Tuesday, July 29, 2014

If Only

I am currently in the midst of researching what I'm hoping will be an especially valuable piece for next week, so I decided to reprint one of my entries from a few years ago.

It was about two and a half years ago when I posted this entry into my blog and the truth of it has held very steady to today.  The real shame of this is that we have yet to see a recovery from this economic down turn that came upon us in 2007.  And I wonder if enough sound economic sense will ever get elected to undo all the damage that's been done since 2007 in the name of supposed learned lessons. 

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Understanding Today Is To Understand Logical Fallacies


I am fond of telling people I am simply applying logic in order to arrive at my conclusions.  I  then go on to present a line of reasoning which to many may seem like just another opinion.  One  that is no better than anyone else's.  Those who see it this way may think I'm just puffed up and  full of myself.  It is for those people and anyone who finds themselves in a discussion with  those people that I provide the content of this series of blog posts.


Many of today's popular views are heavily based on well acknowledge logical fallacies.  By "well  acknowledged" I mean logicians and other scholars who's professions depend on the use of logic  have long since come to agree certain ways of arranging facts or the lack there of are  completely wrong.  I will list some of my favorites with relevance to many popular views.  I  will deal with a couple, perhaps three or four if they're short enough, in each post across the rest of this month.


I will be quoting Wikipedia's List of Fallacies page for the actual fallacy definitions and then adding my discussion of the far too common examples of it in much of today's thinking.

Our Current Economic Crisis And The Regression Fallacy


"Regression fallacy – ascribes cause where none exists. The flaw is failing to account for  natural fluctuations. It is frequently a special kind of the post hoc fallacy."


Popular view number 1:  Our current economic downturn was caused by _______. 
You can fill in the blank depending on one's politics, but unless that blank is filled by  something along the lines of, "the inevitable ups and downs of the economic cycle", we have an  example of a regression fallacy.


The Bush tax cuts didn't cause this.  Lack of regulation of the mortgage industry didn't cause  this.  Excessive government spending didn't cause this.  The size of the national debt didn't  cause this.  Nothing caused the down turn.  


It was inevitable.  This is basic macro- economics.  Economies contract from time to time because they become too full of weak or bad  business ventures.  When large numbers of these ventures fail or get downsized around the same time, investors, lenders, and  consumers very reasonably become cautious and there's a downward momentum in the economy.  Many  reasonably solid ventures also start to suffer because of the lower availability of investment  funds and the reduction of income (due to less consumer spending).  At this point it looks like  a never ending vicious cycle, but eventually it stops.  

Eventually the  accumulation of idle investment funds is lured out by the increasingly solid business ventures  that remain.  These ventures are seen as solid precisely because they've survived thus far.   Once the investment funds start to not only flow more easily but are doing so into largely solid  ventures, the corner is turned.  The economy now begins to grow again.  Good new ventures and  the relaunching of some unfairly halted ones enter the picture and add to the growth even more.   The new jobs and greater incomes lead to more consumer spending which leads to even more  growth, and now we have momentum going the other way, a boom.  

This momentum inevitably starts  to carry even more weakly conceived and/or managed ventures, and they go further than they deserve to because of it.  This sort  of thing accumulates until ... you guessed it, we have a new economic contraction resulting from  all the eventual failures.  This is the economic cycle.  Not only is it inevitable but even if we had a way to stop it we wouldn't want to.  An economy without ups and downs would be very much like a person that can't feel pain.  We'd keep hurting ourselves and never know it.  Economic downturns are inevitable and even good in the long run.  What we can and should be concerned with is not making them more severe or longer than they need to be.

Government can't stop the cycle but it  can effect it.  If government does something to either encourage, prop up, or create weak  businesses it will cause the boom to be artificially high and the following bust to be more  painful.  These are the sorts of things we should be asking ourselves about.

Relevant to our current situation, we should be asking if bad mortgage loans had been  encouraged by government policies, propped up by government, or created by government?  The  answer is yes, yes, and pretty much yes.  The lack of regulations are pretty much a red herring.

"Red herring – a speaker attempts to distract an audience by deviating from the topic at hand by  introducing a separate argument which the speaker believes will be easier to speak to."


The regulations were a problem, but they were regulating a kind of loan that had essentially been created  by government policies and actions and were also encouraged by them, and not only were there too  many of these loans but they wouldn't have even existed without government intervention.  Blaming the lack of regulations is a lot like blaming a forest for a fire, when the better question is who started the fire.


The  government policies that gave birth to these loans came into place back in the 70's as a an  outgrowth of the civil rights movement, the Community Reinvestment Act most notably.  Not to fault the civil rights movement.  I'm just  pointing out that it wasn't just the lenders' greed and the politicians' lust for power that  created these bad policies, it was also misguided good intentions.

I suspect that's why neither major political party is willing to talk about the real major cause of this recession's severity, because to do so would be to admit that both of their sets of rhetoric about  how best to govern for most of the last fifty years has all mostly been wrong.  Both tax cuts and government spending can  stimulate economic growth but at least some times growth shouldn't be encouraged, lest we make  the inevitable bust bigger.  Likewise economic forces and their outcomes are not always  fair, but when government steps in to try to make them fair they will inevitably just move the  pain to another place, another time, perhaps another generation and while doing so make it greater.  The only way to overcome the unfairness of market forces is in the aggregate of all events.  Individuals must win some to compensate for the times they lost and shouldn't have, and government should try to stay out of the way.


People can disagree with me about that last conclusion, but that the current economic policy debate in Washington D.C. is all based on logical fallacies is undeniable.  Most notably they are based on the regression fallacy and red herrings.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

A logical proof of what many claim cannot be proven

What's sillier than dogmatically believing something exists that you've never seen, heard, or touched? One thing is for sure, insisting the neighbor's dog, who he named 'Red', isn't named 'Red'. It gets even sillier when one labels their neighbor silly for disagreeing.

What is this I'm talking about? Well the question of the existence of God of course, and no, I'm not with the “blind leap of faith” crowd on this. The existence of any god is a self answering question. It takes little to no effort to prove it. In contrast it takes a bit of semantics analogous to some scenes from a particularly cruel game of Simon Says to make the proof challenging.

What is a god? It is something or someone to which we ultimately defer and/or honor above most, if not all other things or people. This is the practical definition of a god. Therefore if anyone ultimately defers to and/or honors something or someone above most, if not all other things or people, that something or someone is a god. Q.E.D. The god's existence is proven by definition. The only thing left to argue is if the god in question merits the status, not if he, she, or it exists.

I could leave it at that and tell myself how smart and clever I've been, but I haven't really addressed the question of God's existence, you know, the big 'G' god. That one is not all that much more difficult really though. Let me set up the proof and show you.

All proofs start with definitions and what we call givens, assumptions we ask others to accept that we then use as the foundation and other building blocks to our proof. There is nothing that has been proven in the world that doesn't start with granted assumptions. Our own existence, the existence of others, and the reliability of human perception are some assumptions fundamental to all science for example.  Ideally the nature of one's assumptions should be such that if someone doesn't accept them they present themselves with a heavy burden to prove why not accepting the assumption is reasonable.

For my proof of God's existence I start with the following definitions and givens.
  1. Definition, a god: something or someone to which we ultimately defer and/or honor above most, if not all other things or people.
  2. Definition, God: the god above all other gods.
  3. Given, human reasoning and perception is flawed.
  4. Given, there is such a thing as right and wrong.

If anyone wishes to argue against 3 and 4 I'm done, but I wouldn’t mind being so, since if any of those are wrong then we all must be terribly confused about our state of beings. So, baring any hyper-humanist extremism I will proceed with my proof.

  • Since human reasoning is flawed and yet there is such a thing as right and wrong, it is possible for human perception of what is right and what is wrong to be wrong.
  • Therefore what is right and what is wrong is determined by something independent of flawed human perception.

e.g. If everyone in the world suddenly decided it was okay and even right to kill everyone with red hair just because they have red hair, it would still be wrong.

  • Whatever that is that is independent of flawed human perception that determines what is right and what is wrong is ultimately deferred to and honored, thus making it fit the definition of a god.
  • If a conflict between the god that ultimately determines right and wrong and another god occurs, moral humans will always defer to the god of right and wrong. This makes this god the god above all others.

i.e. Civilized human beings are deferential to morality and ethics and since the source of these things transcends humanity, that is a god, and since we will defer to our best understanding of right more often than not, given any conflict, that god is the god of all gods, hence God.

Now perhaps you see what I meant about the dog named 'Red'. For someone to suggest the belief in God is silly because of a lack of tangibility, is itself the most silly. My theological studies lead me to conclude that God exists precisely because He exists, but even if He didn't exist for that reason, God exists at the very least because we need Him toWe need Him to save us from our faultiness that makes it possible for us to destroy ourselves.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Free Will's Will

I honestly believe I learned more as a teacher than my students did from the experience, which is not an admittance of shame or remorse.  To the contrary I think it's as it should be.  Any teacher who doesn't learn more from the experience of teaching than the students do from being taught should find a new job.  Teachers start with a good student's knowledge of their subjects but before they can explain their subjects to their students they must come to an even deeper level of insight.  But that's just the beginning of why teachers learn more.  It's being in charge of people and observing human behavior patterns in a setting where the directions those patterns move directly effect the achievement of goals.

I started out teaching with my feet squarely planted in the behaviorist school of psychology.  I believed that all I needed to do was introduce the right set of rewards and punishments and I would inevitably end up with a well behaved group of students.

By my last teaching day I had been completely converted to what they call the humanist school of psychology.  Human beings, unlike rats and other animals the behaviorists experimented on, cherish their freedom to make decisions so much they are willing to forgo great rewards and endure much punishment just so they can say to themselves, "I made my own choices and not the ones people pushed me towards".


Oh sure, there are studies that show how human behavior can in fact be influenced by carefully planned and orchestrated inputs, but those studies betray themselves.  They don't actually show how to control human behavior, only influence it, and then only when the subject doesn't realize it's being done.

Whether the exceptions to the aggregate trend are responding to other more powerful external inputs, asserting free will, or some mix between is still completely unsettled by these studies' data.  Likewise the answer to the question as to why those who do respond as desired do so, is still unanswered.  Is it because their decisions are little more than predictably responses, because they just don't happen to care enough to swim against the figurative current, or something else?

I for one came to have a great respect for human will, and rejected behaviorism as an effective model for effectively managing human relationships.  

At the very least individuals are driven to reject complete external control.  So what does that make true of anyone who, knowing this about people, still tries to impose it?  If a child treats a stuffed animal like a friend, what would we think of an adult who tore it part in front of the child and gleefully announced, "see, it doesn't bleed because it isn't a real animal"?  Our disdain would probably be well deserved.

Now being a cruel thing to attempt to impose on people, doesn't make behaviorism a bad theory.  We shouldn't reject theories and ideas in science because they threaten our sense of decency.  There is definitely a legitimate line of inquiry to be followed there, one that has and can continue to offer new and useful insights into human behavior.  But we need to recognize when the results of science are best not applied.

On the other hand, in the case of free will, it's a self-evident reality.  By that I don't mean to be ridiculous.  I'm not saying the existence of free will proves itself beyond all doubt and that should settle the argument.  No, not at all.  What I am saying is that we decide how we perceive reality itself.  

Does it exist?  Do we exist?  Like a blind person suddenly plunged into water and upon finding a steady surface object to grab, we decide quickly if we're going to try holding onto it.  We wont know if that decision was a good or not until after we've committed to it.  That's all of us on existence.  We all pretty much have committed to the idea that we exist and have found that base assumption an effective starting point for rational thought.  

We could alternately start with the assumption that we don't exist or even more nebulously that we just don't know if we do, but those directions have yet to be shown as even remotely practical.  All reasoning begins to seem pointless once we do.  None the less some people pursue and have pursued those very paths.

It seems that we decide to accept the assumption that we exist, since it's possible to accept one of its alternatives, and some have.  Thus we seem to have free will.  Our free will is like our existence, an assumption we see as practical and thus we make.  Until one can demonstrate a consistent method to absolutely control human behavior through external stimuli, there is no practical reason for most of us to assume anything else but that we have free will.

It could be simply said that we choose to believe we have free will or we don't.  Either way the existence of our free will is corroborated.  It becomes a truly ridiculous exercise to try and convince someone who believes they have free will to choose otherwise.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

How Life Confuses Us

        Life pulls a dirty trick, one might say, on all of us as we grow up from being children to being adults.  It's like life has made us the victim of one of those word tricks.
        "What does 's' 't' 'o' 'p' spell?"
        "Stop." 
        "What do you do when a traffic cop holds up his hand towards you?"
        "Stop."
        "What do you do at a stop sign."
        "Stop."
        "What do you do when a traffic light turns green."
        "Stop."
        "Gotcha!"
        For the first decade and then some of our lives this thing called maturity is a steady progression of getting better at things like self-discipline, respecting others, and handling responsibilities.  Then along comes puberty and no matter how well we've been doing up to that point, it seems we become the brunt of a cruel joke.
        Suddenly the chemistry in our bodies presents a challenge of much greater proportion than we had ever seen before to all those things we had come to associate with maturity.  The same will that was more than sufficient for many of us to be good is now barely adequate most of the time and woefully inadequate at least some of it.  We find ourselves seemingly beyond discipline, driven to think disrespectful things about others, especially those we find attractive, and all too easily we neglect our responsibilities.
        Fortunately with age we slowly but surely manage to re-assert our wills mastery over our bodies.  But much of this isn't so much a credit to our efforts as to the chemistry settling down.  But whatever combination of things it may be, those of us who function in society do regain self-control.  Then we move on with our lives as human beings instead of mere base animals.
        But I suggest that we are still scarred by this part of our lives.  It was a trauma that challenged our view of what it means to be an adult.  
        Some of us came to understand how it all fits together in our lives.  How being human has a base animal side that needs to propagate, but it is part of what makes us so uniquely adaptive as a species that we don't allow that aspect of our being to control us.
        Unfortunately though, it seems that far too many of us badly missed the point.  Instead of toughing it through puberty with continued respect for the true elements of maturity, too many of us concluded that sex was the true mark of maturity and that things like discipline and respect were there to be challenged.
        And while challenging ideas and questioning social constructs is a good thing from a learning perspective, it's only likely to be productive if done in a disciplined and respectful manner.  Otherwise the results of the challenge tend to become little more than wish fulfillment designed to satisfy base animal motivations.
        This base mind-set, almost a dichotomy,  sees no merit in tradition more because it stands in the way of a "good time" than because of any serious examination of the role and purpose of tradition in human society.  Chronocentric bigotry becomes the hammer of the day, and everything anchored in the past is perceived as having no worthy foundation precisely because it's from the past.
       "Get with the present." 
       "Don't be on the wrong side of history."
        Those are the sorts of phrases typical of this errant, and I suggest, traumatized mindset.  Puberty scarred them badly, leaving them out of touch with a human reality where we are capable of transcending our base animal natures enough to appreciate and respect civilization.
       And then there's the irony of it all.  This multitude of people that seem to dominate contemporary thinking, these people with a base-animal-mindset that allows desire for sexual satisfaction to bias and distort their reasoning, they may be on the brink of destroying themselves and taking a few unfortunate bystanders with them when they do.  The irony is that they may do this precisely by failing to satisfy the base-animal need of propagation.
        For more details on this sub-point than I'll go into here I direct you to this article here: population trending the wrong direction .  The article discusses reputable studies showing that we are likely headed to a world-wide population peak in the next few decades, to be followed by a precipitous decline in population.
        The article suggest the cause is woman working and using contraceptives, but I think I see something deeper, and not some how a negative consequence of feminism (scientists should try and stay away from social commentary don't you think?).  
        I believe the contraceptives are being used more for the sake of satisfying base desires than as family planning tools.  And while that in and of itself seems harmless at first glance, there's a problem coming from an angle we're not noticing, like the green light in the string of 'stop's.  When we allow our base desires to have too much influence over our decisions we tend to lose sight of our responsibilities to civilization.  Sex has a much more important purpose than pleasure and even relationship, and letting it control us is usually wrong.  At some point after puberty we must re-assert the mind's mastery, for the sake of us all.
       The problem, I suggest, causing birth rates to drop below 2.1 per couple is not contraceptives, but maturity.  Too many of us got lost along the way to adulthood.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Why The Internet Spreads Confusion

A good friend of mine was one the pioneers of modern computing. Not one anyone would likely recognize, since his role was to computer age pioneering as that of a typical homesteader to pioneering in the old west. While Bill Gates was chasing down the details of dos and Steve Jobs was toiling with his friends in a garage, my friend was literally playing with IBM's prototype personal computer. That was the late 70's. In the early 80's he was very possibly the first psychology major at his college to secure official access to the college's computer lab. There he loved to challenge programmers to write more and more complex programs, while hacking into a few himself to see what chimera he could create by cutting out some pieces, modifying others, and combining multiple programs together. Other than a few good careers, nothing huge came of all of that, other than one thing I find quite interesting, an insight.

Besides being a psychology major and strong history minor, he is also a masters level biblical scholar, a man after my own heart, which gave him what I'd call a trans-historical perspective on our age. He saw the things that were happening in perspective of the full span of human history much more so than others. So when he saw the internet develop from a Department of Defense data sharing system into a private sector revolution he wondered about something others didn't, though perhaps should. Was the Tower of Babel “curse” about to be lifted?

The Story Of The Tower


For those less familiar with the Biblical story, it basically says that Noah's early descendents came under the leadership of a man named Nimrod, who directed them to build a tower into the heavens. The exact purpose of the tower is debated but it seemed to my friend to be Nimrod's attempt to reach God on his own terms, possibly even to make his own demands of him. In other words, hubris to the nth degree. Nimrod was the ultimate example of a powerful central government without limitations.

He notes that the authors of the story came from a culture and time that didn't use the words we translate as “heaven” to mean something as general as we use “heaven” for. For them it meant specifically the space between earth's sky and the stars. Yes, interestingly enough the ancients conceived of space, and this tower then was very possibly intended to grant access into this space, something described in other ancient writings as the sea beyond the sky, across which one might travel to the stars.

I know, some may be thinking this is crazy talk and/or a set up for some New Age nonsense, but don't panic. I'm not going there and nor does my friend ever intend to go there. The fact that the ancients conceived of a sea between our atmosphere and the stars may seem to shake up the typical chronocentric perspective of ancient peoples, but it most certainly does not mean the ancients were space travelers or anything that far fetched. 

It's just a testament to the power of human deduction, that even without telescopes, rockets, and satellites, there are enough facts to be observed with the human eye to figure out there's an altitude beyond which the atmosphere ends and something else begins, and that these stars and planets we observe are in fact both very distant and very large.

Now back to the internet and the Tower of Babel.

In the Biblical story God sees what Nimrod's followers are doing as bad. He seems to use the 'absolute power corrupts absolutely' argument and very matter of factly at that. Of course, God is the one sentience in existence that can always safely speak matter of factly. So, citing this argument, He “confuses” their language so they can't understand each other, and scatters them across the Earth.

The Internet


Believing this story to be true, my friend watched the development of the internet with great interest. The internet was about to make it possible for human beings all around the world to communicate pretty much whenever they wanted. Translation programs make spanning the gap between languages almost trivial. 

Was this the undoing of what God did to the builders of the Tower? If so, what was going to happen when this undoing was done?

The answer he says, “we had it wrong”. 

Once again chronocentrism, our natural predisposition to assume the simplest of meanings in ancient records, led us to an incorrect conclusion. Language is not the only communication barrier between humans. “Come let us go down and confuse their language so they don't understand each other”, is what the most authoritative English translation says. Note the languages are not just made different, but they are “confused”. And, indeed that is what the internet's coming to apparently unite the world in communication has demonstrated. Even when we speak the same language, confusion runs wild.

Anyone who uses the internet for research should know by now that many are the people who offer answers to questions, authoritative sources on subjects ranging from science, technical matters, literature, and religion, and many of these people are offering severely biased or just completely inaccurate or even false information. There's no way to control the information offered without giving some group of people undue power to control information, and that would pretty much undo the whole point of it.

Most contributors sincerely believe their offerings are sound, but somewhere along their path of learning they may have been misinformed or misled. 

Many of these misinformed or misled contributors are even highly respected members of the the academic community, so simply checking their credentials doesn't cut it either. 

It seems the more we gather information, the more we see we don't necessarily even know what we thought we knew. More information and more communication seems to mean just more confusion. The internet has come to shine the proverbial light on our confusion and ignorance and revealed to us that reality that we confuse ourselves.

So where do we go from here? Do we abandon the internet as Nimrod's followers abandoned their Tower? Is human progress impossible? 

Of course not. Human progress is clearly possible as we can look at history and see examples of it, such as technology and the expansion of individual liberty across the ages. The confusion we see on the internet is just a revisiting of an ancient lesson, one that points us to a way forward.

Whether one believes the story of the Tower actually happened or not, it's existence tells us the ancients knew something many of us only recently re-discovered. Collectives, whatever they may be, unlimited democracies, religious organizations, political factions, corporations, or Nimrod and his followers after their language was confused, eventually and inevitably fail due to an inefficiency that grows as their numbers grow. 

The only ultimate solution to any problem can be achieved though individuals. Thus the way forward is through maximizing individual liberty within the framework of the absolute minimal amount of government as to facilitate it.

Individuals free to make their own decisions drive progress, not governments or any other collective. So as you see, once again, it all comes back to that, the individual.