"The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha...which is to demean oneself."*
Since I was a kid I’ve had an ongoing debate in my head about whether the world is complicated and hard to understand or whether it’s actually quite simple and straightforward.
I know, it’s a silly question, and of course, the answer is relative to your perspective, or to the question you’re asking, or to what you’re trying to get out of things. Still, though, whenever my head goes down that road of thought – the one that deems the question silly – it’s clearly coming from the analytic – maybe read complex – part of my brain that wants to break everything down and attach qualifiers to everything it sees. That’s the pro-complex side in the debate talking. It deems not only that the world is complex, but, more importantly, that this is whole question is worthless and unfocused because we have to get back to work and figure more things out.
Nonetheless, this little debate has stayed with me for quite some time – almost in a nostalgic sense, like a pop song that you like when you’re young, and as you return to it throughout life it takes on new meanings. I’m not sure what’s fueling it. I think it’s a nagging feeling that life is pretty simple, but we just make things artificially complicated for ourselves. That’s the pro-simple side of the debate. Recently I’ve been erring towards the simple side. Maybe it’s because I need to think less and do more.
But as I think about it more, the problem seems to be that when you look into phenomena, you can either raise more questions or consolidate phenomena. On some level many of us are familiar with both of these outcomes, and at times they go hand-in-hand. The ability to raise more questions is what drives knowledge – it’s that section at the end of a research paper that states future directions for your research; more importantly, it’s that intuitive feeling that the more you learn, the more you discover you don’t know.
And yet we’ve all had that feeling where we solve a problem, life is better, and, well, that’s that.
Although if the drive for knowledge ever became complacent in its footsteps – as if it were to accomplish some new feat, and say to itself, “That’s just what I was looking for. We’ve made such great progress that I feel like I can take a break for a while and bask in the glory of my achievements” – well, then it would have stopped a long time ago.
At the same time, this endless drive forward produces a more fragmentary and disconnected picture of things, where further endeavors become more exacting and less relevant. We’re back at the complicated side of things.
The saving grace is that all of these bits of explanations will eventually be consolidated, somehow sometime. The individual study of such disconnected areas as the color of pigeons, speciation of dogs, beaver dam-building, and barnacles might leave one with an incoherent view of things, but it left Darwin with the puzzle pieces to propose evolution by means of natural selection. For every system of Ptolemaic complexity I presume there must be a Copernican revolution waiting on the other end to fix things. It’s just that the turnaround time can be slow, and that the whole thing only becomes obvious in retrospect. Most importantly however different fields are more or less open to change, and this is where that nagging pro-simple feeling – that we’re making the world artificially complex – returns. On the one hand, the modern sub-division of scientific fields might actually reflect true scientific progress along with the real nature of the things. On the other hand, there may be artificial or economic reasons for keeping things so complicated. Afterall, the time-consuming credentials required to practice science or medicine inherently pushes those professions towards further specialization. This specialization might not be a bad thing, as per Adam Smith the modern economy is based on it, but it can become suspect when – unlike private or less regulated areas – the costs of entry are greater than the out-going benefits, creating diseconomies of scale like our health care system (or, more questionably, like science...I'll have to think on that one some more).
From another perspective, the pro-simple side of me keeps wondering what that Copernican revolution – or even just a bit of genuine scientific consolidation – would look like in various fields. Its benefits I’d think would have to outweigh the pressures pushing towards specialization.
“See the trees outside the window,” my high school English teacher once told us. “Aren’t they just so…beautiful? Trees are good for the environment. But I think they’re just pretty to look at. If people cut down trees then our city would look so …dreary.” She went on to tell us that our city had been named Tree City USA for a number of consecutive years. “I feel honored to live in Tree City USA,” she concluded.
I attended public high school in a liberal area. In English class we learned about the virtues of planting trees and recycling. In biology we learned about compost piles. In government we learned how Hoover’s lassiz-faire philosophy worsened the Great Depression, while FDR’s New Deal brought down unemployment through public works programs like the massive Hoover Dam.
It was a secular and tolerant area of the country, so we were never told that evolution was just a theory. But since then the debate over how to teach evolution in public schools has grown exponentially. As evolution becomes more ingrained in mainstream science, there's a stronger push to teach it at lower levels of education. Just recently the Texas education board narrowly decided that teachers of evolution didn’t have to present the theory’s weakness. The debate is cast as a strange hybrid of science versus religion meets separation of church and state. The real problem lies not with science or religion, but with the state. The debate is borne out of the awkward institution of public education.
Public education is argued to be a lofty institution. And as with most lofty endeavors, its proponents use all sorts of arguments to back it: It’s a human right. It leads to social mobility. It’s a foundation of democracy – how are the people supposed to vote on issues when they’re uninformed? The truth afterall will set you free. How can we have a country where people are ignorant of the truth?
These principles might sound good in theory, but they don’t translate into practice. Our government is good at supplying everyone with the same services, but it’s dreadful when it needs to tailor services to individuals with different needs. Nowhere is this more evident than in public education, where you have some parents arguing that they don’t want their children to learn about evolution, others arguing that their children need to know about evolution in order to compete among the world's intellectual elite, while inner-city schools continue to fall apart regardless.
Evolutionists and creationists each think that they can solve the debate by debunking the other side – that the debate is somehow about evolution versus creationism. Personally I strongly suspect that the evolution-side is "right" in every meaningful sense of the word, but that's not what's fueling the debate. It’s not about who’s right and wrong, because neither side should have to pay for the others’ education.
The argument is sometimes made that evolution shouldn't be seen as stepping on religion's toes. But it does. If it didn't, then religious parents wouldn't feel like their values are threatened by it. Creationist parents are then pressured to use scientific arguments against evolution. But since they're not scientists, those arguments always fall flat, and then scientists mock creationists as both wrong and stupid. But scientists fail to see that it's not about science, it's about values. It's one thing for a scientist - after years of higher education - to call someone else with only a bachelor's, or God forbid, just a high school degree, as ignorant of science. But it's another thing for the scientist to then take control over how their children are educated. The scientist might know more about science, but what does he know about raising a child?
The strain, once again, falls on the fact that most of our schools are public. If more areas transitioned to a voucher system, then the debate would cool down; and if all schools were private, it would be a moot point on the national scene. The flaw in the current system is that everyone’s education becomes everyone’s businesses.
The evolution debate continually brings me back to my liberal high school lessons. Of course, being biased is no crime. But the notion that public education is this pure untouchable right which produces well-informed democratic citizens doesn’t match up with reality. Rather, public education leads to national conflicts of interest about how to best mold the minds of our youth. The debate over evolution is just one of many manifestations of the problems inherent in a public school system.
Dog-breeding, the colors of pigeons, beaver dams, and beehives. These were culled from the wide array of examples Darwin uses to propose evolution by means of natural selection. Typical of former renaissance writers, Darwin wrote with long sentences and erred on the side verbosity. In order to get into his work, you have to slow your mind and get it into a certain flow. Similar to many great writers, his volumes of work now might seem to the modern reader overbearing and archaic, overweighed by infinite trivial examples. But on the contrary, his examples demonstrate how evolution is all around us, in the everyday and in the mundane. And furthermore, where was Darwin supposed to start?
You see, since reading Robert Pirsig, I’ve become absolutely hung up on this notion of lateral truths. We often try to construct our lives in order to move straight forward, but Pirsig argued that there’s more to be gained from lateral movement. The movement straightforward, he argues, simply produces more and more things – be it facts or products – atop a weak edifice of previous things. Whereas lateral movement seeks to strengthen such edifices before going forward. I think that’s why I’ve been hesitant to write about the same topics both across blog posts and within them. Unfortunately I often stop and stutter in my writing, both in the typing and in my thoughts, going back and forth and checking my ideas in various ways. I apologize for any inconvenience, as it's anything but convenient for myself. But the point is that it’s not about adding on top, it’s about consolidating seemingly disconnected pieces across a wide array of phenomena. That’s where my mind seems to be gravitating so that's where I'll go. Darwin began his scientific career as a barnacle expert, supposedly based on the advice that in order make any scientific contribution to the world you have to narrow your focus. He was heavily influenced by geologist Charles Lyell, who set forth similar principles as Darwin’s in his study of rock-formations across the world. On Darwin's formative Voyage of the Beagle, he inspected various islands and peninsulas. Supposedly Darwin brought 3 books on the trip: Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the bible. In piecing together The Origin of Species, he also met with dog breeders and a London-based pigeon-watching society.
When you look at all the separate pieces of evidence that yielded Darwin’s conception of evolution – of which the above are a small sample – you have to ask yourself where you don’t see evolution. It’s uncannily similar to religious arguments for the existence of God – just look around you, can’t you see that there's evidence of Him everywhere?
Darwin’s theory of evolution – and maybe even people's belief in God – both serve to consolidate seemingly disparate things. It’s atop these edifices that we’re then genuinely able to move forward for some time. Adam Smith also had an uncanny ability to construct theory atop the seemingly mundane. In a stroke of literary genius, he began his multi-volume work by discussing pin-manufacturing in Europe. This topic would certainly seem pointless to most people, particularly ivory tower theorists, but that was exactly the point - that even in such a small everyday example, you can see the workings of the division of labor. Shakespeare achieved a similar feat of specificity in his line:
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child (King Lear, Act I, Scene IV)
As a professor once told me, consider how that line would've fallen apart if you replaced "teeth" for "tooth". But if Smith's pin-making example was merely a rhetorical gimmick or a literary hook, then he would have dived straight into abstract theory with little or no return to the real world. Instead, Smith constantly goes back to the real world to support and test his developing ideas. And this gets at the heart of the study of economics, which is to pinpoint the wide-ranging and long-term effects of policy decisions on areas as specific as pin-making. (Pun intended, but it's not really a pun due to the shared meanings of 2 words).
Evolution and capitalism are unfortunately often discussed in platitudes as ideologies. But what I love about Darwin and Smith is that in their writings you can see their theories organically growing out of their observations of the world. Not that this makes their theories automatically correct, but it reveals an honesty that’s too often missing in intellectual discussion.
A lot of writing these days is reactionary and steeped in hatred – this is particularly the case in Karl Marx, whose writings have succeeded more as a polemic against the upper-class than an applicable economic system. Whenever I detect too much spite in a book or an editorial I get a sense that it has little to teach me. All that Darwin and Smith were reacting to was nature right in front them; Thomas Sowell has a similar honesty in his writings as well.
In a few passages in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig will be talking to someone who disagrees with him, and the 1st thought that will come to my mind will be, “Oh that other person is so wrong.” This is because Pirsig builds his case so well in the book. But Pirsig will go on to say, “And in a way they were completely correct.” It’s not just another rhetoric gimmick, because in time you come to see how in that way they were completely correct. When you can see how everyone is correct in their own sense, then you can really get to the bottom of things. It harks back to using Aristotles' law of non-contradiction to your advantage. The law states: "It is impossible for the same thing to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect". What you have to realize, however, is that one person's opinion in favor of something is not the opposite as someone else's opinion against it: They're both true in their own sense, what differs is that sense. And it's that sense that you have to drag your mind to.
What I love about all these authors is that they’re not writing with an axe to grind. The benefit of reading such original sources like Darwin and Smith isn’t that they presented the perfect the version of their theories, it's that they truly saw their theory manifested throughout nature over and over and over again. They were thinking in the right sense. And in doing so, they consolidated phenomena, made the world simpler not more complex, and laid the groundwork for others to build upon. They weren’t moving up, they were trying to get to the bottom of things. There's an aesthetic appreciation for this as well; it's why repetition, used correctly, can be so powerful. Consider the role of repetition in learning or in music. Choruses in songs aren't just effective because they're good in and of themselves, they're effective because when you return to them your mind is slightly different from when it last experienced it.
This is what I’ve been trying to do recently. It recently struck me that the solution to most problems in life – be them intellectual or personal – is to stop and think to yourself, “What’s really going on here? What’s underlying the manifestation I’m seeing in front of me?” It’s a sort of analysis, or a division of labor in the mind so to speak. In my day-to-day life, when I face personal problems, I realize that my mind goes off and I forget to analyze, or I’m not analyzing correctly. Maybe I’m just over-thinking things. But it seems like the world's problems are all just due to a lack of clarity.
Ironically I realize that the last sentence may be vague, unclear. Pirsig expresses a similar sentiment when he describes an instructional manual he's saved over the years. The manual begins, "Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind." Pirsig describes this instruction as both the best and the worst instruction he's ever seen: It contains nothing specific to putting together the bike, but it's a great, perhaps even essential, piece of advice for piecing together the bike, and in that sense, it has everything to do with putting together the bike. Pirsig goes on:
Peace of mind isn't at all superficial, really...It's the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test's always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.
So it’s not just analysis in the classical sense. Sometimes you have to ask yourself about general impressions that you get, make deductions based on them, and then follow those paths down to analysis. Like impressionistic art, you’re feeling a feeling, looking at a whole, and then diving down and asking yourself about versions of meaning. Which is why there's little to gain when at the bottom of things is an emotion like hatred, spite, or an attempt to maintain one's opinion rather than to learn about the real world, the latter of which should always be the focus. I’m sure that Darwin thought of evolution before he actively sought many of the examples in his book; it’s just that after he thought of his theory, he still kept his feet firmly planted on the ground.
Contrary to some opinions, an economic recession is not like a Christmas sale at Macy’s. Yes, they both lower prices and provoke all sorts of mad rushes. But recessions are grave. They’re long hard winters in the wilderness. Companies die. They resemble mass extinctions over evolutionary history, and in that sense have a fascinating, maybe even positive long-term effect. Yet recommendations to buy buy buy, even from Warren Buffett, need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Survivorship bias gives us an overly rosy depiction of history. The term draws attention to an inherent bias in types of retrospective analysis; it's due to how many historical studies only focus on entities that still exist today. For example, most studies of stock market activity during the great depression will only look at companies that survived the whole great depression. This is because companies that go out of business don't have an effect that is easily quantifiable. Empirically speaking, this bias causes analyses to overestimate historical achievements by overlooking public companies that went under.
Survivorship bias is often explicitly recognized as a factor, but it's usually minimized as a statistical artifact, or a minor inconvenience that pops out of data - something to keep in the back of your mind while you’re looking at market trends. But it fully permeates how we judge the stock market, and you can see this on an intuitive level as well:
Think to yourself, quickly, of a few companies that you should have invested in 40 years ago.
Simple enough. Now quickly name a few companies that you shouldn’t have invested in. It’s a bit harder - especially if you don't follow the market closely. But there are tens of thousands of lousy investments over stock market history, and many of them quietly went out of business.
Economic recessions further inflate survivorship bias as the frequency of bankruptcy increases. That is, more businesses go bankrupt, so more businesses are taken out of a study's view. Following an economic recession - and they can last anywhere from years to decades - the market often recovers, and you hear about how great it would have been to buy in while stocks prices were so low. This is often true, and in retrospect you can cherrypick some stocks that would have made you a ton a money. What you don't see are stocks of companies that simply went out of business, which would've lost you money. And this is particularly relevant for buy-and-hold value investors, with time increasing the chances of going belly-up.
With time recessions yield rich fruits. No doubt they’ll provide a few great value investments, but in the grander sense, things always get better. Just as personal challenges offer the best opportunity for growth, recessions stimulate growth. They provide space for new entities to operate.
Biological evolution provides an eerily similar scenario: Scarcity, tough times – long hard winters – stimulate living creatures to evolve. Mass extinctions have a much stronger effect on evolution than times of plenty. Species that survive extinctions are more likely to live through future disasters. While species that die off leave niches for better ones to take their place.
It’s no mistake that humans originated in Africa, which contains some of the harshest climates in the world (along with the most diverse climates in the world packed into one continent). Our relatively modest physical stature may have allowed us to develop alternative resources – like intelligence – in order to survive. Unlike gorillas, we couldn’t rely on physical strength alone (while smaller animals like monkeys often rely more on social living).
Natural resources, like a gorilla’s brute strength, often actually negate the short-term need for intelligent solutions. Economically, a plethora of resources often curse a country’s economy (as with Russia and the Middle East). While in contrast wealthy countries contain relatively few natural resources.
Survivorship bias heavily skews our perception of evolutionary history, even moreso than it skews our perception of the stock market. For every species alive today, there were hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of extinct species. A common myth of evolutionary history is that we currently live during at its peak. This belief may partially in true in some regards – we maybe the most advanced intelligent species that ever roamed the earth. But such judgments are heavily egocentric in their assumption that intelligence is the end-all and be-all of evolution, which is very improbable, and they also ignore other forms of intelligence exhibited by species as wide-ranging as ants and beavers. It's a clear cut case of survivorship bias, just like in the stock market, because we're not seeing all the creatures that have died in the past.
Still, harsh times are generally followed by better ones – not just because things can only get better, but because we become equipped with better tools to help us overcome future hardship. In the wake of our current recession, some well-established companies will be able to lick their wounds and thrive again, and new and improved companies are going to crop up where poorer ones failed. Certainly this provides a window for some great value-investments. But I would encourage the shrewd investor, in picking his buys, to still see these times for what they are, and to recall that entities as promising and diversified as the mammoth, trilobite, and triceratops have all had their day.
-KJ _______________ Media (in order of appearance)
Eve of Tuesday 2019
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Efficiency has been on my mind lately. I would sincerely like to be more
efficient. Yet, the greatest challenge with this statement may be
determining what...
MH370 - Why Search Teams Ignored Georesonance
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*MH370 - Why Search Teams Ignored Georesonance*
As soon as I read about the claims that Georesonance identified an aircraft
wreck at the bottom of the Bay ...
Most importantly however different fields are more or less open to change, and this is where that nagging pro-simple feeling – that we’re making the world artificially complex – returns. On the one hand, the modern sub-division of scientific fields might actually reflect true scientific progress along with the real nature of the things. On the other hand, there may be artificial or economic reasons for keeping things so complicated. Afterall, the time-consuming credentials required to practice science or medicine inherently pushes those professions towards further specialization. This specialization might not be a bad thing, as per Adam Smith the modern economy is based on it, but it can become suspect when – unlike private or less regulated areas – the costs of entry are greater than the out-going benefits, creating diseconomies of scale like our health care system (or, more questionably, like science...I'll have to think on that one some more).
– or even just a bit of genuine scientific consolidation – would look like in various fields. Its benefits I’d think would have to outweigh the pressures pushing towards specialization.
, and 
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