Philosophy of Science: Mathematical Modelling, Assumptions and Causal Realism

Q: How can mathematical modelling succeed when it inevitably involves false assumptions?

We happen to know from the history of science that models with false assumptions can be used to make systematically correct predictions with well-understood conditions of application. Kepler's laws of planetary motion are a canonical example [Colyvan & Ginzburg [2003]]; a more dramatic illustration is provided by the very considerable improvements in the power of metereological and climate-modelling since the 1950s. ¹ The very general explanation for this very general fact is that the dynamics---the progression of state changes---of even complex systems seem to causally depend to a large degree on changes in only a small number of mathematically isolable variables which we can track with mathematical equations. This convenience given us by nature does not, however, entail scientific convenience; instead, it has the consequence that truly successful model-building in higher-level sciences will invariably require the identification of the critical causal variables---that is, the right theory or understanding. This methodological truth sits very uncomfortably with the fact that, precisely because of the large number of variables in play in the large-system modelling in the higher-level sciences, there seems to be very little hope for decisive empirical disconfirmation or falsification of models (embodying theories) which are at least vaguely appropriate for the target system. ²

My thesis in this essay is that these considerations ought to lead one to the view that assumptions do, in fact, really matter: more specifically, that the laissez-faire instrumentalist attitude towards assumptions within scientific theories (which has historically held most sway within the discipline of economics) is deeply misguided. I suggest that the history of science (including recent science, and recent developments within ecology) gives strong weight to the view that models which do not embody the causal structure of their target system either don't have predictive success at all, or eventually badly misfire, on account of being attuned only to some subset of the states of the system, rather than locking into the causal structure which determines the state changes of the system. I submit that the key source of instrumentalist error is the failure to recognise that there are different kinds of modelling assumptions, with different scientific significance, and that models which are not `realistic' in terms of their modelling of causal structure cannot succeed (at least in the long-run). I argue that ecology is an excellent case study for this thesis, by attempting to show that causal realism and the absence of highly unrealistic domain assumptions [Musgrave [1981]] is a feature of successful and commonly used models in ecology.

In his paper “Models and Fictions", the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith makes much of the fact that the scientific enterprise depends on mathematical fiction in the course of asking how it is that fictions in general can tell us about the world [Godfrey-Smith [2009]]. Left unexplored by Godfrey-Smith in the short paper is the fact that in the realm of science we call “fundamental physics", the history and current practice of the science gives us reason to think that our fundamental reality may be perfectly describable using mathematics.³ Godfrey-Smith does himself observe that one of the viable explanations for the problem

¹ More dramatic since, although the amount of chemical and atmospheric `variables' explicitly encoded in climate models has increased over the last few decades and climate models are complicated enough to require state-of-the-art computing power to run, even our best climate models are still (perforce) attempts only to capture the `core' causal structure of the dynamics of

the chaotic target systems [Lucarini [2013]].

²There always exist escape clauses in the form of phrases like “exogenous shocks" and “disturbing factors". To clarify, I do not mean to convey a nihilistic, defeatist or relativist attitude towards the possibility of rational rejection of theories within the higher-level sciences (leading to genuine scientific progress); it will become clear that I believe, in fact, that models which have patently causally unreal assumptions (models which clearly embody the wrong theory) should be dismissed out of hand regardless of any apparent early empirical confirmation. Unfortunately, in the social sciences, there really does seem to be very little hope at all that such norms could be acceded to by a majority, because of the role of ideology and other social

complications.

³The theories of “fundamental physics" really do seem to be profoundly non- fictional, not embodying any assumptions known to be false in the way that higher-level sciences must. The General Theory of Relativity does not model spacetime as if it were a four-dimensional `pseudo-Riemannian' manifold; instead, we have no other grasp on what spacetime is. Similarly, Quantum Electrodynamics (the relativistic quantum field theory of electrodynamics, which Feynmann called the “jewel of

of how fictional mathematical models can tell us about the world is that many of the features of “reality" we assume away to design a good mathematical model are just ornaments for the fundamental universal mathematical patterns inherent in nature---such that a good mathematical model of a system, making the right kind of assumptions, simply cuts through the frippery. ⁴ Whatever the merits of Platonism, I claim that we have very good reason to believe that a very humanly useful approximation of the `causal architecture' of even highly complex or chaotic natural systems is isolable by means of mathematical equations encoding the dominant (numerically abstractable) dependencies of the system. I claim this in view of our knowledge that the necessary presence of the ceteris paribus clause and the “idealisation" in the canonical models of science as we move beyond fundamental physics into non-fundamental physics (and beyond non-fundamental physics into the rest) are not handicaps to very impressive predictions. As I noted in the introduction, it is not just the familiar tales of early Enlightenment physics that bear this out; one of the less appreciated major scientific success stories of the second half of the 20th Century is the constant leaps and bounds we have made in computer-modelling of the earth's weather and climate since the process started with the primitive computers of the 1950s. A 2015 paper in Nature entitled “The Quiet Revolution of Numerical Weather Prediction" gives us some of the key facts testifying to the magnitude this achievement: “Forecast skill in the range from 3 to 10 days ahead has been increasing by about one day per decade" whilst (as an example of some of the progress in longer-term forecasting that has been made) “tropical sea surface temperature variability following the El Nino/Southern Oscillation phenomenon can be predicted 3-4 months ahead" [Bauer et al. 2015, 47].

Unlike Godfrey-Smith (assuming I interpret him correctly), I reject the position that there is any kind of philosophically interesting analogy to be had between novels or films or other obvious fictions, and successful mathematical models of complex systems used in progressive science. I think instead that understanding the different kinds of assumptions in play in mathematical modelling within the various `higher' realms of the scientific enterprise can help us demarcate pseudoscientific modelling---that is, mathematical models that are more akin to novels or films---from mathematical models of complex systems that, whilst necessarily fictional in the sense that they only trace some of the core emergent dependencies or patterns inherent in the target system, are realistic in the sense that, by foregrounding some of the right emergent dependencies (i.e. by embodying a good theory of the target system), have locked into the “deep structural forces" of the target system that determine its evolution through time. As we'll see, I think that this can be illustrated by case studies: by drawing a contrast between---on the one hand---weather/climate modelling and successful modelling in ecology (population dynamics) (and various work on the margins of economics (complexity economics) and the new field of cliodynamics), and---on the other hand---DSGE-modelling in macroeconomics, whose predictive failures can be explained by the fact that the entire enterprise instantiates false domain assumptions (fundamentally embodying the mistaken assumption that the macroeconomy is an equilibrium system).

Before we can analyse these case studies, it is necessary to introduce an analytical tool: a taxonomy of assumptions in scientific theories due to the philosopher Alan Musgrave (contained in his brief discussion of Milton Friedman's very confused philosophy of instrumentalism from the in influential essay “Methodology of Positive Economics"). Musgrave claims that there are three kinds of assumptions worth distinguishing: negligibility assumptions, domain assumptions and heuristic assumptions. The third is less relevant for our investigations, but I shall quickly describe the first two. A negligibility assumption is an assumption that a certain phenomenon not known to be negligible in the real world (or known to be not negligible at least some of the time) is negligible. Galileo tested his theory about the acceleration of falling bodies in a vacuum in the real world with the assumption that (in his experimental cases) air-resistance was of no consequence (correct, in his experimental cases, though clearly not in general). In the complex-systems-level sciences,

physics" [Feyman 1985, 4]) has been confirmed by predictions at an astonishing level of precision---levels of precision that give us reason to think that the equations we have come up really do describe the fundamental dynamics about as well as one could imagine describing them.

⁴ Godfrey-Smith connects this explanation to the doctrine of Structuralism in philosophy of mathematics, the essence of which is given away by the title of Michael Resnik's 1997 book, Mathematics as the Science of Patterns.

we might consider calling the equivalent assumption-category the relative insignificance assumption, simply because in modelling population dynamics in ecology, financial crises in economics, or the rise and fall of social cohesion in history, a scientist will be forced to leave out plenty of variables which they know to make a super-negligible difference much or all of the time in the real world. This, of course, does not mean that they cannot do proper science: as I'll argue when I introduce the case studies, the scientist maintains a claim to doing science for a complex system if they can generate system state-changes that mirror the dynamics of the target system from the simplest possible model embodying their given theory, because this is a good indication that they have struck causal realism. The second kind of assumption, the domain assumption, is of a rather more general kind: it can be thought of as any kind of positive assumption that specifies the world embodied by the model (as opposed to the real world). More helpfully, an unrealistic domain assumption is an aspect of the mathematical structure of a model that is most definitely at odds with the target system it is supposed to model. I see the core instrumentalist mistake as the elision of the fact that any successful predictions made by a model which embodies too many unrealistic domain assumptions will be entirely accidental (and the addition of parameters and extra variables, bells and whistles, to bootstrap predictive power will just make the situation worse when there is a significant shift in the state of the system).

We now have the framework necessary for our case studies, beginning with ecology itself, or, more precisely, “population dynamics". In his 2002 treatise on the methodology, theory and models of mathematical ecology, Complex Population Dynamics, the ecologist and `cliodynamicist' Peter Turchin argues that ecology has become a mature, predictive science, and he attempts to demonstrate this via an analysis of a series of models. Relevant to this enterprise, the book also contains (and embodies) an expression of Turchin's modelling philosophy for complex systems science, a philosophy he has applied in his research in both ecology and on human societies in his development of the Structural-Demographic Theory of the internal cycles of empires. I think this modelling philosophy gives us the key to understanding what good complex-systems modelling should look like. Turchin's methodological algorithm goes as follows.

First, if there are two or more theories postulating fundamentally distinct (though not necessarily completely incompatible) causal mechanisms for a certain explanandum, then these theories must be given a maximally simple mathematical expression and their predictions/retrodictions compared with the data (maximally being the key word, of course, since `simple' in this context does not mean that they are easy-to-solve differential equations like the models introduced to beginning ecology students, or that they are as blatantly unrealistic as such models are). ⁵ Two miscellaneous examples of such explananda due to Turchin himself (from history and ecology respectively) are:

a)      The `saw-toothed' cohesion-cycles observed throughout historical societies, for which the two general competing theories are the “Malthusian theory" and the “Structural-Demographic (`elite overproduction') theory" (he has written several books explicating the latter).

b)   The fluctuations in “southern pine beetle" population size, for which the dominant explanation in the 1980s was climactic (exogenous), but which now appears (thanks to analysis of time-series data) to be explicable mostly “by second-order endogenous factors" [Turchin 2003, 164].

Ideally, this procedure should at least allow for a pretty confident falsification of very bad theories---since, if the fit for the simple version is far off the mark, then it seems a very strong bet that the theory is causally unrealistic, and if a relatively simple model generates dynamics that broadly mirror those in the target system (of course this requires a variety of quantitative measures determining the average period, period strength etc), then one has strong evidence that it is a theory worth pursuing. Second, when it comes to deciding between models of varying complexity embodying the same theory (i.e. once one has a strong theory), the procedure is again empirical. As Turchin explains in Complex Population Dynamics, “The question of whether to include population structure or not can be resolved by constructing and contrasting with data

⁵ It should also be noted that whilst the above principle was fairly simple to state, this conceals the sophisticated statis-tical techniques and intelligent quantitative-measure choice that are needed to execute it properly (“We can then attempt to distinguish between the competing models by doing parallel time-series analyses on the data and on model outputs, to obtain quantitative measures of their relative success at matching the patterns in the data."[165]).

two versions of the model: one that explicitly incorporates individual variability [fewer relative-insgificance assumptions], and the other that averages over this variability with judiciously chosen functional forms [more relative-insignificance assumptions]." [Turchin 2003, 65] The long and short of the philosophy is this: (a) that we should add extra parameters and include more specific variables iff these lead to a model which is a better fit to the facts, and (b) that what is of most importance fundamentally is causal realism. Crucially, this methodological algorithm should actively discourage the production of models with clearly false domain assumptions, on account of the strongly counter-instrumentalist first step.

The highly advanced science of metereology may, on the surface, seem to impugn the first principle of this methodological philosophy, inasmuch as there are no serious climate models in contemporary use that could be described as `simple' (or even which are solvable by hand at all). However, this is superficial, since one critical factor that distinguishes metereology from ecology is that, from its very inception in the 1950s, the modellers had the key `theory' in place: fluid dynamics. As the aforementioned Nature article notes, “The Navier-Stokes and mass continuity equations (including the effect of the Earth’s rotation), together with the first law of thermodynamics and the ideal gas law, represent the full set of prognostic equations upon which the change in space and time of wind, pressure, density and temperature is described in the atmosphere" [Bauer et al. 2015, 48], meaning that the first principle described by Turchin was irrelevant. As for Turchin's second principle, I believe it is in play; it just so happens that adding complexity to models and taking advantage of all the computing power available has been the way to generate better predictive power in metereology. ⁶

The contrastive case study is the discipline of macroeconomics. I claim that the predictive uselessness of even the most celebrated macroeconomic models, particularly (but by no means solely) when it comes to major recessions and downturns, and particularly since 2008 [Edge et al. [2010], Keen [2011]] ---a state of a airs which has led to foundational questioning by some elder statesmen of the field [Blanchard [2016], Romer [2016] ]---has evolved from a historically rooted excessive tolerance of unrealistic domain assumptions (i.e. a philosophy of instrumentalism), which is anathema to Turchin's methodology. Economics evolved as a mathematical science before the advent of complex-systems mathematics, much like ecology, but the mainstream of the discipline did not respond to the complex-systems revolution at all. Whilst there was much upheaval within economics in the 1970s and 1980s (with the rise of Friedman and Lucas and the turn to microfounded macroeconomics), this only pushed the discipline in a more unrealistic direction, in terms of the fundamental assumptions about the economy, with the paradigm of the `representative consumer' (nothing like a real person) and `representative firm' (with a cost structure unlike any real firm) optimising towards an infinite horizon [Keen [2011], Lavoie [2015]]. More fundamentally, the central paradigm of mainstream neoclassical macroeconomics is the model of the economy as a system that does return to equilibrium absent “exogenous shocks", which is not path-dependent and which functions essentially like a machine [Keen [2011], Lavoie [2015]]. This is fundamentally opposed to reality, which is why the only predictive successes that DSGE models ever did generate were the result of tailoring models to recent data, so-called “overfitting". This kind of methodological practice which may generate very impressive near-term successes but it is also likely to result in massive scientific crisis when the target system state changes in a dramatic way (as in the GFC), because the overfitted model that was in use up to this state change is now doubly useless: not only has it been shown decisively that it does not embody the causal structure of the target system, there is nothing anyone can do about it, because how are we to know what exactly went wrong in such a highly parametrised, massively complicated, baroque model?

A key difference between ecology and economics can be observed in the way and in which the role of assumptions changes as one progresses in the subject. In ecology, the elementary models taught to students---the three central `laws' (as Turchin calls them [Turchin [2001]]) of the exponential growth model,

⁶ Again, we should add a detail here: metereologists and climate scientists don't generate their predictions just from running one perfect model. Because of the path-dependence of chaotic systems and our extremely imperfect knowledge about all the potentially relevant atmospheric data, it is necessary to use what is called “ensemble-modelling" (comparing similar models with different initial conditions, etc) to generate reliable results.

the logistic growth model and the Lotka-Volterra model---are not used precisely because of their very bad domain assumptions: Turchin calls the most complicated of the three, the Lotka-Volterra equations, “a horribly unrealistic model for real resource-consumer systems [...] so bad that, to my knowledge, there has been no successful application of it to any actual population system, whether in the field or laboratory" [Turchin 2001, 21]. But in economics, unlike ecology, the higher-level models, although of course far more complicated than the elementary models (their mastery requiring years of graduate training), are just as profoundly unrealistic as the elementary ones.

In summary, and in answer to the question, mathematical models in ecology (population dynamics) serve their purpose when they are built in such a way that their relative-insignificance assumptions are orthogonal to the key causal structure of the target system, enabling the models to generate solid predictions even as the state of the target system changes (because they are calibrated to the drivers of the system's state-changes). This fact helps us see how and in what sense assumptions matter in complex-systems science: the chief task has to be to find the right theory, and this task will inevitably result in the mulching of mathematical models that instantiate completely unrealistic domain assumptions. The scourge of `overfitting' can be avoided by focussing on arriving at a model that can generate all the states of the target system, not just generate some neat predictions in a period of equilibrium, and this is equivalent to a causally realistic model.

References

Bauer, Peter, Thorpe, Alan, & Brunet, Gilbert. 2015. “The quiet revolution of numerical weather prediction".

Nature, 525(7567), 47{55.

Blanchard, Olivier. 2016. “Do DSGE Models Have a Future?" Peterson Institute of International Economics, 11{16.

Colyvan, Mark, & Ginzburg, Lev R. 2003. “Laws of nature and laws of ecology". Oikos, 101(3), 649{653.

Edge, Rochelle M., Gurkaynak, Refet S., Reis, Ricardo, & A., Sims Christopher. 2010. “How Useful Are Estimated DSGE Model Forecasts for Central Bankers?" [with Comments and Discussion]. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 209{259.

Feyman, Richard P. 1985. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton University Press.

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2009. “Models and Fictions in Science". Philosophical Studies, 143(1), 101{116.

Keen, Steve. 2011. Debunking economics: the naked emperor dethroned? Rev. and expanded edn. London:

Zed Books Ltd.

Lavoie, Marc. 2015. Post-Keynesian Economics: New Foundations. Edward Elgar.

Lucarini, Valerio. 2013. “Modelling Complexity: The Case of Climate Science". Pages 229{253 of: Ghde, Ulrich, Hartmann, Stephen, & Wolf, Jrn H. (eds), Models, Simulations, and the Reduction of Complexity. De Gruyter.

Musgrave, Alan. 1981. “Unreal Assumptions in Economic Theory: The F-Twist Untwisted". Kyklos, 34(3), 377{387.

Romer, C. D. 2016. The Trouble with Macroeconomics. Commons Memorial Lecture of the Omicron Delta Epsilon Society.

Turchin, Peter. 2001. “Does population ecology have general laws?" Oikos, 94(1), 17{26.

Turchin, Peter. 2003. Complex Population Dynamics: A Theoretical/Empirical Synthesis. Princeton Uni-versity Press.

Civility, Non-Argument

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/930459427353890816

Jesse is correct.

As people like Scott Atran note, tribalism leads to moral crimes, even though it is (almost?) always mixed with righteousness and the conviction that one's side is incapable of moral crimes.
One of the things that has been really brought home to me over the last year is that it is a good idea to constantly check one's personal righteousness, no matter how good one thinks one is.
...Unfortunately, this advice is not likely to be heeded by many internet Leftists, since sequestering oneself away in communities packed full of moral grandstanders constantly striving for the most ultra-leftist signal does not really conduce to moral self-criticism!

Anyway, on a related note, remember that Sam Kriss guy? He was actually a real asshole on Twitter, and in general (I promise you I'm not suffering from hindsight bias, I had these views before). I mean, I guess he was not much more of an asshole than a lot of people on Twitter, but the reason I say it is this: people who criticised him on Twitter were routinely publicly insulted in colourful ways to entertain his enraptured sycophantic fans, and on more than occasion, a detractor with an unflattering photo was given the treatment of having an enlarged image of them posted by Sam accompanied by a caption in which he brutally insulted their appearance (a specific incident stuck in my mind where he tweeted the photo of some right-wing incel-type with a really severely blotchy face and said he looked like "mouldy bread" (I felt really, really sorry for the guy; I find it personally very troubling that this kind of bullying is tolerated amongst people who are supposedly meant to be caring and compassionate (medical problems seem to be fodder for humour among some Twitter leftists, which is also troubling to me))). Meanwhile, on his blog, he said some thoroughly nasty things in longer form about a bunch of people. Last year, he went after Nick Cohen pretty viciously. Funnily enough, I also strongly dislike Cohen and think he's not very good at thinking or writing (and when Kriss' piece on Cohen was originally published, I should say that I couldn't help finding it funny and nodding in agreement). Nevertheless, I am capable of recognising that he really did not deserve the vitriol and no doubt only felt his convictions about the loony left grow stronger as a result.
Of course, Kriss was not only an asshole, but also a highly irrational person, as I noted in a previous post that happens to be (last time I checked) the most viewed on my blog ever (http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com/2016/11/exhibit-exhibit-b-two-mysticist-counter.html). Worse, he was often most irrational when he was at his most horrible. For instance, in his infamous piece on Neil deGrasse Tyson, he castigates Tyson for spoiling the fun of life by constantly stating obvious facts that everybody knows... thereby betraying his total disconnect from the vast majority of humanity and making his extreme populist politics seem more laughable. (Sam, if you talk to ordinary people, you actually realise that they don't know basic scientific facts---which, incidentally, helps explain why not everyone does think that Neil deGrasse Tyson is an annoying pedant! A curious fact, isn't it, how these posh Marxist extreme-populists are so pretentious and elitist (anti-populist) in terms of how they express themselves (the absurd neologistic cant of the pseudo-intellectual charlatan academic Left) and what they talk about and even what they do (go to fancy restaurants and the theatre)---as Chomsky noted in his tremendously fun takedown of the entire postmodern Left from the 90s (http://www.mrbauld.com/chomsky1.html). It's almost like the more extreme the populist, the more extreme the cloistering from normal society!)

Kriss would, if he ever read this post, find it hilariously 'liberal' and stupid and whatever (my syntax here obviously embeds my assumption that his ostracism didn't turn him into an angry alt-right incel). I know this for sure (assuming his politics didn't change) because one of his major themes was the supposed absurd hypocrisy of people who are concerned with "civility" in discourse. This theme originally emerged on Twitter, but he also ended up writing a widely shared (on the Twitter left) blogpost on the issue called "The Iron Law of Online Abuse". I won't link this, because I only link things I endorse (I'm not being intellectually irresponsible, it's easy to find!). Sadly, it was a very bad and dumb post (this is relative to other posts and articles he wrote, which I sometimes liked quite a lot!). He pointed out correctly that there are angry and horrible people with all kinds of political affiliations and that the people most vocally concerned with "civility" tend to be massive hypocrites. What he failed to do was actually think about the issue generally and systematically---a recurring theme among internet Leftists. What do I mean by that (in this particular case)? Well, he totally ignored the following considerations: that people with extremist views like his (and I don't mean "extremist" here entirely pejoratively, because some of his extremist views are views which I myself would like to see become far less extremist) actually require advocates who are capable of convincing others and getting them on side; that being civil rather than resorting to personal insults means you are being a better person, because bullying people is wrong (and that it is irrelevant if you are bullying in the context of a debate about, e.g., war crimes, because your bullying is not helping stop those war crimes); that norms of civility almost certainly help us get closer to truth, by limiting polarisation and fractiousness; and that norms of civility probably help foster a healthier society. These considerations make me personally think that it is a very good idea to try to uphold a standard of civility!

As for why I turned that criticism into a general claim about online Leftists, I'll explain that now. A very recent Jesse Singal article (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/there-have-been-so-many-bad-lefty-free-speech-takes-lately.html) helps illustrate the problem with regard to "free speech". Singal notes that instead of actually thinking in terms of abstract moral principles and the long-term consequences of upholding or trashing certain political norms, many Leftists are instead opting for asinine moral grandstanding on free speech, adding weight to their positions not by means of argument, but by insinuating or even directly stating that people who don't agree with them have severe moral failings. I think this is a very important specific insight of Singal's, because I think it generalises. I think the same thing happened with the Nazi-punching 'debate', such as it was; instead of thinking rationally, the objection was simply, 'These people are Nazis? What are you, some kind of Nazi apologist? You don't think Nazis should be punched?' (for more, see http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/08/quick-and-belated-word-on-punching-nazis.html and https://johnhalle.com/outragesandinterludes/on-left-anti-fascism/). I think we are seeing it again in the extreme reactions to people writing articles worrying about trends in desire for extreme body modification in children and the apparently growing extreme dogma that children and early-adolescents with such desires always somehow know deep truths about what will make them happy (Singal's obviously been a major target of backlash on these issues, ever since his piece on Ken Zucker's (seemingly) terribly unfair firing (http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/02/fight-over-trans-kids-got-a-researcher-fired.html)). Believing, e.g., that drastic and dangerous medical interventions should be a last resort for kids and adolescents and that it's worrying that a growing number seem to be seeking it, does not mean that you don't think that we shouldn't try to eliminate job discrimination against trans people, encourage people to show concern about pronouns if uncertain, reduce 'attack helicopter'-type horrible bigotry, and let trans women into women's shelters. But such nuance is impossible for the overheated tribal soldiers of the internet.

The saddest thing about all of this trouble on "the Left" is that people like me or Jesse, who are 'far Left' insofar as we feel the Bern and hate the Democratic Party and think the Republican Party is the most dangerous organisation in human history and hate the fact that the US government kills thousands of people for no reason and whatnot (and I'm really an ultra-leftist on the environment, in that I think that environmental issues (pollution (plastic in the ocean, air pollution, heavy metals, etc), climate change, species extinction, soil salinisation and erosion, pesticides) totally subsume all other political concerns), are not only alienated by the horrible people I have described in the above, but actively excluded by them, decried as "liberals" for writing things like I have just written and thereby lumped in with the Eric Garlands and Hillary Clintons of the world in an absurdly Manichean, self-undermining ultraleftist worldview.
For chrissakes, people, I'm a huge fan of Chapo Trap House, even if they did seem to be fans of Sam Kriss before the big story and even (more fundamentally) if I do still fail to understand why people give themselves the invidious label of "socialist" when they are not that extreme in their politics and even if I am starting to grow in my conviction that I no longer want to call myself a "leftist" at all, despite all my nutty ultra-left views (well I mean I'm not into tribes anyway, even if tribes are the only hope for achieving anything).

Going Out

Tonight (it is 2:30AM on a Saturday night as I am typing this sentence), I 'went out' with my two housemates, D and C, and two of D's engineering friends, for the second time, and almost certainly for the last time (the key factor is not anything tragic, just that the three of us are soon to be evicted, about which more later). I left early, which is why I'm in bed creating this post. One of the things I shall endeavour to explain in this post is why I left early. I hope to cover in this post a significant amount more than that, of a lot more significance. I also hope to complete this post within the next hour in a fairly inebriated state. I don't know if this is overly ambitious; we'll see [FUCK: Update at 3:07.I am nodding off and I am about to turn off the light, even though when I started this post I thought it was quite urgent to finish it tonight). Update at 11:18AM on Sunday: I just woke up and I am continuing. Just so you know, I got up to "not too long after" (see below) last night, but I have been editing.]
Three or four Saturdays ago, D, who had at that point only been my housemate for a little while (but with whom I got on fairly well already, because he is a really nice guy (just to add detail, he is Dutch-Greek (he and his engineering friends all studied in the Netherlands)) invited over his French engineering friend T for 'pre-drinks' (T is doing a Masters with D at USyd), while C, my even newer housemate, a 23-year-old, highly genial, Irish (Derry specifically) psych graduate and Taylor Swift fan, got ready to go out with them. While I was in the kitchen preparing ravioli for myself, at 9:15pm, having had a typically dreary and lonely day of ceaseless, solitary intellectual toil in the library, feeling sorry for myself on account of my status as a total social pariah (as I sometimes do), D mentioned in a friendly and unassuming way that I was welcome to join the going out party if I wanted to (at that point I can't remember if T had arrived or not). I was noncomittal and rather blase in response, but the offer was intriguing to me. M and S, the ones who live opposite, whom I had not visited for several weeks - a state of affairs which may or may not have had something to do with my belligerence on the question of the scientific integrity of their obsession with Kombucha - had previously said some things to make me think they might be interested in going out with any social housemates I might acquire. As I was beginning to lean towards the decision "I am going to accompany my housemates on their night out", I sent a message to the M and S groupchat, saying roughly "I'm about to go out with my new roommates. You're welcome to come along if you want." It turned out S was at work (in recent times, she has been overworked by her boss because their shop is shortstaffed) and that M was at the library studying. Needless to say, the offer was not taken up.
After I finished making my dinner, I sat down at the tiny table in the small living room of the house, and I began talking with C and T (let's just assume that he was there when I finished my dinner, because I know he was there not too long after). Not too long into the conversation, I revealed to T that I speak French with some level of proficiency, and we had a brief conversation. I was lifted by his claim that I was "almost fluent" and that with a few months in France I would be. C was very impressed; she apparently learnt French herself but forgot it all. C is easily impressed, though, so this means little (she has also been impressed by my ability to cook what to me and most other people are extremely simple meals).
Anyhow, to make a long story short, we drank some nice Chilean white wine and then, finally, after 10 at some point, we went out. Following my lead, we walked towards Newtown.... We started out at the Newtown Hotel (although C couldn't get in because she had no ID, which was obviously terrible and meant she wasted 45 minutes walking back to the house and then back to King Street in elevated shoes), at which venue J (big, ursine, friendly, nerdy Italian engineer (my favourite, with whom I had good conversations about Australian wildlife and politics and other things (similar to me in terms of having a large database of interesting facts))) and A (blonde, typically French, seemed-to-think-he-was-really-cool-but-kind-of-dopey engineer) joined our party. After C had returned, and this party of engineers  plus me had finished three rounds of drinks at the hotel (lots of jokes were made about D's dislike of beer and fondness for cider), we went wandering further west down King Street. For some reason, they actually were keen on going to the Irish pub, Kelly's, so that's where we entered next. Inside Kelly's, we walked upstairs into an area of deafening noise - the kind of music so loud that it literally feels like it has become some kind of viscous substance enclosing you. I hated this fact; it made me extremely uncomfortable (the loudness of the music where we were sitting at the Newtown Hotel had already made me uncomfortable but this was worse). It legitimately made me feel claustrophobic, as well as concerned about my hearing. I have particular trouble with this kind of noise, not only because I have reasons to think that I am genetically predisposed to deafness (and I already have a weird occasional tinnitus which I suspect is related to hearing damage, even though I have largely avoided these kinds of environments and generally listen to music on a relatively low volume), but also because one of my many slightly spergy traits is that I have always been hypersensitive to loud noises. As an infant and child, I absolutely could not stand fireworks; they made me want to scream and run away. My parents were disrespectful of my intense fear, and so when the fireworks came on at the San Christmas Carols every year, I had to stand around with them with my hands clapped over my hears, wincing in terror, desperately trying to convince them that we had to go.
I stayed in Kelly's despite my discomfort with the loudness of the music (and, look, at least we weren't right next to the speakers), and despite the stickiness of the floor. One reason to stay was that we had something to do: our party had decided that, since we were standing around some pool tables, we would play pool. Around the pool table at this point was a very eclectic collection of people. Playing pool were two guys who looked pretty old, one seemingly an over-forty five guy, with extremely brown, leathery skin and that really rugged look of a labourer who treats his body like shit but apparently is genetically fit enough to survive it all (I was very intrigued that someone that age was spending a Saturday night in an environment like this; needless to say, it made no sense to me, and I figured that he was an extremely different kind of person from me (and probably profoundly stupid, with little to no executive function or self-control)). The other player was this kind of seedy-looking, weedy guy who was at least over thirty himself; he was pretty good at pool and I think he won the game. Around the pool table, sitting on the furniture, was a lot of young people, mostly men, some of whom looked like those extremely degenerate, young English men from hideous Northern towns, as well as (bizarrely, from my perspective) a couple of good-looking young women. A lot of them were smiling and laughing but I must admit I didn't understand why they were there, just sitting around, because, as is clear, I found the place a very unpleasant environment.
For some reason, I think it was A and I that played the first pool match together, against the seedy-looking guy. I did some ok shots, but I didn't really help the team. But A was very good and he carried our team. I think we might have won when the seedy guy accidentally sank a black ball; something like that happened, but I can't exactly remember. A couple more games ended up being played without my participation (J performed some heroics, I recall, but I can't recall any specifics (this is not so much because I was off my face (I was tipsy, to be sure, but not drunk), and more that I have a poor episodic memory and am close to aphantasic)), and then, after about 45 minutes (maybe more) in this place, our party decided to leave. T had hatched a plan that we were going to catch a bus to the CBD to go to this underground pizza bar and rock venue called Frankie's that he had been to before, but we kept staying too long inside and missing the buses due to the pool games. We left knowing that there would not be a bus anytime soon. Upon walking out of Kelly's, and escaping the noise, it felt like I was underwater, and my ears were ringing. I figure this is the norm for leaving really loud places (very gradually, you start to hear normally again and the ringing disappears). At that point, I think it was probably after 1AM. It think it might even have been after 1:30AM. I can't remember.
With pleasant conversation, we walked back east up King St toward the shitty 'Greek' takeaway shop way back near Missenden Rd. The engineering boys bought some kind of unhealthy lamb-based meal at this place; I bought nothing, because I am vegetarian and because it looked disgusting anyway. At this point, J was planning to go home, and so eventually he came to be standing at the bus stop nearby, as we were sitting on a bench on the street. Unfortunately, the bus that he thought was the right bus passed him by even as he waved at it. Then another bus that was apparently meant to stop didn't stop. He eventually decided that he was giving up on going home at that point, and returned to be with us on the bench, ready to continue the night. As we were sitting down, I remember we were discussing the possibility of getting an Uber to travel to the CBD, but a major issue was that the party was too big for one. So we eventually figured that we were going to head back down King St. T, looking on his phone, raised the specific idea of going to the Sly Fox Hotel, which apparently you could still get into. Three notable things happened while we were sat on that bench: 1.) some youngish guy got in a taxi with what looked like a younger, highly drunk girl (like maybe five years younger), with the girl's friends looking on (the girl was in conversation with the dude, asking him where he lived (he said Kingsford and she apparently decided that that was "close enough" to where she lived)); 2.) A tried to seduce some ladies nearby, with whom he spent a while in conversation (they eventually told him they had boyfriends); and 3.) a strange tall man wandered past in the regalia of a 1930s detective and behaved erratically around us (I joked that he looked like he was from the video game LA Noire, which made the engineers laugh).
To make a long story short, we ended up walking all the way down to the Sly Fox (which was like 20 minutes west, beyond Kelly's), making jokes the whole time related to the fact that it might be an exclusively gay bar (the Google results were unclear on that). When we arrived, it didn't appear to be an exclusively gay venue, but we had to pay $20 to get in at that late hour (it was 3AM at this point). We didn't want to pay and so we decided to go home.
When I finally got home at 4AM, I sent off a message to the M and S group chat. "It was fun," I wrote, and I meant it. I had enjoyed myself, particularly my conversations with J. Even Kelly's had been an interesting experience, and I had found it vaguely fun to play and watch the pool games.
Last night, however, was a different story [it is now 1:11PM on Sunday as I am writing this sentence].
Last night began with D and I playing chess against each other at 8:30, using our laptops. He beat me three games out of three (one game was close). D had planned the night believing that our landlord would show up and that we would 'take him out' (our landlord has apparently decided to live in the house for the few days until it is being renovated (that's why we're being evicted)). The landlord didn't turn up. Anyhow, at about 9:30, T arrived and then later J arrived (this was the first time I had seen them since the events just described three or four weeks previous). We had slightly more extensive pre-drinks this time, because 'we' (I don't know if this is the right pronoun to use, because initially I thought I wasn't going to drink, given that I am about to enter my exams) had decided to take advantage of the various kinds of unused alcohol sitting about the place that other residents had left behind: we had one of those tiny bottles of Bailey's, about 400mL of Pimm's, and this disgusting drink called Coconut Beach (25% alcohol), as well as some of the Chilean wine from last time (which had been left out). Initially, C was convinced that the Pimm's wasn't pure, having been diluted by coke, and therefore thought that we wouldn't need anything with which to mix these drinks, but she was wrong, so I decided to quickly go to the 24 hour Convenience store nearby to buy Sprite and cranberry juice. When I returned, I started drinking with the gang, and I had basically decided that I would go out with them. My thought was: 'Well, I've run out of past papers for integral calc anyway, so..'... The discussion that went on covered several topics, but the main topic was places to go in Australia. (The NBN, Australia's internet speed and the idea of fibre optic cable 'to the node' was also covered, and several jokes were made about D's failure to gain significant muscle mass despite going to the gym regularly.) I was probably the dominant speaker, as I often am in social and academic situations, especially when I have a lot of knowledge to impart (as I did on Australia).
We ended up leaving quite late, when it was already 11pm (or maybe 11:30pm)  This time we were going to head to this Frankie's place directly, by bus. So that's what we did; we walked towards Parramatta Rd and eventually got a bus that took us to Central, then another to near Martin Place, from which it was a short walk to Frankie's. I think it was definitely after midnight when we arrived, and we still had to wait in a queue for quite a while. During this wait, several jokes were made about D's shitty Greek ID as he worried about being barred (he had been already at a different Sydney venue, on a previous night out). "You can tell it's from a bankrupt country," I said.
Finally, we got in and entered Frankie's.
The first room in Frankie's was pleasant-looking. It was an incredibly noisy and busy pizza bar. Meanwhile, shitty 80s rock music was playing loudly from the dark area behind. T gave me the impression the venue would have live music, but apparently not. T bought me a beer as we were standing around awkwardly in the crowded space. Meanwhile, I realised I needed to piss pretty badly and was looking forward to moving onto the next area, where there would no doubt be a toilet. As my need to piss came to conquer my mind, I surveyed the people around me with my judging eyes. As usual, I felt pity/mystification at the bartenders, who weren't that young and were clearly destroying their ears by working at a place like this. (Also loud noises increase cortisol levels; loud noise is just really bad in general; I am shocked at how profoundly reckless so many people are (I guess it doesn't help that when you start drinking heavily young you damage your ability to make sensible decisions!).) After about 10 minutes, time spent hanging around as D and T looked over the menu and then decided not to order a pizza after all (and also D and C and J each bought a drink for themselves), we moved into the dark dancing zone.
The dark dancing zone was really bad. I'm pretty sure the noise level in this room was worse than Kelly's. Put it this way: it felt like my head was being bored from both sides with laser beams. I couldn't help feeling like my brain was going to explode inside my skull at any moment. It really felt strongly like I was under a very strange but very real kind of physical assault, and I had to exercise a degree of willpower to make the rather stupid decision to actually stay in this atmosphere. Meanwhile, the claustrophobia element was amplified significantly; the sound was so loud, so thick, that I really did feel entrapped. Now, I should clarify that when I first walked in, it wasn't quite this awful, because the front of the room doesn't have all the speakers on the ceiling, and the first thing I did was put my beer in J's hand and walk to the bathroom (incidentally, the bathroom was one of the many disgusting things about this den of depravity, with a floor covered in piss).
But when I returned and the gang had started dancing underneath some of the speakers - well, that was when things got really bad...
It might have been slightly less bad if the music wasn't awful (although I don't know how anyone could enjoy music at that level anyway). But the music itself was fucking awful. The engineers loved it, because they have no taste (in fact, J really loved it, this was his favourite music), but it was really horrific to me. Two of the first tracks that came on while we were on the dancefloor were AC/DC. I think it was "Thunderstruck" and then "It's a Long Way to the Top". (It's when the bagpipes came in in Thunderstruck that I literally felt like my head was going to explode, and I decided to escape to the bathroom again, despite the filth.) We also had "Lithium" by Nirvana, which I guess is an ok song and felt kind of like a relief because it was slightly quieter - but that's about all I can say in favour of Nirvana. To me, this is the kind of music you listen to as a little boy.
Now, to clarify, I was dancing to this music (well, I was intermittently dancing and just doing that kind of bouncing thing that people do when they're not really dancing but don't want to stand completely still) because otherwise things would have felt really awkward. They already did feel really awkward, because, although J was getting well into it, D and T were sort of just bouncing to the music a bit (this despite the fact that this was T's venue of choice) and I reckon our group would have looked slightly odd from an external perspective (what can you do without pingas?). I soon began to notice that although I had had a fair amount of alcohol that night (well, I'm not really sure (I think probably more than four standard drinks), but it's hard to tell because of the way I was drinking at the house (no shot glasses and I didn't pour myself a lot)), I was still very much sober in the sense that I was highly aware that I was in a deeply ugly environment listening to terrible music and that I was only pretending to have fun.
One of the major things that made the experience non-fun was observing the disgusting degeneracy and animalism of the human beings around me. Probably the majority of the people in this room were older than us, although there were a fair few ugly young men (there were certainly very few very young women around (classic place for an engineer to choose)). All of these people around us, mostly men, seemed to be much less inhibited than we were, standing directly under the deafening speakers as they did exaggerated dancing and made MDMA faces (probably a lot of them were not on pingas, but no doubt they had drunk an immense amount of alcohol). Incidentally, during "It's a Long Way to the Top", all of these people shouted out the main lyrics. Everyone also sang the main "Yeaahhh" in "Lithium". This made me feel as if I was in a nightmare.
During the fifth or sixth song, I started directly reflecting on how profoundly ugly and debauched my surroundings were, in this horrible dark room with hideous penis art (I didn't mention that, but there was some disgusting penis art on a column near us), enclosed by this crowd of ugly degenerates, listening to horrible music at a volume that was obliterating my fragile biology. It was epiphanic, not because these were really deep thoughts for me, but because the fact that I was having them showed that I was actually pretty cognitively alert. It suddenly occurred to me that even at my most drunk, I would be far too sober for this inferno. It occurred to me that, fundamentally, this was not my place; I didn't belong among these animals. At that point, I stopped dancing. Surveying the room once more, I saw a thirtyish year-old woman about 10 metres away from me, at '11 O'clock' (using the analogue-clock directional system) making those typical female-drunk bodily movements on a table (moving her arms about really loose-limbed and so on) right underneath one of the speakers; ahead of me, through the crowd, I saw a young man making a classic MDMA face as he enjoyed the music next to the even bigger speakers that were probably blasting the music even louder than it was near me (I found it hard to fathom how noise could get louder than it was near me (the noise near me felt to me  viscerally like the maximum possible volume noise could be)). It suddenly occurred to me that I could leave, and that I would be much happier and healthier if I did. And so I did.
I shook hands with the engineers, and then hugged C, and got out of that place. At the door, I was informed, in a voice that I knew was louder than it sounded to me (because I was suffering from the underwater sensation and ear-ringing, despite only having been in the worst of it for maybe 25 minutes) that, since it was after 1:30, I would not be allowed back in if I left. "That's fine with me," I said, and walked out.
Although I was concerned about my hearing, the overwhelming emotion I felt after my escape was relief. I had fled the subterranean cesspit, I had done it. I also felt a certain degree of pride that I had been at least intelligent enough to leave before I had damaged my hearing more (and for no reason, given the lack of enjoyment).
Strangely, out in the relatively clean and crisp air of a Sydney night (with no cars around), I felt an overwhelming urge to run. The same thing happened on a previous occasion where I had a night out, that time at a classical music concert  at the Opera House (that time I ended up running more than 2.5 kilometres in chinos and brown suede shoes, only stopped by the disgusting air of Parramatta Rd, which made me worried about my lungs (it wasn't that late on that occasion, so there were still a fair few cars)). And so I did. On account of the hearing damage, my shoe-slapping was all muted (the underwater sensation lasts for a while), but it felt good to be running, even if it was in chinos and brown suede shoes. I actually ran quite fast and hard, at a 3-minute kilometre pace, and for quite a distance (roughly a kilometre). And then I ran a bit more. As I passed people, I imagined that probably most of them thought I was on drugs; little did they know that I was just an eccentric. Once I got near central, I just started walking. I decided, as I had also decided on that previous Opera House night, to walk the rest of the way home. As I was making my way home, my driving thought was that I must write about my experience. As I was about to cross Parramatta Rd opposite Glebe Point Rd, I amused myself by trying to describe in the most pompous way that dark area at Frankie's; phrases that came to mind were the rather cliche "den of depravity" (used in this post, as I knew it would be), and "the epitome, the quintessence, of bestiality", which was more creative (and also more dumb).
And now it is 3:09 PM, and I guess I should have a shower and clean up the alcohol from last night and so on - and then go to Fisher Library for some maths study. I heard C get up more than an hour ago, I think, but I have been holed up in my room for a couple of hours now (I only went down to get weetbix, all six of which I scarfed down in my room), and I think D just got up too.

How strange life is,

The Most Important Book I Have Read Is

Collapse by Jared Diamond

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-of-ecological-armageddon-after-dramatic-plunge-in-insect-numbers

Words

I have written probably more than 100,000 words of material over the last few years that hasn't made it onto this blog (poems, massive chunks of my memoirs (for example, my attempts at recounting my extremely lonely and traumatic first three years of high school) and essays). I nevertheless estimate that this blog contains at least 250,000 words.

Although I have clearly had too much time to write, the funny thing is that I perpetually have the feeling that I should be trying to transmit more of what I know and think is important. I feel like I may get more into writing on history (summarising Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War and Diamond's Collapse perhaps).... Orthogonally (a fucking terrible transition-adverb), one project that I'm thinking about currently is a long-ish piece called something like "Everything One Ought to Know about Palaeoanthropology". Palaeoanthropology is a subject that has interested me since early childhood, and I often considered a career in it (I am still considering a career in it, to be honest, and a computer science degree and mathematical training is a ticket to a lot of different kinds of research!). This project will consist of detailed summaries of the properties of each known member of the hominin line (and I will summarise theories about their diets and so forth), and analyses of the different theories explaining the various evolutionary 'steps' that our line took, and in this context I will discuss sex differences, sociality, co-operation, violence, mating and companionship, and the controversy relating to the origin of language and symbolic thought.

I may also start writing about philosophy of science. I finally read Alan Chalmers' What is this thing called science? last week and I thought it was terrific. It also reminded me to actually read Lakatos' philosophy of mathematics, and to return to that subject more generally (I always had unfinished business in the philosophy of mathematics; I only wrote one essay but I was planing to write a real major project, and to do a lot more reading beyond Stewart Shapiro's excellent Structure and Ontology).

I wish I didn't find posting to my tiny audience thrilling - but unfortunately I do, which helps explain why I have ejaculated so many words. Human social life is little other than a tooth and claw struggle for status. Of course, saying this violates a taboo and is embarrassing, but it's true. It may be pathetic that I derive a feeling of greater status from posting on this blog. In fact, I oughtn't admit it because humans do not value honesty, and the low-status speak the truth about themselves at risk of total social catastrophe, unless they're lucky enough to be able to write like Proust or whatever.

The Environment versus Silliness: No, Optimism does not make you more rational

I tend to think, like George Monbiot, that the only appropriate moral reaction to the various forms of ecological trauma the world is experiencing - the mass extinctions, the hideous despoliation of our oceans with plastic and our air with toxins, the horrifying juggernaut of climate change -  is an attitude of very intense concern, and to begin doom-mongering in desperate hope that we might be able to reverse these horrifying trends before we fuck everything (and not merely out of concern for other species, but out of concern for our own). The case that this is the only appropriate moral reaction to the environmental degradation we are carrying out has to be made, of course, and maybe in this post I'll briefly sketch that case. The primary purpose of this post is not this, however. The primary purpose is to cover in detail an old bugbear of mine that falls within this universe. I've written about this bugbear before, within other posts, but I don't think I've ever dealt with it properly. The bugbear is the following Neoliberal/Libertarian/'New Optimist' anti-environmentalist rhetorical manoeuvre (I hope what follows isn't too Straw Man-y): 

Step A) Neolib makes the correct point that Malthus' famous and very simple model of population growth (assuming no improvement in agricultural technology, assuming that with prosperity would come increased fertility, when it has proved the opposite) stopped being applicable after the Industrial Revolution because we began to consistently improve our agricultural technology and because it turns out that the liberation of women is the panacea to a dangerously high birth-rate (a correct point they typically supplement with some predictable references to falsified 1960s predictions of collapse,  Silent Spring, the supposed errors of Limits to Growth, and (if it's Pinker or a Pinker-influenced person) some discussion of how cognitive science gives us reason to think that we are biased towards such extreme reactions, and how the media amplifies these biases). 

Step B) Neolib uses some graphs and some Hans Rosling statistics to make the point that, taking a very high-level, aggregate perspective on the world, the last thirty years have been really good! Poverty, health, education - everything has seen improvement. Question posed to 'Malthusians' [[even though none of the prominent environmentalist activists and academics who write books and deliver talks about the threat of climate change and ecological catastrophe see Malthus as an inspiration, or even cite Malthus as a source (because they know that his model was highly flawed as a guide to today's world (see, for example, Jared Diamond's discussion of this point in Collapse)), ppl like Michael Shermer seem to think it makes sense to use this label to describe anyone very seriously worried about what we're doing to the environment]] : 'Science/the data says things are getting better, so how can you maintain such a pessimistic attitude? The null hypothesis is that we're going to continue using human ingenuity to solve our problems! Look at the data!'

Step C) Neolib says 'Yes, we need carbon taxes but because of [A] and [B] there is absolutely no need to panic (and no need to vote for anyone like Bernie Sanders!!!)

A lot of people buy into this line of argument, but it’s actually unsound. First of all, Hans Rosling’s statistical summaries (and others like them) do not show that things are ‘getting better’. What all of us now know, thanks to people like Mr. Rosling or Steven Pinker, is that the level of extreme poverty and illiteracy in the world has gone down a great deal over the last thirty years (what’s underemphasised, of course, is that the most astonishing leaps cluster in those South East Asian countries that defied IMF advice on capital controls and liberalisation, which casts serious doubt on the narrative that it has anything at all to do with Neoliberal policy (especially seeing as, in the West, many of the same trends over the same period look negative! (see my previous post on Ann Pettifor called “Hans Rosling shit does not vindicate global neoliberalism”))). This still leaves it open as to what level of credence one should have that those happy trends will continue. Your credence should be high that these happy trends will continue only if you have reason to think that the mechanisms that underlie these trends are stable. However, I think that it is irrational to maintain high confidence that human ingenuity and human capacity for social cohesion in the face of adversity will triumph over the effects of environmental degradation.

Why do I think this? Well, let me just say that it seems to me like the assumption of continuity in this case is the extraordinary claim. What reason does one have to have high confidence that even as climate change and pollution wreaks a greater and greater toll on our planet – even as coastal cities are increasingly beset by floods, even as formerly crucial agricultural areas are stricken by major drought, even as millions of people in countries like Bangladesh are forced to migrate to escape flooding, even as the perennially desperate drought-situation in the Horn of Africa becomes yet more desperate, even as our major world cities acquire increasingly toxic air and respiratory diseases skyrocket, even as the microplastics in our bodies reach the point that they’re doing serious damage – our societies will remain more or less stable, there will be no war between major powers, and there will be no major political crises? Why have high confidence that disaster does not await? Why have even moderate confidence? Maybe people will say something about geo-engineering, or they’ll say we’re going to get to Mars. Well, geo-engineering is actually fucked up and a total last resort; and nobody is going to have a successful pregnancy and birth in the massively irradiated, bone-density-thinning, muscle-atrophying atmosphere of space (and any baby that survived would be fucked up, probably physically and mentally impaired). No, as awkward as it is, we kind of need this planet to not be like Venus; we kind of need to avoid making everywhere on earth look like Henderson Island.

Here’s another reason why the graphs don’t suffice:

One rather disturbing fact about the data on wars over the last few hundred years (which Steven Pinker completely elides for the sake of his grand narrative) is that, even as the frequency of major conflicts is seemingly ‘on the slide’, the intensity of these conflicts, the scale of the bloodshed and the amount of deaths, is increasing (‘technology’ is a more or less adequate one-word explanation for this “power-law” distribution). In fact, it is probable that the knowledge that another world war could wipe out the world helps explain why we saw such a historically unprecedented level of international co-operation and diplomacy after World War II (but, if I recall correctly, Pinker does not even entertain this thought).

 One of those classic quotes attributed to Einstein which I mention often in my posts on this blog really sums up my thoughts on this: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Albert Einstein, in an interview with Alfred Werner, Liberal Judaism 16 (April-May 1949), Einstein Archive 30-1104, as sourced in The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2005), p. 173.

Also, as Chomsky details in Who Rules the World? there were actually several major nuclear near-misses and it’s kind of crazy that we’re all still here (anthropic principle? Are there many worlds?).

As usual, this is a structureless blob of a post. At least it’ll have a spicy ending:

I feel like, in my time, I have seen several Ted talks by people who love talking about ‘the data’ (https://youtu.be/-yFhR1fKWG0?t=7m25s) where they discuss the ‘surprising fact’ that you can seemingly plot human ‘technological progress’ as an exponential starting from roughly 100,000 years ago.

Why do they never discuss the fact that all exponential growth patterns in nature end abruptly?

Corruption in the Wake of GFC: Obama's Role

Extracts from Chapter 17 of Killing the Host, “Wall Street Takes Control and Blocks Debt Writedowns”: Obama’s Moves post-GFC

“What voters wanted in the U.S. 2008 presidential election was a change away from multi-billion dollar gifts to Wall Street and the Cheney-Bush foreign military adventures. Barack Obama presented himself as the “hope and change” candidate. In an atmosphere shaped largely by public anger at the bailouts, he and other Democrats spoke of writing down mortgages for underwater homeowners, rolling back bank salaries and bonuses, and re-empowering the regulatory agencies that the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations had gutted. Congress had not written any of this into its TARP legislation or pressured government agencies to limit how banks could spend the giveaways they received. The hope was that this would change with a strong voter mandate that gave Democrats control of the House of Representatives and Senate as well as the presidency. The political path was open to enact far-reaching reforms.

Obama quickly slammed the door shut. Although having run on a populist platform, his role was to deliver his Democratic Party’s liberal constituency of urban labor, racial and ethnic minorities, environmentalists and anti-war advocates to his campaign contributors. Over the past half-century the Democratic Party’s strategy has been to create a menu of promises in two columns. Column A reflects the hopes and changes that voters want. That is the platform on which the Democrats ran. Column B represents what the party’s major contributors and lobbyists want. Obama won the election by verbalizing the hopes of the 99 Percent, but did in practice what his campaign backers from the One Percent wanted. His language was populist, his policies oligarchic and aimed to prevent change.

Adept at applying this about-face with grace and a smile, Obama named former investment banker Rahm Emanuel his chief of staff to stifle the party’s left wing, and appointed Clinton’s old Rubinomics gang to key policy positions, headed by Larry Summers as chief economic advisor, and Geithner at Treasury to block bank regulation or debt writedowns. Instead of responding to public aspirations to appoint regulators of Wall Street, the top administrative bureaucracy was drawn largely from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, excluding anybody as truly regulatory as the Bush administration’s Sheila Bair or Neil Barofsky.

Post-2008 economic policy became that of the campaign contributors who comprised the Wall Street financed Democratic Leadership Council under Clinton. The continuity runs from the Clinton to Obama administrations via the economic policy of Summers and Jack Lew, another Rubin colleague. At the Justice Department, Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer blocked prosecution of bankers and pulled funding from FBI or Securities and Exchange Commission investigators of financial and corporate fraud.

Obama’s naming of a Wall Street-approved cabinet showed his intention to block the reforms that most voters backed and expected, headed by debt relief. What voters got after 2008 was financialized “deep state” concentrating more wealth in Wall Street’s hands; no follow-through on Obama’s airy talk of raising the minimum-wage; and a drive to reduce the federal budget deficit at the expense of Social Security and other New Deal economic programs instead of public spending to fuel recovery.

Assigning financial policy to Geithner to block debt relief

Obama left economic policy to the Treasury, assigning Secretary Geithner the pro-bank role that Rubin had executed under Bill Clinton. Geithner already had served Wall Street as President of the New York Federal Reserve, whose website describes its “core mission” as being in part to “supervise and regulate financial institutions in the Second District” centered in New York City. Geithner promised his Congressional questioners at his March 2009 confirmation hearings that he had refused to perform his designated task: “First of all, I’ve never been a regulator … I’m not a regulator.”

What then was his job? Sheila Bair and Neil Barofsky have described his actions to circumvent public regulations, first at the New York Federal Reserve and then as Treasury Secretary, lying outrageously to defend Citigroup. Citigroup’s chairman Robert Rubin had sponsored Geithner to head the New York Fed, and had bene grooming him to become Citigroup’s CEO as George W. Bush’s administration was ending. But rumor has it that Geithner was asked to defer his “descent from heaven” into Wall Street’s high salary world in order to become Treasury Secretary and protect the banks (especially Citigroup) from what were feared to be Congressional pressures to regulate it more in the public interest.

Geithner quickly set to work crafting an even more bank-friendly policy than his predecessor Paulson had done. Under Geithner’s direction bailout funding was made unconditional rather than subject to regulatory tightening. No firing of management, or even a cutback in salaries and bonuses. No cleanup in shady mortgage practices. (The MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems) scandal unfolded with zero government protection of homeowners against false bank documentation of just who owned the mortgages and how much was owed.)

Just how remarkable a feat this subversion of regulatory cleanup was is reflected in thef act that by April 2009, TARP Inspector General Barofsky had “opened twenty criminal fraud investigations into the $700 billion program” and its “cash for trash” dumping of junk mortgages on the Fed and Treasury. An early report “sharply criticized the government for failing to hold financial institutions accountable” for the money they were given.

[…]

Geithner’s undercutting of TARP showed that despite protests from Congress and the public, Wall Street could still get away with theft. Refusing to enforce reforms, Geithner became bolder as he saw his actions backed by President Obama, Chief of Staff Emanuel and Democratic congressional leaders. Former IMF economist Simon Johnson observed that troubled banks usually “are ‘cleaned up’ as a condition of official assistance, either by being forced to make management changes or being forced to deal with their bad assets. (This was the approach favored by Ms. Bair when she was at the F.D.I.C … The idea that there was no alternative to Mr Geithner’s approach simply does not hold water.)’”

Obama’s false promise to write down bad mortgages

Nowhere was Geithner’s unconditional support for the banks more blatant than in his neutering of President Obama’s promise to reduce the debts of underwater homeowners in the Home Affordable Mortgage Program (HAMP). When $50 billion in TARP funds were committed in 2009 to help homeowners through HAMP, Obama announced his intent “to help up to 4 million struggling families stay in their homes through sustainable mortgage modifications. Hundreds of billions more were still available and could have been used by the White House and the Treasury Department to help support a massive reduction in mortgage debt.” In fact, as Barofsky reports in his book Bailout, “the conflicts of interest baked into the program would render it ineffective unless principal reduction was made mandatory.”

Geithner pretended that “the losses that the banks might suffer on their first and second mortgages could push them into insolvency, requiring yet another round of TARP bailouts.” Instead, he insisted that lenders be compensated for their losses on “liars’ loans.” Supported by Geithner, the banks banded together against underwater homeowners. “The message was clear,” Barofsky concludes: “No way, no how would Treasury require principal reduction, even when Treasury’s analysis indicated it would be in the best interest of the owner, investor or guarantor of the mortgage.” President Obama permitted Geithner and the Treasury to block the HAMP, derailing hopes for a housing recovery by leaving “it to the largely bank-owned mortgage servicers (and to Fannie and Freddie) to determine if such relief would be implemented.” The effect was to leave the economy debt-ridden rather than writing down mortgages.

A conflict of interest between banks and homeowners was inherent in the HAMP program. In addition to their first mortgage, many homeowners had taken out “equity loans” as a second, subordinated mortgage – that is, second in line to be paid in case of default. Often the same bank held both mortgages. Because first mortgages are the first in line to be repaid, “secondary” creditors bear the loss if a debtors defaults – which is why these second mortgages almost always bear a higher interest rate.

Banks used government subsidies to write down first mortgages (for which the government reimbursed them!) so that they could enable homeowners to continue paying their equity loans or other second mortgages in full, The banks thus were able to collect on liars’ loans that were not subject to government reimbursement, thanks to the fact that “the initial plan didn’t require the banks to write down second liens they may have held – like home equity lines – from borrowers whose original loans were modified.” [Gretchen Morgan]

To dilute public support for writing down underwater mortgages, bankers and Geithner mounted a propaganda campaign to pit debtors against each other. Their divide-and-conquer ploy was to characterize homeowners with negative equity – but who still had enough income to afford to pay for their mortgages – as free riders. It would have paid for such individuals to walk away and buy a similar home at a lower price, leaving the banks holding the bad mortgage. But bank lobbyists and the Treasury tried to goad the homeowners into staying current on their payments, even when their mortgage debts were more than the home was worth. Warning about the “moral hazard” of “irresponsible” mortgage debtors getting a free ride, banks incited “responsible borrowers” to resent debtors who were offered relief for mortgages larger than the market price would cover.

Bair accused Geithner of using the “moral hazard” argument in a one-sided way to buttress this double standard. “Saying that he didn’t want to reward the behaviour of those who knowingly got in over their heads,” he had “no such concern for the mega-banks.” Ultimately at issue, she concluded, was “whether our financial system should be based on a paradigm of bailouts or on one of accountability.”

Geithner’s opposition to debt writedowns shows that instead of seeking to create a viable financial balance, the Treasury promoted a one-sided financial grab by Wall Street, leaving the economy in a debt trap. Matters got much worse when banks saw that the Geithner-Obama program enabled them to make much more money by foreclosing (and running up fees and penalties) than by writing down debts.

[…]

Obama’s smoothness in misleading voters

One of the first books giving an intimate look inside the Obama Administration, Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men, reported that on March 27, just two months after taking office on January 20, 2009, the new president invited the executives of thirteen leading Wall Street institutions to the White House. After listening to their arguments for why banks had to continue paying bonuses (ostensibly to get the best talent to manage their money), Obama told them: “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that.” He explained that only he could provide them with the political shield needed to forestall public pressure for reform, not to mention prosecution of financial fraud. “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

One leading banker attending the meeting told Suskind: “The sense of everyone after the meeting was relief. The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t – he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob.” As Suskind summarizes the result, which would shape the incoming administration’s policy: “Obama had them scared and ready to do almost anything he said…. An hour later, they were upbeat, ready to fly home and commence business as usual.”

Obama smoothly marketed his policies defending Wall Street in his interview with Steve Kroft on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” broadcast on December 13,2009. Shedding crocodile tears over the fact that bankers have not shown “a lot of shame” about their behaviour and outsized remuneration, the President tried to gain sympathy by showing that he knew very well why voters “are mad at the banks. Well, let’s see. You guys are drawing down $10, $20 million bonuses after America went through the worst economic year that it’s gone through in decades, and you guys caused the problem. And we’ve got 10% unemployment.”