"Constitutional rule over Autocracy"-Obama

Excerpt from President Barack Obama's address to the Ghanaian Parliament: Time and again, Ghanaians have chosen Constitutional rule over autocracy, and shown a democratic spirit that allows the energy of your people to break through. We see that in leaders who accept defeat graciously, and victors who resist calls to wield power against the opposition. We see that spirit in courageous

Nigeria's Maladjusted Middle Class

Babatunde Ahonsi in 234Next writes about Nigeria's defective middle class:Too many of its members are bogged down with devising and pursuing private or individual solutions to macro and collective problems. The resultant strong sense of insecurity about its future well-being is therefore undermining its capacity to think trough what it needs to do to address the root causes of the situation. It

For the win

FDL has the best Franken/Coleman post.

ding in the land of asshats

It has been a while, poppets. If you've been catching my apoplectic Tweets, you know I can't even get myself together enough to craft a fine piece of writing. Instead, I'm going to vent:

1. Our state legislature is a collection of ignorant, do-nothing boobs who'd rather protect their election prospects than actually get some work done. Unfair characterization? Perhaps. But when you have a budget crisis and only spend ONE frakking day during an emergency session at the capitol and you STILL haven't come to a resolution, then you're frakking useless and incompetent.

(I’m looking at y'all, Governor Quinn, Sspeaker Madigan, Leaders Cullerton, Radogno and Cross! Swear to god, you all deserve a flaming bag of poo.)

2. When they're tired, elected officials can be alarmingly candid. From a GOP legislator: 'Every organization in the state could call us but it still wouldn't matter. People who work in social services vote Democrat; people who use their services tend to vote Democrat. What's in it for us to go your way?' Niiiiice. Frakking useless.

3. The women I work with are awesome. For a month, I’ve been holed up in our 'situation' room, hammering out implementation strategies to save our agency with two other women who are, frankly, awesome. They're smart, feisty, no bullshit and when we disagree we always find a workable compromise. (I’m so angry I advocate more for the 'scorched earth' strategy and they're more for the 'let's work this out' strategy.)

We swing wildly from hope that all this work will bear fruit and we will successfully lobby our legislators to get off their asses to do the right thing to despair that everything we're doing still isn't enough to counteract the massive amount of apathy and partisan bullshit in Springfield. We are not pros at grassroots organizing but I find it amusing to see us suddenly adopting some of its practices.

Our COO worked on the Obama campaign and she comes into the situation room at least a couple of times a day to give us some coaching, some encouragement and tell us stories from the campaign to inspire us - and it works. She rocks. I've already told her, 'When I lose my job, I will need your advice on what to do next and how to get in someone's office.'

She said, 'When folks hear you're on the market, you won't need my help.'

If we're all laid off in the next week or so, we've all promised to convene regularly as Ladies of the Day - slightly bitter, exhausted, depressed, over-educated women who kick ass while being momentarily at loose ends.

4. The people who inhabit our political process are the worst things about it. This isn't some fake cynicism on display here. This is what I’ve honestly seen during the past few months. I used to love watching politics; I loved the drama, the snark, the 'gotcha'-ness. But it's only when you connect the dots, and see that what happens in the political arena actually trickles down and materially impacts a life (or hundreds of thousands of lives), that you realize the people we have elected have cheapened the whole process.

It's a wonderful thing when a farmer downstate can walk into his state rep's office and say his piece and that aide or rep will listen to him. This is the beauty of our state political process. It really is that down home. (By the way, how many of y'all have visited the district office of your local rep?)

But there's another side to it that infuriates me. In Illinois, at issue is a now $9.2 billion deficit budget that the general assembly has chosen not to address. Instead, at the end of the regular session it ignored its responsibility and chose to send a 50% lump sum budget to the governor that basically decimated all of human services. The budget solves nothing, except to put the governor in the uncomfortable position of signing a budget that will turn Illinois into Mississippi.

Here's the infuriating part: they know that.

They know the 50% lump sum budget is a bad idea. They know it doesn't solve the deficit; they know that without revenue, the deficit gets worse; they know the impact of a decimated human services sector on their districts. They know there are structural problems that need to be fixed in this budget and still no one makes a move. For some reason, they think the veto session will bring a magical Resolution Fairy and then they'll find the money to solve the problem.

What they're really doing is keeping their eyes on the 2010 elections and hoping to do nothing that will endanger their seats.

Ask each side what they're going to do about this crisis and they shrug and say the same thing. 'We have ideas,' they say. 'But the other guys don't want to hear them.'

They know the human collateral this budget will cause and they look at you without blinking and say, 'There's nothing i can do. You all will have to call my colleagues and convince them.'

At which point someone grabs my wrist and I clamp down on my tongue so i don't scream, 'Swinging your colleagues is YOUR FUCKING JOB! WHY CAN'T YOU DO YOUR FUCKING JOB?!'

This is an abdication of responsibility that is unacceptable. And I’m not just talking about the GOP here, either. It's the Dems, too. They act like giving a Yes vote was the height of their duty, like voting Yes was a shining gift to the people of Illinois.

Last week, Cynthia Soto, my rep, was in a budget briefing the governor's office had invited us to attend. She stood up and said, 'I voted yes to raise revenue! I did my part! Now do your homework - it's your turn to make those calls to the No votes and get this thing turned around!'

I turned to the woman standing next to me and whispered, ‘What bullshit. What the fuck does she think we've been doing for the past month? When is she going to get off her ass and do her fucking job?'

The woman whispered, 'Unbelievable, isn't it?'

You wanna give us a gift, elected officials of Illinois?

We, the people of Illinois, would love to see you take your jobs seriously and work as hard as we do. Really. We would. Earn your paycheck, you apathetic motherfuckers.

The Future of Rationality

It occurred to me I haven't bothered you with my random thoughts for a while. Not that I had lack thereof, they just possibly were a little too random to make it into written word.

I wrote this sentence with my toes, just to amuse you.

So here's a thought I've been pushing around for a while. Are we on the path towards more or less rationality? The last several hundred years were marked by increased rationality: the rise and success of the scientific method, the Age of Enlightenment, the decline of religion and superstition, and so on. But you look around these days it seems that increasingly more people seem to be scared by the prospect. If you extrapolate that trend where will it lead us? Maybe there are just things we don't want to know. (See also The Right Not to Know).

It seems to me there's a sentiment in the air that we need more "spirituality," more "magic," more "wonders" in our increasingly technological world based on mechanical engineering and computer algorithms. Some people want to "reinvent the sacred," others emphazise "emotional intelligence" or "the power of thinking without thinking." Blink.

While I think some of these arguments aren't very insightful, there are two aspects I'm sympathetic to.

For one, I think there is at any one time a limit to what humans can possibly know, possibly even a limit to what we can ever know and we should be more aware of that. That means for example instead of being scared by gaps in our knowledge it or discarding them as a failure of scientists we should recognize the relevance of acknowledging and dealing with uncertainty, incomplete knowledge and 'unknown unknowns,' as well as be vary of The Illusion of Knowledge.

But besides that putting an emphasis on rationality neglects other cognitive abilities we have. For example, many of us have on some occasion met somebody who, through their experience, have developed a strong intuition for what might or might not work. Even though they might not be able to come up with any precise "rational" argument, they have a feeling for what seems right or doesn't. Granted, they might be mistaken, but more often then not you'll benefit from listening to them. One of the most important gifts, so I believe, of the human mind is to make what Plato called on some occasion at this blog an 'intuitive leap' into the unknown. Without such leaps our space of discoveries would be strongly limited. Rationality isn't always the path towards progress. (While not many insightful points were raised in the aftermath of the publication of Lee's book, I found it very interesting what Joe Polchinski had to say on the role of rigor in physics.)

Now let me step away from the human brain and consider instead of a system of neurons the systems that govern our every day lives, like for example our political systems. They have some "rational" processes to deal with input and to decide on actions. They also have some emergency shortcuts resembling unconscious reactions. If somebody throws a pillow at you, you'll raise your arms and close your eyes without a long deliberation of whether or not that's a good thing to do. If somebody throws a bomb on your territory you don't want to get stuck in endless discussions about what to do.

But what about intuitions and emotions? Where is the space for them?

Let us take as an example the credit crisis. It was not that people who were actively involved in building up the problem were completely unconcerned. They just had no way to channel their uncanny feelings. From a transcript of a radio broadcast "This American Life" (audio, pdf transcript, via):

mortgage broker: ...it was unbelievable... my boss was in the business for 25 years. He hated those loans. He hated them and used to rant and say, “It makes me sick to my stomach the kind of loans that we do.”

Wall St. banker: ...No income no asset loans. That's a liar's loan. We are telling you to lie to us. We're hoping you don't lie. Tell us what you make, tell us what you have in the bank, but we won't verify? We’re setting you up to lie. Something about that feels very wrong. It felt wrong way back when and I wish we had never done it. Unfortunately, what happened ... we did it because everyone else was doing it.

Italics added. My favourite part though was this

Mike Garner: Yeah, and loan officers would have an accountant they could call up and say “Can you write a statement saying a truck driver can make this much money?” Then the next one, came along, and it was no income, verified assets. So you don't have to tell the people what you do for a living. You don’t have to tell the people what you do for work. All you have to do is state you have a certain amount of money in your bank account. And then, the next one, is just no income, no asset. You don't have to state anything. Just have to have a credit score and a pulse.

Alex Blumberg: Actually that pulse thing. Also optional. Like the case in Ohio where 23 dead people were approved for mortgages.

Well, so much about rationality. The point is it's not that people didn't feel there was something wrong. It was just that the system itself had no way to address that feeling. The negative feedback it could have provided went nowhere. 

Or take the academic system, one of my pet topics as you know. It's not that people think it's all well and great. In fact, they can tell you all kinds of things that don't work well and some can complain seeming endlessly. But the system itself has no way to address these concerns. The only way to improve it is external intervention, which however usually only takes place once things go really wrong.

It's like you go out with a guy and even though you don't know exactly what's wrong, he makes you feel really awkward. But instead of just stop dating him you'd go see a shrink who looks up in a book what you're supposed to do. That's about what's wrong with our political systems.

So what's the future of rationality? I think we'll need to find its proper place.

Aside: I believe that many of the arguments we have about rationality are based on a lacking definition. For example if I intend to buy a new gadget I will typically look at the first few offers and pick the one I like best, finito. Sure, if I had looked a little harder or a little longer I might have saved some bucks. But frankly I'd rather pay more than spending an infinite amount of time with customer reviews. I think this is perfectly rational. Others might disagree. (And now encode that in your utility function.) That is to exemplify that rationality might not easily be objectively quantifiable.