Book review: The Sciences and Philosophy

The Sciences and Philosophy by JS Haldane is a physically lovely book; the paper - linen-type, perhaps - and the red cloth binding are superior to anything you'll find nowadays. Published in 1929, as the record of the Gifford Lectures of 1927 and 1928, it seems to be to be a memorial of another and in some ways more thoughtful time. Unfortunately, it is also wrong.

JSH seems to have been a decent chap, a good scientist - though likely not the one you're thinking of, that was JBS -, and a benefactor of mankind. But he allows his philosophy to be lead by his conclusions. Those conclusions are - I'm interpolating my own conclusion here of course - that religion and/or spirituality are needed for a healthy moral society, and therefore materialism is false.

Part One, The Sciences, contains some interesting material about his researches on respiration; and on science's gradual discovery of how complex it all is; that breathing is regulated by the pressure of CO2 in the alveoli; where the energy is generated to power the muscles; how blood is regulated; and more. Indeed, he decides that life is so complex and interrelated that it cannot possibly be considered a mechanistic process but needs its own category, Life⁶. This is alas just a failure of imagination on his part. He argues continually against materialism, against a mechanistic Newtonian⁴ viewpoint; but is sensible enough to realise that "vitalism" or "animism" or "souls" is not a viable alternative. That leaves him a bit stuck. Here's a quote  about reproduciton:

Quite clearly, the mechanistic interpretation assumes the fact of hereditary transmission, and apart from hereditary transmission the theory of natural selection or of supernatural creation in the remote past would be meaningless. But what do we assume when we assume hereditary transmission? On the mechanistic interpretation, hereditary transmission means the reproduction in offspring of an enormously complicated physico-chemical structure. We must sweep away the crude idea that what happens is simply the increase and division of an albuminous substance without definite structure, called protoplasm. The substance must, on the mechanistic interpretation, be enormously complex and yet perfectly definite in molecular structure. But if it is so complex, how can we imagine its dividing into two parts, one at least of which must have the capacity of repeating the process indefinitely often?

A mechanist of robust faith would reply that though we do not understand the process, there must be some molecular mechanism by which the reproduction is brought about. In accordance with his robust faith he will also speak of the "mechanism" of reproduction. But the more we ponder over this question the more clearly does it appear that the idea of a complex mechanism which can also reproduce itself or mend itself is not a coherent idea at all. In fact no scholastic absurdity was ever more of an absurdity than a mechanism of heredity. Those who may still have a lingering affection for a mechanistic conception of life, or who imagine that life must be something which had a beginning in time, would do well to ponder further over the nature of hereditary transmission. A mechanism of hereditary transmission is simply a contradiction in terms.

Score one for the mechanist of robust faith and zero for Haldane. We forgive him, of course, for not knowing about DNA. But we cannot forgive him for deciding that some purely physical mechanism like DNA is absurd².

When we come to the philosophy in Part Two, we find him quite taken with Kant, which is forgiveable, but also with Hegel, which isn't; I won't trouble you with the H stuff.

Kant did not infer that mind makes the universe, but only that mind gives to it the form which it takes in our perception of it. Behind the visible and tangible world of our perceptual experience there was for Kant a world of "things-in-themselves," while the visible and tangible Newtonian world of bodies existing in time and space and acting on one another was the form given in perception to the world of things-in-them-selves.

I still think this is gobbledegook or the bleedin' obvious³; and although he generally doesn't go too far into woo, sometimes he oversteps: There is no such thing as a physical world existing apart from consciousness is on p 243. But I think he is attracted to K's stuff because it in some way "devalues" the physical world, and that is the direction he wants to go.

On values and morals:

We make, in practice, a sharp distinction between what we regard as of value from a mere individual standpoint and what has a wider social value. From the individual standpoint what is of value can be exchanged between different individuals, and has thus what is called a market value... If we ask why we should act honestly when if we acted dishonestly in our own individual interest it would almost certainly never be found out, or why we should go out of our way to act courteously to persons who do not know us and whom we shall never see again, the answer is that it is in our own wider and more real interest to act honestly or courteously. This wider interest is just a fact, and a fact which obliterates the mere individual interest which, owing to ill-breeding or defective education, we may have mistaken for a fact and assigned a market value to.

I'm largely happy with that, except for his snootiness about market value. But asserting that the wider interest is "just a fact" is shallow: he has allowed his inquiry to end too early; he knows that he wants it to be true, but has no real theory to justify it; what he is looking for is of course The Foundations of Morality⁵, which would distress him by being entirely material. 

Reality is not to be found in the ideal world of economics, dealing with market values... Those who keep nothing but their own self-interest before them are very properly treated with contempt in good society. A real State depends on the honesty, loyalty, courage, and mutual charity of its citizens; and true citizenship bears no relationship to the possession of wealth or specialized knowledge. We depend at every turn on the reality of this citizenship, and the general extension of the franchise in civilized States is only an acknowledgment of it.

I quote that to indicate how he is a good person trying to make a good society. Later, we get If once we admit what at the present time is presented to us as mere common sense, namely, that the world as interpreted physically is real, there is no stopping until we have apparently stripped our world of everything to which we can attach objective value. And he is very keen on values. But really, there are no objective values; values are things we humans impose on our view of the world; in that they are shared, they can be called real; and as they guide a flourishing society, they are useful (see-also: The Evolution of Morality). He is guilty of despair leading to him grasping for false solutions, due to lack of imagination.

Towards the end, having for several chapters danced around language of religion, he is obliged to come out as not Christian but Spiritual: The Spiritual Unity which we have found by philosophical analysis to be the Reality manifesting itself in all our experience corresponds to the Reality called, in the language of religion, God...¹ a very large and increasing body of persons who have studied or been influenced by one branch or another of science find themselves unable to belong to any recognized Church, because they cannot accept any form of belief in what is supernatural. It is to this body that I myself belong. And on immortality we get:

The question as to immortality appears now very differently from what it did from the animistic stand-point. In the first place, mere individual personality is unreal. It is only in so far as God is manifested in us that we partake of reality. Just as death of the individual cell or individual compound organism, or even the last of a species, must be regarded as a normal event in a wider life, so death of the individual person must be regarded as only an event in God's manifestation in time-relations. Through faith in God as the only ultimate Reality we must regard death of the individual from this standpoint, and our faith in this regard is just our faith in the self-consistency of our experience. It is God manifested within us, and not the abstraction which we call our individual self, that is immortal and the Creator and Sustainer of time-relations themselves. From this standpoint the immortality of individual persons is only a meaningless conception.

This is all regrettable woo, and usefully reminds us of the dangers of motivated reasonning.

As a sort of postscript, I note his The mathematical sciences deal merely with time-relations (arithmetic and algebra) and space-relations (geometry). This isn't reffed, but the wacky time-is-arithmetic will be recognised by the cognoscenti as the dead hand of Kant fouling his brain.

Notes

1. Caution: this ellipsis elides a large gap. I flow these together for my convenience.

2. We also get It is true that many biologists have expressed belief in an origin of life from purely physical conditions; but, as was pointed out in a previous lecture, such an idea is due to mere confusion in thought, and is on a par with the idea of a creation of life in time.

3. Depending on how you interpret it. If it is saying that we - our consciousness - doesn't directly perceive the real world, but we have sense-impressions mediated by eyes and ears and nerves and brain and so on, then it is just the obvious, badly expressed (see-also: Being You). If it is suggesting that our mind has freedom to impose any kind of order on the outside world and have it make sense, then no, that's nonsense. But I do wonder if JSH's perspective helps in some way to explain what on Earth big K was going on about.

4. He is aware of relativity and QM, and in my reading is eager to find in them support for his ideas, but is wise enough not to pin anything on them.

5. From which we should recall the quote from Mill: whatever may be the practical value of a true philosophy of these matters, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the mischiefs of a false one.

6. Later, he discovers that he needs another for Consciousness.

Scientists who put faith in technology less likely to take climate action

The headline seems bleedin' obvious really. But the Graun is excited by it: Fabian Dablander, the lead author, said the belief that technology will largely solve climate change and its consequences, labelled “techno-optimism”, can lead to an over reliance on unproven solutions at the expense of the far-reaching socioeconomic transformations needed to address the climate and nature crisis. I blame Timmy for pointing this piece out.

Anyway, two things on top of Timmy's point: firstly, notice how the tech-fork gets a label, techno-optimism, which I think is meant to make you think such people are naive and simplistic in their beliefs, and the headline dig at "faith"; whereas the socio-trans fork doesn't get a label, because that's just common sense, and slips in the word "needed" because that is simply obvs to all right-thinking people.

Secondly and more importantly, notice that the tech-fork ideas are "unproven" whereas the unproven, unknown and unspecified socio-trans ideas are not so labelled. This is bizarre.

In tech terms, we have a number of things - mostly solar panels, maybe more wind, could be nooks if only the idiots would allow them to be built - that offer a fairly clear path to solving GW. Together with some rather more speculative ideas - iron fertilization, solar geoengineering - that are probably only emergency measures¹.

In socio terms, we have no real ideas what we would be aiming for, and no idea how to do it, and little to no idea of how to change society², beyond vague useless hand-waving images of peasants singing around maypoles.

And Kevin Anderson can fuck right off.

Notes

1. And which are "unproven solutions" only because the clowns won't allow them to be researched or tested.

2. Somewhere, not long ago, I read an article - possibly at ACX - pointing out that changing society is really hard and that we end up solving lots of problems with tech; but I can't find it right now. I should also note Popper's cautions regarding revolutionary change and his arguements for piecemeal social engineering.

3. My picture is a detail from - I think - a crucifixion scene; and is certainly in the OldMasters museum, Brussels. Do tell me exactly which painting, if you know; like a fool I forgot to note it.

Refs

* A Sentiment Analysis of Cowen, Hanson, Caplan, and Krugman.

* Britain’s Greens are now a hard-left, antisemitic party.

* Nobel Peace prize goes to Navi Pillay, promoter of the Israeli genocide blood libel.

* US imposes sanctions on International Criminal Court.

The Fall of the Rebel Angels and Friends

To Belgium, to G(h)ent and surrounds, to see the wonders thereof.

This is by Bruegel the Elder, not Bosch, wiki will tell you all about it. I saw this many moons ago in 2007, but thought less about it then. Here is a close up of a fragment.

It is all very wonderful, down to the strange frog-like thing aching to pull open her swollen belly and release her spawn. It is dream-like; similarly, in the Massacre of the Innocents, there are some dogs playing in the background, while in the foreground the hard men kick down doors.

I had thought that Milton made this up; but obvs not, this is too early. And wiki tells me it is in that reliable source, Revelations.

There's some Boschish too.

Refs

* Art for art's sake.

* Christ Carrying the Cross (Bosch, Ghent).

* Compendium of Writings on the October 7 War and Related Issues.

Book review: Chimpanzee Rights: The Philosophers’ Brief

This is a bad book: one-sided, not honest, more akin to propaganda than philosophy... unless you're familiar with The Republic, of course. And also wrong². So this "review" is more me filling in the other side. As to why I should bother with something so bad: I blame E for owning it; and the boundaries of rights is an interesting subject.

Context: Goodreads; Wiki. As far as I can tell, their project has been a total failure. One reason for that is that law is custom; this doesn't seem to be a concept that they are familiar with, despite their reliance on the common law.

To get a few snarks out of the way: the intro tells us that the authors are "renowned philosophers" - how modest of them - who "consider" the issues. But they are lying: most of them are associate professors, a lowly form of USAnian academic life. And this is no open-minded consideration of the issue: these people have made their minds up on the pro-animal-rights side, and will not consider arguments against. They also have an irritating tendency to quote someone saying something they agree with, and then treat that as a settled point in their favour. This is also a good place to say that they made so many errors that I cannot even mention them all.

Their argument proceeds under four heads: species membership; social contract; community membership; and capacities.

Under species membership they make the apparently sensible argument that biological categories can't provide a rational basis for rights moral or legal or matters of that ilk. They don't do a good job of distinguishing morality from legality. Legally, they notice that entities can only be persons or things, and appear to dislike this; they have a third category to propose, but they don't mention it until the end of the book. They apply for habeus corpus on behalf of some chimps, which is rejected, but - in my view - vitiate their own argument by applying for HC to move them from captivity by individuals into a "sanctuary" - which is to say, captivity somewhere else (p 94 belatedly admits this; and also admits that the court noticed). This implicitly admits the obvious: chimps can't live freely as part of human society.

Why is species membership a sensible legal definition of personhood? Because it works⁴; because it is custom; and because it is an easily applied test. Our Authors do their best to obscure that last point, wurbling around about how problematic the concept of race is blah blah blah but it won't work: "is this a human?" is far too easily answered a question for their equivocation to do away with.

One day, perhaps, we will meet space aliens and have to rethink this. But the method of rethink is fairly obvious and to all appearances not needed in the near future, so we don't need to worry about it. Rather sooner, perhaps, we will meet AI and have to rethink this. But I doubt that will help the chimps.

Species membership pretty well exhausts the legal matters, but OA quotes the courts discussing reciprocity of rights and responsibilities; and so we come to social contract, which is a perfectly sensible thing to discuss in this context. OA immeadiately bring up the distinction - vital in their eyes - between persons and citizens; the latter being persons participating in the social contract. They need to do this because chimps can't - are not able to - participate, obvs; in my view this is good evidence against chimp personhood. This is the point to note that we allow personhood to humans who aren't able to participate - natural fooles; infants; the mad or demented. Partly this is due to natural sympathy; partly to avoid having to deal with the inevitable edge cases³. OA then attempt to reverse this: if you can "bear rights"¹ then you are a person, even if you cannot bear responsibilities. They then, straining mightly, use Rawls's broken "Veil of Ignorance" stuff to argue that perhaps we would agree under said VoI to extend the contract and thus rights to non-human non-rational entities. I don't think we would. But if we did consider this, unfortunately for OA, this proves too much: that argument extends the contract to stoats, weasels and ferrets, as well as OA's favourite charismatic megafauna.

Next, community membership. The idea put forward is that being a person is being a part of the community of persons (this is slightly circular, but you get their idea); in their words "We all come to be persons through embeddedness in interpersonal relationships of interdependency, meaning, and belonging". This is pretty vague. Does it help their cause? Not obviously. Their original complaint is that the chimps are being held in inhumane conditions, so they aren't part of the community. They deal with this by saying "ah, but they are capable of being part" - but is this true? I doubt putting a free chimp into a human community would end happily. Further, this would cover all house pets as well, and (due to the "are capable") clause, a great deal of other animals. Really, this attempt doesn't differ significantly from the previous.

Fourthly, we come to "capacities": things like sentience, emotion, autonomy, self-awareness, sociality. Do you need all of these, some, or shifting combinations to make you a person? In fact the list is arbitrary, and really is just a list of things that people do, retro-fitted. But never mind, because OA decide to pick "autonomy" and declare personhood based solely on autonomy (p 94). This doesn't work: autonomy is too vague, and too widely shared; indeed, on its widest fringes it is practically synonymous with life, and OA make no attempt to bound it; their efforts are all in the other direction, to stretch the category far enough to include chimps.

Under conclusions, they note that they don't have a positive account of personhood to propose. This is a fundamental problem for them, and leads them into "lawyers philosophy". "We don't know what a person is, but surely this makes you a person, and so...". As noted at the start, the law makes entities persons or things, and at last we get a thought of a third category (though they don't seem terribly enthusiastic about it and are careful not to endorse it): "sentient being". But the problem is that the simple creation of this category gives you no idea of what "rights" a member has. For example (p 105) they note a Mexican law obliging respect for the life of nonhuman animals, but as we all know that "respect" doesn't include not killing them; this is the kind of double-think you end up with when cute fluffy words run up against custom.

In my humble opinion

Enough of their wrongness. What is the right answer? The obvious answer is that personhood involves being (capable of being) part of the social contract; and we extend that to cover natural fooles, etc., as noted earlier. What defence do chimps - or other things capable of suffering - get, from our moral or legal systems? Essentially the "repugnance" defence; see eating-a-dog bit from my review of The Righteous Mind: being cuuel damages ourselves.

Notes

1. "bear rights" is strange language; I can't tel if they really mean it, or if this is intended to be equivalent to "have rights".

2. Fundamentally, OA are nice, caring people who have allowed their compassion for chimps to override their reason.

3. On p 56 OA quote Carruthers saying exactly this. But somehow they fail to understand him; they cannot understand that there is an edge-case problem with "degree of rationality", which is a continuuos variable, but not with "degree of being human", which is binary.

4. If you object to "works" as grubby practicality that has no place in a philosophical discussion, I remind you that this is also a legal discussion; indeed primarily legal at this point.

Refs

* The paradox of American multiculturalism.

* Firm Functionalism.

* Climate Change: The World’s Most Overrated Problem.

* Were the Nazis Socialist? Only in Part. The Nazis were similar to socialists supporting economic statism, but different in other key aspects of their ideology.

Book review: The Evolution of Morality

The Evolution of Morality by Richard Joyce: Goodreads; his website. This is only a partial review, as I DNF'd in chapter 2 because... well, for reasons I find somewhat hard to concretise. He is an academic (wiki²) and whilst the book is not a dry academic tome it does have all the whiffling and qualifications leading to pointless digressions and obscurations you expect from academia (see-also this review). Furthermore, he doesn't actually know what morality is, which is a bit of an issue for him; even more of an issue is that he attempts to get around this bijou problemette by nibbling around at the edges⁸; unfortunately this leads him into pointless digressions about moral judgements, which seemed like his main interest; at least, that's when I gave up.

So I should explain why I'm bothering to review this: it is because I had thoughts that interested me while reading it, which I deem worth writing down.

Before I go on, you should read my review of The Foundations of Morality to make sure we're on the same page; and I should read it, to make sure I don't contradict myself... right, I'm back.

I see that there, I didn't commit myself to any comment on "evolution". In reviewing Reason and Morality I explictly said "those rules bind because they have "evolved" to"; by writing in that fashion - putting evolved into quotes - I meant to be ambiguous about whether they had genetically or culturally evolved. But clearly they have evolved, in that they were not simply imposed by fiat of law or god at some single time. Whether we imagine that people have some "moral organ" perhaps in analogy to a "language organ", or that it is all cultural, or some mixture, doesn't particularly bother me at the moment¹. Our Author is in favour of morality having evolved³, but perhaps somewhat weirdly or so it seems to me, it doesn't seem to be a major preoccupation of the book; perhaps it is in the bits I skipped.

Let's get to the shite bits. If you read his wiki page, there's a section on "Moral error theory" (this says OA is one), which contains "the moral error theorist maintains that moral judgments are truth-evaluable assertions... but that the world doesn't contain the properties (e.g., moral goodness, evil, moral obligation) needed to render moral judgments true". It is indeed true that the physical world doesn't contain moral goodness or evil; these are meta-properties imposed on it by humans⁴. Just as a story doesn't exist in the real world: in the real physical world, there exist books which are leaves of paper with squiggly black marks on them grouped into "words" and "sentences" and "chapters", but none of these things physically exist, they are organisational concepts; see also [[Popper's three worlds]] if these ideas are unfamiliar to you. But OA's problem is letting this language confuse his discourse: because he doesn't know what morality is, he gets lost in discussing "moral judgements" as an attempt to get close to saying something about morality - I think - but then goes all philosophy about moral judgements presuming a moral object to judge, which of course doesn't exist, objectively⁷. Moral judgements are the workings of our moral sense; they are the states-of-mind of people who have considered from a moral viewpoint a given situation.

In order to confuse things further, he then discusses Moore's paradox, which is a new one on me. It may be new to you, too, so go skim it; try to avoid your revulsion at the blatant philosophical wank. So the situation is of someone saying "P; but I do not believe P". And the gloss is that this is absurd, but not contradictory, because "It can be true at a particular time both that P, and that I do not believe that P". But the problem is that the setup is someone saying "P"; not the fact-of P. And saying P (in the course of honest discourse, which this is assumed to be) is equivalent to "I believe P". Because everyone knows that stating P does not make P happen and is not ironclad evidence for P, because everyone makes mistakes; by saying P you are merely expressing your belief in P⁶. And so the situation is equivalent to "I believe P; but I do not believe P"; which is not a paradox, it is merely a contradiction¹¹.

From a Goodreads review: A brilliant analogy Joyce uses is with the way we see color: I see my walls as red, even though the 'redness' is actually not as much in the wall as in the way lightwaves from the wall interact with my eye. But: the redness really is in the wall: the wall has physical properties that affect the way light interacts with it⁹. Compare: two men indulge in homosexual relations and are seen by a third, who "sees" immorality and judges it so: where is the immorality? It isn't in the real physical world, because we enlightened people of the cold west know that homosexuality is not immoral in our culture; but we are so enlightened we know that people of other cultures may say it is in theirs⁵.

A niggle: Kant [says] that actions motivated by prosocial emotions cannot be considered morally admirable... I am more than happy to side with common sense against Kant on this point... In fact, I am willing to endorse the view that on occasions a per-son whose motivations derive from explicit moral calculation rather than direct sympathy is manifesting a kind of moral vice. This is weird. We have, so to speak, two sorts of "moral organ": the quick instinctive moral judgements that we use constantly without really thinking about for everyday matters and is governed by the hypothesised "moral instincts"; and a slower harder thoughtful consideration of more difficult, less common issues; this you might say is governed by our general-purpose thinking engine. Most people are inclined to go with the quick results, even in situations where they really should be using the slow; certainly, the slow should be more reliable, and give better results, whenever it is invoked honestly and carefully. Why OA should consider this "moral vice" I don't know; he provides no explanation or example.

I think that's enough.

Refs

* Justice Kavanaugh turns down request from Missouri to use congressional map expected to aid Republicans.

* No Doing, No Learning.

* State of Oregon v. Trump.

Notes

1. Should I care? Do tell me why. OA spends some time explaining why even if we were sure morality was genetic, we shouldn't be bothered for free will type reasons, and I'm fine with that.

2. Which all turns up as a big blob by one user who does little else. I deduce either a fanboi, or the man himself. Either way, I'm going to treat it as accurate.

3. Minor aside: in the wiki article on Evolution of morality he gets barely a look in.

4. Or other moral beings.

5. Ours is better; obvs; but that's another post.

6. When discussing contingent properties of the real world.

7. Maybe he thinks morality is objective, and therefore there must exist moral objects? Probably not... actually I think that's one of my problems with the book, he presents many thoughts but rarely endorses any^7a. Moral objects seem weird to me, but then I'm not a theist, so I have no source for any desired objective morality. It is obvious that different cultures have non-identical moralities - indeed different people do. We observe that all cultures contain some shared morality - mostly, do no harm - but this is because cultures that don't put that into their morality fail to thrive. I've said this before, somewhere.

7a. This is, in my view, unhelpful, at least in the area of philosophy. There are zillions of different views, and philosophers are skilled at generating new ones, much in the way that Sabine Hossenfelder criticises mathematical physicists for pointlessly inventing new "possible" particles. The need is to eliminate old wrong views by considering them carefully; to clear away the deadwood that the philosophes so love.

8. The "nibbling at the edges" issue is interetsing, in that it reminds me of Popper's theory of knowledge: Conjectures and Refutations. You acquire knowledge of a thing by guessing, then trying to see if you're wrong. Not by doing what OA does, trying to understand tiny bits of it at a time.

9. This confusion about intrinsic vs accidental properties of things has been around since the antient Greeks. Descartes (see esp footnote 4) for example was not alone in thinking that the fundamental property of matter was extension and everything else was an accident¹⁰; but we now know about mass, charge, spin and so on.

10. Gemini agrees. But rather weirdly thinks this a good thing, ffs.

11. Apparently M'sP was a fave of Wittgenstein, which is a bit of a hint that it is a purely linguistic issue, not a real problem.

Checking up on Hazlitt with Gemini

While writing this, I had a terrible fear that my fanboi adulation of Hazlitt was vulnerable to some brilliant philosophical debunking that would point out his obvious crass errors. So I Googled it, and Gemini told me, and I paste it below. I feel that Gemini has done a fair job, and am happy with the answer, because all these criticisms are stupid. I'm also moderately sure that at least one of my commentators would have been happy to jump on any flaws.

Henry Hazlitt’s moral philosophy—primarily outlined in his 1964 book The Foundations of Morality—is considered "wrong" or heavily criticized by certain philosophers and economists primarily because it reduces all ethical systems to a form of rule utilitarianism centered entirely on social cooperation. [1] (https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/03/question-to-the-non-ideal-theorists-of-justice-what-do-you-think-of-henry-hazlitt/)

Critics, including academic reviewers and rival political theorists, argue that his framework fails for several key reasons:

* Rejection of Natural Rights: Hazlitt dismisses objective natural rights or moral intuitionism, arguing that moral rules are merely utilitarian conventions hammered out over centuries to foster social utility. Critics who believe in inherent human rights argue this makes justice subordinate to collective cooperation.

* Economic Reductionism: Reviewers have chided Hazlitt (a renowned free-market economist) for tailoring his ethics to justify private property orders and classical liberal market frameworks, making morality look like an extension of abstract economics rather than an independent philosophical truth. (https://www.libertarianism.org/essays/review-foundations-of-morality)

* Overly Optimistic Harmony: Hazlitt claims that an individual's rightly-conceived long-term self-interest always neatly aligns with social cooperation. Critics argue this harmony is naive and fails to account for real-world scenarios where brutal exploitation or systemic injustice can genuinely benefit a ruling individual or group at the direct expense of others. (https://fee.org/articles/hazlitts-the-foundations-of-morality/)

* Dismissal of Metaethics: Hazlitt openly criticized modern moral philosophers for getting bogged down in linguistic and metaethical analysis, leading strict academic ethicists to view his approach as overly simplistic or evasive of deep philosophical complexities. (https://www.hazlitt.org/e-texts/morality/ch23.html)

If you would like to explore this further, let me know if you want to compare Hazlitt's view with Kant's deontology or look more closely at his defense of rule utilitarianism.

The Data Heat Island Effect: Quantifying the Impact of AI Data Centers in a Warming World

By Andrea Marinoni et al.. Coming to you and me via X. And of course, I begin by apologising for the intrusion of climate into this war-focussed blog.

The basic idea seems perfectly sensible: from a MODIS dataset, identify datacenter locations and look at the temperature change after they turn on.

A nit: as we see from their figure, the average effect is a temperature jump, which isn't surprising: you don't expect a trend, unless the datacenter is ramping up over time; from the figure, it looks like that isn't usually the case. And yet they say stuff like "the Bajio region a great hub for AI data centres¹. Nevertheless, it has been recorded [sic] a serious LST increase trend (in the order of 2°C) in the last twenty years in the region". But it isn't a trend, which they effectively admit by expressing it in degrees, rather than degrees-per-time. But this is just a carelessness of language, not a real flaw.

The flaw is in what they don't say: how does their datacenter heat island effect compare to the usual UHI? A random search for London and Paris says 5-10 oC compared to rural. So my suspicion is that worrying about the DHI is about as useful as worrying about their water usage. For bonus points, their "A way forward" section is comically silly; and their conclusion - " Our study shows a non negligible

and rather remarkable impact of the AI data centres on their local regions" - is simply not true; NN is correct, but RR is pure emotionalism and doesn't belong in a real paper. This is of course but a preprint.

Refs

* A hyperbolic and misguided article in the New England Journal of Medicine, prompted by the death of Jason Arday.

* US strikes Iranian launchers on Larak Island in first known attack in weeks.

* Scientific American on the skids, sold by Springer Nature to another company.

* The deputy leader of the Green Party, whose policy it is to “abolish landlords”, is a private landlord (though to be fair, while this is witty and amusing, the policy was only agreed last autumn and it isn't obvious he is bound by it).

* UK retailer Next wins appeal to pay warehouse staff higher basic pay.

* THE SIMPLIFICATION AND AGENCY OF GOVERNMENT (fine words but... well, that didn't last long).

Notes

1. It seems to me that they are rather casual about "datacenter" vs "AI datacenter". Obvs - no? - neither Bajio nor anywhere else has been an AI datacenter hub for the past 20 years. I doubt that much matters for the analysis.

Did you miss me (yeah) when I was a gay?

Last used in 2018, good grief, that was a while ago.

But like then, I'm back from the alps, keen and eager to leap back into the fray, as soon as I can think of anything worth saying or responding to. Don't hold your breath.

Once again, I'm struck by how the mountains are falling apart. The Gran Paradiso is still just about an F, but the slopes are getting less friendly and the crevasses are opening up. And most seriously - for my purposes - the Grand Couloir was deemed so dangerous that they shut the Tete Rousse and Gouter huts entirely (arrete; Gouter ref page arch), rather blowing my plans for Mont Blanc. See-also this video.

Otherwise, it was hot, but walkable, provided you got used to starting early and taking a midday break, preferrably in a suitable refuge where refreshments could be provided. And towards the second half the "afternoon rain" pattern predominated.

In due course a full travelogue of my exciting adventures from Modane to St Gervais - yes, again - will appear.

Refs

* Why Arday Splits Anglosphere Elites.

* The Foothills Of Bay Area House Party.

* UK Regulatory Burden.

* A Wall Of Separation Between LGB and T.

* Trump Imposes Harmful and Illegal Section 338 Tariffs Against Many Canadian Imports.

* Federal Court Rules Speech-Based Deportations Violate the First Amendment.

Arma Mangoque Cano

My attempts to wait for the end of the little tiff between the MM and the MMs¹ has failed: here am I.

My graph shows one measure of the state of play: some version of "the oil price" though I have come to realise that its all a bit more complicated than I first thought; nonetheless some features can be clearly read, most notably that all is not over, but that the market expects reasonable flow in the near future. Are they right? Spoiler: I don't know.

My expectation - which shows how little I know of fanaticism and stupidity - was that the MMs would take the vague unclear deal on offer and use the inclarity to boast of victory whilst quietly stopping any overt naughtiness², and everything would trail off. Unfortunately - unless you're a popcorn vendor or pundit, obvs - buoyed, quite likely, by idiot Western intellectuals telling them that they had won - they decided to keep up the attacks on random ships and got twatted in return. Neither side has any great regard for, or even it would seem understanding of, truth; so reading their words is of no great value. But the MM calling the MMs "scum" might turn out to mean something. Could it be that he has finally learnt that they have no intention of abiding by their words, and that Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength? The weird thing is that he is so desperate for peace either because he loves peace, or because he loves votes that he is prepared to repeatedly overlook transgressions; not a strategy that works well in this area.

Meanwhile, the situation in Lebanon continues, but that doesn't seem to be troubling either side at the moment, which makes sense, since it is no part of this conflict. Or at least, it shouldn't be. If the MMs insist on entangling it, I can't see that going well for them.

Singing³:

Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting-dogs fed full,

  And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;

And I wiped my mouth and said, "It is well that they are dead,

  For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong." 

Updates

Don't expect blow-by-blow stuff.

* 2026/07/16: US strikes oil tanker with missiles as it enforces new Iran blockade. And Iran tells Houthis to close Red Sea oil route if US hits power network - oooooh yes bring it on. 07/22: Trump says he’ll hold Iran responsible for future Houthi attacks on ships.

* 2026/07/23: US House passes war powers resolution directing Trump to end Iran conflict says the Graun. But the vote is party-partisan (as you can tell from the Graun quoting a lying pol (“This is not a partisan issue,” Jayapal said following the vote) and later on the Graun negates its own breathy headline by noting that Later on Thursday, the Senate rejected a similar resolution proposed by Democrat Chris Van Hollen in a 47-49 vote, largely along party lines. Having Congress try to run the war like this is bad.

Notes

1. I'm aware that sources suggest that the MMs are now sidelined by the menwithgunz; but that doesn't fit so well, and is anyway too new and doubtful to replace yet; and officially Iran remains a theocratic dictatorship. Wittily, I saw on X a re-translation into English of the Arabic version of some CENTCOM I think it was post, which started "The Supreme Leader has instructed US forces to...".

2. Given the obvious banal motive for Trump - that he wants peace so oil prices go down so that gas(oline) prices go down so that USAnians go back to sleep - I'm kinda baffled by the MMs thought processes. If they go around twatting ships and stopping traffic, yer MM is not going to be happy. Perhaps to try restating that: the MMs have leverage, by threatening to close Hormuz. But actually closing it, isn't leverage.

3. You will be wondering what I meant by that; I know I am. Reconstructing myself: firstly, I read it, and liked it. Second, I am gently mocking myself: the enthusiasm of the singer for the certainty of his cause is revealed as ill-founded in the next verse.

Refs

* Art for art's sake.

* The Best Thing About Wokeness.

* Biological Sex Is Binary and Rooted in Anisogamy.

* ...The socialization process is what makes it difficult for us to see the rules of our own society as rules – having grown up with them, we have acquired a desire to act in the way that the rules require us to act, and so typically experience the behaviour as voluntary, even though it is constrained...

* He's Got My Vote: An Atypically Productive Exchange on the UBI.

* ...a large portion of the population live in an alternative reality built entirely on words...

* Evidence we should sell the NHS for scrap.

* As U.S. Starts 'New' Iran War, Lawmakers Want Answers About Deadly Elementary School Strike.

* the "Gaza genocide"... the left-wing equivalent of the stolen election hoax.

* A police officer explains why ending rough sleeping is likely to be very hard.

* Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has sacked the country's army commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi.

* Libertarianism Against the Welfare State: A Refresher.

* Moody’s Lifts Argentina Debt Rating in Fresh Boost to Milei.

* Saudis must recognise Israel for nuclear deal, says Trump.

* Will Courts Uphold the EPA's Rescission of the "Endangerment Finding"?

* We haven't got a clue if America will launch another “massive attack” on Iran - El Econo. Retitled for clarity (and it looks like they have retitled it too; orig).

* The rise of the deserving rich; and.

* Court Packing Is a Dangerous Gambit Best Avoided.

* Private Property: For Abundance and Diversity.

* The Negligence of War and Peace.

Book review: The Rise of the Western World

The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History by Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas. First published in 1973, this is a radical interpretation, offering a unified explanation for the growth of Western Europe between 900 A. D. and 1700, providing a general theoretical framework for institutional change geared to the general reader. It looks like you can read it here, or here, for yourself rather than rely on my unreliable summary; it is fairly short, and not hard going.

It describes - in economic and political terms - the developments in the West, well in western Europe, but stops before the industrial revolution, saying "well there you go then: that's what laid the ground for the industrial revolution to happen in England". What it talks about is largely organisation; and how various rulers' desperate need for money in the short term lead them to a variety of expedients for taxation or other equivalent money-raising schemes; some of which were in the long term bad. So for example the Spanish crown favoured the Mestas because they were a ready source of income; but this worked against recognising property rights, and so was unfortunate in the long term.

Here's a quote, to give you an idea of their language and terms:

To understand the background, we must explain the functions of the state against a wider background than would be necessary in dealing with the feudal world alone. Even in our day, the government is primarily an institutional arrangement that sells protection and justice to its constituents. It does so by monopolizing the definition and enforcement of property rights over goods and resources and the granting of rights to the transfer of these assets. In return for this service, the state receives payment in the form of taxes. Since economies of scale in the provision of protection and justice make this transaction potentially worthwhile to the constituents, a basis exists for a mutually advantageous trade between the governed and the government. So long as economies of scale continue, the state's widened protection and enforcement of property rights increases the income of all constituents and this saving is divided in some manner between the constituents and the state. What determines the division of these savings? The citizens are interested in receiving as much of the incremental income as possible; but so is the state, since its very survival during this period often depends on the maximization of present revenues. Let us consider again the historical evidence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as described in...

I find this helpful; it strips off so much of the gunk. But there's also some more fact-based stuff, if you're interested in population, or prices, of the evolution of the manorial / feudal systems.

We end up considering France, Spain (unfortunates) and the Netherlands and England (fortunate); I forget why Italy and Germany fall out of the analysis. But the end result, though they don't say it, is essentially trial-and-error, or Darwinistic: people try stuff, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, places where they do things that work well thrive, others don't. We and the Neds got property rights; the Frogs and the Spics got a strong crown. You may notice a certain vagueness of my part here: although I've only just finished reading it, the details are already fading.

The book is prone to say things like "progress was not possible until the private and societal rates of return were made to coincide". By which it means, that unless entrepeneurs and inventors could capture a significant portion of the return from newe thinges - which required new laws, or new systems -, they would not put in the time, effort and resources - the investment - required to produce those newe thinges, from which all benefit. This is I think a useful overarching perspective; a summary, which makes it easier to order and think about individual events. And yet it doesn't actually explain any of the individual events, obvs.

This - it occurs to me so I shall write it down here pending a better place - is a little like theories of history: there are a great many events; to turn them into history they must be grouped and ordered: a "great man" theory; as "economic"; as monarchs; whatever.

Disappointingly, there's nothing here on "why the West won": they don't talk at all about why anywhere else, perhaps most obviously China, didn't succeed. See-also The Grand Titration. Put into this framework, the answer is likely lack of competition; a lesson for our times. If you only have one go at getting the right answer, you'll probably fail.

Refs

* 1776 in the US and Latin America.

* We woz wrong about oil, sez El Econo.

* Europe's Weather Losses Keep Climbing; But a new loss normalization finds no trend after accounting for economic growth - guess who.

* The Declaration of Independence and the Case for Non-Ethnic Secession.

* The Causal Effect of Income is (Often) Zero.

* Rich World, Poor World: RCP 8.5, IPAT, and Climate Impacts Reconsidered.

* Why We've Been Thinking about the Fertility Crisis Wrong: Did humans evolve to seek solitude?

* A Conservative Court—Not a Trump Court.

* Airpower Did Not Fail in Iran — Simplistic Thinking Did.

* JD Vance's crusade against GDP is wrong and bad: Making Americans poorer won't make our society better. While I'm here: for me, see GDP impartially consider'd and links therein in particular Is Decoupling GDP Growth from Environmental Impact Possible?; and to Limits to Growth comments.

Peace in our time

This was going to be a post about the end of the MM-MMs war, but that doesn't seem to be quite over yet, so instead it is about the hopeful Trilateral Framework Between the United States of America, the State of Israel, and the Republic of Lebanon.

It contains most of the right kind of words and recognises the actual problem: the LAF will restore effective sovereign authority over all Lebanese territory, pending the verified disarmament of non-state armed groups and dismantlement of associated infrastructure... Lebanon reaffirms its resolute and irreversible commitment to restoring and exercising full sovereignty over all its territory. The Government of Lebanon will rebuild the State’s monopoly on the use of force, achieve the complete and verified disarmament of all non-state armed groups, and ensure that such groups will have no military or security role and no armed capabilities anywhere in Lebanon; you should read it. Sadly the Leb's can't quite bring themselves to say the H-word, though the Kikes can: Israel stresses that its military actions in Lebanon are solely a consequence of the attacks, threat posed by, and hostile intent of non-state armed groups, particularly Hizballah.

With Iran weakened, Syria broadly friendly, and it would seem the Leb's finally prepared to talk sense, maybe there is hope.

Refs

* By the sword you did your work and by the sword you die.

* RIP Judith Curry's Climate Etc (arch).

Mayflies

Another year, another Mays. They flow past like water. 2025; 2024; 2023...

With Inigo and the bucket gone I'm not really sure what image to use; I didn't take many, mostly vidz; but I guess this one of Lance looking bothered will do, photobombed by House. This was Thursday, because LMBC are ahead of Caius; but as anticipation suggested that didn't last the day. It did last a while though; see here; and while that's a long way down the course it is still a few hundred meters to the finish.

So Peterhouse are head and Caius, sadly, did not dent them. On the ladies' side, Jesus rowed over convincingly.

Full playlist here. Due to... errors on my part, and the lack of cannons on CUCBC's part, I dropped my drone in the river on day one; so there are two days of hand-held filming before Amazon delivered the replacement. See here for exciting details.

Refs

* Teachers: Value-Added and Social Desirability Bias.

St Gervais

I'm just back from a trip down to the Chamonix valley for some low level alpine type fun, but being now a retired gentleman of leisure, had time enough to spend half a week getting there and much the same back, visiting more cathedrals than I can remember along the way, as well as Meung.

Anyway, the wildly exciting story is available here, should you be interested.

While I'm here: some people are bad at taking hints. So to be somewhat more heavy handed: "You should ignore it" is a hint that the topic isn't welcome; I will only admit particularly illuminating comments that discuss it.

Refs

* Why Callais Doesn’t Justify Court-Packing.

* When It Really is Racist to Talk About Racial Gaps.

* Bruce Schneier is a fuckwit (see-also Ilya Somin, though Bruce's fuckwittery goes deeper than that).

* An Unconstitutional War Results in a Bad Deal - jumping the gun, in my view, but IS is worth reading.

* Second Amendment Roundup: Gun Ban for Pot Users Unconstitutional.

* Were 250,000 English Girls Raped by Grooming Gangs? Obvs, no.

* Foundations of Public Choice: A Primer by Michael Munger.

* Comedy headline time: Trump Singles Out Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and BP Over High Gas Prices.

* Europe's Deadly Aversion to Air Conditioning.

* I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup.

Book review: The Allegory of Love

I don't have a lot to say about this but want to record reading it. See some Goodreads reviews for things I might have said, if my memory were better. My picture, of the cover (FFS flickr on phone won't let me embed it, so for now I'll just reuse that image), is I see with amusement the picture I used for The Discarded Image; this may have been Hulme's fault. I found this harder going than TDI, perhaps because I do not have the congenial model in my mind. It has however inspired me to acquire The Romance of the Rose (Dahlberg translation), and to begin reading it in Meung sur Loire.

Just as TDI transformed or perhaps just informed how I saw ye olde folkes' views of that aspect, so I found TAOL very helpful in getting at least some initial hooks in... well, the bookes it covers: ROTR, Fairie Queene - which I haven't yet ordered - and others. However I am conscious how much of Lewis's thought slips my mind even as I read it; I am too unfamiliar with this stuff.

Here's a sample of Lewis:

In many periods the historian of literature discovers a dominant literary form, such as the blood tragedy among the Elizabethans, or satire in the eighteenth century, or the novel of sentiment and manners in the last age or in our own. During the years between Chaucer's death and the poetry of Wyatt allegory becomes such a dominant form and suffers all the vicissitudes to which dominant forms are exposed. For it must be noticed that such dominance is not necessarily good for the form that enjoys it. When every one feels it natural to attempt the same kind of writing, that kind is in danger. Its characteristics are formalized. A stereotyped monotony, unnoticed by contemporaries but cruelly apparent to posterity, begins to pervade it. Thus, even in times that I can still remember, the threadbare motives of the novel were not nearly so obvious as they now threaten to become. The monotony of Augustan satire, on the other hand, is easily felt; that of Italianate blank-verse tragedy more easily still; and that of late medieval allegory unescapably and with resentment. In the second place, a dominant form tends to attract to itself writers whose talents would have fitted them much better for work of some other kind. Thus the retired Cowper writes satire in the eighteenth century; or in the nineteenth a mystic and natural symbolist like George Macdonald is seduced into writing novels. Thus in the fifteenth and sixteenth century we have the Assembly of Ladies written by a poet who has no better vocation to allegory than that of fashion. And thirdly-which is more disastrous-a dominant form attracts to itself those who ought not to have written at all; it becomes a kind of trap or drain towards which bad work moves by a certain 'kindly enclyning'. Youthful vanity and dullness, determined to write, will almost certainly write in the dominant form of their epoch. It is the operation of this law which has given later medieval allegory and hence allegory in general a bad name. A recognition of the law will perhaps liberate our critical faculties to distinguish between good and bad work-between the poetic use and the fashionable abuse.

But there is yet another 'accident' to which dominant forms are liable, and it is one which much concerns the historian. Often, though not always, we can detect under the apparent sameness of such productions the burgeoning of new forms, and find that a tradition which seemed most strictly bound to the past is big with the promise, or the threat, of the future. I half suspect that such a process is going on about us while I write: that the novel, which we saw becoming so biographical in works like Sinister Street and so preoccupied with period in works like The Forsyte Saga, is even now transforming itself-has transformed itself, in the work of Strachey and M. Maurois and Mr. Herbert Read-into the imaginative biography, a genuinely new form standing at the same distance from biography proper as the Chronicle play stands from the 'just' history.

And on Courtesy:

We are to conceive of courtesy as the poetry of conduct, an 'unbought grace of life' which makes its possessor immediately loveable to all who meet him, and which is the bloom (as Aristotle would say) - the supervenient perfection - on the virtues of charity and humility.

Book review: The Handmaid's Wail

Dead famous, but also dead boring². The surface veneer is tolerable: La Atwood has clearly been to writer's school and learnt how to write words¹, but they forgot the bit about writing an interesting story; or perhaps that bit isn't teachable. There is a colourless cloying pallid dry dusty silence spreading over the prose⁴; this contrasts with, say, Moby Dick - another wildly popular-in-the-lists book that no-one except me ever reads - which at least has some salt and colour to its language and vigour to its speech. Proust can also be boring; but unlike LA, Marcel rewards you in the end with beauty. As well as some fascinating insights into the culture of his times. LA has no interesting insights into culture to offer, because her culture is entirely made up and not at all plausible³.

The woke left lap this stuff up because it is trying to be nasty to the religious right. And yet - as the epilogue obliquely admits - the target is really muslim society, of the Saudi / Iranian type; though naturally LA isn't brave enough to say this out loud: there are no plaudits from the left for saying that kind of thing. And although ostensibly about the evils of patriarchy, in fact most of the oppression is by women.

My edition has an Introduction, nominally by Naomi Alderman, which I hoped might be enlightening; but alas I rapidly discovered that it had been written by a Fembot-type AI given the prompt "say bad but implausible things about the USA and lay it on as thick as you can: these people aren't thinking". Oh, and lastly and trivially: this isn't sci-fi; it is politics.

Refs

* Trump's Iran War Continues to Violate the Constitution - and Now Also the War Powers Act of 1973 (see-also Yanquis and Kikes twat the Mad Mullahs).

* Court agrees to immediately finalize Voting Rights Act decision.

* Applying US Air Warfare Theory and Doctrine to Evaluate the Campaign against Iran, Part II: Iranian Missile Forces.

* Weasels electrocuted by particle accelerator honored in exhibit (via RS).

* IQ With Conscience.

* London by William Blake.

* Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Alvin Roth on Organ Markets.

* An Ode to Low-Skilled Workers: Version 1.

* A Modest Uptick in Supreme Court Popularity.

* European stagnation is real.

Notes

1. But see this review.

2. Confession - with which I had originally meant to open this review - I knew before reading the book that I was going to dislike it; nothing about the reading of it gave me cause to change my opinion. Partly because mainstream writers trying to write sci-fi is always painful; partly because it isn't sci-fi; partly because of the strain I knew would be there.

3. Leading - as this review says - to the reader being unable to suspend disbelief.

4. Towards the end the protagonist apologises for - I forget the exact terms - not being interesting, not being active, enough. This may resonate with progressive female youth-du-jour, if what one reads in the papers is true; though I lack contact with any such and so cannot say from personal experience.

There Is No Progress in Philosophy

There Is No Progress in Philosophy will be an idea familiar to us all; my particular text is taken from an article published in 2011 but brought to my attention by Twatter. And since I haven't ranted about the evils of philosophy for a while now, and nothing much else seems to be happening, I thought I would indulge myself.

Part of the answer is that of course there’s progress in philosophy, we just stop calling those topics that make progress “philosophy”. Although that isn't really progress in philosophy: that is progress in removing things from philosophy - cosmology, physics, most obviously - as they become science. In the same sense we could say there is progress in religion. As time goes by, philosophy is left with all the stuff that people can't agree on, whereas science is what works, bitches.

Part of the answer is that there is genuine progress, but most philosophers aren't interested; as Popper wistfully notes the problem of induction is solved. But nothing seems less wanted than a simple solution to an age-old philosophical problem. Hazlitt on morality provides another example; that he was an economist and therefore from out of field doesn't help. Professional philosophy is about publication count and tenure and talking, not about solving problems; no-one hires a philosopher to actually solve problems.

But a lot of the answer is that much of philosophy is not grounded in reality, unlike science, and so there is no final arbiter. So people are free to disagree, and retreat behind screens of words.

Refs

* Court unanimously sides with oil and gas companies in suit over damage to Louisiana coast (Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana).

* This Be The Verse.

* WHAT DO WE DO IF IT FOSSILIZES?

* The Missing Right-Wing Firms: Hanania's Plausible Resolution.

* Against Attribution Studies.

* United Arab Emirates to quit oil cartel Opec.

* Rethinking Conservative Approaches to Executive Power.

* The Origins and Influence of Zero-Sum Thinking.

* Former US officials criticise Pentagon silence on deadly Iran school attack.

* Anti-Communism and Anti-Racism.

Good news

It is always charming to be the bearer of good news, so I am pleased to reveal to you that Donald Trump is the war’s biggest loser, in the words of the Economist. Since the MM has been at worst mildly inconvenienced, those grieving for the dearly departed, and indeed the very shades, can take comfort that their losses are even less.

If only that were true. Sadly it isn't; instead, it is the sort of drivel people write when only the named people matter. And if you want drivel, there is much much more out there; see-also Yanquis and Kikes twat the Mad Mullahs.

The situation as I write: there is a ceasefire between the aforementioned Ys, Ks and MMs and US-Iran peace talks begin in Islamabad through Pakistani mediators. There is not a ceasefire in Lebanon, and the erstwhile "neutral" (ho ho) Paki mediators are siding with the MMs in asserting that is part of the "agreement". But there is no agreement; both sides have ceased firing for the moment but agree on nothing else.

My expectation, a few days back when this was announced, was that there would be no meaningful negotiation, just a pretence, and things would just stay as-is on the ground, and everything would quietly go back to normal. But the MMs have decided to play rough and keep Hormuz closed, and I'm doubtful that will fly. Or swim. If I was the Yanquis, I would be putting my pieces into place for re-opening Hormuz by force; and that would include non-military stuff like sorting out insurance (and demonstrating how safe it is...). El Econo has a reasonably decent article setting things out.

Based on past experience I expect the MMs to not give any meaningful ground in the talks, and to pointlessly insist on their Lebanese proxies being part of the ceasefire. Meanwhile the Lebs are - stupidly, performatively, but apparently no-one in our idiot meeja can see how dumb this is - refusing to talk until there is a ceasefire there. Brent crude is currently at $94, down from its highs but up from its lows, reflecting everyone's uncertainty about Hormuz; what the MM will do once it becomes clear the talks are a waste of time I don't know. Do you know the future? Then earn kudos by predicting it in a comment.

Most of the meeja seem to feel that the war has been pointless, which is just their disappointment at not getting a clear-cut result that their tiny minds can grasp. That the MMs have been "knocked back"¹ isn't something they can understand.

Update: I'm not sure I fully know how to interpret this chart, but it seems to show the market expecting happiness in the medium term. It will be interesting to see how it changes.

2026/4/12: witty and amusing developement is the US deciding to blockade Iranian ports. Such fun! I don't think that was on anyone's cards. Oil is mildly up, but whether caused by that, or the totally unexpected breakdown of negotiations², I don't know. And sharez iz up.

2026/4/17: the Economist's Mar 28th 2026 Advantage Iran hasn't aged well. Brent currently at $90 and S&P500 at an all-time high.

2026/4/29: Brent at $119 - though the S&P is happy at 7135 - and Trump says No More Mr Nice Guy. Popcorn time? The Economist thinks that Oil markets are still in La La land, though it does say it is loth to second-guess those who have the facts to hand and billions of dollars at stake (2026/07/01: We woz wrong about oil, they confess). UAE quits OPEC.

2026/5/6: Brent hovering just above $100; S+P at 7340; and rumours of peace though such are unreliable, and Aunty notes the problem of who would even approve such an agreement among the factions in Iran's leadership; and U.S. Forces Disable Vessel in Gulf of Oman Attempting to Violate Blockade, which is bound to make the MMs happy.

2026/5/11: The pattern continues: Brent above $100, but S+P rises, and the Iranians prevaricate - well, the MM has now rejected the MMs rejection of his plan; the US blockade continues as does the Iranian one; it is hard to see this ending peacefully. The MMs have nowhere to go; although Iran of course has excellent options, starting with getting rid of the MMs.

2026/06/10: low-level twatting continues, but Trump does genuinely seem to want peace, to the despair of the popcorn class. Hormuz closed seems to be normalised; who cares anymore? And the market cares more about possible AI froth.

Refs

* The War the Arab World Is Watching.

* The goal of the negotiation in Iran should [be]...

* What Iran Won - RH, everyone's favourite pundit - flip-flops like a lightweight.

* U.S. warships cross Strait of Hormuz for first time since Iran war began.

* U.S. Forces Start Mine Clearance Mission in Strait of Hormuz.

* Tis but a flesh wound.

* U.S. to Blockade Ships Entering or Exiting Iranian Ports.

* I've pushed for a blockade for over a month...

* Lead finals | Meishan 2026 (men's boulder; women's boulder).

* You Can't Feed The Poor By Taxing @JeffBezos ' Wealth.

Notes

1. A breadmaking metaphor; perhaps tasteless when applied to humans.

2. Actually I fully expected negotiations to limp along for ages. The breakdown is likely a sign that the USAnians don't want to piss about; good for popcorn futures, bad for Iranian infrastructure.

Book review: The Case Against Education

The Case Against Education is a book written by libertarian economist Bryan Caplan and published in 2018 by Princeton University Press. Drawing on the economic concept of job market signaling and research in educational psychology, the book argues that much of higher education is very inefficient and has only a small effect in improving human capital, contrary to the conventional consensus in labor economics. Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to certify their intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity—attributes that are valued by employers. He ultimately estimates that approximately 80% of individuals' return to education is the result of signaling, with the remainder due to human capital accumulation, as wiki says. Or you can try Goodreads. As BC himself notes, almost no-one changes their mind as a result of reading the book, so entrenched are everyone's opinions; so I'm not going to make any attempt to convince you he is correct: read the book if you want the details.

His data is almost all from the USA, but that hardly matters, because the same is true world over. Every government happily burbles that nothing is more important than education, and no-one amongst the elite - or indeed, anyone else - will listen to arguments to the contrary. Which is itself a meta-argument: how can so many fools all be right?

Another meta-argument: why is it that education is the only "good" that its recipients try so hard to avoid?

Anecdote: one of the gains to education is a strong societal, and indeed personal, gain at the lower end of male ability, because staying in education, and the minor gains to employability, tend to reduce criminality amongst young men. But there's no similar gain for young women, because so few commit any crime.

There are two sorts of gains: personal, and societal. The personal is improvements in your employability, future earnings, and the care and comfort of your soul. The societal is how much extra you'll produce as a result of what you learn, together with harder to measure stuff like the good of your soul and reduction in crime. If the bulk of the personal gain came from what you actually learnt, then the two types of good would be close to indistinguishable; BC's main argument is that they aren't, because the bulk - his estimate is 80% - of the personal good comes from signalling: completing your education signals to employers that you are intelligent, industrious, and conformist. But signalling has no societal benefit: it merely alters the relative ordering of people, it doesn't make people any more useful.

He produces exhaustive evidence for the effect of signalling, but I suspect this is much like evolution: you don't really need evidence, once the concept has been explained, unless your religion prevents you from believing. An example is that the rewards for education - as measured by earnings, in this case - are not linear with years of schooling; instead, there is a marked jump around graduation, from either high school or college. This would make no sense if the gains came from what you learnt; but makes perfect sense if what matters is the piece of paper saying you hae passed the course.

For what it is worth, BC happily accepts that reading, writing and arithmetic are valuable skills that we all need, and so doesn't trouble himself with junior school. Probably if you pushed him he would quibble that too, but never mind we need not go there. He also accepts that some of what is learnt in some courses - for example, engineering - is useful.

His remedy is austerity: the government should stop, or at least begin to reduce, subsidising useless signalling. He is perfectly well aware that this isn't going to happen.

I think that his arguments-from-future-earnings are unassailable, which means the easiest way round them is to argue for nurture-of-the-soul. This has the great advantage of being very hard to measure, so it is easy to apply wishful thinking, and people promptly do so. I - and I assume you, dear reader - are amongst the cognitive elite; and so our experience of education is rather different to that of the masses, at least I should jolly well hope so. I enjoyed school, and I enjoyed university. And I rather suspect that applies to quite a lot of elite policy and opinion formers out there; this may account for some of the bias. But nurturing the soul, and instilling a love of education, knowledge, and culture for its own sake, is not something that the bulk factory education system is going to do, except by happy chance.

If we were to accept his case, how much does it matter? The waste is then lots of money, but that translates into lots of time: all those people teaching stuff pointlessly, and all the students who could be doing something more productive. So, yes, it matters: the facile govt idea that at least it keeps people off the unemployment rolls for three years is silly.

Refs

* Congress more or less doesn’t exist, except as a social media operation. The institution has abandoned itself.

* The Vast Emptiness of Social Psychology.

* Our Amicus Brief in the Section 122 Tariff Case - Ilya Somin.