The saga of Dr. Jayant Patel is that of a man who concealed his incompetence by never staying in one place long enough for consequences to catch up to him. But though he buried his true track record, Patel took care to bring with him enough social proof to persuade a new set of victims to trust him. As long as he could stay one step ahead, he was gold. It wasn’t as if nobody suspected Patel wasn’t all he claimed to be. One gets the sense that many of his patients had doubts even as they looked up to him from the operating table, but never enough to challenge him openly; to impel them to say the one thing that would have saved them: ‘I don’t want this doctor, get me another’. And yet the truth was that he was probably trying; trying hard to be a doctor. One of the charges against him was that he treated patients that’s weren’t even his. Maybe he figured he needed practice. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But that didn’t help him because the basic problem was that Patel was incompetent. He should have been something else.
You can guess where this is going. Dr. Patel killed dozens of patients, because he wasn't man enough to admit that he was unfit for his office.
Naturally, an analogy follows. What is important, though, is that this is the generous reading. This is the reading whereby the man is a well-meaning incompetent, who wants very much to do what is right, and is just unable to admit to himself that he isn't competent.
The less generous reading is that he's destructive on purpose. This is a reading that I encounter more and more.
My previous post about oxytocin mentioned the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” game that figured in some recent oxytocin research, and included a link to an article about Anatol Rapoport, the game theorist whose winning entry in a cybernetic “Prisoner’s Dilemma” tournament employed a combination of clear-sighted retaliation and sweet-natured trust and forgiveness. If the Prisoner’s Dilemma forces players to decide whether to be sheep or wolves, Rapoport’s winning strategy could be said to convert its player into a sheepdog: someone who never hurts the sheep but is primed for ruthlessness against the wolf. But how to know for sure which one your opponent is? What if he might be either one, at different times, or even depending on how you treat him?
Before Rapoport’s contribution, people were drawing sour conclusions about human conflict from the established fact that the optimum solution to the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” from the point of view of one player in a single game was to choose a betrayal (wolf) strategy. This was a frustrating conclusion, given that the optimum solution from the point of view of both players considered together was mutual trust (sheep). The problem, of course, is that one player has no way of knowing whether the other player will take the first player’s well-being into account, a welcome development that would convert the two players into a cohesive unit for which the game’s results can be optimized.
Rapoport’s genius was to consider that people don’t always engage in single, isolated conflicts with strangers. More often (unless they’re engaged in a species-ending paroxysm) they need strategies for addressing repeated conflicts with people about whom they can learn something, and to whom they can impart information about themselves. They live in a world where each party to the conflict may learn from mistakes, build a reputation for trustworthiness, and use effective sanctions against predatory behavior: become sheepdogs.
Rapoport was a man with many generous tools for conflict-resolution in his box. According to Daniel Dennett, he
once promulgated a list of rules for how to write a successful critical commentary on an opponent’s work. First, he said, you must attempt to re-express your opponent’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your opponent says “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Then, you should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
Excellent advice, not (unfortunately) followed by its admiring but irritable quoter. Dennett’s review left me thinking that some books promise to be so unpleasant in their style of argument that I can do without buying and reading them. But this Rapoport guy – he looks like someone worth knowing more about.
His winning “tit for tat” strategy is said to be an “exceptionally effective sanction” for selfish behavior, in that the punishment lasts only as long as the selfish behavior lasts, whereas cooperative behavior is rewarded immediately in kind. Rapoport’s “tit for tat” strategy can yield even better empirical results in the "tit for tat with forgiveness" variant, in which the first play occasionally, and unpredictably, “turns the other cheek” by declining to respond to a betrayal in one game with his own act of betrayal in the next. This promises both players an exit from a disastrous vicious cycle of retaliation without exposing them to permanent exploitation by dyed-in-the-wool predators. In other words, if the early work on the Prisoner’s Dilemma suggested Leviticus 24:19-21, the work of this mathematical Russian Jew suggested an empirically successful fusion of that hard old law with Matthew 18:22.
British Petroleum is not just a corporation. It has deep ties with the government in the UK. For example, we've all read about how the investment of pension funds in BP stocks is creating significant nervousness in the UK as they look on the Obama administration's rhetoric about squeezing every dime out of the corporation that it can.
A court might well look at this and say, "It's fine to ask for damages; but since you refused to accept the help offered that would have limited those damages, we'll also limit the liability." That's even fair, is it not? After all, to the degree that the Obama administration is making things worse, there's no reason that BP should be the ones footing the bill. Insofar as they have decided it is more important to have the paperwork in order in Washington than the beaches in order in Louisiana, they're the ones -- not the British -- who should pay the cost of that decision.
Of course, that means that the US taxpayers foot the bill. Alas, they were the fools who voted for this crew.
This one's for Eric, mostly. A group called Roman Army Talk asks about a symbol being used by the Serbian Orthodox priesthood, which also appears on some early Roman shields.
An early commenter gets "Thulsa Doom" out of the way as a possible origin; what follows is an interesting discussion, with plenty of photographic evidence as well.
This week's Mark Steyn column about people with and without loyalty to their homelands is an interesting counterpoint to some new research about group bonding. Pointy-headed experts have published the alarming news that that oxytocin, the happy love hormone, has a “dark side” in which its “niceness breaks down.” It seems that warm bonds between human beings may lead to their joint aggression against outsiders, particularly in defensive mode. (If only we could dissolve all those uncontrollable bonds among individuals and transfer their unconditional loyalty to the World Government! Then people would stand by while their comrades were under attack.)
The researchers used the “Prisoner's Dilemma” game to test the effects of oxytocin. In this game, the reward that each player can expect will range from highest to lowest in the following three scenarios:
(1) the first player betrays the other while the other is loyal;
(2) both cooperate; and
(3) each betrays the other.
The optimal solution for a single player is betrayal, while the optimal solution for the two players considered together is cooperation. When the game is played only once, betrayal is the winning strategy from the point of view of that player, even though it is not optimum if you consider both players. The researchers used this aspect to judge the effects of oxytocin on the decision whether to betray.
What the researchers didn’t look at, apparently, is another and more interesting aspect of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. If the game is played repeatedly, the long-term winning strategy is not simple betrayal but tit for tat,” in which a player begins by cooperating, then responds to the other player’s betrayal or cooperation in one turn with the same choice in the next. A slight variation, which can prevent both players from getting trapped in a cycle of defections, is “tit for tat with forgiveness,” in which the first player very occasionally (and unpredictably) responds to a betrayal in one move with cooperation in the next. The “tit for tat” game strategy tends to result, over time, in the players’ learning to trust each other and to behave themselves.
In other words, they form a bond. Probably reeking of oxytocin – and they’ll be ready to join forces to kick the butts of the next group of strangers who show up threatening to use the short-sighted betrayal strategy.
An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly.
In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed.
Evidently the best way to win an argument, then, is to be really glum about it, or at least take some pains to appear to be in the worst mood in the room.
On the other hand, “positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts.”
So as long as the people you’re talking to don’t care how you got there, you’re more likely to win them over by being jolly. Maybe the rule is to be grumpy when you think you’re right and jolly when you suspect you’re full of it.
My better half could not be suspected of a sunny disposition even by his friends. From now on, when he’s morose, I’ll simply observe that he seems unusually persuasive today.
This fellow apparently wrote this tune himself, before recording it for free distribution on Youtube. Eric sometimes mentions the advantages we have arising from this easy access to communication and technology; here is a clear example.
[A]ll the multiple-victim public shootings in Western Europe have occurred in places where civilians are not permitted to carry guns. The same is true in the United States: All the public shootings in which more than three people have been killed have occurred in places where civilians may not legally bring guns.
The Lexington County Republican Party on Thursday night asked GOP state Sen. Jake Knotts to resign for calling gubernatorial nominee Nikki Haley a “raghead.”
The county party said the comments brought “shame” and “disgrace” to both Knotts and the state in the resolution condemning the state senator’s actions.
Now that's the language of honor! He has brought shame on his state, on his party, and on the people of South Carolina. If they are to defend their honor, they are bound to hold him to account. It is heartwarming to see them doing just that.
By the way, what she was before becoming a Methodist was a Sikh; about which this is relevant:
The Kirpan (English pronunciation: /kɪərˈpɑːn/; Punjabi: ਕਿਰਪਾਨ kirpān) is a sword or dagger carried by many Sikhs. According to a mandatory religious commandment given by Guru Gobind Singh (the tenth Guru of Sikhism) at the Baisakhi Amrit Sanchar (a holy religious ceremony that formally baptizes a Sikh) in AD 1699, all baptised Sikhs (Khalsa) must wear a kirpan at all times....
The kirpan is both a defensive weapon and a symbol. Physically it is an instrument of "ahimsa" or non-violence. The principle of ahimsa is to actively prevent violence, not to simply stand by idly whilst violence is being done. To that end, the kirpan is a tool to be used to prevent violence from being done to a defenseless person when all other means to do so have failed.
As far as I'm concerned, that makes them one of the most honorable religions in the world. I'll take as many Sikhs as they want to send.
One issue for us free marketeers is this: we like to talk about how pollution is, in some ways, a property rights issue. When a huge oil leak contaminates a sea and damages vast amounts of marine life and say, fishing industries, it is an interesting question on how exactly that issue gets resolved without some way of apportioning costs and compensation. Is a state needed to oversee this? Can it be fixed by entirely non-state means?
The answer to that question is "No," because costs approaching the costs of this spill are always going to be worth fighting for. As a result, some coercive method is going to be required to ensure that payments are made, not merely promised.
The closest a pure market solution could come to that is some sort of Mutually Assured Destruction arrangement, whereby firms/corporations that welshed on their debts would be subject to every party to the agreement refusing to work with them in the future. The problem with such an arrangement is that the firm/corporation is already facing certain destruction if it attempts to pay liabilities on this scale. There's at least a chance they could find a few people willing to work around the agreement; so the MAD "treaty" would necessarily be of less threat than the hard reality of taking responsibility.
Everyone knows I'm no fan of super-powered governments, but this is a clear case for governance. (Nor is it an affront to Constitutionalism: the Constitution gives authority for dealing with Law of the Sea matters to Congress, not the states or the People.)
Now, the bad news: the government model isn't going to work here either.
While I am no lawyer, I'm fairly sure that BP can protect most of its resources by filing for something like bankruptcy under British law. British judges are not likely to hand over a core national asset to be chopped to pieces for America's benefit; especially not at the demand of a President who sent the bust of Churchill back to England because he didn't want it in the White House. Even if he were an honorary Knight of the Garter, though, they're not going to wreck their country to save ours.
A utopian World Government might possibly be able to resolve this matter according to some norm of law. Such a government is a practical impossibility at this time, given humanity's very different ideas of what "justice" and "law" ought to mean. (Confer sha'riah with the West with China.) Even if it weren't impossible, it doesn't exist.
So the lesson is: life isn't fair. Injustice is the norm. The best we can hope to do, with all our efforts at law and order, is to create the occasional lapse in injustice.
Be prepared to suck this one up, because there's nobody to make it right. Nobody can, and therefore nobody will.
I think I would like to take Eric up on his suggestion that we do another round of Plutarch before we move on. He has a selection to suggest to us, and then we can move on to one of the Icelandic sagas -- this will give me a moment to review them. The Saga of Burnt Njal is surely the most famous and for good reason, but it is a large undertaking: you'd have to let me know if you'd prefer a shorter book, though if you choose it, it is certainly worth your time. On the other hand, my personal favorite -- the saga of Egil Skallagrimsson -- is likewise fairly long! (Although there is a redacted version for fans of Dr. Suess.)
We might follow it up with a comparison of two or three pieces that touch on Harald Hardrada, "the Thunderbolt of the North," who (few remember now) invaded England only days before William the Conqueror. Had the English king not just finished defeating a major Viking invasion at Stamford Bridge, only to have to conduct a forced march to the sea... well, it's possible that history might have been different.
So, next, the lives of Nicias and Crassus, with Plutarch's comparison. We'll discuss them in about a week. After that, Vikings.
Joe recently made a remark on the subject of fairies. As he raised it in a memorial post to someone he admired, I didn't wish to raise the issue at the time, but after a decent interval I'd like to dispute something he said. That was this:
Or, as I might say to Chesterton, you may like the freedom to believe in fairies - but the fairies lose their magic if you do. And what a shame - because, in their rightful state, how beautiful they are.
Now, that is a serious claim. Chesterton wrote quite a bit about the fairies. His chapter in Orthodoxy called "The Ethics of Elfland" is among the finest things ever written. Elves are not fairies, of course; the root for elf is the Old Norse alfar, meaning "white," and they seem to be the honored dead, or those who belong to the Otherworld to which we go (or from which we come!) when we are not living here. Fairies are beings of a type unlike us; the root word is ultimately from the Latin, relating to the Fates. Elves are like us, but in another state; fairies are, whatever their other nature, genuinely alien beings.
The old tales about this are quite clear, if you care for old tales as I do. The problem in dealing with fairies is that they don't really understand us, and vice versa. In a fairy story, what seems amusing to them may destroy a man entirely; or bounce him hundreds of years out of his timeline, losing to him forever everyone he loved. We aren't really able to know if the 'revenge' our heroes take on them in these stories doesn't destroy them, or otherwise distort them in horrible ways. There is a sharp disconnect; and if you're of a literal mind about your literature, you might say that it is one of the rare attempts by humanity to imagine a completely different kind of intelligence.
Chesterton wrote quite a lot about these things, but the thing he wrote that I'll quote here is on another subject. It is still on point:
The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder.... If you reject [the "choking cataract of human testimony in favor of the supernatural"], you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant's story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story.
This is the problem I have. I have never seen a fairy; I don't know that I could see one. Yet I believe in them, because I know a woman who tells me that she has seen them. This woman is one whose testimony on any other subject I would not question; I have known her for years, and I have observed her to be a woman of unusually strong moral character. She is faithful to what she thinks is right even when it is to her own disadvantage. I am quite certain of her honesty.
That gives me compelling reason to assert, at least: "I know that she really believes that fairies exist." What would stop me from asserting, "I am prepared to believe that fairies exist"? Chesterton tells us: I have his two options. The first one, though, will not do. I cannot reject her testimony because of who she is, because I know she is just the kind of person whose testimony I should rely on if I rely on anyone's at all.
That leaves, then, only the second option. If I reject her testimony, it must be because I have a doctrine that fairies cannot exist; that fairy stories are never true.
I don't have any evidence, however, for that proposition. If I say I am being rational in rejecting her testimony, then, I am fooling myself. I have no rational reason to doubt her testimony merely because I haven't had the experience myself, any more than I could doubt her testimony to a murder because I didn't see it happen too.
The modern way of dealing with this is to push it into psychology; to say, in short, that there is something wrong with her. That is wrong in two senses. First, I have never observed anything wrong with her; genuine disorders are usually evident along a broad line of problems. She has always held a job, works hard, has strong and steady friendships and relationships to others, doesn't drink (let alone to excess) and uses no drugs, etc. So, it would be strange for me to impute some sort of disorder to her. She shows every evidence of being well ordered.
Second, I can no more see her mind than I can see a fairy. To make a positive judgment about her mind (that it is disordered) in order to avoid a positive judgment about a fairy (that it might possibly exist in some way we don't yet understand) is merely to prefer one sort of untestable theory over another. There is no lab test that can approach either question. I'm really making an aesthetic claim, not a scientific or a rational one. I'm saying that I prefer a world in which people who believe in fairies are insane, or that I prefer a world in which fairies might exist.
Of the two, aesthetically, I prefer the second. This happens to line up with the evidence of the woman being well-ordered in all other observable aspects; and with a vast wealth of similar testimony, dating over centuries and across cultures. So: I honestly believe that the rational position is that there likely are fairies. That also happens to be what I'd prefer to believe. I am aware of the potential for confirmation bias, then; but anyone who asserts the contrary had better be equally aware of their own aesthetic preferences, and resulting biases.
Does that mean that fairies lose their magic? I don't know that it does; they are quite mystical to me, since I have no way of seeing them, yet believe that somehow they exist.
What it definitely doesn't mean, however, is that I'm denying them their rightful place. If indeed they do exist, their rightful place is in the realm of things that exist. We should conceptualize our world in a way that leaves room for them.
The particular meeting of the minds that I am exploring this evening occurred in the 1680s. That was just a century after the pioneering Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (whom the Chinese still refer to by his Chinese name of “Li Madou”) had crossed the border between Macao and China and rented a small house in Guangdong province. As a conversation piece, he placed on the wall a print of a world map made in the West, with the names of the main continents and countries spelled out in the Western alphabet. Some of the Chinese who came to visit were vexed, other were intrigued. It was those Chinese with the greatest interest in getting at the truth who persuaded Ricci to make an enlarged version of the world map with the names identified by Chinese characters, and with the cartography somewhat adjusted so that China was closer to the center of the map, rather than being stuck on the periphery (as had been the case with the original map). In following these Chinese requests, Ricci further revised and enlarged the map with descriptive passages (in Chinese) which gave commercial and political details of many countries in both Europe and East Asia, along with descriptive references to some aspect of the Catholic states, the role of the papacy, and the nature of Chinese relations with its neighbors.
Over the following years, a small but steady stream of missionaries followed Ricci, and even served in Chinese official positions in the bureau of astronomy. A smaller number of Chinese also traveled to Europe during this period, though none left detailed accounts of their experiences. But travelers moving in either direction during the 1680s were aware....
...and the man makes the dog. (Hat tip to T99, who should remember that she has posting rights here.)
Maggie's Farm says, "Pathetic. Even when my kids were little, they would not put up with that from our dogs. That is now a worthless dog, and it is the owners' fault."
It's not a worthless dog, though. That dog could be put right in thirty minutes by a man who knew how to do it. The problem is, having done it, the training would need to be reinforced and maintained. "Mr. President" would be right back in this situation in a few weeks, even if you handed him an animal that was perfectly trained.
That's nature at work. That's a metaphor for where the whole world is going, as long as he remains in the position he's in.
Their allegations may ultimately help Ms. Haley, experts say, if she is viewed as a victim of dirty campaigning.... “I voted for the lady,” [one man] said, referring to Ms. Haley. “I was going to vote for McMaster but I didn’t like all of the junk that the other campaigns were saying about the lady.”
I hope we'll see the scoundrels run out on rails. It's a fine old tradition, really.
Gerard van der Leun, of the blog American Digest, from time to time has a little feature he calls "something wonderful" when he comes across something, well, wonderful on the internet.
So in that spirit, Here's the Opera Company of Philadelphia flash mobbing the Reading Street Terminal Market on a recent Saturday.
This one goes with Grim's story of the Marine carrying his girlfriend up the mountain. Semper Fi, she says. Indeed.
And here is a little Belle Heures teaser. I didn't forget you guys and risked life and limb taking pictures with my cell phone, whilst evading no fewer than three minders in the exhibit. I felt so Mission Impossible. (I just went to a translation site to be cute and put that in French for effect and don't you know its spelt the exact same way?!)
This might be the one that I took through a magnifying glass they supplied. The aureola have real texture and look as though they were painted yesterday, though my little cell phone camera cannot reflect the true skill used.
And another one taken of two Mourners they had near the Belle Heures stuff.
And this is a little bit of information related to the conversation we were having about traditional religious orders. It's from the newsletter of a group of cloistered monks I support.
It's been a while since we had a book club entry. While I suppose Zelda's Ogre counts as reading, in a sense, it would be a good idea to get back to the business of reading some underlying classics.
I've been reading Parzival this summer, one of the last major Arthurian texts that I hadn't read before. It fails my basic test of reading material for GHBC, though, which is that there does not appear to be a free version online. I suspect that it's not even available at most of your public libraries, except perhaps through interlibrary loan, as the story -- once the most popular tale in Europe -- has fallen out of fashion.
We could do some more of Plutarch, if you like. Some of the Norse sagas make for excellent reading, and I'd like to tackle at least a few of those over the next few years. Some of you may have other ideas. Let's hear them.
Roger Scruton takes on an old debate of ours, and looks forward:
The belief that humanity makes moral progress depends upon a wilful ignorance of history. It also depends upon a wilful ignorance of oneself – a refusal to recognise the extent to which selfishness and calculation reside in the heart even of our most generous emotions, awaiting their chance. Those who invest their hopes in the moral improvement of humankind are therefore in a precarious position: at any moment the veil of illusion might be swept away, revealing the bare truth of the human condition. Either they defend themselves against this possibility with artful intellectual ploys, or they give way, in the moment of truth, to a paroxysm of disappointment and misanthropy. Both of these do violence to our nature. The first condemns us to the life of unreason; the second to the life of contempt. Human beings may not be as good as the shallow optimists pretend; but nor are they as bad as the prophets and curmudgeons have painted them.
In order to see human beings as they are, therefore, and to school oneself in the art of loving them, it is necessary to apply a dose of pessimism...
That is the beginning; but what happens when we can change human nature? He appears to be pessimistic about that as well. Yet he is pessimistic in an odd way; this pessimism is required for us to be happy.
The transhumanists believe that we will replace ourselves with immortal cyborgs, who will emerge from the discarded shell of humanity like the blessed souls from the grave in some medieval Last Judgement. The transhumanists don’t worry about Huxley’s Brave New World: they don’t believe that the old-fashioned virtues and emotions lamented by Huxley have much of a future in any case. The important thing, they tell us, is the promise of increasing power, increasing scope, increasing ability to vanquish the long-term enemies of mankind, such as disease, ageing, incapacity and death....
We are not, and cannot be, the kind of posthuman cyborgs that rejoice in eternal life, if life it is. We are led by love, friendship and desire; by tenderness for young life and reverence for old. We live, or ought to live, by the rule of forgiveness, in a world where hurts are acknowledged and faults confessed to. All our reasoning is predicated upon those basic conditions, and one of the most important uses of pessimism is to warn us against destroying them. The soul-less optimism of the transhumanists reminds us that we should be gloomy, since our happiness depends on it.
Confer with the piece from Mr. Dalyrymple, below. The idea is that redistributing resources cannot make people happy, because happiness comes from the development of internal virtues. It cannot even make them "not poor," as the failure to develop those virtues will strip them of whatever wealth you redistribute to them. What it can do, as in the case of the islanders with the phosphorous, is destroy them: it can undermine the virtues they do have by removing the scarcity that demands and regulates those virtues. Disaster follows.
This would appear to be the same concept, but pointed not at "the poor" but at all humanity. It seems like it might be right, too, on the same terms. Aristotle held that happiness (eudaimonia) was an activity, specifically rational activity in accord with excellence. The concept of "excellence" rubs up against failure: after all, you are judging what is excellent by comparing it with what is not.
This kind of life is perhaps a good example of what would 'justify us in having a child' according to Mr. Singer. What if we could promise that the child would never grow old or weak, nor be hungry, nor suffer pain or danger? Well, wouldn't the child be horribly bored with such an eternal life? Where then is the joy, the eudaimonia that Aristotle spoke of? How does the child excel if there are no challenges?
No matter, you might say; emotions are really "in" the brain, so we will remove the concern that you would be bored and unhappy by simply arranging to stimulate the appropriate pleasure centers. You will be perfectly happy and satisfied, forever.
That, then, would be for Mr. Singer a justification of the child's life. What kind of person would we be, though? What would that do to our moral nature? What would we do with such lives, and such freedom?
I suspect the answer is "nothing." If that is the case, Singer is wrong: the child may as well not have been born at all.
