Crikey group sub: it’s on again

Posted on March 27, 2019 by Nicholas Gruen
Crikey Worm: Pauline Hanson crashes the PM's tax cut gravy train

Put in “Crikey” to DuckDuckGo’s image search (Google is for data donating chumps) and you mostly get Steve Irwin and crocodiles. And Pauline, who, as we speak, is, between takes of Dancing with the Stars, is fighting for second amendment rights for terrorists and us law abiding folks, so we can shoot them before they cause too much trouble to our way of life.

The ClubTroppo Crikey Group sub is on again.

Please email me on ngruen at G mail if you’d like to participate.

Please put ‘crikey’ in the subject heading to reduce your chances of your email getting lost in translation

(All emails are translated – for obvious reasons)

Those getting a subscription will also be flown First Class to the city of their dreams to meet Camilla Parker Bowles and her fictional Great Aunt Sally Bowles of Goodbye to Berlin for the unveiling of the latest vehicle in ClubTroppo’s Garage of automotive delights.

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The Guru recipe

Posted on March 18, 2019 by Paul Frijters

[I just read a self-help book and, like Don Quixote, need to vent…]

My 10 rules for becoming a successful guru:

  1. Appear popular at the start: humans are just like dogs that follow other dogs. So have a legion of disciples and followers. Make them up when you start out. Don’t hesitate to hire actors and internet helpers.
  2. Give the audience the keys to the universe: flatter your audience by giving them a story wherein they are the heroes capable of great feats as long as they follow a recipe that you are a part of. A good guru knows the secret worries and desires of his audience and orients his stories towards those. If the audience fears asteroids, spin them a story about how the mind can influence the forces of the cosmos responsible for the trajectory of asteroids. If the audience secretly wants to control the weather, tells them about the magical rain dances. If they want to be healed, tell them your theories cure cancer or whatever else they worry about.
  3. Fit the story within the culture of the audience so that the mechanisms sound familiar and validated. Truth is completely irrelevant for this and is often a hindrance, so you only need to use familiar words and concepts, replacing the actual theories with whatever suits your story. When you talk to a Western audience where science is the source of truth and power, you thus stack your story full of the latest terms in Western science, whether that is gravitational waves, Higgs-Boson particles, intergenerational epigenetic transmissions, blockchain, Modern Monetary Theory, or whatever it is that your audience is likely to have heard of in the news. Use those terms, explain them in a way that is roughly right, and then claim some theory about them that is complete nonsense but suits you.
  4. Do not tax the intelligence of the audience for if they were smart enough to understand all the things you refer to, they wouldn’t be interested in what you had to say in the first place. So explain things in a very light and emotional storytelling manner. Speak of quantum waves as if they are friends with whom you can have a conversation. Talk about the mysticism of the carbon cycle as if your audience was born with the buttons in their hands that ruled the minutest details of that cycle. Your audience will love you for it because it will make them feel they finally understand these things in a way that makes them feel smart and powerful. Indeed, you basically cannot overdo this part: all that happens if you are spectacularly wrong in one story about some part of modern science is that you lose those members of the audience that really know that part, a negligible number.
  5. Set your audience up slowly with a hook: offer them something cheap that draws them in and only when they are in so far that they become slightly dependent on more do you increase the demands on their purses. The key thing here is that the audience will trust you if they want to trust you and hence only after you have managed to create a continued need for your message. This is a subtle game of hints, ‘proof’, personal ‘testimonies’ of your previous disciples, stories of how you really are uninterested in money, etc.
  6. Your appearance is everything so look the part and be seen to believe yourself, ie walk the walk. Whether you truly do is irrelevant because what matters is the appearance. Truth is no obstacle at all. If your audience needs you to have travelled the stars, simply tell them aliens abducted you and took you for a ride. If the audience wants to hear you spent 10 years in a cave in Tibet, then just tell them that is what you did. If they need you to have 100 kids and 50 wives, just make them up. If there is too much well-known information out there to prove you couldn’t possibly have done what your audience wants to believe, pretend you were in contact with someone who did who was your guru and that you are now following in his footsteps. Similarly, dress and behave the way the audience expects you to, whether that means you must have an enormous beard or a weird antenna sticking out of your behind. Remember the important lesson of Machiavelli: people believe what they see and hear. Don’t worry about the very few who look at your actions and deduce who you truly are: they are not into gurus anyways so you lose nothing by not appealing to them. Your potential followers resent such skeptical characters, so they are no threat to you at all (indeed, the more noise skeptics make about you, the better).
  7. Entertain and be charming. You have to make the audience want to be you or sleep with you. If you can’t be entertaining and charming, don’t even start.
  8. Have a bible. If need be, you can have a follower write that bible, but you need a holy book that people can pick over and worship.
  9. Be ambiguous: no two people truly want the same thing. So in order to have many followers you must create enough ambiguity in your story such that they can all believe something different. Like the bible, tell many different sides of the same story such that different members of the audience can buy into different aspects.
  10. Be scarce: a guru is like a Ferrari and must not be seen to be available to everyone because that limits the value to the audience of having one. They want to feel special. So when things take off you must become sparing with your time and your new public utterances. Indeed, the best thing is then to die.
Posted in bubble, Cultural Critique, Ethics, Geeky Musings, Journalism, Law, Libertarian Musings, Life, Social, Society, Space, Theatre | 14 Comments

Scaling knowledge: Should our disciplines have mesh or tree-like relation to each other?

Posted on March 18, 2019 by Nicholas Gruen

Beyond Open: Culture and Scaling in the Making of KnowledgeI’ve just been reading some of Tim Berners-Lee’s Weaving the Web about building the World Wide Web and it put me in mind of Paul Frijters’ recent post on teaching the social sciences. Paul argued that:

The biggest change needed is to teach the material in terms of basic patterns, with more complex arguments taught later as combinations of basic patterns. Another change needed is to enforce a single language on the entire curriculum. Finally, what is needed is far more use of virtual reality-teaching and field trips so that students experience the phenomena they are meant to understand, unlocking their visual acuity and emotional skills as learning tools. Students should learn with their whole being, not merely with their abstractive capacities.

Regarding the first two points, 1Berners-Lee’s frustrations with the world before he changed it seem to mirror Paul’s. He was frustrated with the ‘tree like’ organisation of knowledge 2. and wanted to invent a looser, more ‘associative’ form of knowledge architecture which he called ‘mesh’.

Be that as it may this seems like quite a big deal to me. Indeed, as the internet grew in order to effectively scale it needed to move away from ‘tree-like’ architectures for sending data packets through the net as outlined in this write up of the Border Gateway Protocol (or as us aficionados call it the BGP – some of us have only been aficionados for the last couple of minutes, but we’ll leave that to one side).

Anyway, the way knowledge started being classified in the 19th century was by discipline. Sometimes a discipline disappeared because it was discredited – as in the case of phrenology. But mostly the disciplines stayed in place and each spawned endless sub-disciplines. The disciplines are tree-like structures of knowledge, sometimes paying obsessive attention to their unitary structure as in the case of micro-foundations in economics and selfish genes as in the case of neo-Darwinism.

There are occasional cross-overs, as in the case of behavioural science and economics or imaging and psychology or evolutionary psychology for instance. Interdisciplinarity is spoken of at least by some with reverence, but all the disciplinary incentives are against it and the tree-like structures of each discipline remain in place. Thus these crossovers might be likened to rhizomes rather than any real challenge to the tree-like structure of disciplines and plantation like structures of knowledge generally.

As knowledge has proliferated over the last two centuries, you’d expect some re-architecture of the relations between disciplines, but there’s been no systematic change whatever, and what occasional change there has been, has been limited to ad hoc marriages of sub-disciplines where new technical possibilities present themselves or where exhaustion with the sterility of one discipline sets in and some (usually very limited) reaction is in order. An example of the former is where MRI imaging is now used in psychology and even in philosophy and of the latter is behavioural economics or the empirical or ‘Freakonomic’ turn in economics (though this is also to some extent the response to the new technical possibilities of ‘big data’ and desktop computing).

  1. I won’t comment on his third point other than including it here because of its importance and my strong agreement with it. ↩
  2. The paper proposing that he work on what became the World Wide Web had a heading “The problem with trees” and began “Many systems are organised hierarchically” ↩
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Review of Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline: Guest Post from Simon Molloy

Posted on March 14, 2019 by Nicholas Gruen

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline could upend our thinking about our future of planet Earth with far reaching implications for policy on climate change, immigration and border control, defence, education, child care, and jobs, to name just a few.

In the face of Hollywood’s habitual dystopianism we have become inculcated with familiar mantras: we are facing a global population crisis, humans are a plague on the planet, we are poisoning the Earth and so on.

These population mantras are wrong. Not just wrong; diametrically wrong, according to the book’s Canadian authors, Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, and journalist, John Ibbitson. They say, “We do not face the challenge of a population bomb but a population bust”.

Based on extensive research aimed at assessing the trajectory of global fertility rates, they argue that “one of the great defining events of human history will occur in three decades, give or take, when global population starts to decline. Once that decline begins, it will never end”. Continue reading →

Posted in Climate Change, Economics and public policy | 18 Comments

French Film Festival

Posted on March 5, 2019 by Nicholas Gruen
Top Picks
Trailer Icon 03 The Trouble With You (Opening Night)
Yvonne is the principled young widow of the local police chief who was killed in the line of duty. Each night she puts their young son to sleep with tales of his daring and bravery, and so naturally Yvonne is horrified to learn that her husband was not the embodiment of virtue as she had been led to believe-an innocent man named Antoine, has spent eight years falsely imprisoned as a result of his corruption! Yvonne decides to do everything she can to help return the hapless parolee to his regular life and devoted fiancé. Unfortunately, Antoine has trouble adjusting back to society, and soon blows a fuse that leads to an hilarious trail of destruction, where moral, social and romantic obligations are put to the test in a spectacular way.
☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB
David is a carefree 20-something in the throes of a new romance with Lena, and lives a carefree life until an incident abruptly forces him to assume the guardianship of his seven-year-old niece, Amanda.
☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB
Alexandre lives in Lyon with his wife and children. One day, quite by chance, he discovers that the priest who abused him when he was a member of a boy scout troop is still working with children. Determined to see justice served, Alexandre re-establishes contact with his boyhood friends – also victims of the same priest – François and Emmanuel. The men vow to ‘lift the burden of silence’. However, as the institutional weight and power of the Catholic Church bears down on this defiant group of survivors determined to tell their story, no one is left unscathed.
☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB
Two decades after its filming, Olivier Meyrou’s controversial yet exquisitely drawn portrait of France’s last great fashion designer, Yves Saint Laurent, has finally seen the light of day, having previously been withheld from release by Saint Laurent’s business partner, Pierre Bergé. Echoing its ambiguous title, Celebration goes behind-the-scenes to present both Yves the Legend and Yves the Man, as he prepares his final collection before the fashion house was sold to Gucci in 1999. Icons of the glamour industry and the many top models who have donned Saint Laurent’s gowns – show their unerring dedication to the fashion house and its namesake. And then there’s Yves himself – on the one hand, larger than life and, on the other, astonishingly reclusive, irritable and even inelegant.
☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

Continue reading →

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Burnheim on Gray on Hayek

Posted on February 18, 2019 by Nicholas Gruen

Friedrich Hayek was notoriously less savvy with photoshoots than some of his relatives.

A few years ago I read some John Gray on Friedrich Hayek. In short, he’s very good on Hayek, though he seems to have moved on rather to larger topics, not always to good effect. Anyway, If you have the best part of an hour, you could do a lot worse than read Gray on Hayek back in 1982 when Gray was (I think) something of a fellow traveller (and it was less evident how badly some neoliberal reform would go – I’m looking at you GFC). And here’s an excellent revisiting of Hayek 33 years later. I recommend both heartily.

I really should have written the words above just to let you know of two excellent essays, but I probably wouldn’t have bothered but for the reaction I got from John Burnheim when I sent him a link to the first essay above. Below the fold are the words he sent back in reply. As usual, there seems to be a vast depth of thought behind his words.   Continue reading →

Posted in Democracy, Economics and public policy, Philosophy, Political theory | 8 Comments

When is a conversation not a conversation? When it’s a political conversation.

Posted on February 18, 2019 by Nicholas Gruen
Violence in Bahrain as Democracy Protesters Take to Streets

This essay is cross posted from Quillette

I

It looks like liberal democracy is falling apart. But we can put it back together if we take democracy seriously enough—as seriously as the ancient Greeks.

The chaos of Donald Trump was unimaginable just a decade ago. Brexit was a similar humiliation for Britain’s political class, leading to its bewildered paralysis ever since. How do such things happen? Perhaps because I admire economists’ deployment of very simple ideas to powerful effect, I’ve come to an approach to these problems that I think is simple and compelling.

First, democracy is government by conversation. A political conversation should often be competitive—to sharpen ideas and measure their support. Yet, to remain a conversation rather than a parody of one, it must also be a co-operative search, if not for agreement, then at least for mutual understanding of where positions differ. However, this co-operative foundation for our politics has been largely extinguished by the weaponisation of political communication by professionals operating on the mass media, and, more recently by “trolling” on social media.

Second, where elections bake competition into the operating system of representation, there’s another, even more time honoured way to represent the people. The ancient Greeks built their democracy around it and it hides in plain sight today whenever a jury is empanelled in a court of law. And, whether it concerns legal or political matters, deliberation within such bodies nurtures the collaborative aspects of conversation. Giving citizens’ juries and assemblies chosen by lot a role within our beleaguered democracy could see it renewed.

II

To become a politician you compete for election. You then join party colleagues competing against their opponents. Yet democracy implies limits to competition. We remain safe for now that no substantial political grouping perpetuates extra-legal violence. Yet something more fundamental is afoot.

Though it apes the form of conversation, political communication has become as professionalised, as optimised to the competition to win votes as McDonald’s use of salt, fat, sugar and advertising is to win customers. Meanwhile, responding to similar competitive imperatives, the informational foundations of our democracy were being shorn away by mass media news values long before the internet arrived. Between 1968 and 1988, the length of presidential sound bites on US network news went from 43 to 9 seconds.1

The singleminded goal of each player in mass media political conversation is to manipulate it to their own end. Politicians rehearse “focus grouped” talking points and slogans like “take back control” and “roll up our sleeves” available on online lists (seriously!). Spokespeople cherry pick arguments, spurious or otherwise to defend their vested interest—until the they argue the opposite for their next client or employer. As Groucho put it, “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I’ve got others.”

Our language and etiquette are being transformed by the imperatives of political and ideological combat. The repertoire of “moves” now labelled “political correctness” have grown like bacteria in a petri dish in no small part because of their success as tactics in political debate. Taking offence, “checking” privilege, and associated strictures offer trump cards to instantly ideologise and emotionalise a conversation to one side’s tactical advantage. Continue reading →

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