Category: Uncategorized

Egyptian spring!

Fortunately, Facebook and other social media are far more powerful than mere militaries. Right?

Egypt’s highest court declared the parliament invalid Thursday, and the country’s interim military rulers promptly declared full legislative authority, triggering a new level of chaos and confusion in the country’s leadership. The Supreme Constitutional Court found that all articles making up the law that regulated parliamentary elections are invalid, said Showee Elsayed, a constitutional lawyer.

It’s not as if the USA is in a position to throw any stones here. The new Egyptian military government is no less illegitimate than Mr. Soetoro. Regardless of whether they decided it rightly or wrongly, at least Egypt’s Supreme Court is willing to consider the question of whether the elected officials are valid or not.

The Dread Ilk expand

Congratulations to JartStar, who has a new little girl. However, there were some complications in her birthing and she and her mother could use some prayers on their behalf.

Mailvox: the permissive will of a red-handed god

KH asks about the so-called “permissive will” that is part of the Calvinist concept of the divine:

I have followed your discussion of Calvinism with great interest. Some of these questions come up routinely in an on going group Bible study. Recently, one Calvinist used the term “permissive will” in reference to God allowing a natural disaster to kill people. (The term was new to me). He argued that God does not cause these tragedies but permits them or allows Satan to cause them. The problem I perceived with this argument is that one is still blaming God for the earthquake or tornado fatalities, whether it was His “permissive/passive” or active will. The term “permissive will” seemed like a euphemism to get around the belief of God controlling every storm and fault line without actually accusing Him of murder. I still feel like there was a missed opportunity for the use of logic to take out that argument. How would you have responded to the use of that term?

This is one of the concepts I lampoon in my occasional reference to the nine billion wills of God – actually, I think I previously referred to 17, but nine billion more appropriately reflects my view of the matter – and it refers to the distinctions that some Calvinists make between the “perfect”, the “permissive”, the “decreed”, the “directive”, the “perceptive”, and the “directed” wills of God. This isn’t quite as insane as it sounds, as there is a necessary and legitimate reason to distinguish between what God demands, what God decrees, what God anticipates, and what God wishes but does not expect, all of which can be reasonably described as what He wills.

However, KH is correct in smelling a rat. Those inclined to omniderigence will draw no such distinction; John Piper, for example, is straightforward about his belief in a literally murderous Jesus Christ who purposefully kills people with tornadoes. But this is a theologically incorrect use of “permissive will”, as that is what is used to explain Man’s ability to sin, not Man’s suffering natural disasters, which is generally considered to be a consequence of God’s “perfect will”.

This use of “permissive will” actually sounds rather more like my very non-Calvinist perspective, although I would never use such a term to describe what I observe to be Satan’s partial sovereignty over the world. It is always intriguing to compare the Calvinist claims of God’s sovereignty with the contradictory claims of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul concerning the being they describe as “the prince of this world” and “the god of this age”.

Inequality before the law

As with homogamy, one of the real purposes behind eliminating the statute of limitations for child abuse has nothing to do with the purported ones, as it is intended to specifically target and damage the Church.

While the first criminal trial of a Roman Catholic church official accused of covering up child sexual abuse has drawn national attention to Philadelphia, the church has been quietly engaged in equally consequential battles over abuse, not in courtrooms but in state legislatures around the country.

The fights concern proposals to loosen statutes of limitations, which impose deadlines on when victims can bring civil suits or prosecutors can press charges. These time limits, set state by state, have held down the number of criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits against all kinds of people accused of child abuse — not just clergy members, but also teachers, youth counselors and family members accused of incest.

Victims and their advocates in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York are pushing legislators to lengthen the limits or abolish them altogether, and to open temporary “windows” during which victims can file lawsuits no matter how long after the alleged abuse occurred….

In New York, the Catholic bishops said they would support a modest increase in the age of victims in criminal or civil cases, to 28. But their lobbying, along with that of ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders, has so far halted proposals that would allow a one-year window for civil suits for abuses from the past. The bishops say the provision unfairly targets the church because public schools, the site of much abuse, and municipalities have fought successfully to be exempted.

Now, I don’t have any problem with making it easier for genuine victims of child abuse to confront those who victimized them and receive reparations, but it is reprehensible to do so on the basis of the employer of the criminally culpable individual. This is a gross violation of the increasingly nonexistent concept of equality before the law; why should teachers and government employees be provided a free pass on molesting children?

It would appear this is because the state governments don’t want to be held financially responsible for the actions of their employees, and while they can often get away with excusing criminal behavior under the guise of it being committed in the exercise of the state employee’s duties, it’s not presently credible to claim that anyone’s occupational duties require the commission of sexual abuse. So, the Church is expected to pay for the misdeeds of its priests, but the state intends to exempt itself from paying for the misdeeds of its teachers and other employees.

The potential problem in this is that if the state governments are permitted to get away with this two-tiered law concerning past crimes, there is no reason they cannot extend it to cover present ones as well. After all, the logic is identical, as exempting teachers and state employees from responsibility for the sexual abuse of children would also reduce the financial liability of the state and local governments.

Euro 2012 Day 5

Czech Republic 2 Greece 1

No interest, didn’t watch it. Apparently the Czechs scored twice in the first six minutes, then hung on for the next 84 minutes.

Russia 1 Poland 1

The Russians were clearly the much better team, but the Poles were playing as hard as I’ve ever seen a team play. They took a pretty good punch in the mouth when the Russians scored on a free kick against the run of play and were back on their heels for the remainder of the half, but they somehow made it to halftime without conceding another goal. After the half, they came out fired up again, and after they got their equalizer on an excellent goal from their captain, they kept the Russians mostly under control. It may have been a tie, but it felt like a major victory for Poland and the Polish crowd celebrated it like one.

Separating superintelligence from intelligence

I’m informed this ecard is “very me”, which I suppose is probably true, considering the source.  But in my defense, I should like to point out that when people quite reliably fail to understand what one is saying in a very clear, precise, and articulate manner, assuming that one will have to explain oneself to the unwashed, overweight, and quasi-illiterate masses is the decent and civilized thing to do.  Contra common assumptions, assuming MPAI is much more fair to one’s audience and one’s interlocutors than the assumption that everyone is capable of understanding what one is saying.  While I may happen to be arrogant, that is merely a coincidence and the impression that I may occasionally appear to be talking down to people is less an indicator of that arrogance than material evidence that I am a decent and civilized individual dedicated to mutual comprehension in conversation.

However, it did remind me of this article in the New Yorker, which helps explains why so many intelligent and educated people regularly make such prodigious asses of themselves:

Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves. Although the bias blind spot itself isn’t a new concept, West’s latest paper demonstrates that it applies to every single bias under consideration, from anchoring to so-called “framing effects.” In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.

And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse. The scientists gave the students four measures of “cognitive sophistication.” As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes. Education also isn’t a savior; as Kahneman and Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question.

This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. I’ve long observed that most smart people don’t actually want to question their core assumptions anymore than stupid people do, and they’re far more inclined to attempt to BS people into letting them skate by on a bluff. I think this may be part of what separates the superintelligent from the intelligent and it’s something that we’ve seen at work here numerous times, most recently in the discourse with the Three Pound Brain gang. It’s what I tend to think of as “the second pass”. While I’m just as susceptible to the shortcut problem as anyone else, I have a natural tendency to mentally “check my work” before answering. This doesn’t mean I’m any less biased than anyone else, or that I don’t have the usual blind spots, only that I am inclined to take the time to go and search those blind spots and see what my biases have caused me to miss on the first pass. The object is to treat one’s own mind as harshly, ideally even more harshly, than one treats the minds of others.

For example, when I looked the two problems in the article, my brain leaped immediately to the conventional wrong answer, only it noted that the answer couldn’t possibly be correct. On the second pass, I worked it out instead of attempting to justify the initial assumption, and that answer subsequently turned out to be the correct one. The trick, I think, is attuning your mind to be suspicious and look more deeply when the answer seems obvious, but something doesn’t seem quite right about it. The fact that one’s intuitive thinking is prone to these errors doesn’t meant that one’s logical thinking will be. My philosophy is that since I will probably commit errors, I might as well be the one to catch them if I can.

This, of course, is why I am so adept at setting traps for others. The reason I know where to place them is that my intuitive mind has already fallen for them.

The value of predictive models

Thomas Friedman fails to understand why not only the Europe Union and the Arab states, but the United States as well, are in the process of breaking up:

Europeans failed to build Europe, and that is now a big problem because, as its common currency comes under pressure and the E.U. goes deeper into recession, the whole world feels the effects. The Syrians failed to build Syria, the Egyptians failed to build Egypt, the Libyans failed to build Libya, the Yemenis failed to build Yemen. Those are even bigger problems because, as their states have been stressed or fractured, no one knows how they’ll be put back together again.

To put it another way: In Europe, the supranational project did not work, and now, to a degree, Europe is falling back into individual states. In the Arab world, the national project did not work, so some of the Arab states are falling back onto sects, tribes, regions and clans.

In Europe, the supranational project did not work because the European states were never ready to cede control over their budgets to a central authority that would ensure a common fiscal policy to back up a common currency. In the Arab world, the national project did not work — in many, but not all cases — because the tribes, sects, clans and regional groups that make up these Arab states, whose borders were drawn up by colonial powers, were unwilling or unable to meld genuine national communities….

One question historians will puzzle over is why both great geopolitical systems fractured at once? The answer, I believe, is the intensifying merger of globalization and the information technology revolution, which made the world dramatically flatter in the last five years, as we went from connected to hyperconnected. In the Arab world, this hyper-connectivity simultaneously left youths better able to see how far behind they were — with all the anxiety that induced — and enabled them to communicate and collaborate to do something about it, cracking open their ossified states. In Europe, hyperconnectedness both exposed just how uncompetitive some of their economies were, but also how interdependent they had become. It was a deadly combination.

Friedman is wrong. Historians will not puzzle, as we know the answer already, which does not originate in communications technology, but economics. Robert Prechter not only provided the answer, but repeatedly predicted these political events, beginning with his landmark Pioneering Studies in Socionomics. Peace and political unity are strongly correlated with periods of economic growth. That’s why history has always tended to skate over those boring periods where nothing happened, no one went to war, and people gradually got wealthier. The six-decade post-WWII period has been one of the longest periods of economic growth in the West since the fall of the Roman empire, so it should not be surprising that there was relative peace and partially successful attempts to build supranational organizations during that time.

However, the prosperity brought about by the post-war rebuilding of a world shattered by global war ended in 1970s and was artificially extended by the large scale substitution of credit for economic growth and wealth production. With the end of the perceived prosperity, the centrifugal force bringing people together has also ended and now the political inertia is moving in the opposite direction. Given the negative economic prospects for the next decade or two, it will be much more surprising if the various political unions do not break apart as the people brought into the various countries, drawn by the economic prosperity, will tend to become the focus of the divisive forces that will break apart the states on their various fault lines.

VP vs 538

Nate Silver releases the first of his many dynamic predictions concerning the presidential race:

The first look at the 2012 FiveThirtyEight presidential forecast has Barack Obama as a very slight favorite to win re-election. But his advantage equates to only a two-point lead in the national popular vote, and the edge could easily swing to Mitt Romney on the basis of further bad economic news. Mr. Obama remains slightly ahead of Mr. Romney in most national polls, and he has had a somewhat clearer advantage in polling conducted at the state level. Mr. Obama would be about 80 percent likely to win an election held today, according to the model.

So, five months out, Silver is predicting that Obama will be reelected. I will stick with my prediction, made more than one year ago, that Obama will withdraw from the race for one reason or another.

Former aides to President Bill Clinton are calling for a dramatic shift in their party’s economic message before the November election, warning of an “impossible headwind in November,” if they continue on their current path. The two political operations — Clinton and Obama — have never seen eye-to-eye, and now some of the top voices of the Democratic 1990s have shifted into open criticism of a political operation they cast as overly negative and reactive, and failing to offer a positive set of plans for the economy.

The “dramatic shift” that they are actually calling for is a different candidate.

Euro 2012 Day 4

England 1 France 1

While France was clearly the better team, England played hard and actually created the better chances despite being outnumbered 5-1 in shots on goal. They also arguably cheated by starting an obvious Klingon, who scored their only goal by heading in a free kick. I’d like to see some DNA testing of the so-called “Joleon Lescott”, as I would be very surprised if he was shown to be of Terran origin. Milner missed a wonderful opportunity when he was put through to goal and beat the goalie before shooting wide, while on the other end, John Terry demonstrated why his teammates are willing to put up with having such an untrustworthy wanker for a teammate. He repeatedly cleaned up potentially dangerous messes. For the French, Riberry was easily the best player and was constantly putting pressure on the English defense with his runs. There was a near goal on a French corner kick, but the English keeper, Hart, produced a nice instinct save to keep the ball out of his net. After seeing this, I expect France to win the group, while England will have a tough time of it unless they can enlist some Romulans or something.

Ukraine 2 Sweden 1

I can’t say much about this game since I only watched the first half, which was scoreless. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Ukraine won, however, as they were clearly the more aggressive team, but I was surprised to see that Shevchenko returned to form and scored both goals. The erstwhile great was relatively ineffective in the first half, failing to even put either of his best opportunities on goal. Ibrahimovic, on the other hand, hit the post in the first half and scored in the second, but I find the half-Swedish striker to be somewhat overrated. While he’s powerful in the air and moves surprisingly well for such a big man, I see him as a complimentary striker, not a number one option, and any team relying on him to be the primary provider of their goals is likely to be disappointed. Neither team looked like it had France’s quality, as both relied very heavily on the long ball, but both looked better than England. I’d be surprised if France and Ukraine didn’t take the top two spots in the group.

Of bailouts and bullet- biting

It may be illuminating to compare what I wrote in RGD to the various ways countries mentioned in it have responded to the debt crisis. Consider the following quote from the book:

“According to Austrian theory, the effects of the housing bust on the overall economy should be much greater in countries like Estonia, Spain, and Ireland than in Austria, Germany, and Poland, and to the extent that inexpensive debt was made available to that and other sectors of the economy, we would expect to see that signs of the resulting economic contraction are similarly greater as well. Therefore we should see unemployment rising faster, prices falling further, GDP contracting more, and government deficits growing larger in the three housing boom countries than in the three non-boom ones.”

From today’s NYT on the Spanish bank bailout:

Two weeks after Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain vowed “there will be no Spanish banking rescue,” and after days of delay in which Mr. Rajoy pressed European officials for sounder rescue terms, Spain has now joined Greece, Ireland and Portugal as the latest bailout recipient. Catastrophe averted? Hardly.

Spain, check. Ireland, check. But no Estonia? What happened there? Why hasn’t Estonia required a bank bailout? The answer can be found in the rationale given by Fitch Ratings decision to affirm the little country’s credit rating.

“The rating decision reflects “the country’s near seamless transition to full membership of the euro zone starting on 1 January 2011, coupled with a more balanced economic recovery and the continued deleveraging of the private sector”…. Estonia was the only euro-area member to report budget surpluses for the last two years and had the lowest public debt among the region’s 17 members in 2011 at 6 percent of gross domestic product.”

Translation: Estonia is the only one of the three housing boom countries I noted in RGD that chose to bite the bullet and accept economic contraction and debt default rather than attempt to put off dealing with it in the interest of its banking sector. As even Paul Krugman has begrudgingly noted, they’ve hit bottom and are now in an ongoing process of recovery. But first they took a 20 percent hit to GDP, which is very much in line with what I said would have to be the case in RGD. All the multiple bailouts in Europe and the USA have accomplished is ensure that the trough will have to be bigger and deeper in the end.