Good Entropy

Blame the Republicans, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

Strangely, though, every Democrat and liberal I know routinely blames one category of people for their vicious choices: Republicans.

Meaning of the opening scene song : TrueDetective

In an old video on YouTube of the Handsome Family performing the song live, Brett Sparks introduces it as about the myth of a cactus that only blooms once every 10,000 years and if you look at it, you go insane — and, of course, you have to look. This comment was made in the context of all the dangerous and poisonous animals and reptiles that live in the New Mexico desert around Albuquerque, where they live.

Jonathan Haidt on Psychology and Politics | The Volokh ConspiracyThe Volokh Conspiracy

In short, Haidt’s research suggests that many liberals really do believe that conservatives are heartless bastards–or as a friend of mine once remarked, “Conservatives think that liberals are good people with bad ideas, whereas liberals think conservatives are bad people”–and very liberal people think that especially strongly. Haidt suggests that there is some truth to this.

 

Marginal Revolution: Murakami’s *1Q84*

That’s the new Haruki Murakami book, due out in the U.S. in late October. It’s over one thousand pages and it was published originally in three parts. My view of Murakami is that his later works are good but not special, and that his masterpieces are the early novels and also his non-fiction chronicle of the Tokyo gas attacks, Underground. My favorite is Hard Boiled Wonderland the End of the World, which also should appeal to science fiction fans.

IQ84 has been a smash hit in Japan and the never-easy-to-please Germans very much like it too. Here are other foreign reviews. I have read the first 130 pages and believe it may well be his masterpiece. It starts off with two dual stories, with what are recognizably Murakami-esque characters, but I won’t say more than that.

This American Life | WORKLIFEDESIGN

Ira Glass, recounts how upon watching the 1937 Disney classic Snow White recently, he noticed how it has almost an operatic feeling with each of the main characters entering the story with a song. When he mentions this to his sister (who works for Disney) she informs him that what he’s seeing is the “I Wish” song in action. It’s a common storytelling technique that’s used in musicals where the character declares exactly what they want in that first song.

As Ira lists through all the musicals (classic and contemporary) that have I Wish Songs, I’m gobsmacked to hear how common it is. Think, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” starts off The Wizard of Oz, or, the Britney Spears’ film Crossroads which begins with her singing Madonna’s “Open Your Heart”. The Little Mermaid. Fiddler on the Roof. Funny Girl. All begin with the main character’s I Wish song.

Marginal Revolution: From the comments

PeterW has written:

I never really bought the “conservatives are fearful” argument; after all, the left is the one arguing for more economic protection.

I think a more useful distinction is that people want free-market competition in areas where they are strong, and protection and regulation in areas where they are weak. Conservatives want free competition in the economic sphere but moral protections in social interactions; liberals want protection from market forces but are happy to take their licks in status-seeking competitions.

In a state of nature, the highest-status people get away with much more bad behavior than low status folks. Therefore, strict social rules are essentially a progressive tax on status!

from Kids
Prefer Cheese: The Embarrassing 2nd Amendment.

Had a nice glass of wine last night, and re-read one of my favorite
essays, by one of my most favoritest lefties….Sandy
Levinson, of the UT-Austin Law School.

Here is the essay: The Embarrassing 2nd Amendment.

Sandy (whom I got to know down at UT-Austin when I was there) is honest.
He does not like the 2nd Amendment. But he believes in the rule of
law, and so feels obliged to point out two things.

First, the
words in the 2nd Amendment have meaning. They appear to mean that there
is an individual right to keep and bear arms. Subject to regulation,
not an absolute right, all that’s true. BUT. SOME. INDIVIDUAL. RIGHT.

Second,
we can’t pick and choose which amendments to enforce. If the Bill of
Rights is important, if the Constitution cannot be violated, then we
have to enforce all of it. If you don’t like the 2nd Amendment, then
amend the Constitution.

I enjoyed re-reading the piece, as I
said, given the events of this week. I particularly liked these
passages:

To put it mildly, the
Second Amendment is not at the forefront of constitutional discussion,
at least as registered in what the academy regards as the venues for
such discussion — law reviews, casebooks, and other scholarly legal
publications. As Professor Larue has recently written, “the second
amendment is not taken seriously by most scholars.”

…I cannot
help but suspect that the best explanation for the absence of the Second
Amendment from the legal consciousness of the elite bar, including that
component found in the legal academy, is derived from a mixture of
sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the
perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, perhaps even
“winning,” interpretations of the Second Amendment would present real
hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation. Thus the title of this essay — The
Embarrassing Second Amendment — for I want to suggest that the Amendment
may be profoundly embarrassing to many who both support such regulation
and view themselves as committed to zealous adherence to the Bill of
Rights (such as most members of the ACLU). Indeed, one sometimes
discovers members of the NRA who are equally committed members of the
ACLU, differing with the latter only on the issue of the Second
Amendment but otherwise genuinely sharing the libertarian viewpoint of
the ACLU.

Give Sandy credit: that is an honest portrayal
of the problem. He at least realized that he should be embarrassed.
And he was.

For two decades, I have been given at best a
condescending hearing when I have claimed that the 2nd Amendment clearly
confers at least a limited individual right to bear arms. And since
these same super-silly-ass folks also claim to believe the Constitution
says what the Supreme Court says it says….well, I love America.

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Gravity Emerges from Quantum Information, Say Physicists

It suggests that differences in entropy between parts of the Universe
generates a force that redistributes matter in a way that maximises
entropy. This is the force we call gravity.
.
.
.
It also relates gravity to quantum information for the first time. Over recent years many results in quantum mechanics have pointed to the increasingly important role that information appears to play in the Universe.

EconLog – Sage

Talking about Thomas Sowell’s new book Intellectuals and Society

For example, it is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge. That is why so much social engineering backfires and why so many despots have led their countries into disasters.

Brilliant.

Intuitive differences: when to agree to disagree
13Kaj_Sotala29 September 2009 07:56AM

from here

Two days back, I had a rather frustrating disagreement with a friend. The debate rapidly hit a point where it seemed to be going nowhere, and we spent a while going around in circles before agreeing to change the topic. Yesterday, as I was riding the subway, things clicked. I suddenly realized not only what the disagreement had actually been about, but also what several previous disagreements we’d had were about. In all cases, our opinions and arguments had been grounded in opposite intuitions:

* Kaj’s intuition. In general, we can eventually learn to understand a phenomenon well enough to create a model that is flexible and robust. Coming up with the model is the hard part, but once that is done, adapting the general model to account for specific special cases is a relatively straightforward and basically mechanical process.
* Friend’s intuition. In general, there are some phenomena which are too complex to be accurately modeled. Any model you create for them is bristle and inflexible: adapting the general model to account for specific special cases takes almost as much work as creating the original model in the first place.

You may notice that these intuitions are not mutually exclusive in the strict sense. They could both be right, one of them covering certain classes of things and the other the remaining ones. And neither one is obviously and blatantly false – both have evidence supporting them. So the disagreement is not about which one is right, as such. Rather, it’s a question of which one is more right, which is the one with broader applicability.

As soon as I realized this, I also realized two other things. One, whenever we would run into this difference in the future, we’d need to recognize it and stop that line of debate, for it wouldn’t be resolved before the root disagreement had been solved. Two, actually resolving that core disagreement would take so much time and energy that it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.

The important thing to realize is that neither intuition rests on any particular piece of evidence. Instead, each one is a general outlook that has been formed over many years and countless pieces of evidence, most of which have already been forgotten. Before my realization, neither of us had even consciously known they existed. They are abstract patterns our minds have extracted from what must be hundreds of different cases we’ve encountered, very high-level hypotheses that have been repeatedly tested and found to be accurate.

It would be impossible to find out which was the more applicable one by means of regular debate. Each of us would have to gather all the evidence that led to the formulation of the intuition in the first place. Pulling a number out of my hat, I’d guess that a comprehensive overview of that evidence (for one intuition) would run at least a hundred pages long. Furthermore, it wouldn’t be sufficient for each of us to simply read the other side’s overview, once it had been gathered. By this point, we would be interpreting the evidence in light of our already existing intuition. I wouldn’t be surprised if simply reading through the summary would lead to both sides only being more certain of their own intuition being right. We would have to take the time to discuss each individual item in detail.

And if a real attempt to sort out the difference is hard, resolving it in the middle of a debate about something else is impossible. Both sides in the debate will have an opinion they think is obvious and be puzzled as to why the other side can consistently fail to get something so obvious. At the same time, neither can access the evidence that leads them to consider their opinion so obvious, and both will grow increasingly frustrated at both the other side’s bone-headedness and their own failure to properly communicate something that shouldn’t even need explaining.

In many cases, trying to resolve an intuitive difference simply isn’t worth the effort. Learn to recognize your intuitive differences, and you’ll know when to break off debates once they hit that difference. Putting those intuitions in words still helps understanding, though. When I told my friend the things I’ve just written here, she agreed, and we were able to have a constructive dialogue about those differences. (While doing so, and returning to the previous day’s topic, we were able to identify at least five separate points of disagreement that were all rooted in the same intuitive difference.) Each one was also able to explain, on a rough level, some of the background that supported their intuition. In the end, we still didn’t agree, but at least we understood each other’s positions a little better.

But what if the intuitive difference is about something really important? Me and my friend resolved to just wait things out and see whose hypothesis would turn out more accurate, but sometimes the difference might affect big decisions about the actions you want to take. (Robin’s and Eliezer’s disagreement on the nature of the Singularity comes to mind.) What if the disagreement really needs to be solved?

I’m not sure how well it can be done, but one could try. First off, both need to realize that in all likelihood, both intuitions have a large grain of truth to them. Like with me and my friend, the question is often one of the breadth of applicability, not of a strict truth or falsehood. Once the basic positions have been formulated, both should ask whether, not why. Assign some certainty value on the likelyhood of your intuition being the more correct one, and then consider the fact that your “opponent” has spent many years analyzing evidence to reach this position and might very well be right. Adjust your certainty downwards to account for this realization. Then take a few weeks considering both the things that may have led you to formulate this intuition, as well as the things that might have led your opponent to theirs. Spend time gathering evidence for both sides of the view, and be sure to give each piece of evidence a balanced view: half of the time you’ll first consider a case from the PoV of your opponent’s hypothesis, then of your own. Half of the time you’ll do it the other way around. Commit all such considerations in writing and present them to your opponent an regular intervals, taking the time to discuss them through. This is no time for motivated skepticism – both of you need to have genuine crisis of faith in order for things to get anywhere.

Not every disagreement is an intuitive difference. Any disagreement that rests on particular pieces of evidence and can be easily resolved with the correct empirical evidence isn’t one. If it feels like one of the intuitions is strictly false instead of having a large grain of truth to it, it’s still an intuitive difference, but not the kind of one that I have been covering here. An intuitive difference is also kind of related to, but different from, an inferential distance. In order to resolve it, a lot of information needs to be absorbed, but by both partners, not simply the other. It’s not a question of having different evidence: theoretically, you might both even have exactly the same evidence, but gathered in a different order. The question is one of differing interpretations, not raw data as such.