Everything At Once Part 2

 

If you’ve dipped into ancient Christian philosophy, you might have come across Boethius’ idea of how eternity is the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite life, and how that means for us, as creatures created to spend eternity with God (should we choose to accept the gift), that there is a sense in which our state of being encompasses all of life at once (see an earlier blog post Everything At Once that conveys something similar).

I think there is a sense in which that’s true - and to see why, we only need to think of what it’s like being ourselves in the present moment. Our ‘now’ sensation encompasses our history, where we can recall to mind the time we had a burger and chips with our chum in secondary school, and the time we grazed our knee when falling off our skateboards, our first day at work, and so forth. Our whole remembered life is in us in the present moment, even though we’ve forgotten much of it. What is remembered is there.

God doesn’t have the problem of forgetting things; His perfect Mind persists through endless time by being both part of time and outside time altogether. He sees all events - past, present, future - in a single, timeless now. But while we don’t have perfect minds, we are made in His image, and we do, in one sense, possess the fullness or potential fullness of life all at once, in that everything we are, everything we’ve done, and everything we could be, are all part of a single, unfolding reality. A kind of unified experience of being in which there always exists the potential tapping into the ever-present totality of life - a bit like how a tree contains its whole life in a single moment: rings of the past, leaves and branches of the present, and all the future growth contained within, all existing together in the living organism.

Consider what this means for you and for your potential if you think about it in the right way. Imagine that your life is like a film reel composed of countless frames. Each frame shows a single moment of your experience - a snapshot of what you think, feel, and perceive at that instant. If your life is everlasting (this life and the afterlife), then the film reel simply stretches on forever. Frame follows frame, moment follows moment - the story continues indefinitely, but always one scene at a time. Now imagine something stranger. Suppose that instead of a film reel, your entire life is encoded in a holographic plate - a two-dimensional interference pattern that contains, within every microscopic region, the information for the entire three-dimensional image. In a hologram, the whole is present in every part: each tiny patch of the plate can reconstruct the whole scene, though with varying degrees of clarity. In this “holographic” version of your life, every point of time contains the fullness of your whole existence - not just a slice of it.

I like what that implies about our potential - and the fact that we are never all we could be. Through this model, every thought, every stage, every experience is co-present within the single timeless structure of your being, and you can tap into the entirety of your life simultaneously, as the hologram possesses the entire image for us to navigate at once. It gives a real sense of what you might call a totality waiting to be awakened step by step with each new improvement, every fresh edification from experience, and every new unfolding – that all that we could be is, in some sense, already here in potentia - shimmering beneath the surface of our awareness, waiting to be drawn into the light of our becoming. Life is a journey, of course, and a continual invitation to open ourselves up to the infinite depth that already dwells within.

The Economics of Exaggerated Victimhood

 

We keep hearing about increased anxiety in young people, and an increase in perceived victimhood. This might not be so strange except for the fact that there’s a good argument to be made that, negative social media influences aside, young Brits have been brought up in one of, if not the most, privileged, safest, most prosperous, most peaceable societies that’s ever been created. So, on the surface, you might think it strange that there is increased anxiety in young people, and an increase in perceived victimhood. But I have a theory that probably explains at least some of it.

This current society is one in which material risk and genuine adversity are relatively scarce - so in economic terms, you could say that the demand for meaningful challenges has begun to exceed the available supply. This imbalance creates a kind of market distortion in which individuals, unable to compete effectively in the constrained market for competence, shift toward the effectively more elastic market for perceived victimhood. In other words, because competence is constrained by reality (inelastic) while victimhood claims are effectively limitless (elastic) – the dynamic creates an effect whereby, because claims of harm can be produced at near‑zero marginal cost and yield high and often unjustified social returns in the form of various signalling effects, the result is inflation.

On top of that, there is another tactic employed to expand the supply of available victimhood claims – just keep broadening the definition of a problem until it applies to you. For example, in a society where racism, sexism or other forms of unfair discrimination become less frequent, the incentive emerges to stretch those categories to capture ever‑smaller offences or affronts, effectively increasing the pool of actions or events that can be framed as unfair discrimination.

It’s perhaps to be expected, therefore, that when genuine crises are diminished, synthetic ones emerge to satisfy unmet demand, allowing individuals to capitalise, and help create a market supply that caters for needs that have been exaggerated or fabricated. 

I say all this, not because I’m insensitive to genuine need, victimhood, and harm – because I’m really not. I’m actually highly sensitive and attuned to other people’s pain and suffering. No, I’m saying it because cultivated or courted victimhood is actually a malady for people’s well-being, because it makes them easy to manipulate. In a hyper-connected world, there is no shortage of bad actors who are looking to invoke your outrage, provocation and disharmony – and in the many exaggerated or fabricated cases, this not only diminishes your well-being, it also distracts you from primary responsibilities, and is highly likely to keep you perennially anxious, unsettled, ungrateful and resentful.

On Feminism

 

A feminist asked me what I think of feminism, so I told her a joke:

Why was the fraction nervous about marrying the decimal?

Standard Answer: Because he would have to convert. 

Feminist Answer: Because marriage is an oppressive tool of the patriarchy designed to trade and hold women like property. 😅

I then shared a profound truth that only a minority discern, but I hope you will. You don't need to be a feminist; you only need to be an egalitarian. If you're a feminist instead of an egalitarian, you're probably putting ideology before equality of opportunity – drawing battle lines in a fight that should have no sides.

If you’re still unsure why, think of it in terms of set theory. Egalitarianism is the broad set of beliefs that uphold equality of rights and opportunities for all people. Feminism is, at best, a skewed subset within it, and at worst, a narrow, reverse-sexist agenda that actually pushes against egalitarianism. Everything feminism purports to seek already falls inside the larger egalitarian set - so the fact that it’s promoted under the banner of feminism rather than egalitarianism suggests that it is really pushing against egalitarianism.

Valentine's Special: Is Your Partner Much Of A Catch?

 

Sometimes with beloveds I wonder, through an economist’s lens, what kind of a find he/she is in terms of numbers? 😃 That is to say, what kind of 1 in an n have I got? - where one always hopes n is a large number.  Is he/she a one in a hundred thousand, one in a million, one in a hundred (lol)? Naturally, you could say about any unique individual that they are 1 in n, where n is the number of (wo)men in the world today (or, as a subset, number of viable prospective partners). But we are not really asking that question; we are asking what kind of a catch our beloved is, in terms of the dating equivalent of price systems, matching markets and implicit valuation of preferences.

If you want to play along in your head, start by considering what you think your partner is in terms of catchiness – where someone highly desirable by many scores high in catchiness, and someone less desirable scores low in catchiness. Perhaps, like my wife is, you are with one of those one in a million male beloveds – one of those astounding finds that you almost can’t believe he came along at all 😃. Or maybe you’re with someone who was on the shelf for years, and you had to pull them off to save them from more decades of singleness and tracksuit-bottomed repeats on UK Gold 😃

I guess, suffice to say, the approximate 1 in an n value you assigned in your head definitely comes from an intuitive and rational calculation, because it’s the same kind of mental calculation we make when deciding how much we value fruit, cheese and trousers. That’s what the price system is for.

Similarly, a prospective partner can be viewed as a scarce resource in a two-sided matching market. Each individual possesses a set of attributes - physical, intellectual, emotional - that confer utility to potential matches. The rarity of certain combinations of attributes increases their “market value,” analogous to goods with limited supply but high demand.

What we know intuitively and rationally in terms of our specific partner is that they are part of the equation whereby the probability of encountering a partner with a specific combination of desirable attributes is a function of the distribution of those attributes in the population, alongside the selectivity of other agents in the market. Thus, in contemplating a partner’s “catchiness,” you are implicitly assessing their expected utility relative to the available alternatives and the opportunity cost of forgoing other potential matches.

Do with all that what you wish 😃

 

Cutting The Psychological Root Of False Beliefs

It’s strange that so many people believe so many obviously false things (which includes excessive over-interpretations). Let me offer you a hopefully useful way to think about the nature of false beliefs in a more expansive way. When people believe so many false things, you’ll find that those individual false beliefs are often trojan horses for other beliefs, which at their root are usually rationalisations for self-serving interests. If false belief x is really a proxy for false belief y, which is really a justification for self-serving interest z, then you can expect that when people try to justify false belief x they will produce all kinds of auxiliary defences which support x, y, and z.

Let’s take …. I don’t know……rent controls as an example. Rent controls are often defended as a straightforward way to make housing affordable. Yet this surface belief clearly functions as a proxy for a deeper socialist mindset that wants to believe markets are morally suspect and cannot be trusted to allocate essential goods. Beneath that, in turn, lies a self-serving interest in expanding political control over prices while virtue-signalling compassion at low personal cost.

Another example - climate alarmism commonly presents itself as genuine concern for the planet (also ticking the box for virtue-signalling), but in its more extreme forms it also often operates as a vehicle for the belief that only centralised governance can manage society’s problems. That belief then serves an interest in enlarging the scope, budget, and moral authority of the state, while fostering a sense of belonging for those involved in the cause.

A third example - cancel culture is often justified by the claim that certain speech causes direct harm and therefore must be curtailed. But this claim frequently masks a broader belief that some ideas are illegitimate and should not be heard at all, which itself supports a self-serving interest in status and power through moral gatekeeping. Hence the rapid escalation of rhetoric in which disagreement becomes “hate speech”, offence becomes “harm”, and enforcement is applied selectively to protect the gatekeepers’ own norms.

In all the above cases, you’ll notice too that justifications are offered by depicting challenges as unvirtuous, and they treat the economic and social costs of intervention as negligible or non-existent. At the same time, the short-term psychological benefits (but longer term psychological harm) are that these beliefs and causes stabilise identity, elevates status, and legitimise control to lessen anxiety - while allowing all of this to be experienced as perceived moral virtue. And it should be blindingly obvious now why most politicians jump on board with this – it serves the majority of their interests and conveniently aligns with what much of the electorate believes and seeks comfort in.

It’s much the same with protectionism too (political, economic and intellectual protectionism) - it is commonly defended as a way of saving domestic jobs, and protecting belief systems, yet this belief frequently substitutes for the assumption that exchange of goods, services and ideas is zero-sum and that external gain must imply internal loss. And, of course, that assumption conveniently serves political interests and intellectual grifters tied to protected industries or organisations. And you’ll probably notice too that political, economic and intellectual protectionism all present competition (of goods, services or ideas) as predation rather than cooperation.

You can see this too, of course, in young earth creationism - which is usually expressed as a claim about the age of the Earth based on the hyper literal interpretation of Genesis – but, of course, it frequently acts as a trojan horse for a deeper need for worldly things to remain subordinate to their particular theological reading to assuage fear and insecurity (see here). That, in turn, serves the preservation of group identity, perceived moral and spiritual superiority, and theological and communal authority.

Naturally, we could go on and on with further examples, but suffice to say, I think all the above is an important thing to understand in critical thinking. In each case of false beliefs, the surface belief attracts intense defensive pleading against all reason and evidence because it is psychologically, socially and culturally load-bearing. To abandon it would not merely concede an error; it would threaten the deeper beliefs, identity and interests it surreptitiously supports.

And consequently, to be rescued from false beliefs in the x and y category really means addressing the deeper interests in z that they protect. It requires more than correcting facts or pointing out errors of reasoning or interpretation; it requires lowering the psychological, social, and moral costs of abandoning those beliefs, and offering alternative ways for people to secure identity, meaning, and status without having to defend what is demonstrably false. Because the reality is, until the need for status, power, identity, belonging or moral superiority is met by the proper means - that of truth, competence and authentic virtue - and until the underlying psychological and social payoffs are removed or replaced, the false beliefs that pervade our society will continue to be defended with ever-greater ingenuity, precisely because so much else depends on them.

Why We Cannot Hold God Accountable

 

For years, I held the view that God is morally responsible for the creation story He chose to create. Given presumably an infinite number of possible creation stories He could have chosen, I wondered why He chose one with quite so much suffering in it. I guess, in a C.S. Lewis-esque ‘God in the Dock’ kind of way, I tended to put God “on trial” by judging His creation story by my mere human standards. But about twenty five years ago, I had an epiphany, where I started to develop the kernel of an idea about how absurd it is to even think of our perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God in terms of humanly discerned responsibility and accountability. So much so, that I came to realise that it’s preposterous to hold God morally responsible for anything, but that the reason why is far from obvious.

When we think of human responsibility in terms of right and wrong, and better or worse, we assign value judgements based on various possible scenarios - and if we have high standards, a hypothetical ideal that we bring to bear on the metric. When writing an essay, dealing with a noisy neighbour, or fixing something in the house, we can do a good or bad job, and make the results better or worse according to our efforts and conduct. But that is because everything we do is measured against a standard higher than ourselves, where however well we do, we always fall short of perfection. And the more complex the task, the further from the ideal we end up - a bit like how the bigger the circle we try to draw with a pencil, the less like a perfect circle it looks.

Now, to be clear, I’m not of the school that thinks all genuine value reduces to intrinsic value, and extrinsic value is wholly derivative. Some philosophers subscribe to this - they contend that greatness is identical to, and exhausted by, intrinsic value. That is, there is no greatness in itself apart from such value, and what is called extrinsic value is merely value derived from intrinsic value. But I reject this, because as far as humans are concerned, it’s clearly not true that an item has extrinsic value only insofar as it contributes to, or realises, something possessing intrinsic value. Some values are fundamentally relational - like, say, loyalty, fairness, courage, responsibility, artistic expression, comedy, hospitality, solidarity, and so forth - and not merely instrumental. To put it in formal mathematical language, even if intrinsic value exists, “greatness” is a multi-dimensional evaluative space rather than a single axis.

I can show further why it’s wrong by applying this to God, but with a caveat that, in actual fact, the proposition that genuine value reduces to intrinsic value, and extrinsic value is wholly derivative, is much truer of God than it is us. In fact, it’s nearly entirely true of God, but not quite wholly true. To say that God is the greatest possible being is to say that God possesses intrinsic value to the maximal degree permitted by possibility. In other words, God instantiates intrinsic greatness at its logically maximal extent by being the I AM under consideration (Exodus 3:14, John 5:58) - there can be nothing greater than God. But even God, about whom there is no possible increased greatness, has a greatness that is not maximally contained intrinsically; and we can surmise this because we know He desired to create - that is, to express His perfection extrinsically in creation - in order that He could have a loving relationship with His creation. God couldn’t have been maximally manifest or wholly fulfilled in His intrinsic perfection because He desired extrinsic value in terms of loving relationships. Don’t get me wrong, I do think God’s desire to create is itself part of His perfection, and His relationality is not a limitation but an expression of maximal perfection. But it must be true that God + creation is superior to God alone; otherwise, God would have had no reason to create anything at all.

An analogy from physics might help. We could think of intrinsic value like a rest mass: a property something has in itself, independent of external reference frames; and extrinsic value as being like kinetic energy - it exists only relative to interactions or relations; it is not a fundamental property but one that arises from a system’s relation to something else (a frame of reference, a field, a transformation). On this analogy, claiming that a being’s value is entirely intrinsic is like claiming that a particle’s rest mass is its fundamental property, while any additional energies - such as kinetic or potential energy - are purely relational and therefore derivative. And when applied to God, the analogy suggests that calling God the greatest possible Being is akin to saying that, if a particle possessed the highest rest mass permitted by physical law, that intrinsic property would define its fundamental status, with all other forms of energy remaining secondary and relational.

Perhaps now you can see what I mean by saying that it’s preposterous to hold God morally responsible for anything. Jack is morally responsible if he chooses to commit a bad act instead of a good one, or does a bad job rewiring the house because he chose to get drunk, because he had better options available to him, and better versions of himself that could have conducted those decisions. But our perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God cannot do anything better, and has no higher intrinsic or extrinsic state He can manifest. So, therefore, He cannot be responsible for something He cannot possibly be or enact, and He cannot possibly be or enact anything that is not good or perfect. 

You may say that in attributing goodness and perfection to God through my human-centric lens I am making a value judgement and assigning some kind of positive responsibility, but only insofar as I am projecting human standards onto a Being for whom such standards simply do not apply in quite the way a human can understand. It’s perhaps a bit like how a dog can discern a happy marriage from an unhappy one, but could only import crude canine speculation about the nature of deep love between beloveds.

God cannot be morally responsible for who He is, and who He is, is perfection, under which He has maximal compulsion to do the greatest things, even if by our human standards we might foolishly dwell in the illusion that we are equipped to act as judge. The accused stands above indictment, and the plaintiff lacks standing to bring a case.

On Alton Towers & Neurodivergent Queues

 

On this news item making the headlines - depending on the scenario, allowing/disallowing people with invisible disabilities to jump/not jump the queue has an obvious information problem in economics, namely: 

1)         Those who don’t really need to jump the queue but will do so anyway.

2)         Those who do really need to jump the queue but now can’t.

Even if we overlook a further issue – that there are people who potentially suffer more in queues that don’t get to skip the queue – this is still a classic economics problem of how to allocate scarce resources optimally when demand exceeds supply. As regular readers will know, there is nothing better than the market price system to allocate resources efficiently – so here we’d need a price system mechanism that also enables fairness and transparency alongside efficiency.

In a previous post some years ago, I warned of the dangers of demand inflation with increased blue badge allocation - that is, when more people qualify or apply than the system (in this case, parking spaces) can efficiently serve. What’s strange about demand inflation problems is that they are so obvious, easy to understand, and so predictable that it’s strange that the policymakers either totally ignore the trade offs, or act as though the problem won’t materialise. The man with a chronic lung condition who can’t find a parking space in the town centre because the eligibility increased criteria prioritised a less severe need has reasonable grounds to be aggrieved. Similarly, a policy like the above means that priority queues become overcrowded, and wait times rise for disabled guests themselves, thereby increasing the chances that more severely disabled people wait even longer. Because the system doesn’t price in different disabilities (as far as I know), the problems that arise become a predictable outcome of non-priced allocation under rising demand, just as they would if the items in question were bananas, coffee or laptops.

Given that any market-based mechanism would ideally balance three goals for this case: efficiency (optimal waiting times), equity (prioritising greatest need), and legitimacy (public perception of fairness), I’ve thought of three potential solutions, but they are all likely to disappoint one group. 

1)         Differential pricing for priority access: that is, a sliding-scale pricing depending on demand levels, which depends on severity of disability. Prices would act as signals that encourage only those who truly need or value priority access to use it at peak times.

2)         Market-compatible subsidies, such as means-tested disability credits.

3)         Time slots in queues: that is, instead of unlimited queue access, visitors could select ride time slots. When time slots are scarce, small tradeable allocations could allow flexibility and reduce congestion in peak queue times.

I think, given this is a difficult problem, those 3 options are probably the best I can come up with. But….there are significant issues with all 3. The main issue with differential pricing is that tying queue access to prices or severity risks appearing to monetise disability, and may disadvantage genuinely vulnerable people who are less able or willing to pay. The main issue with the market-compatible subsidies is that means-testing and credit systems introduce administrative complexity, and someone has to pick up the cost of that. And the main issue with time-slot allocations is that they impose spillover costs on non-disabled customers and on the business owners who cannot offer the same level of service as broadly or equitably.

No, I think no solution truly satisfies, because this is a complex Hayekian knowledge problem to solve – and probably impossible to resolve in a Pareto efficient manner (by making no other party worse off) without one or more groups feeling hard done by.

Further reading: The Economics Of Queuing, Booking & Paying

On Adults Engaging With Children

Many adults seem generally comfortable around children, but I observe other adults who look very self-conscious trying to relate to and converse with children. Some of those adults may find it equally difficult conversing with other adults, but some probably find children uniquely difficult to relate to, due to the gulf in age and understanding.

For those people, the writer Rebecca West makes an eloquent observation about children that might help. In one of her novels, she says that children have their adult qualities within them but are handicapped by a humiliating disguise. I wouldn’t take it hyper literally, of course, but it’s a sharp observation about how children’s core temperament contains adult qualities in seed form, and as they grow, their real interior perspective develops at a rate that is constrained by their childlike frame.

This kind of ideation might counsel against patronising children based on what we see on the surface rather than the continuity between who they are and who they are becoming. The essence of the adult is already present, certainly in nascent form; it’s just trapped in a body and social position that can’t express itself fully yet. But children are already equipped with the seeds of adult flaws and the seeds of adult virtues. Perhaps this is why experience tells me that children grow in confidence more quickly, and mature emotionally more steadily, when adults speak to them respectfully and sincerely, as fellow persons rather than caricatures of childhood.

Answered Prayer & Probability

 

A lot of people don't believe that God answers prayers. I will show you why we can be reasonably sure He does. God answering prayers is basically this; a Christian prays for x, x happens, therefore x happened because God answered the prayer. That happens a lot, but this apparent pattern is complicated by two common exceptions: times when a Christian prays for x, and x does not occur; and times when x occurs without anyone praying for it at all.

It is easy to understand why both exceptions occur, though; when a Christian prays for x, and x does not occur, we ought to conclude that x was the wrong prayer or not aligned with God's will. And x occurring without anyone praying for it at all does not tell us anything much about whether God answers prayers, any more than a fair coin landing heads tells us whether coins in general are biased.

A more appropriate way to affirm that God answers prayers is to look at what is being prayed for, and ask what the likelihood of the event is anyway without the prayer. For example, suppose Jack has a deck of cards, and prays that, after shuffling them, he will draw the king of diamonds. Since there are 52 cards in the deck, there is a 1 in 52 probability of this happening by chance alone. If 52 independent people were each to pray that they would draw the king of diamonds from their shuffled deck, probability suggests that, on average, one of them would succeed and might therefore conclude that their prayer had been answered.

What we are therefore looking for, in order to justify belief in answered prayer, is to consider events that occur where there is an astronomically low probability that it would happen by chance, but which are specifically and unambiguously prayed for in advance. This requirement precludes cases in which low-probability events are later interpreted as answers to prayer simply because they happened to occur, and excludes low-probability events that do in fact occur by chance, but lack any prior, specific prayer corresponding to them.

At this point, the sheer weight of Christian testimony should be ample evidence that God answers prayers - the kind of prayers which significantly undermine objections such as 'it is only anecdotal testimony' or 'there is no medical verification'. I have been instantly healed a few times immediately after prayer - from a pulled muscle in my leg, and from a chronic tooth pain - and I have witnessed a blind person given their sight back immediately after prayer, a severely deformed leg twist around, grow and be restored immediately after prayer, and a lady crippled and confined to a wheelchair all her adult life stand up and walk immediately after prayer. And they are merely a few experiential drops in a sea of miraculous testimony amassed worldwide.

The likelihood of any one of those events happening by chance is astronomically low, so the likelihood of any one of those events happening by chance immediately after prayer is even lower (for obvious reasons). Therefore, the most likely explanation is that these immediate healings were answers to prayer - especially when these events are considered cumulatively. If the likelihood of an instant healing is almost zero and it happens straight after prayer, the best explanation is the prayer caused it to happen. If the same thing repeats five times in just my experience, the best explanation being answered prayer becomes cumulatively stronger. When this pattern is multiplied across the experiences of Christians more broadly, answers to prayer become so much more plausible that it would be difficult to dismiss without adopting an unjustified scepticism.

 

EDIT TO ADD:

A friend asked about why miracles aren’t more attested to in terms of medical statistics.

My comment: Let me start with a question for you; even if we simply focus on the prayer examples I outlined - to keep it concrete and less abstract – I wonder why you focused not on them but on the proposition that if prayer worked like a predictable medical intervention that it would yield statistical differences in population health data. Please don’t misunderstand, I understand the appetite to broaden it to a wider empirical investigation, but if one is faced with gold standard evidence with 5 evident miracles, then a lack of consistent, predictable formal medical outcomes is not adequate to undermine it by itself.

I agree with your point that prayer and belief in God can enhance outcomes through psychological and community engagement – and given the truth of Christianity, one could reasonably expect that any behaviours that align with His truth can be expected to enhance well-being and utility.  But most Christians understand that prayer is about relationship with God Himself, and is therefore unlikely to be friendly to statistical analyses when treated too mechanically. God is not a God who likes to be tested as though He has something to prove – especially if one doesn’t approach Him with humility (not saying you lack humility). Once one is in a relationship with Him, and gets to experience the power of His love, grace and what He can do for us, those kinds of empirical probing can only fail to enchant. A bit like if a bodybuilder has shown us he can bench press 200kg, investigations about whether he can curl two 5kg pink dumbbells seem quite remiss.

Incidentally, I don’t think you’re being closed-minded or churlish at all - you’re attempting to apply a consistent standard of evidence, which is the very bedrock of empirical investigation. And it remains an interesting question about how some truthful phenomena manifest primarily through population-level statistics and how some operate more at the level of cumulative testimony. But as I’ve argued in other articles, the cumulative testimony in favour of Christianity is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for its truth.