assess our inclination to use them when the situation demands. This is a crucial distinction: as Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University puts it, intelligence is about brain power whereas rational thinking is about control. "Some people who are intellectually able do not bother to engage very much in analytical thinking and are inclined to rely on their intuitions," explains Evans. "Other people will check out their gut feeling and reason it through and make sure they have a justification for what they're doing."

The analogy I prefer is firepower. IQ is intellectual firepower. Some have .22 caliber popguns, some have 152mm howitzers. But a .22 to the forehead is far more lethal than a 152mm artillery shell that falls miles wide of the target. This is why I occasionally refer to "functional idiots". These are people with the intellectual capacity to function in an intelligent manner who for various reasons don't actually use that capacity and so end up with conclusions that are identical to those reached by people without any such capacity.

When people are doing the same stupid thing over and over again, when they are trusting the word of some scientist or priest rather than critically examining the reliability of that word, when they are operating on the basis of information instilled in childhood about which they have never actually thought or on pure emotion, it does not matter how intelligent they are, because they are obviously not making use of that intelligence.

One of the greatest challenges that intelligent people face is learning to distinguish between when they are using their intelligence and when they are not actually making use of it. The action of an intelligent person behaving thoughtlessly is no more likely to be intelligent than the action of an unintelligent person, and in fact, if the action of the intelligent person is not guided by the wisdom of the stored societal knowledge known as tradition, it is actually very likely to be observably less intelligent and lead to less positive results.

What Chesterton described as "the democracy of the dead" may not always be the optimal path, but it is unlikely that it is the most suboptimal one. As has been demonstrated many times throughout the past, creating a significant disaster worthy of historical note usually requires a truly intelligent person. This is why wisdom is always to be preferred to mere intellectual brilliance.

A failure of happy talk

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:48:00 +0000

A third stimulus plan appears to be in the works:

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke was “imprecise” when he said President Barack Obama’s advisers are considering a second stimulus measure, his spokesman said today. Locke, in an interview with Bloomberg Television, said: “If there is to be another stimulus -- and that’s being hotly discussed and very seriously considered within the administration as well as members of Congress -- it needs to be very targeted, very specific and we need to be very mindful of the deficit as well.”

It's amazing how quickly they forget the $145 billion Bush stimulus plan of 2008. And, of course, the mere fact that more stimulus is being discussed despite the loud trumpeting of the "recovery" indicates that it is employment that is the true measure of economic growth rather than GDP.

Did Ron Paul read RGD or something?

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:59:00 +0000

It does sound rather like it:

Any number of pundits claim that we have now passed the worst of the recession. Green shoots of recovery are supposedly popping up all around the country, and the economy is expected to resume growing soon at an annual rate of 3% to 4%. Many of these are the same people who insisted that the economy would continue growing last year, even while it was clear that we were already in the beginning stages of a recession.

A false recovery is under way. I am reminded of the outlook in 1930, when the experts were certain that the worst of the Depression was over and that recovery was just around the corner. The economy and stock market seemed to be recovering, and there was optimism that the recession, like many of those before it, would be over in a year or less. Instead, the interventionist policies of Hoover and Roosevelt caused the Depression to worsen, and the Dow Jones industrial average did not recover to 1929 levels until 1954.... Can anyone realistically argue that a few small upticks in a handful of economic indicators are a sign that the recession is over?

What is more likely happening is a repeat of the Great Depression. We might have up to a year or so of an economy growing just slightly above stagnation, followed by a drop in growth worse than anything we have seen in the past two years.

Or perhaps it was a book entitled The Repeat of the Great Depression. Although it really is remarkable how in sync his comments are with my conclusions in the book.

Yeah, not so much

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:53:00 +0000

The stunning effectiveness of the New Atheist campaign:

The percentage of self-identified atheists according to the September/October Psychology Today

1944: 4 percent
1964: 3 percent
1994: 3 percent
2007: 4 percent

One can't but help notice that as per their stunning dedication to the truth in all its forms, atheists often try to count agnosticism or "no religion" as atheism whenever trying to inflate their numbers, while leaving the "no religion" sorts out of the accounting whenever average intelligence levels or criminal predilections are being compared.

The article also noted that there are presently five atheist or agnostic heads of state: China, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Chile, and Sweden. They appear to have somehow left out Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. Needless to say, this doesn't bode well for the inhabitants of those countries... note that the two agnostics are the Prime Minister of Sweden and the President of Chile. Also, Nazarbayev of Khazakhstan is an ex-atheist as he has converted to Islam.

WND column

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:02:00 +0000

Extend, pretend, and defend

Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who has called for an end to the Federal Reserve, said legislation he introduced to audit monetary policy has been "gutted" while moving toward a possible vote in the Democratic-controlled House.
– Bloomberg News, Oct. 30, 2009

There is always a fraudulent aspect to democratic government. There are things the electorate does not want to hear, so any candidate who hopes to win their support quickly learns to avoid subjecting the voters to uncomfortable truths. Once safely in office, it seldom serves the interests of the elected official to tell the people whose interest he nominally represents anything that will highlight the divergence between what is good for the legislator and what is good for those who will be subjected to the legislation he helps create.

Morning Magazine interview

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:15:00 +0000

Here is a link to the MP3 of my interview yesterday with Michael McSorley on his Morning Magazine radio show.

Banking Oct 2009 update

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:21:00 +0000

Bank failures: 115
Total Deposits: $7,566 billion
Failed Deposits: $107.2 billion
Failed Assets: $129.5 billion
Estimated Losses: $29.4 billion
Actual Losses est: $52.4 billion

Failed Deposits/Total Deposits: 1.42 percent
Estimated Losses/Failed Deposits: 27.4 percent
Actual Losses/Failed Deposits: 48.8 percent
Total loans & leases: -6.8 percent (6720.3, 10/14/09)

DIF balance Q3 reported: negative
DIF balance FDIC est: -7.7 billion
DIF balance actual est: -20.3 billion

FD/TD 1929: 0.47 percent
FD/TD 1930: 1.65 percent
FD/TD 1931: 3.60 percent
FD/TD 1932: 1.99 percent
FD/TD 1933: 8.55 percent
AL/FD 1929-1933: 25.66 percent

FD/TD 2008: 3.21 percent
AL/FD 2008: 14.99 percent

September's figures

Why Peanuts is the greatest comic of all time

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:24:00 +0000

I really liked The Far Side. Bloom County was another favorite along with Calvin and Hobbes. But their merits notwithstanding, I think there is a reason that Peanuts wasn't merely long-lived, but was superior to even the best comics of subsequent generations.

Lucy.

I always despised Lucy as a child. She was so pointlessly mean, so needlessly cruel. Her selfishness and narcissism were incredible; what other cartoon character would kick her own little brother out of the house when given the opportunity? She bothered me to the point that I used to refuse to make Lucy cookies at Christmas with our old Peanuts cookie-cutters. I could not understand what could possibly have possessed the cartoonist to spoil what was otherwise a lightly amusing comic with such an unpleasant character.

Now that I'm older, however, I understand why intellectual sophisticates hailed Charles Schulz as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Unlike most creative sorts, he fully recognized the fundamental pettiness and cruelty of human nature and explored it to the full, often in the persona of Lucy. The seeds of his brilliant and unusual perspective are visible in the very first Peanuts strip, published 59 years ago on October 2nd.

My favorite bits usually concerned Snoopy's fantasy life. The vulture, the dinosaur, the Sopwith Camel, and, of course, the literary career. But what ultimately distinguished Peanuts from the rest was Schulz's fearless recognition of Man's fallen nature. Lucy is not driven by biological or economic imperatives, she simply is. And we all know a Lucy, we all have aspects of Lucy in us to a larger or hopefully smaller degree. Charlie Brown's persistence in the face of his own haplessness is obviously a major aspect of the comic, but even Charlie Brown is most notable for the foil of human decency he provides to Lucy's all-too-human petty evil.

I do not believe that Eco was entirely correct when he wrote: "''These children affect us because in a certain sense they are monsters; they are the monstrous infantile reductions of all the neuroses of a modern citizen of the industrial civilization.'' For all his brilliance, Eco is an Italian urbanite, and does not understand American suburbia or the complete irrelevance of European modernity and urban civilization to it. Charlie Brown's neuroses are amusing, to be surebut they are far less significant than the interplay between him and the quotidian cruelty of the other children, the innate and trivial cruelty that one can easily observe in the interactions of children and adults today.

Perhaps the most poignant in the series of strips is the baseball game when Charlie Brown's team finally has the opportunity to win a game. All he has to do is let the team's best batter do the work, run home from third, and tie the game. It is the obvious thing to do. It is the smart thing to do, and even the girls who seldom pay any attention to the game while they are playing in the outfield know it. Surely, they say to each other, surely he could not be so stupid as to try to steal a base. But Charlie Brown suddenly finds himself seduced by his desire to be the hero... and as a result finds himself lying on the field, staring into the night sky, crying "why? over and over again.

And who among us has not found himself in a similar position? There is little overt religion in Peanuts, the classic Christmas special notwithstanding, but as Tolkein once said of The Lord of the Rings, "it is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work." Peanuts is catholic rather than Catholic, but whether you grasp the religious aspects of it or not is totally irrelevant; it is worth reading and re-reading because it is the greatest philosophical work produced in the 20th century. It is our Iliad and Schulz was our Homer. And if his poetry was less than lyric, well, that was fitting too.

It could have been worse

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:15:00 +0000

Anyway, it's not as if California voters can claim they didn't know about Ahnold's predilection for this sort of crassness:

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has made American political discourse a little cruder – which is saying something. As California journalists noted, he sneaked an obscene acrostic into a veto message. The first letters of the middle paragraphs lined up to spell “F*** you.” A spokesperson for the governor half-heartedly suggested that it was a coincidence. Yeah, right. The odds against those seven letters appearing in that specific order by chance are 8,031,810,176 to one.

At least it wasn't something like "All hail Obama, Devourer of Worlds!"

RGD $1.99

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:36:00 +0000

While I wasn't able to make the ebook available for free, you can get the PDF for only $1.99 at Scribd immediately. The Kindle version will also be $1.99 when Amazon finally gets around to updating their database and makes it available. Even if you're waiting for your hardcover to arrive, you might still like to check out the Scribd preview, since it features three four-page sections that cover the comparison of present and historical bank failures, the "global savings glut" and the failure of the monetarist predictive model, and five of my suggestions for what can and should be done on the macro scale. I always prefer to have both the book and the ebook myself, and thanks to the low ebook price and the Amazon discount you can get both the hardcover and the PDF for less than the cover price of the former alone.

Today looks like a busy day. I had three radio interviews yesterday and five today; it was gratifying to discover how keenly interested people are in the subject matter. Granted, the national show was focused on money matters, that being the name of the show, but regardless, it was remarkable to observe the divergence between the reactions of the Wall Street-based financial media and the talk radio hosts to yesterday's "surprising" GDP report. Speaking of today's radio shows, one of them is The Barry Farber Show. I'll be on from 8PM to 9 PM Eastern and his producer said that he'd very much welcome callers with questions about the book in the second half-hour. The number is 800-336-2225 if you've got an economics related one that I haven't addressed here already and the show has an Internet live stream available.

Letter to Vox Day V

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:12:00 +0000

Luke responds to my fourth letter:

Vox,

We agree that a rational demonstration that someone is wrong – about the facts of evolution or their own knowledge of theology, for example – can be taken as an insult. Your continuous implications that I am ignorant or stupid sounded like insults to me, but perhaps you only meant to rebut my factual claim to have some understanding of Christian theology.

Then again, maybe not. I thought the purpose of our dialogue was to get at the truth, but you seem proudly preoccupied with your self-described role as a “Cruelty Artist” bent on orchestrating my own “self-evisceration” (self-disemboweling) which is a “more perfect beauty” than “any collection of dabs of paint on canvas.”

In any case, I am not motivated to defend my theological knowledge. I have read many books on theology and taken many courses. I have spent hundreds of hours reading the Bible and popular commentaries. But if you still think I am ignorant, well… that’s your own judgment.

Read the rest at Common Sense Atheism.

RGD on Lew Rockwell

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:15:00 +0000

The Return of the Great Depression

It can quite reasonably be said that at no point in economic history has technical knowledge ever been less relevant to being a good economist than today. Mainstream economics is in complete disarray. In the UK, economists are reeling in shock as their predicted third-quarter recovery has failed to appear, while in the USA, Nobel-winning Keynesians are first calculating the need for a $600 billion stimulus, then turning around and declaring a $787 billion stimulus is insufficient. A report from the Kiel Institute entitled The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics has concluded that a "reconsideration" of the "basic premises" of standard macro and finance models is required due to their inability "to provide any insight into ongoing events." And even the venerable Economist has been wondering aloud where economics went wrong.

Garbage in, garbage out. The truth that is known to every computer programmer is finally beginning to penetrate the economic elite. Keynesian models have failed. Monetarist models have failed. Neo-Keynesian and Post-Keynesian models have failed. The only known concepts that have not completely failed – yet – are the financial instability hypothesis of Hyman Minsky, Richard Koo's concept of a balance-sheet recession, and the credit-focused cycle theory of the Austrian School.

Mr. Rockwell, the chairman of the Mises Institute and a great champion of both Austrian economics and human liberty, was kind enough to ask me to personally introduce RGD to his readership. This is an article I wrote specifically lewrockwell.com for the official launch of the book today, and I'd encourage you to check it out. I have to admit, I was a bit taken aback to hear the host quote the opening sentence of it during my interview on The Rob Johnson Show.

Falsifying RGD

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

I've been asked to consider the possibility that the thesis of my latest book, The Return of the Great Depression is incorrect. If I were the Mogambo Guru, this would of course be the correct occasion to respond with nothing more than the Mighty Mogambo Snort of Derision (MMSoD) followed by a verbose and entertaining rant involving pitchforks, firearms, indignities performed upon the corpses of deceased central bankers, and gold, but as I am merely an Internet Superintelligence with a tendency to take things literally even when they are clearly intended as metaphor, sarcasm, or irony, sometimes for the purposes of illustration but more often for my own amusement, I shall consider the question of what would indicate that I am incorrect and we are not in the early stages of a massive worldwide economic contraction.

As it happens, I have gone into some detail in examining the possibility that I am wrong in the book itself by cataloging the six plausible scenarios, five of which are presently part of the present economic discourse. While the five scenarios that range from Saint Bernanke and the Green Shoots to Great Depression 2.0 each have their public advocates who are listed by the scenario they are forecasting, I have yet to discover any economist who is genuinely convinced that we are headed for the sixth scenario: Fallout 4 Live.

Since a significant part of my conclusions are based on Austrian theory with a much-lesser nod to Minsky's financial instability hypothesis, the first indication that I could be wrong is related to bank credit. Austrian theory teaches that either the money supply and/or bank credit has to contract; as Mises puts it: "[T]he moment must eventually come when no further extension of the circulation of fiduciary media is possible." So, an sustained increase in either TOTLL or total credit market debt would be the first and strongest sign that either a) the depression is coming to an end or b) Whiskey Zulu India, the hyperinflation scenario, is coming to pass. TOTLL is presently down 8.2% from its peak one year ago, while TCMD was very slightly down in the second quarter; we are still waiting for the third quarter results.

The second sign will be rising property tax revenues, particularly at the state and local level. While it is easy for governments to play games with statistics, it is much more difficult for them to falsify their tax revenues. The document "State Finance in the Great Depression" is useful on this score. "After the Depression began, local government property tax collections did not again reach the 1927 level until 1944. For states, it took until 1952 to reach the 1927 level, although in the interval, states had reduced their reliance upon the tax." Since state and local governments now already derive their revenue from a much broader range of taxes, it is unclear if one can use aggregate tax revenues as a similar indicator, but the collapse in cumulative tax revenues from declines in sales and income taxes suggests that this may be the case.

"Among the worst cases is Indiana where revenue collections were 8 percent below forecast, or $254 million lower than expected, leading state budget officials to speculate revenue could fall $1 billion by the end of the fiscal year."

Most economists will be looking primarily at the GDP figures, and indeed, a positive report above three percent will probably be widely cited as evidence that the recovery has arrived, although anything south of the 3.3% growth expected by the mainstream consensus will likely sink the markets. But the current numbers are considerably juiced by the summer housing and automotive subsidies and the "positive" aspects of the improvement from the second quarter were entirely the result of a) government spending, and b) Americans buying fewer imports, neither of which is a legitimate sign of economic growth. But, I would regard two quarters of economic growth of four percent growth without any substantial government programs propping up consumer spending to be a legitimate sign of recovery. The fact that it is looking increasingly likely that the home buyer's credit act will now be extended to April 2010 does not inspire great confidence in the legitimacy of the GDP numbers for the third and fourth quarters. I will be analyzing the Q3 Advance report on the RGD blog later for those who happen to be interested. (UPDATE: the BEA is reporting 3.5% growth for Q3, of which almost half, 1.7%, is from "motor vehicle output". In other words, from additional government-subsidized debt.)

Finally, it is important to remember that GDP is an artificial construct intended to provide a means of modelling Keynes's general theory which is predicated first and foremost on employment. The very concept of a "jobless recovery" is a contradiction in economic terms. As with GDP, U3 and U6 are subject to government statistical shenanigans, but unemployment is a little harder to disguise, so regardless of how the BLS plays around with the consistency of the "labor force" in order to make the rate look lower, seeing the Employment/Population ratio move back above the 60% would also be a strong sign of genuine economic recovery. Note that we are presently at 1984 rates of employment-to-population.

A fifth indicator that I am incorrect and the hyperinflationary scenario is unfolding instead of the debt-deflationary one is a rapid increase in the price of gold. Please note that this is not an economic recovery scenario, it is only a different form of the massively contractionary one. I believe that gold, being a form of money, can benefit from deflation. So, $1,075 gold is not conclusive, especially since it's still lower than the $1,425 inflation-corrected 1981 peak. But only inflation could possibly account for the sort of rapid rise in price that would be projected to take it above, say, $5,000 per ounce, and if there is hyperinflation, the gold price can safely be expected to exceed that by a considerable margin.

Finally, physical shipments of goods are a necessary and relatively objective measure of economic activity. The Baltic Dry Index is a daily average of international shipping prices and it was at 11,771 at its peak in 2008. It is presently below 3,000 but rose as high as 4,291 in May, so any move above 5,000 would be an initial indication that an economic recovery is underway. Above 10,000 would appear to be positive proof that the economy was completely back on track, barring the hyperinflationary scenario, of course.

In summary: 1) Increasing bank credit and overall debt. 2) Rising state and local property tax revenues. Possibly increasing aggregate tax revenues as well. 3) Consecutive quarters featuring four-percent plus GDP gains not created by government spending, reduced imports and consumer spending subsidies. 4) Employment to population ratio over 60 percent. 5) Rapidly increasing price of gold over $1,500 per ounce. 6) The Baltic Dry Index exceeding 5,000. If anyone else has any suggestions, please feel free to list them.

The world as Python skit

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:44:00 +0000

How, I wonder, do you attempt to explain this sort of thing to the next-of-kin if you're the responsible policeman? I mean, somewhere under the badge, you too are a human being, you have feelings, and you probably wouldn't be given the assignment if you weren't at least somewhat sensitive to the emotions of others. But then comes that critical moment when you are asked how it happened, and you have to answer "Coyotes."

Wolves would be one thing. Bears, no problem at all. Even ants, I could understand, having kept a suspicious eye on the little bastards since reading about Leiningen's encounter with them as a child. Squirrels or lemmings, on the other hand, would be even worse. And then of course, when one first reads the headline, it's hard to escape the fleeting thought that there could be an element of divine justice at work there.

Granolas never seem to grasp that "communing with Nature" sometimes means that you'll be playing the part of the bread and wine.