The Banal Fallacy

“It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying that there is so much falsehood in the world."

Samuel Johnson

I read a lot, and a lot of what I read is not particularly memorable, edifying or inspiring. However, it sometimes comes to pass that I find the perfect soft-cover to be read when I’m waiting for my damn game to load. Anyways, I was at the local McNally-Robertson during final exam season, looking for some light reading, and I stumbled upon two books which seemed useful: Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence, and Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. As it’s been my humble, humble intention to write about the information world, I figured “there’s no better place to start than the human brain”; and these two books seemed like a good place to start. I don’t really remember what I read in “Social Intelligence”, although I do remember it was quite memorable; but, it just so happens, I picked up Gilbert’s book not long after I had writer’s block on this very subject.

Sage that he was, Samuel Johnson too had his occasional lapses from factual accuracy. In that respect, he is firmly in the camp of the multitudes: 99.99% of us make the occasional mistake when it comes to relating or remembering things we see, experience or hear. Although most of us see ourselves as paragons of truth-telling―I do myself―perhaps this will shed a useful light on some of the mechanisms our truth depends upon, and, perhaps, erode an iota of that certainty―if only for as much time as it takes for the brain to fabricate a rebuttal to my arguments.

I call “this carelessness with the truth”, as Johnson would have it, the ‘banal fallacy’. Banal fallacies have a great deal of impact on societies by reducing the efficiency and accuracy of information transmission: bad information can lead to the wrong politician being elected, or misdiagnosis. It can also lead to broken friendships, stupid business deals, and fraud.

So, the question is, “why does he have to come down so hard on people, and accuse them of falsehood, blatant misrepresentation of facts, and generally being bad citizens?” Well, the answer to that question is this: I’m not making a moral argument (per se), and I’m not going to come down hard on you at all. It’s something we all do, and it’s banal for that very reason. Typically there are three sources for fallacies, including properties of the brain, communications and error. Very little has changed, over thousands of years, in that respect, other than the volume of information whose source we are not even casually acquainted with. In this regard, the ever-widening sphere of human knowledge, when married to our finite capacities and imperfect tendencies, does seem to bring new scope to foolishness. Before I introduce you to the brain, and some things you may not have known (although you may have been aware of them), I should probably explain why the fallacy, banal or not, is not necessarily a good thing.

In human society, the question of factuality, the abstraction’s relationship to its object, is crucial. Without the ability to generate or warehouse accurate (factual) information, it becomes impossible to make meaningful comparisons between activities or objects. Bereft of this capability, it would be simply impossible for a group of people to develop tools, a society, or even survive. The degree of factuality is instrumental in determining the reliability and relevance of feedback, a system’s output forming part of the input fed back in; and, therefore, in determining the performance of the system as a whole (feedback is a mechanism facilitating control of a system). A good example, a common calculator takes inputs―punched in numbers and formulae―and passes them through its processing unit (containing the internal logic) in order to provide an output. If the calculator is not correctly programmed, it will process inputs such as 3 x 5 into a non-factual output, such as 16. For those of us who aren’t convinced that three times five is equal to sixteen, factuality would seem very important: arguably it makes a huge difference whether we have $100 or $1000 dollars, or whether the lion is dead or just sleeping.

Now that we know just how important accurate, factual information is, I can get to demonstrating how little our brains care for it. Let’s begin with the role of the three vehicles by which much of our ‘carelessness with the truth’ is accomplished. They are, in no particular order: filling in, leaving out, and selective sampling. The first, and least obvious vehicle, filling in, is done without the knowledge of the conscious mind.

Filling in is a pretty universal mental phenomenon―although some autists may be less likely to do this some of the time; but it is also unconscious, and so most of us are blissfully unaware of its occurrence. It is actually a biological necessity: our brains, no matter how marvelous they may be, have limited amounts of space available to store the information they are constantly being bombarded with. So, in order to conserve space, the brain compresses experiences into salient facts, and when the time comes to remember them, fills in with ‘made up’ details. As Daniel Gilbert, authour of Stumbling on Happiness, notes, “The elaborate tapestry of our existence is not stored in memory-at least not in its entiretey. Rather, it is compressed for storage by first being reduced to a few critical threads, such as a summary phrase, or small set of key features. Later, when we want to remember our experience, our brains quickly reweave the tapestry by fabricating-not actually retrieving-the bulk of the information that we experience as a memory.” So, our brains seem to have a tendency to remember things that didn’t happen, particularly when we summon the same memory more than once. Unfortunately, the brain is also complicit in another mistake: forgetting things that didn’t happen.

Donald Rumsfeld was harshly criticized for his “known unknowns” speech. But, what if he had a point?

“…there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know."

From the perspective of the human mind, the ‘unknown unknown’ is a value that doesn’t reside in the memory for the simple fact that the fact has never happened, or for the simple fact that the brain has not registered that the fact has happened. Gilbert states, “…studies show that when ordinary people want to know whether two things are causally related, they routinely search for, attend to, consider, and remember information about what did happen, and fail to search for, attend to, consider, and remember information about what did not…in other words, we fail to consider how much imagination fills in, but we also fail to consider how much it leaves out.” Our predictions for the future tend to be flawed for this fact: we base our expectations on what we know has happened, and, for that reason, they tend to say more about us, our time and our place than they do about the next. When we aren’t dreaming about an idyllic future, we may be trying to make the best of our present; and that requires us to be a little selective in the information we give credence.

Selective sampling is a time-honoured human tradition designed, it would seem, to give us a more favourable impression of ourselves and our ideas than they truly merit. We should probably be thankful for it: if we didn’t have this capacity for self-deception, we might all be extremely depressed. After all, by definition, half of us are below average―and let’s not pretend that ‘average’ sets the bar high. In order for us to have positive views of ourselves, and so function effectively, we need to believe that we really stand out. This, of course, presents a quandary because much of the information we receive and process should tell us otherwise. The conscious mind isn’t quite so undiscerning that, when presented with overwhelming negative evidence, it will simply disregard it, and, if we don’t disregard it, we might be compelled to accept it. That would be bad, as would the opposite. “When we cook facts, we are similarily unaware of why we are doing it, and this turns out to be a good thing, because deliberate attempts to generate positive views contain the seeds of their own destruction,” says Gilbert, “…when volunteers in one study were told that they’d scored poorly on an intelligence test and were then given an opportunity to peruse newspaper articles about IQ tests, they spent more time reading articles questioning the validity of such tests than articles which sanctioned them…by controlling the sample of information to which they were exposed, these people indirectly controlled the conclusions they would draw.” It’s simple really: we can avoid tough realizations by subconsciously selecting for information which affirms ourselves. Once we come to realize that the human mind isn’t exclusively geared to truth-telling, even to its conscious self, it shouldn’t be hard to accept that it will pass on or accept inaccurate information.

Societies, organizations or complex organisms all exhibit degrees of specialization of function. Specialization of function, to be successful, requires the coordination of disparate functions, and coordination is achieved through transfer of information―communication. If the wrong information is communicated, dysfunction results. Wrong information can be transmitted due to the failings of the medium, such as interference, or due to misinformation in the original message. The transmission of a fallacious notion from one person to another is not a particularly mind-bending process, and doesn’t require much in the way of investigation. It can be done consciously to manipulate other people’s perceptions, or unconsciously…because the people involved simply don’t know any better. What is interesting is how often fallacies spread with greater ease than the truth, showing a great deal of resilience to whit. For example, mistaken ideas about areas where the intended audience do not have a great deal of knowledge, and ideas which make people feel better about themselves may often gain acceptance.

Mistakes happen: they’re a fact of life. Without mistakes, we wouldn’t be able to make smarter mistakes, and, eventually, find solutions to problems. We should probably thank our lucky stars that we’re a fairly advanced-model organism, and that many of the mistakes that made us have already been made. So, with only a little bit of information stored in us to begin with, and a great deal of capacity for storing and gathering―never mind processing―information, it’s not surprising that there are a lot of things we don’t respond to in the best way possible the first time: we don’t understand them because we have no knowledge of them. Our ability to imagine a plausible scenario is a function of our memory of something similar; in fact, the ability to store information in our memory the way we do would be a rather pointless one if we always made the right decision to begin with. So, people make mistakes in interpreting the information they do have, and this is a fertile source of fallacious ideas. It’s a universal problem.

If people have brains which often seem to wish to misinform us, if we have minds which are only as good as what they already know (and rarely that good), and if communicating bad information is easy, why is it that our societies function fairly well, our lives last fairly long, and we’re still in that relationship? Why is it that banal fallacies have not completely hamstrung humankind? Truth be told, banal fallacies, common as they are, are, individually, short-lived phenomena (in the great scheme of things). As much as I seem to have painted a bleak picture of the world of information, I’ve only told a fraction of the story. The human mind, and human societies have developed―some better than others―mechanisms to resist and to correct fallacious ideas. Our ability to capture experiences in written language, and now in audio and video, allows us a much clearer, and detailed view of prior events. Communications technologies are constantly increasing the effectiveness of the medium, both in preserving integrity of the message, and in increasing informational density. Most large organizations, and scientists certainly are, aware of our tendency to sample selectively, as demonstrated by practices in the laboratory or in the HR department of a large multi-national. Inevitably, the information we receive and process will never fully reflect the state of the world at a given moment; but I have confidence that, over time, the lifespan and scope of the banal fallacy will fall.

NYPD Blue

I have trouble putting myself to bed at reasonable hours at the best of times, an inability that really makes my work days stretch on and on. Imagine my irritation when, having successfully overcome my handicap last night, I was startled awake just shy of a deep sleep by the sound of popping glass.

When the second smashing sound came, I figured somebody had to be stealing a car (having clean forgot that since everybody in the neighbourhood has a car alarm that goes off hourly, smashing windows would segue instantaneously into ceaseless wailing). Went to the north window (fronting the "back yard" nestled between the buildings on our block) and saw nothing. Ran to the phone, searching for the precinct's phone number, rather fruitless considering I didn't even know what precinct I'm in. 32^nd, for future ref. Unable to phone and thinking I'd best act fast, opened my barred window to the fire escape and, stuck my head out, noticed the rear-end of a guy in a red T-shirt hanging out the bottom window of a building across the yard.

Before things went any further, sirens presaged cruisers roaring down W 138^th and finally onto W 139^th where they were needed. Climbing out onto the fire escape pulling a shirt over my head, I saw the cops start piling out of their cars. What followed was a ridiculous if not very dramatic scene.

Very quickly, about six officers appeared on the roof of the building our friend was burglarizing in such an ill-conceived manner. As they had no idea what was going on and I did, I started shouting at them: "Hey! He's down there!" "Where is he?" "Down at the very bottom in the window!" "What floor?" "Very bottom! He's wearing a red T-shirt and he's not moving, just sitting still in the window!" and so on. Officers clambered down the fire escape under my expert guidance (haha) and, reaching the bottom, proceeded to pull out all the lines they learned watching cop shows on TV. Guns at the ready, they barked golden oldies like, "Don't move or I'll blow your motherf---ing head off!", and so on.

I'm not sure if our inconsiderate glass smasher had a clear notion of what he was doing. He seems at least to have successfully picked an apartment with no one in it at the time, though it was unclear if he noticed that every ground floor window within three miles of here is barred. The coppers sure had a field day making fun of him. Not that much cleverer themselves, they couldn't for the lives of them figure out how to get their felon out of the fenced yard. Some of their more gifted counterparts set to work with a sledgehammer on the gate of the park that abuts the yard. I'm not sure if this move was calculated to rouse everyone else who wasn't already awake or simply prevent them getting any rest. In any case, the lock got the better of the exchange and the police were forced to uncuff their man and escort him up the fire escape.

That was the end of it, though they good-naturedly thanked me. I was left wondering why no one else had bothered to come outside. The commotion must have been enough to wake nearly everyone on the block, and there are a lot of us--the precinct has a population in the ballpark of 61,000 in a hair less than a square mile. All bedroom window lights stayed out, that I could see. All windows closed. Though someone did call the police, people were more inclined to stay indoors. It clearly was a situation presenting no physical danger--just a moron who forgot about the second half of breaking and entering. On the bright side, if the New York Police Department can spare about twelve officers, all told, to arrest the world's most incompetent burglar, they must be staying on top of crime. On the other hand, it's not that tough to arrest a complete idiot.

I'm behind on sleep again: that and a fellow's dignity were the only things stolen last night. Did get some amusement out of the deal, however... Just one more day in Harlem!

Big Apple Circus

An afternoon conversation via acoustic telegraphy with johndon't sashayed across a good deal of territory, including the ground broken by contractors working for the Metropolitan Transit Authority here in New York City at the 135^th Street and Lenox Avenue stop of the 2-3 subway line. Blocking pedestrian traffic in front of Harlem Hospital is a gaping hole through earth and pavement from which will spring, the labourers assure me, an elevator to the platform below. Perhaps spring is too forceful a word to bandy about. After a lengthy gestation period, spring having come and gone, a lift will emerge in slow motion circa this time 2008. With any luck after all this anticipation, eager elevator-goers will be able to descend to their waiting rail cars and travel anywhere the 2-3 line is wont to go, providing they don't mind losing their wheelchair routes for a year while the sidewalks on both sides of the street are removed.

Meantime, I don't anticipate much rioting by the masses of the stranded infirm. Not because they don't riot (on the contrary! In their own special way) so much as that there aren't any. If I were an executive (let's assume for the purposes of this example that the MTA is a real company rather than a government-chartered monopoly with a board staffed by annointed political hacks and union reps) and somebody handed me a capital project costing many millions over a lengthy construction period, I might enquire how much revenue she expected this outlay to generate, and when. Suppose she handed me the wildly optimistic figure of $10,000 per annum and I (because I enjoy being lied to) bought in. Let's also pretend this undertaking costs a mere $1,000,000. It doesn't. In reality the price is a great deal more elevated and will be raised on the backs of taxpayers from here to Binghampton and beyond.

At that rate, it will tkae 100 years just to recoup our costs!¹ Preposterous! (I would shout, pounding upon my desk for emphasis). Incompetent! Get thee back into the tempest and the night's Plutonian shore!

Though no business in its right mind would get on board such a crazy scheme, the people who run the transit system are ever clamoring for more of them. It makes you wonder how they get away with it in a neighbourhood like mine, where it's pretty difficult for your average family just to make the rent for the roof over its collective head, a rent that owes much to stratospheric property taxes (which shouldn't even exist!). Ignorance & Apathy, as the saying goes, but two other factors play a role: cartels, and the complete unequality of human networks to the task of disseminating large amounts of correct information.

There's lots of information out there. Some false, some true, much totally irrelevant. Certain people in computer sciencey disciplines even have numbers that attempt to define the size of the totality of information in existence with words like terra- and exabytes. (That's scary! The idea that all knowledge could possibly, somehow, be stored on an enormous tape drive in Google's basement -- but its scarriness falls into the domain of irrelevant information and I'd do well to drop it). In a nutshell, there's a lot of information: many, many nutshells worth. Given that human beings aren't some strip of theoretical magnetic tape, none of us can ever "know"² all of it even if at different times in our lives we might manage to know bits and subsets of it here and there.

When people do know a given thing -- perhaps it might be more accurate to say when people carry given smattering of information, as knowledge implies true facts -- it's worth noting that sometimes the information or a variant of it is fairly widespread. A neighbourhood, club, city, hemisphere might all be heavily invested in some notion or other. And just as we have popular culture, popular music, popular science, and popular trees³, so do we also have popular information. As anyone who's ever survived a "pep rally" run by his high school's duly elected student council can attest, popularity contets aren't necessarily the best way to make choices; they're just the most prevalent.

Winston Churchill's famous adage about democracy being a terrible form of government is doubly true for the democracy of information dissemination: it sucks, but its still better than the alternative. To the extent that human networks are even capable of the Orwellian information tyranny that the Soviets aspired to and the Chinese, with their American corporate pals, still strive for, there is no recourse against ignorance or falsehood.

Given the difficulty of seeking out, discovering, and keeping good information, we often find it easier to live by our illusions. As Artemus Ward pointed out, it ain't the things we don't know that get us into trouble: it's the things we know that ain't so⁴. Apart from the insatiable demand for conspiracy theories, there are many examples of popular information on our day-to-day lives. Just think US Presidential Election 2008 in which Barak and Hilary, campaign bank accounts already bloated with $30 million apiece, will enlighten us with all manner of Very Important smears and soundbites. And surrenders.

So much for the failings of human networks, which aren't capable of telling the people in my neighbourhood that the MTA is up to no good and should be stopped. Knowing necessary facts is not even half the battle; it's a precursor, like gathering intelligence. The real fight is dislodging the vested interests that want to keep things the way they are. In the case of our subway elevator, the cartels involved probably comprise a lobby group of some kind; there's likely a law firm or two and suits under the famous "Americans with Disabilities Act"; probably also a lot of powerful transportation "czars", as the media love to call them, who really enjoy managing pointless and expensive projects and a few tantalizing cost overruns here and there to keep things exciting.

These cartels don't just lurk in the labrynths of the city's underground system. Consider the fortunes of Enron's stock and bondholders. As is frequent in cases where people find themselves fleeced on such a grand scale, a great outcry arose to the effect of, "there should be a law against that." Nevermind that there already was. In any case, with much ado, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act⁵ was born, and accountants are chortling all the way to the bank. To an accountant, the SOA is important. After all, it protects the American people from dishonest company managements, right? That and it makes thousands of highly-paid CPAs indispensable.

Ever wonder why a simplified, or even flat, tax system is hard to get accepted? Is it because current systems are "progressive" and thus inherently righteous? Or is it maybe because billions of dollars change hands every year in totally unproductive labour as tax accountants doing relatively easy work leech off the work of the economy's productive segment? Now we even have tax preparation software, and tax-breaks for using professional tax preparers. How do you shut down an industry like that?

Think we should clamp down on frivolous lawsuits and insane "damages" awards? Try to talk the lawyers into that, and they run everything anyway. Think members of your legislature are too well paid or get to spend too many years in office? That's too bad because any effort to change things has to go through that same cartel and they will circle the wagons. Want to fire lazy/lousy/loopy public school "educators" who couldn’t teach their way out of a paper bag if you gave them the instructions in phonics? Talk to the union, boss⁶. And though I hate to touch upon so tender a nerve after the last couple of days, seriously: want to hire MTA crews that don’t get their track workers run over every couple of days? To penetrate the closed ranks of that labour provider/service provider monopoly is no less a challenge.

Every day, some fresh⁷ law or regulation or bureaucracy conjures a brand new industry devoted entirely to maintaining it out of thin air. Every day, somewhere, there’s a catastrophe either real or imagined that is read by a cabal as an opportunity to concentrate a bit more power in its hands – most often accompanied by vehement protestations of the public good. As Adam Smith pointed out, people of the same trade seldom meet together but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.

I heard a cute little quote the other day to the effect that, by definition, half the employees at a given company are below average. It’s frankly so easy to believe that that, between myself and johndon’t, nary a conversation can end without one of us observing that people are stupid (which is true, by the way). After all, half the voters in a given electorate are below average by definition. The thing is, many structural problems in our governments result not so much from a problem with individual people as from a known failure of human networks to disseminate correct and useful information, a failure that leaves us at the mercy of various cartels that get their way either through the slickness of their advertising or the fecklessness of their maneuvers. Worse, we’re all part of a cartel – everybody gets a tax break, grant, or special privilege he’d as soon take to the grave with him than give up for the greater good.

Open question, then: what do we do? Those of us who believe that things that are right are right for everyone can’t go over to the enemy, quietly using the system to our advantage. We have to try to change things. How, against those two adversaries? Ideas aren’t in short supply – you can fill up a library with books written by very smart people. Getting them put into action is another thing, for you can equally fill a pretty long Hansard with the empty promises of those who’ve said they would help only to join their own cartel, that of the career politician who has more in common with his opponents across the Commons than, well, anyone who’s common. We have ideas, but fail to enact them because it’s easier to dig a new hole down to the subway. What do we do?

¹ This completely ignores the opportunity cost of having a million bucks around for a of hundred years, too.
² What is the definition of "know" anyway? To have stored somewhere? To have stored somewhere coupled with the ability to retrieve it at all the right times? The preceding plus the ability to thread it into an argument or rational thought?
³ Lighten up... I'm just kidding 'bout that one.
⁴ It definitely ain't so that Artemus Ward was anyone's real name!
⁵ Since I'm really going to town with footnotes, is it just me or are American lawmakers becoming more grandiose by the day. Back in the thirties, they made laws like the Securities Act of 1933, the Trust Indenture Act of 1939, and so on. These days it's all Sarbanes-Oxley, McCain-Feingold, and what have you. Say what you will about rampant egomania -- at least one can tell at a glance what those old acts were about.
⁶ Or take your kids here.
⁷ I of course mean this in the loosest possible sense of the word…

He Said, She Said

Beginning in 1969 and carrying over into the early seventies, there were a number of brokerage house bankruptcies. Here, we compare two versions of the explanation.

...in the early 1970s when the New York Stock Exchange had to shorten its trading hours to reduce the number of transactions occurring in a day--just so the firms could keep up with the paperwork.

During this time, many firms went out of business not because they ran out of money but because they couldn't keep up with the mountains of paperwork created by the cash and carry system of settlement. Clearly a new system was needed.

What we have above might be called the popular theory of brokerage bankruptcy; the voice that echoes it there is Stuart R. Veale in a book called "Stocks, Bonds, Options, Futures" (2^nd Edition, Ch.7, p.102, 2001). Contrast with:

The first financial troubles of the brokerage houses (in 1969) were attributed to the increase in volume itself. This, it was claimed, overtaxed their facilities, increased their overhead, and produced many troubles in making financial settlements. It should be pointed out this was probably the first time in history that important enterprises have gone broke because they had more business than they could handle. In 1970, as brokerage failures increased, they were blamed chiefly on the "falling off in volume." A strange complaint when one reflects that the turnover of the NYSE in 1970 totaled 2,937 million shares, the largest volume in its history and well over twice as large as in any year before 1965. During the 15 years of the bull market ending in 1964 the annual volume had averaged "only" 712 million shares--one quarter the 1970 figure--but the brokerage business had enjoyed the greatest prosperity in its history. If, as it appears, the member firms as a whole had allowed their overhead and other expenses to increase at a rate that could not sustain even a mild reduction in volume during part of a year, this does not speak well for either their business acumen or their financial conservatism.

A third explanation of the financial trouble finally emerged out of a mist of concealment, and we suspect that it is the most plausible and significant of the three. It seems that a good part of the capital of certain brokerage houses was held in the form of common stocks owned by the individual partners. Some of these seem to have been highly speculative and carried at inflated values. When the market declined in 1969 the quotations of such securities fell drastically and a substantial part of the capital of the firms vanished with them. In effect, the partners were speculating with the capital that was supposed to protect the customers against the ordinary financial hazards of the brokerage business, in order to make a double proft thereon. This was inexecusable; we refrain from saying any more.

Above, the voice of Benjamin Graham from the 1973 edition of "The Intelligent Investor" (Ch. 10, p.139).

It appears that Mr Veale has hitched his wagon to the popular version of events and that his two sentence analysis is better accepted today than Graham's two paragraphs. Seriously though, reading them, which one sounds more plausible?

How to: How to write a book?

Well, I told Ellen, about a week ago, that I had every intention of writing a book, and that I'd start during the so-called 'Reading Week'. Surprisingly, I've remained committed to the idea long enough to actually start; however, I've put myself in a very serious predicament: I either have to succeed, fail in a convincingly heart-wrenching way, or be forever dishonoured. You could say that 'fail in a convincing, heart-wrenching way' is my Plan B.

I'm not going to say what I want to write about. That may be due, in part, to the fact that I feel really foolish about this whole thing. Writing a book is something people always talk about doing: it's not a petty goal, it's just one that's hopelessly idealistic and rarely followed through to completion. It may also be that, at this stage, I have no real idea of what I want to write about. I have a vague idea, sure, but how long 'til the mask slips? Worst comes to worst, we can always talk about it on the phone: conversation better lends itself to concealing conceptual deficiency than does writing. If one wishes to be respected at all, that is.

My knowledge of books is more biased towards reading than writing them, and most of my writing, however prolific it may be, is confined to punditry on specific, discrete topics. Certainly I haven't had much to do with the challenges of thinking up something interesting to write about, considering its many implications, and branching that original acorn into an optimally foliated forest giant. That generally requires the abstraction of separate thema to build chapters, sub-thema and observations which may be developed into paragraphs. Which reminds me of criticism's primary advantage: the scope has already been determined by someone else. All that remains is to tear up his life's work in a callous display of wit, irreverence or incontrovertible logic. It's reactive: it's easy.

So the real challenge hasn't been so much 'what do I write about', but 'what do I write about'? We all have ideas that interest us, and that we probably have a credible insight into. The dividing line is between those who can expand upon that central theme until they can fill a large volume, and those who can't. I want to be in the 'can' camp. I guess I'll need more than one insight! [either that, or I'll load pages with cited passages and footnotes]

Stephen Harper's Hockey Pool

I was watching the Sens-Bruins game Saturday January 27^th on the Hockey Night in Canada daytime broadcast part of a tripleheader that also featured the Leafs vs. the Canadiens and an Oil game in the late slot. I expect Ottawa was screwed into the afternoon time because "Leafs Nation" owns Saturday evening on the CBC. Too bad for the rest of Canada.

Speaking of Canada, I saw a familiar sight there: our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, in the stands with all the regular folks. I've been noticing it a fair bit, actually, as the guys controlling the camera cutting never begrudge him his due in broadcast time. Kind of creepy how cameramen can do that at sports events, actually! You never know if they're zoomed in right on you. Mr. Harper has to assume it and comport himself accordingly of course. He got his air time during the singing of our national anthem and, like any good Canadian, gamely mouthed the words along with the singer. That really gets to me: though I sing astonishingly badly for whatever reason, I do do my utmost to sing (at least volumewise!) the anthem at public events rather than this new fad of kind of silently half forming the syllable shapes or phonemes or whatever they call them just because you're not totally comfortable with doing nothing at all. You'd think our elected Number One Guy would show some more pride.

Despite his shortcomings, I do like Stephen. He's an improvement over his predecessors and would-be successors of the moment. We all know he's an avid hockey fan -- even writing a book on the subject. Very careful not to root for any particular franchise, his crafty advisers seem to see the hockey lovers of the populace as a crowd of morons who'd vote their team logo into office if given the chance, a precaution which might not be wholly without merit. So with the help of a taxpayer-subsidized television station taping in a taxpayer-subsidized stadium he's steadily at work convincing beer-drinking jersey-wearing goalie-jeering taxpayers that, far from being a Scary Conservative with a Hidden Agenda, he's a nice fellow just like them.

Some people get groups of hockey nuts together and make bets about which team will win the Stanley Cup. Stephen Harper bets that if he's seen with enough hockey nuts his team will win the next election. I'm sure he enjoyed the game, too. 3-1 Sens!

Moxy Frügal

It's hard not to look at the U.S. Constitution -- objectively and without bias regarding what a government ought to be or do -- without concluding that today -- January 18, 2007 -- the United States Government is well advanced on its way to being something completely other than that which was intended yea those many years ago. The America of bygone times was a decentralized federation of self-reliant states and self-reliant people. America today cleaves much closer to an advanced welfare state with massive taxation, spending, entitlements and financial commitments extending into a future we know very little about.

Inevitable entropy might explain this advance of statism. The idea that entropy -- the quantity of energy in a system that is not available for useful work (or more accessibly, a system's degree of disorder) -- applies not only to the science of heat and mechanical power but to every facet of existence is not a new one. In his 1927 book The Nature of the Physical World, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington avows:

The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations -- then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation -- well, those experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

The defunct Thornhill geek rock group Moxy Früvous actually had a song about entropy whose whimsical lyrics went something like this:

It's entropy you see that turns finesse into mess,
A palace to a pigstye, why it's simply scandalous!
Energy once neat turns into to waste heat
(We must repeat!)
Because of entropy

Moxy Früvous was a bunch of socialists so, even though we love them for their früvolous songs, we must take a quote from a fellow who's against decreasing available energy. To that end, Thomas Jefferson hands us the pithiest observation on the phenomenon of entropy growing over time even in man-made political structures:

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain.

Though Thomas said that at a time when government barely had a beachhead in America, its accuracy isn't so much from prescience as from the man's clear understanding of a segment of history that has repeated itself again and again. From this vantage, trying to push back against ballooning bureaucracies, even if only to stall them rather than force a retreat, seems like a hopeless task. Particularly because a government that engages in "programs" and "services" is like a snowball rolling down a mountain -- the growth is self-sustaining. Government jobs are jobs for life. One reason: once you're employed by Big Government, you vote Big Government because your vote is a vote to stay employed. The more people as a percentage of a population employed by Big Government, the fewer votes there are in play that might dislodge it. The perduring character of public employment leads many people to seek it out on purpose, including many of a torpid sort loathe to do much actual work. If life is a "Simpsons" episode, then government is Lyle Lanley and his monorail:

Barney: What about us brain-dead slobs?
Lanley: You'll be given cushy jobs!

Thus the fact that it cannot really shrink makes it grow.

Sometimes voters do get midly concerned about the size of their government's obligations and, ergo, their own present and future tax bills. As often as not, though, they'll fall for the dulcet tones of a "middle-of-the-road" group of "centrist" politicians playing what Bruce Bartlett calls the old [political] game: calling reductions in the rate of spending growth a 'cut'. When more radical would-be shrinkers find themselves in office, they generally also find themselves on a leash so short they can only tinker with line-items here and there. However, sooner or later, for whatever reason, somebody does try to reduce the size of a piece of government a bit. Spendthrift tax-heavy socialist wunderkind Pierre Trudeau actually tried this, though it was only because fiscal reality reared its ugly head, forcing him to back off his expansion plans to regroup a bit. Unfortunately for Trudeau (actually, it was more unfortunate for the taxpayers really...), he ran up against the world's worst memoirist, Mr. John K. Starnes.

In his autobiography Closely Guarded, which reads like an excruciating list of lunch dates with boring people that I Mostly Disregarded, Starnes does toss out one revealing passage:

Being assistant deputy minister in charge of the department's administration kept me busy. ... The most discouraging [change] was the evident desire of Pierre Trudeau to whittle down External Affairs. His method was to make an arbitrary percentage cut to our budget and to tell us to get on with the job. Mitchell Sharp seemed unwilling to make an issue of the matter with his colleagues, particularly Trudeau. Ministers were not happy, however, when we responded by proposing that some of our missions be closed. Since a considerable percentage of our annual budget was given over to salaries¹ and allowances, closing a few missions and reallocating the personnel affected appeared preferable to widespread layoffs, with all the personal and other problems attendant on such action.

There you have it. Cutting jobs is never fun nor is it a matter to be taken lightly². On the other hand, here we have a decision by the elected representative of the people of Canada (the public) handed to the chief assistant deputy minister in charge of obstruction³, a public servant and he comes up with two mutually exclusive plans:

1. Either maintain a bloated payroll -- not exactly the department's mission,
2. Or maintain foreign legations -- more or less exactly the purpose of Foreign Affairs

And he chooses option one, crippling any possibility of reducing the size of government in any meaningful way. Loyalty to public servants trumps loyalty to the public.

So how irreversible is the creeping size of government, what are its effects, and how pointless the effort to shrink it? The Reagan soundbite apocryphally ascribed to Alexander Fraser Tytler isn't too optimistic:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury...

Not exactly a sparkling outlook, that. Common sense says we should resist growth of government to the utmost because to do so is right and success -- if temporary -- is always possible. In the end, government frügality can't be Moxy Früitless. The tendency to expand isn't overwhelming (even if it is very very whelming!); individual people can still influence events. We just have to remember to keep our sanity when we fail and maybe get a little guilty schadenfreude from watching the EUtopian countries most far progressed into nanny-statism collapse in slow motion beneath their own distended corpulence.

¹: My emphasis.
²: Though it should be noted there are win-win ways to approach the problem that leave both the layer-off and the layed-off reasonably happy.
³: Lest there be any confusion on this point, this is a civil servant's posting, not that of an elected representative.

The Importance of Earning Interest ... i.e. Being Solvent

So Enron went belly-up a couple of years back and people were furious! I lost millions! This is all somebody else’s fault! Well, here’s a bit of throwaway introductory text from the early chapters of an accounting textbook I happened to be glancing at. I’ve highlighted a few choice words.

Intermediate Accounting 7th Canadian Edition (2005) Volume 1, Chapter I pp 5-6

Consider the much-publicized case of Enron. Enron was formed in 1985 through a merger, beginning life as a pipeline company. Its business changed over the years as energy wholesaling and trading overtook pipeline operations. Revenues grew exponentially to more than $100 billion (U.S.) and the company reported profits of just under $1 billion (U.S.) by 2000. Enron's shares were trading at over $80 (U.S.). All this came to an abrupt halt when the company declared bankruptcy in December 2001. Its shares were delisted by the New York Stock Exchange in January 2002. Since then, thousands of people have been affected by the fall of Enron, losing investments, jobs, and pensions.

Arthur Andersen, one of the top five public accounting firms in the world, was a direct casualty of the Enron bankruptcy, closing its offices later in 2002 after being convicted of obstructing justice in the ensuing government investigations. Credit rating agencies such as Moody's Investor Services and analysts came under scrutiny, the government wanting to know why the rating agencies had not been able to determine much earlier that Enron was overextended. Investment banks such as Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase were criticized for assisting Enron in setting up the very aggressive financing schemes that eventually led to its downfall.

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The Securities and Exchange Commission, although it collected the financial information from the company on a timely basis, failed to detect any problem. Finally, the investors and creditors invested their capital without really understanding what they were investing in. They did not really understand the significant risk that they were taking. Most of these stakeholders were overly keen on being involved with such a large, apparently successful company. They did not stop to ask whether Enron was just too good to be true. In hindsight, it was.

Anyone who is interested in investing his money, as opposed to giving it to someone else to steward as best he can, should be familiar with Ben Graham’s The Intelligent Investor. There is a case study in the book that would have induced anyone to take a hard look at selling his shares when they were at $80, long before the descent to Zero. Not because the shares were at $80, though this is a good point. Because the company expanded exponentially. Because it went through a phase of enormous growth coupled with extremely aggressive diversification, change of business focus, and undoubtedly acquisition. Such change can hardly be managed except by taking on extensive obligations -- usually debt disproportional to the growth’s ability to generate income. This alone should have been enough for serious warning. The fact that in 2000 earnings constitued less than 1% of total revenue could probably have been another clue.

Yes, the allure of cocktail party conversation makes people overly keen on being involved in large, apparently successful companies. It is much harder to be involved with miscellaneous unsexy actually successful companies. Definitely, shame on Citigroup, Chase, Moody’s, &c. But c’mon: anyone who was involved in the decision to own Enron securities within several years or more of the bankruptcy has only himself to blame.

Home for Christmas

I always forget how beautiful it is in Saskatoon, even in winter. Such clear skies, such white snow. Wow.

About a week ago I went to see the movie "Stranger than Fiction" with T and her lovely mother. In spite of the fact that it's awesome -- something the whole family can enjoy too -- I was a little crushed by the intersection of its originality with its formulaic banality. The premise is wonderful (and I shan't ruin the experience for my 1.2 readers by revealing it) but BAM! right where you'd expect that first act plot twist to throw you into Act II of the 3-part screenplay formula, there it is. Enter the romance, the finding yourself, the insulated eremitic loner blossoming into a butterfly.

It never ceases to disappoint me to be reminded yet again that a motion picture is an extremely confined vehicle for storytelling and artistic expression. The limitations that make it a cookie-cutter are self-evident: the 2-hour running time; the necessity to reveal everything as a 2-dimensional image plus dialogue, sound-effects, and score, with nothing left to the imagination. Because it is necessary to show a completely self-contained story in such a short time, strict rules must be followed. With these old cinematic saws and precepts comes a consequent repetitiveness that starts to detract from the experience the more used one becomes to it. I honestly feel pain for the well-known movie nerd Roger Ebert. How many movies he must have watched! Repeatedly! I'd much rather be a literature critic, where the possibilities are endless and the blasted thing doesn't demand to be read all at once.

Just because film is repetitive in some ways doesn't mean movies can't be good, though. Many have succeeded and do succeed by eschewing some of the most pervasive Hollywood platitudes -- big explosions, car chases, million-dollar CGI effects, trendy scores, Clive Owen, and so on, in favour of quaint little niche aspects like convincing acting and a decent story. "Stranger than Fiction" succeeds along these lines and, though it foists that greatest Hollywoodism of all upon us -- the "unexpected" Happy Ending -- we forgive it. A good storyteller knows what kind of story he's telling and this one needed the ending. No matter that it looks a wee bit awkward.

One of my roommates and his addiction to science fiction of all kinds has unintentionally got me thinking about the narrative possibilities of a different visual medium, the television series. Once you go serial, you're in a whole new world of course, what with the entirely different revenue model of advertising (not to mention new inventions like DVD box sets of entire seasons and Podcast) and the ability to plan around twenty hours worth of drama (or more if you're ambitious enough to span seasons!) at a go. You pay for some of the advantages with a host of unique drawbacks: commercial breaks that dictate both the pacing and often the very content of the drama; cancellation or time slot juggling in the face of ratings adversity and the resulting effects on budget; the rising cost of talent with success; and that talent's death or departure for money, career, or boredom.

The possibilities and liabilities of television manifest themselves in different ways, from the rondo-like static worlds of the animated "South Park"/"Simpsons"/"Futurama" crowd to self-contained "Law & Order"/"Star Trek" styles and the ongoing stories of shows like "Smallville". The show I'm thinking about now is not lame-o "Star Trek" nor awesome but cancelled "Firefly" but a new phenomenon which -- I'm told -- is earning rave reviews from mainstream publications on the gamut from "New York Newsday" to "National Review": the 3-year old revision -- more correctly, to stress the point, re-vision -- of Battlestar Galactica.

Battlestar began with a bang in a 2-part 4-hour television miniseries. Literally. In an absolutely horrifying nightmare to watch, an artificial race spawned by human technology and arrogance attacks its twelve colonized planets in a surprise nuclear carpet bombing that gave me chills to think about¹. What few survive reactivate a soon-to-be mothballed battleship, relic of a previous Cylon war, and head out into uncharted space fleeing an enemy relentlessly intent on their total annihilation. This stuff makes excellent drama², superb TV, especially the miniseries and the first TV episode to air, "33", in which the narrative has unstoppable motive power and the action never lets up. After "33", exactly the same thing happens as that "Stranger than Fiction" first act twist: a pattern becomes apparent. Ensuing episodes digress into one-off side plots involving sabotage, prison ships, search-and-rescue, flight deck accidents. Just as well, because the single battlestar³, Galactica, can't take the pounding of constant combat with its superior opponents any more than (much as we might desire it) we battle-loving audiences can take the eventual repetitiveness this implies.

My dilemma is this: I’m loving the show for story and execution, especially for the war and the battles. Based on parameters set by the creators so far, the story could be carried on to a logical and pleasing conclusion: the war could be won, the Cylons finally defeated or outrun. The first third of the problem is that, because they provide the conflict that moves the plot forward, the Cylons are necessary until the end. The second third is that being infinitely more powerful and numerous than the humans it will be difficult to craft a believable story arc that keeps them as a threat right up until their final defeat without resorting to tasteless Deus Ex Machina. The third third is the worst part: it’s in no one’s interest to conclude any time soon because the show is popular and critically acclaimed.

As a television show it doesn’t have to end. As a powerful revenue generator, it is desirable that it does not. Where these two factors intersect they must almost certainly thwart the necessity for Galactica, as a story and a piece of art, to stop before its finite creative/narrative potential is used up and it degenerates into one of its own doomed space fighters, billowing smoke and spiraling haphazardly but ever so slowly toward an ignominous and forgotten end. I don’t mind side plots and quirky episodes: these were invented a long time ago in the space opera/epic style of television show both to provide variety and to stretch those budgets -- especially the visual effects ones -- as far as they can go. I've come to accept this. My fear is that built in levers like the treacherous narcissist Dr. Gaius Baltar⁴ and his controlling Cylon program Number Six will be thrown whenever needed to wrench the story this way and that as writers and other creatives go through the revolving door yet the show lurches on with no clear destination in sight. To this end, the Cylons will be brought in for a victory whenever the humans seem to be getting too cozy.

There you have it: an amazing new story in a well-known medium quickly betrays signs of the rigid stage on which it is acted. The signs can't destroy the storytellers' achievement but they worry anyone who wants a story in the end and not network vultures biting the last rotting dollar bills from a corpse that could have had a dignified end had it, when living, known where and when to stop.

¹: Worth noting that not merely the idea of actual total armageddon is creepy: also the certain knowledge that someday, somehow, some body dehuman enough to blow itself into bloody smithereens just to bring a few innocents with it will manage to strap on not Semtex or C4 but a bomb of fissile uranium or hydrogen. In a world where it's possible to retreat into lonely insanity and still have the world at our fingertips and taking our cell calls and all you need is one in six billion, it IS only a matter of time.

²: Not that plot without major chinks, some catastrophically distracting to a nitpicker such as myself. Most glaring first example: apparently the Cylons started the first war. Ended in a draw and some sort of armistice. Subsequent armistice, an outpost established in neutral space for diplomatic relations between the races where, year after year, humans send an ambassador. Cylons not only don't send an ambassador in all the forty years they are absent, they bloody disappear. A nation of realists confronted with such a vicious inexorable and inhuman opponent would stop sending the ambassador long before forty years elapse and start looking for the frackin' bad guys. I suppose on the other hand, a nation of reality TV watchers would bore of vigilance and opt for the fantasy approach: recall John Bolton and send Colin Powell to shift papers in a vacuum, endlessly, when the end in fact is nigh. If America can become that ADHD superpower who flips the channel when interest lost at peril of its life, we can't begrudge same to Ron Moore and his made-up space warriors, can we?

³: Because in this paragraph I do so dearly love footnotes! For the uninitiated, a battlestar is some sort of water recyclin' behemoth spaceship that acts like the interstellar hybrid of battleship and aircraft carrier.

⁴: Gaius Baltar is Tony Blair and Number Six is Cherie Booth. Seriously.

Ye Quarterlie Complaynte

Remember this post, from back in Avril? It had a certain point to it and was able to precipitate a short flurry of posting by certain siblings here and there. Inactivity is piling up though, if it's possible for Inactivity to do anything at all.

Come on O my friends and brothers (and sisters). Let there be posting.