In praise of David Hume

Towards the end of The Social Contract, after discussing the continuity between Rousseau and the The Terror, David Hume appears and we leap 250 years into an essentially modern perspective.

It’s not the first time in years of listening to In Our Time that Hume comes in to deliver the final word. So why is it that we hear of Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Sartre, Popper, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and other, lesser, philosophers and not of Hume? Is it that Hume takes all the fun out of philosophy by drilling directly to the 21st century? (More like, from what I can tell of Melvynn Bragg, that he’s looking for a team who can do justice to the Great One.)

Who the heck ways this guy, anyway (emphases mine):

David Hume (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The most important philosopher ever to write in English, David Hume (1711-1776) — the last of the great triumvirate of “British empiricists” — was also well-known in his own time as an historian and essayist. A master stylist in any genre, Hume's major philosophical works — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748) and concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) — remain widely and deeply influential. Although many of Hume's contemporaries denounced his writings as works of scepticism and atheism, his influence is evident in the moral philosophy and economic writings of his close friend Adam Smith. Hume also awakened Immanuel Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers” and “caused the scales to fall” from Jeremy Bentham's eyes. Charles Darwin counted Hume as a central influence, as did “Darwin's bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley. The diverse directions in which these writers took what they gleaned from reading Hume reflect not only the richness of their sources but also the wide range of his empiricism. Today, philosophers recognize Hume as a precursor of contemporary cognitive science, as well as one of the most thoroughgoing exponents of philosophical naturalism….

…Born in Edinburgh, Hume spent his childhood at Ninewells, the family's modest estate on the Whitadder River in the border lowlands near Berwick. His father died just after David's second birthday, “leaving me, with an elder brother and a sister under the care of our Mother, a woman of singular Merit, who, though young and handsome, devoted herself to the rearing and educating of her Children.” (All quotations in this section are from Hume's autobiographical essay, “My Own life”, reprinted in HL.)

From what I can gather he was probably also the first modern psychologist and the first cultural anthropologist.

Of course he’s not a perfect modernist. His opinions on IQ and race are pretty much in line with his times (and today’s Bell Curve gang). So he’s only 200 years ahead of his time.

Incidentally, the 2008-2009 IOT season has begun. Podcasts are only available for a week, so I suggest subscribing to the IOT feed in addition to iTunes subscription (though now that I have an iPhone with Remote 1.1 I do leave iTunes running all the time).

Sounds familiar

I'm not nearly as extreme, or as talented, as the people Cringely mentions here, but there is a wee bit of a passing similarity ...

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Door Number Three | PBS

.... I have a friend of 20 years who is in a key technical role at a very large company. He's too vital to the company to risk losing but too geeky to fit in. He's on the craft (non-management) salary scale, but way higher than he ought to be for having no direct responsibility. All he does, in fact, is from time to time save his company from ruin. And even more rarely, he saves all the rest of us from ruin, too, in ways I am not at liberty to explain. How do you manage such a guy? Where he works they have him report to the CEO. The Big Guy has 5-6 direct reports and one of them -- my friend -- doesn't manage anyone or anything....

In most publicly traded corporations (PTC) rewards increase in proportion to the budget and team a person manages. PTCs can have a hard time dealing with oddballs who may be quite appreciated, but who don't fit the structure.

I think most of these people do best starting companies or joining small companies, but the latter are rare and the former is rather a lot of work - to the exclusion of other duties. Sometimes PTCs find a way to fit 'em in.

Fox attacks Sarah Palin the Black Democrat

Painfully wicked, painfully true.

Sarah Palin as a Black Democrat. Keith Knight: "Willow? Track? Trig? Black folks are cursing their children's futures with these crazy, ethnic names!!"

Where Wall Street meets Main street

A few hundred billion in bank losses typically means a few hundred billion in someone else's pocket. Winners and losers, money sloshing about, but, really, it need not impact the real world all that much. Not like a massive earthquake in, say San Francisco. There you'd be talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of real losses.

Where things meet the real world is when the financial system is so disrupted it can't fulfill it's essential functions including setting prices, assigning risks, and moving money around:

Why the threat of systemic meltdown is real - How the World Works - Salon.com:

... So why should we all be worried? Well, for one thing, if banks start failing, and credit markets freeze up, then any business that depends on rolling over short-term debt to fund daily activities is in danger. Remember Enron? Enron imploded in a matter of days because its lenders suddenly refused to roll over its short-term debt. But it's not just Wall Street investment banks and out-of-control Houston energy companies that depend on debt markets -- a vast number of large corporations engage in the same practices. And if a significant percentage of large corporations can no longer borrow money the implications for the 'real economy' will be substantial. Higher unemployment, slower or negative economic growth, etc...

Less activity means lower economic growth -- which is the equivalent of real, tangible, things getting destroyed.

Nice summary from HTWW. Unfortunately, with Bush/Cheney in power, we can't trust the executive branch to get things right. We've got to rely on the Democrat majority in the Senate to work out the best compromise ...

Will McCain withdraw?

Why would McCain duck a debate he was expected to do well at? He's been a better debater than Obama, and all he has to do is put on a reasonable show to win.

Maybe he wants to exert his will on the bailout bill. There's a good chance he'll be president -- he should have real influence within his party. Maybe he has donors he has to take care of.

Or maybe his Rovian advisors calculate political theater will get more votes than the debate. They could be right, they know their base much better than I do.

Or maybe McCain is not ready to be seen in a debate setting.

I've noted a few times that McCain is at risk, by virtue of age, smoking history and head injuries (Vietnam), of a dementing disorder. His erratic behavior over the past month makes that even more probable.

Cognitive disability in the aged often arises from a combination of the Alzheimer's process and vascular disease, including frequent small strokes. If he's experienced an abrupt drop in his cognition, I'd wonder about a small stroke or "micro-infarct". Typically symptoms will improve over days to a week, but usually not back to the previous status.

I'm not the only one to wonder, of course:

Daily Kos: Has John McCain had a stroke?

...listen to his speech, and look at his left eye. I'm no expert, and this is pure speculation only, but could the real reason McCain has suspended his campaign be because he has suffered a small stroke?

If McCain's health is failing the trip to Washington may also involve finding someone to stand in for him.

The Bush problem: how to rescue without ownership

So now we understand why the Paulson plan is so weird.

It is constrained by the Bushie's ideological aversion to owning private companies (emphasis mine, note Japan is not mentioned) ...

A billion slap in the face - Paul Krugman - New York Times Blog

... let’s talk about how governments normally respond to financial crisis: namely, they rescue the failing financial institutions, taking temporary ownership while keeping them running. If they don’t want to keep the institutions public, they eventually dispose of bad assets and pay off enough debt to make the institutions viable again, then sell them back to the private sector. But the first step is rescue with ownership.

That’s what we did in the S&L crisis; that’s what Sweden did in the early 90s; that’s what was just done with Fannie and Freddie; it’s even what was done just last week with AIG. It’s more or less what would happen with the Dodd plan, which would buy bad debt but get equity warrants that depend on the later losses on that debt.

But now Paulson and Bernanke are proposing, very nearly, to do the opposite: they want to buy bad paper from everyone, not just institutions in trouble, while taking no ownership....

Doing this without ownership is new ground. It's a choice mandated by executive branch ideology, not empirical reasoning.

You can't have it both ways. Either stay hands off and let the economy go where it will (to heck probably), or intervene and accept the scarlet stain of government ownership.

Dark flow - false alarm, right?

I've grown somewhat accustomed to the idea that our universe is far weirder than my brain can comprehend. Even so, this "dark flow" idea is pushing the envelope. For context, the In Our Time Multiverse program spent quite a bit of time talking about how no-one can imagine a way to test the nature of the universe beyond our event horizon.

I'm looking forward to commentary from my favorite physics bloggers. I assume it's a false alarm of some sort ...

SPACE.com -- Mysterious New 'Dark Flow' Discovered in Space

... Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon "dark flow."

The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude...

...Scientists discovered the flow by studying some of the largest structures in the cosmos: giant clusters of galaxies ... observing the interaction of the X-rays with the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is leftover radiation from the Big Bang, scientists can study the movement of clusters.

The X-rays scatter photons in the CMB, shifting its temperature in an effect known as the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect. This effect had not been observed as a result of galaxy clusters before, but a team of researchers led by Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., found it when they studied a huge catalogue of 700 clusters, reaching out up to 6 billion light-years, or half the universe away. They compared this catalogue to the map of the CMB taken by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite.

They discovered that the clusters were moving nearly 2 million mph (3.2 million kph) toward a region in the sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela. This motion is different from the outward expansion of the universe (which is accelerated by the force called dark energy).

"We found a very significant velocity, and furthermore, this velocity does not decrease with distance, as far as we can measure," Kashlinsky told SPACE.com. "The matter in the observable universe just cannot produce the flow we measure."

The scientists deduced that whatever is driving the movements of the clusters must lie beyond the known universe.

A theory called inflation posits that the universe we see is just a small bubble of space-time that got rapidly expanded after the Big Bang. There could be other parts of the cosmos beyond this bubble that we cannot see.

In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn't contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.

"The structures responsible for this motion have been pushed so far away by inflation, I would guesstimate they may be hundreds of billions of light years away, that we cannot see even with the deepest telescopes because the light emitted there could not have reached us in the age of the universe," Kashlinsky said in a telephone interview. "Most likely to create such a coherent flow they would have to be some very strange structures, maybe some warped space time. But this is just pure speculation...

I suspect thse guys are jumping the gun by a fair bit, but looking forward to more commentary.

700 billion fluffy nothings

Sadly, an Obama administration would be bad news for Morford. The modern GOP inspires him...

700 billion fluffy nothings / Staggering bailouts? Body counts? Global warming stats? They're just numbers, silly

... A $700 billion bailout of a Bush-gutted economy by an already nearly bankrupt U.S. Treasury? Two trillion for a failed war in Iraq? Ten trillion in national debt and a $480 billion budget deficit (not counting the $700B for the bailout and it could be much more) and a record trade deficit, with all those numbers nearly double (if not far more) of what they were in 2001? Why, you'd almost think someone -- or maybe an entire administration, perhaps the most irresponsible in modern U.S. history -- was largely to blame. But they're not! Because they're just numbers...

Patents gone bad: slowing science

Patents and copyrights are not a rule of physics, nor a matter of human rights or natural justice.

They exist to benefit society, creating a temporary wealth incentive for the holder to increase scientific and technological progress.

The system is defective. On the one hand we have Nathan Myhrvold's patent extortion scheme, on the other evidence that the patent system is 'stifling science'.

We don't need to throw out patents and copyright entirely. We do need serious reform. I hope China will lead the way if the US and Europe cannot.

Reform begins with the phased elimination of process patents. They were a terrible error. In other domains patent lifetimes must be shortened. Overlapping patents consolidated. The cost of obtaining a patent increased.

We have enough problems without creating more through wrong headed law.

Update: Today is world stop software patents day. Who knew?

McCain Flintstone -- the Dinosaurs by Kathy Writes

A friend of ours is managing election trauma through the lens of an old tv show ...

2008 Election: The Dinosaurs

John Flintstone padded through his Sedona adobe abode, one of his seven luxury caves, grumbling.

“Cindy, where are my flag coveralls? Sarah’s going to be here any minute. We’re getting in the Dinomobile and off to Colorado again.”

“Consuela is washing them, you grumpy old man,” Cindy called. She was standing near the fire pit, trying on one of 400 potential inaugural outfits. “It’s in the spin cycle.”

He heard the club hitting the front door bam, bam, bam and stumbled off to answer it. “Keep your mini-skirt on, Sarah,” he yelled. “I was a POW, remember?”

He opened the door. Sarah stood there with her slingshot and club, panting, pointing proudly behind her. On the ground lay a dead moose, bleeding. “I brought you a present, Gramps,” she said.

“Sarah, how much moose do you think we can eat?”

“You have to be ready for end times, John. Hang it over the fire and smoke it.”

Consuela rushed forward with his flag coveralls. She stopped to gape at Sarah, who was wearing a mid-thigh-length skirt made of dinosaur hide, an Amazonian-style brassiere and a boa made of auk feathers....

She's now on episode 2.

Kathy Writes is a pseudonym. Andy, you know who she is!

The Economist is irrelevant. Sad.

I read The Economist devoutly for about 20 years. The last ten years of my subscription were increasingly dismal. Two years ago I gave up...

Gordon's Notes: The Economist 1986-2006. RIP.

... I gave up on the Economist this year. I signed up in residency; it was fabulous back then. Smart, cool, analytic. It weakened in the early 90s, then it took a sudden dive around 1996. Maybe it had something to do with the color photos....

The Economist I loved had turned into a pale imitation of the WSJ OpEd pages.

I still follow a few feeds -- Africa, Science, and the obituary. Mostly though, I don't think about my old friend.

So it was with a start that I realized that nobody I read mentions it any more. I'm not the only one to have forgotten them.

We're in the midst of the biggest financial event since 1930, and The Economist is irrelevant.

Maybe Rupert Murdoch will buy them.

Do they care?

Why I don't read letters to the editor ...

Noteworthy, but not surprising ...

I ghost-wrote letters to the editor for the McCain campaign | Salon News

... Next to commercials and phone banking, writing letters to the editor is the most important method of the McCain campaign to attract voters...

It's a form of spam of course.

Gramm fear - explaining it to Republicans

Krugman tells us how we can explain our fear of Treasury secretary Gramm to Republicans ...

Princeton saves the world - Paul Krugman - New York Times Blog

... I’ve been pointing out that the dictatorial powers Paulson has sought would accrue to the next Treasury secretary, who might well be Phil Gramm. I’ve been trying to come up with a liberal-leaning name who might seem equally horrifying to Republicans, and the only one I’ve come up with is … me.

Treasury secretary Krugman. Let's try it on Limbaugh.

Ministry of Treasury Paulson dials 419

A 419 message received today ...

Egregious Moderation: Ministry of Treasury Paulson

... I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. ...

... After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds."

Brilliant. Unsigned, but I think by Brad DeLong.

Trust the Bush administration?

I'd sooner sign with a 419 scam. At least my money might find its way into an impoverished nation ...

Rescuing Wall Street - No equity stake, no deal

It's the new bottom line for the trillion dollar rescue package:

Getting real and letting the cat out of the bag - Paul Krugman: "No equity stake, no deal."

In other words, we partly nationalize those that need help.