I'll Say One Thing For Corbyn: Thanks To Him I'm Never Short Of Blog Material

Global trade is the biggest cause of material progression the world has ever seen. When we Brits buy goods produced on foreign soils, we gain hugely, as do the foreigners that produce these goods. These are what we call ‘mutually beneficial transactions’. No surprise then that the perennially misinformed Jeremy Corbyn wants to upset this with his own hair-brained idea:

“A Labour government would seek to ensure we build things here that for too long have been built abroad", says Corbyn.

We’ve repeatedly talked about why this idea is both fatuously short-sighted, and damaging to the people he’s trying to help (most notably low income Brits) - but in case there are any readers who still haven’t grasped this, let me offer an analogy to higlight the utter buffoonery on display here. Just so we are clear what we are saying: Asserting that we Brits should buy home grown to make ourselves better off is logically equivalent to the reverse statement, that we must be worse off if we buy more from abroad than buying it domestically. If we are on the same page, now the analogy:

Suppose you get a job at Sainsbury’s, and you get paid 80% of your wages in cash and the other 20% in Sainsbury’s vouchers. Then imagine there’s a minister in charge of supermarkets who introduces a law prohibiting every Sainsbury’s worker from spending more than 25% of their vouchers. At the end of the year you’ve spent all the cash you want, you’ve spent your 25% voucher allocation, but you have in your drawer a stash of Sainsbury’s vouchers that the minister has made it illegal to spend. Has the minister done you a favour or not - ensuring you have a stash of vouchers you cannot spend? Almost everyone can see why the answer is ‘no’.

Let’s even assume he makes an attempt to rectify the situation by offering you a cash refund of 50% of the value of the vouchers. Has this helped? A little, but you are still in a much worse situation than if he let you spend all the vouchers you earn - or even better, if Sainsbury’s paid you your entire wages in cash and enabled you to spend it wherever you wanted. Making Brits buy home grown goods by restricting their ability to buy from abroad is equivalent to insisting that they are paid a proportion of their wages in vouchers that it is either illegal to spend, or less valuable than spending what they earn on the transactions that would confer the most benefits for them.

On the off chance that there's someone still following me who doesn't understand why socialists like Corbyn - and communists, young earth creationists, ethno-nationalists, for that matter - are missing the boat, let me articulate it in the following way. All subjects have experts: these experts have put in the hours over many years to master their subject. They know a lot more than the layperson - and therefore, when laypeople get into arguments with experts they invariably come off worse in the exchange.

Sometimes, especially in the social sciences, humanities, and philosophically intractable subjects, there are experts that disagree with other experts. That's why two experts that differ on, say, the extent to which we have free will, the nature of consciousness, or the nature of quantum theory can have very engaging discussions and still end up disagreeing. But it's relatively rare for a debate between an expert and a layperson to be engaging. This is because, by and large, the average layperson does not have the knowledge to match an expert on his or her subject of expertise. People who disagree with experts are usually far less informed, stubborn and so agenda-driven that they lack the basic ingress for rational persuasion.

So the people we mentioned - the socialists, communists, young earth creationists, ethno-nationalists, etc - are guilty of major solecisms against robust intellectual enquiry. Because, you see, you can guarantee that the experts with whom they disagree know a lot more about the subject than they do, have studied it for a lot longer, have lots more supporting information, have better access to facts, are more apprised of counterarguments, and are probably more intelligent and conscientious too. And yet despite all this, the average person, who knows comparatively little on the subject, thinks they are right and experts are wrong.

Now don't misunderstand, it always good to avoid complacency - and no one likes confounding so-called expert opinion and turning it on its head more than I do. But the vast majority of the departures from expert opinion from laypeople are hopelessly inadequate, and are simply based on lies and distortions of the truth. When you get people like Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell happy to promulgate ideas that history has consistently (by which I mean always) shown to be rationally, empirically and logically discredited - and which depart from the long-standing and robust body of expert opinion, we have to ask some serious questions about how we've created a society that lets them get away with it so easily.

He's A Lumberjack & He's Okay!!

Just now I stumbled upon this article in Construction News about health and safety protocols in the industry, dating back as far as John Prescott in 2001. Here is what we are told:

"Many firms in this bracket think of H&S as a drain on time and money, and that it is limited only to physical safety.”

I can’t say I’m surprised. Health and safety legislation is a bit like eating a juicy steak: if there’s the right amount of it, it’s fine, but if it’s too large it becomes uncomfortable to swallow. Here’s why.

Recently I observed out of my window a gentleman who had been paid by the council to cut down three huge trees to create the space for a car park. What struck me was how risky his job looked: he was climbing near the top, sawing through branches while being finely balanced on a nearby branch, and he would swing down to lower of levels of the tree with apparent alacrity. I don’t know what the health and safety regulations are surrounding his role, but one thing of which I’m fairly certain is that a job like that is precarious, and therefore that precariousness will be compensated for in his wages.

Put it this way, a firm that provided health and safety equipment, such as scaffolding or a crane or a highly expensive tree-cutting device to greatly minimise his risk would not be paying him as much. The corollary of this is that a minister who forced the firm to purchase the health and safety equipment would be enforcing lower pay for the worker in question. The point being, there are many times where health and safety regulations are justified, especially with asymmetry of information, when the workers need protection against unscrupulous bosses - but those occasions are mostly limited to when employees do not have sufficient information to measure the risk of doing a job.

When employees have sufficient information to assess the risk of their own jobs against the rewards of doing those jobs, no state legislation needs to exist. The reason being; workplace health and safety regulations are not free to those who are forced to mandate them, but just as important, they are not free to those who benefit from them either. The more risky or socially undesirable the job, the fewer people will be willing to do it, and the more the wages will have to be bid up in order to attract prospective employees.

Being forced to make your workplace safer is not always a desirable law, especially in cases where individuals can make rational choices based on the known risks and rewards. This is because different people make different trade-offs between risk and reward (higher pay). People in high risk jobs, like our aforementioned lumberjack, tend to, on average, put a lower monetary value on low risk than people doing low risk jobs.

Employers only benefit from improving workplace health and safety regulations when the cost of doing so is lower than the savings they make on reducing wages. Similarly, these health and safety measures must be worth more to workers than the cost borne in reduced wages. This means that, while there are plenty of beneficial health and safety regulations, there are also plenty of times when individuals can make their own decisions based on risk and reward strategies, and therefore, need not be subjected to extraneous regulations that impede rational decision-making based on perceived risks and rewards.

Why So Many People Are Bodging Up The Brexit Debate

A couple of weeks ago on Facebook, I said that I have some highly intelligent Remain friends, who I love dearly, but that I think they are missing a key thing: most Remainers fail to realise why the EU has to go, because they misunderstand why its most well-informed critics dislike it. Here's a simple way to explain it.

The EU shares a common property with Islam. All the bad things attributable to Islam are the reason it's perhaps the worst of all human inventions. And all the good things attributable to Islam are nothing to do with Islam - they are good human qualities that exist in spite of Islam, not because of it. They are the qualities associated with being human that Islam has appropriated, and for which it has tried to take credit, fooling millions in doing so.

Similarly, the bad things attributable to the EU are what make it an obviously failed economic model, with all the concomitant problems that come with diseconomies of scale. And all the good things about the EU are the good human cooperatives that are nothing to do with the EU - they are beneficial things that would exist in spite of the EU, not because of it. They are the qualities associated with being human that the EU has appropriated, and for which it has tried to take credit, fooling millions in doing so.

Although I stated that quite succinctly, what I am describing is a very complex phenomenon that makes the Brexit battleground oversimplified, and talk of deals and no deals somewhat inadequate to the task. The reality is, a monstrosity of an organisation like the EU, and its concomitant interconnectedness with all the domestic politics of its members states, is going to be a very knotty institution from which to disentangle ourselves. This means that countess social commentators from both sides will continually be able to bleat on about the benefits and costs of Leaving, and the benefits and costs of Remaining, and act as though they the only ones talking sense.

The debates would be of a higher standard if more people adopted a Bastiat-esque Seen & Unseen approach to the situation. That is, everyone who wants to talk about Brexit should constantly be mindful of the reality that there are huge costs if we Leave, huge benefits if we Leave, huge costs if we Remain, and huge benefits if we Remain. Unless you are attuned to thinking this way, you are providing only sub-standard analyses of the Brexit debate.

Moreover, you also need to add in another element - the element of timescales, which adds a further level of permutational complexity to the debate. For example, with timescales factored in, there are huge costs if we Leave soon, huge benefits and opportunities if we Leave soon; huge costs if we Remain now and Leave later, and huge benefits if we Remain now and Leave later. The number of possible outcomes is nigh-on uncountable, because there are so many subset events that could feed into any potential transpiration, and there are so many good and bad things that might happen, based on so many good and bad decisions that could be made, that it is virtually impossible to predict the short-term net benefits and costs of the culmination of all this.

But all that said, I think there is a way to be confident that, unapprised of all the permutations and possible costs and benefits, voting Brexit was still, on balance, the best decision you could have made. I'm a great believer in the integrity of challenges to failed models, even if that failed model has numerous benefits. Failed models are inevitably going to provide a net loss when all costs and benefits are counted up - and that is why it is right that Britain should leave the EU. It may be a long percentage game to reap the rewards and gradually undermine the failing institution, but many long term gains require bold decisions in the short term.

One of the reasons it's hard to measure the net costs of failed models is because both benefits and costs to society almost always happen very slowly, and are hard to perceive with the naked eye. It is hard to tell if a swimming pool is gaining water or losing water if there is a small leak during a rainfall.

The prosperity pool

That analogy reminds me of a term the economist Don Boudreaux has for human material progress - he calls it 'The prosperity pool', where the higher the water level in this pool, the greater our prosperity. Boudreaux rightly points out that the “prosperity level” in the prosperity pool is only gradually filled up with drops. Even tiny saucerfuls of additional prosperity are exceedingly rare - there are mostly only small drop-by-drop progressions, no more. This is also why if something is going to be good and large, it is going to emerge bottom up, not be imposed top down.

Very few single drops have any noticeable effect on the prosperity level, but each drop - bicycle stabilisers for children, cat's eyes on the road, padded cushions for bike seats, new shades of varnish, comfier shirts, more efficient sewing machines, sunglasses, clothes pegs, and so on - make our lives a little better through their entrance into a highly competitive market. Even the things you may perceive as quite large drops - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Ford, General Motors, Samsung, Apple, Sinopec and Walmart (to name but a few) are still small relative to the entirety of the prosperity pool and the complex nexus of the human interactions required for these developments.

There are numerous ways the EU causes harm to human prosperity (see my sidebar tab), but as well as the harm it causes, it also doesn't create enough additional value to justify its existence. The rest of the time it primarily moves resources sidewards - and as anyone who has ever taken a swim knows, moving water around in the pool does not raise its overall level.  

In the prosperity pool analogy, new drops are added to the pool every time value is created in society: either through a new good or service, an improvement to an existing good or service, an increase in efficiency, an improvement in technology and decreasing costs of doing something (there are a few more, but those are the big five).

Furthering the analogy; taxes, subsidies, tariffs, price fixing, protectionism, bureaucracy, overregulation and making itself rich off the fruits of other people's labour is the EU's raison d'être. To the typical Remainer, the EU seems to resemble a consignment of rocks thrown into the pool over time as the EU has grown in size (consistent with Wagner's law), which appears to them to have raised the prosperity level. Propagandist memes like this one below are a good case in point:

 

   

But alas, the above meme is a rather pathetic medley of exaggerations, attempts to take undue credit, misunderstandings about opportunity costs, and outright falsehoods - all intended to create a fabricated picture of the benefits of the EU. But here's the reality check: as anyone who has ever taken a bath or read Archimedes would know, even if the measured level of the prosperity in the pool appears to be higher, the appearance of a consignment of rocks can make it seem like the water levels are increased when, in fact, they are not.

 

Continuing with the pool analogy, what the taxes, subsidies, tariffs, price fixing, bureaucracy and overregulation are really equivalent to is closing some of the valves in order to restrict the plumbing line to the pool. They are the costs that society bears in the shape of all the unnecessary expenses, the misallocations of resources, the interferences is information-carrying price signals, and in the new businesses that never get started up, the buildings that never get built, the innovations that never materialise, and the countless mutually beneficial transactions that never occur.

 

And if we do have genuine aspirations to create a world where the bureaucrats get properly exposed for what they are doing, and a world in which the above activities are no longer an impediment to a fuller and even faster global development for all human beings, then the only way to vote was to vote for Brexit, and hope that by starting to pull out the weeds we will be beginning to irrigate the soil too.

 

 

 

A Fascinating Twist On The Theory Of Our Evolution

In my as yet untitled book on God, mathematics, physics and philosophy, I wrote a chapter along the lines that without biological sentience the universe is just pure mathematics - or at least, pure mathematics is one way it could be described by the mind of God. The basic story of human evolution is that all the stuff we humans perceive as being 'out there' - the stars, planets, trees, mountains, etc - are perceptions that accurately reflect reality through the Darwinian lens that is essential for survival. In other words, we perceive the world physically because we are physical, but the outside reality is not very much like what it seems.

This morning I read an interesting interpretation of that idea by professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Donald D. Hoffman, who postulates that not only are our sensory perceptions a very limited reflection of reality 'out there', but that it may in fact have been evolutionarily advantageous to avoid perceiving the outside world as is (full article linked at bottom of page). Here's how professor Hoffman puts it:

"The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction."

He then says that an organism that sees reality as it is will never be fitter for survival than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. What follows is a terrific computer desktop metaphor from Hoffman about how seeing a false reality could be beneficial to an organism’s survival:

"Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position, and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you."

In one of my books I wrote a chapter about what I called the 'mental matrix' - the limitations of physical organisms in seeing the world through the narrow lens of their own biological landscape. I argued that there is a multifaceted, highly complex outside world that our biological evolution only enables us to sparsely sample. As with Kant, the distinction between the world 'out there' (noumena), and the world experienced through minds 'in there' (phenomena) creates a very limited phenomenal world that engages with external reality through evolutionary perceptions and conceptions of space and time.

But on top of the noumena merely being things which can’t be known 'as is' due to our being locked inside the limitations of our evolutionary biology, Hoffman wants to take it even further and hypothesise that natural selection acts on mutations that retain a veiling filter between reality 'as is' and reality 'as is perceived'. In other words, Hoffman's contention is that noumenal reality is so ultra complex and so informationally intractable that our brains evolved a sensory system to inform us of the fitness consequences of our actions and at the same time shielded us from developing a too complex, albeit potentially more accurate perception of outside reality.

I think there is plenty of truth in all this. Avoiding snakes and tigers is much more evolutionary advantageous (in the short term) than being able to appreciate complex metaphysical wonders of reality, or do philosophy, or tap into our creative endeavous - and it is probably true that evolution edited out some of the extraneous cognitive qualities if they would have impeded survival. But the fact is, along with the our reactions to moving objects, our fear of the dark, our blushing, our sneezing, our hairs standing up, our goose bumps and our trepidation at wild animals, we did evolve the capacity to philosophise, and do complex maths, and write profound literature, and construct beautiful poetry, and enjoy hints of the numinous, and be awed by our sense of wonder, and recognise God as the Creator.

While there is no question that we are evolved beings, with all the limitations of a Savannah-dwelling species, it is also very evident that our cognition operates as though it is over-engineered for the things for which biological evolution equipped us. I was in HMV earlier looking for a CD: an activity sedimented in a variety of things such as alphabetisation, image awareness, memory, geometrical apprehension, and every other perceptive tool that causes an interrelation between the agent, the objects and perceptivity. But even a simple task like finding a CD comes with all the suggestion that we are over-skilled and over-endowed in our cognitive capacity for the tasks at hand that aided our thriving of the species - there seems to be a supplementary facet to task-management that goes well beyond simple agent and action. What we do with our minds astronomically dwarfs what we need to do with our minds as evolutionary animals. 

For balance, I should say, one must remember the law of large numbers and how, given vast amounts of activity, things that produce seemingly extraordinary patterns are bound to occur. If one thinks of our development as rather like dealing cards, then natural selection has dealt a lot of cards, so our mental engineering, fecund as it is, must also be seen on those terms, especially as natural selection is rather like getting to keep hold of your favoured cards when they are dealt. So we should remember that, in card dealing terms, natural selection has dealt billions upon billions of hands that are 'under engineered' compared with us, so the human mind is certainly a stupendous deal - and on this score it is important to avoid simply assigning providence to our cognition just because we happen to notice it is superior to anything else in the world we know. 

On the other hand, there may be a better explanation. As well as it being true that our evolution filtered out most of the stupendous traits of cognition that would have helped see reality even more comprehensively, perhaps the dynamics of the interaction of the agent and its surroundings, as primary determinants of bit by bit accumulative development of reasoning, gave rise to an inevitable unsatisfactory logical dead end, whereby the justification of the fecundity of the human mind using mental artefacts that arrived through natural selection was just simply too much of a cognitive leap for us to understand quite how amazing we are in relation to the rest of the universe. In other words, perhaps a feature of our evolved consciousness is that it had to evolve with sufficiently limited protocols that it doesn't have the potential to recognise its own metaphysical magnitude, except by way of hints, such as when transcendent echoes like poetry and music literature seep through the cracks.

You can read the whole article here.

The Outsourcing Disaster

In one of the chapters in one of my books, I wrote a section of advice to a teenager about not outsourcing your thinking. Because the good human inclination to learn from others is so prominent, it's easy to fall into the bad human inclination to outsource your own thinking to others - and that makes you very susceptible to significant damage to your own thought systems, as you open yourself to all kinds of nonsense.  

The distinction is an important one: when you are learning from others, your thinking is heightened and highly engaged, as you interpret facts, opinions and ideas, and apply your own mental cognition to the accountability process. Learning from others ought to feel a bit like being in a courtroom, where you rigorously examine the data in front of you and arrive at accurate conclusions. To that end, truth is to epistemology as justice is to a court of law.

Outsourcing your thinking is different: it is uncritically accepting the thoughts and opinions of others without any kind of self-imposed critical evaluation or accountability. Outsourcing your thinking makes it inevitable that you will fail to engage in the full complexity of ideas, and that you will be a lazy-minded reviewer of the world who latches on to the sloppy views, beliefs and sound-bites of those to whom you've outsourced your thinking.

The rise of Corbynism is perhaps the best recent example of the mass outsourcing of thinking to an intellectually incompetent, political dangerous cult of personality figure. Within a very short time, Jeremy Corbyn went from being a rank outsider in a Labour leadership contest to a celebrity figure so ubiquitous that he was able to draw the attention of a crowd of credulous Glastonbury festival goers who believe he is the best thing since sliced bread.

Once something big happens like the emergence of a political cult, or religious cult, or Gaia cult, there is a pool of adoration waiting to outsource their thinking to someone who will feed their minds with ideas like dolphins awaiting their feed in a zoo. What emerges is a kind of mass hysteria where the thoughts of the dominant figures seamlessly become part of the cultural milieu that supports it, until it operates from a hermetically sealed discourse that indolently enshrines those ideas as part of their identity, and shuts them off from any contra opinions that may rattle their epistemological framework

But there's another important element to this. As well as divesting yourself of accountability for your opinions, there's another big reason why you shouldn't outsource your thinking to others. You may well be smarter than them, and as a consequence, they are unworthy repositories for your outsourcing. In fact, given the types of people who command a following based on superficial and intellectually lightweight views and beliefs, there's a fair chance that a great many of the sheep are smarter than the shepherd herding them.

To finish, here's an off the top of my head list of ideas, terms and belief systems that act as socio-cultural receptacles into which a lot of people have poured their outsourced thinking, from which they would be solemnly advised to recoil immediately, and over which they should look to restore their own intellectual sovereignty in pursuit of a change of mind:

All religions except Christianity

Young earth creationism

Intelligent design

New wave atheism

Communism

Socialism

Climate change alarmism

Trickle down economics

Economic Protectionism

Intellectual Protectionism

Tariffs

Price fixing

Positive discrimination

All women shortlists

Diversity quotas

Equality of outcome

Subsidies and bailouts

Contemporary Feminism

Overpopulation

Identity politics

Male privilege

Unfair gender pay gap

Nationalisation

Postmodernism

I'm sure there are more, but it's been a tiring weekend, and that's all I can come up with for now. If you've outsourced your thinking to the extent that you are on side with any of the above, there's a whole new world of lucid discovery awaiting you when bring your thinking back in house on these matters.  


EDIT TO ADD:

 

Developing an outsourcing mentality will soon become habitual inability to interpret and process yourself - you'll merely parrot ideas, phrases and beliefs that you've picked up from others, and in the end you'll put on a mask and the face you wear will grow into the mask until the two are indistinguishable.

A good indication test:

 

1) Think of an objective view you hold that your smartest friends think is plain wrong

Then another:

2) Think of an objective view you hold that your least smart friends think is plain wrong but your smartest friends think is right

 

Score yourself one point for every example you can think of in each category.

If you are an outsourcer of your thinking you should find you score high in category one and low in category two. If you are a master of your own cognitive domain, subjecting everything you hear to a rigorous, balanced analysis, you should score low in category one and high category two.

 
 

  

The Pink Tax and Women Drivers

On her Facebook thread, a friend of mine presented me with a few questions about the so-called 'pink tax' - that is, the extra amount she believes women are unfairly charged for certain products or services, especially products related to sanitary needs and hygiene. My friend thought the price differential 'unfair', and another contributor insisted that these things should be priced the same.

The problem with saying something complex like a price is 'unfair' is that prices are not just figures slapped on products - they are a very complex nexus of information signals that reveal what people perceive as valuable, and how (in)elastic they are in their demands.  

There is no systematic unfairness, unless you count 'unfairness' as being a world in which different people are price sensitive to different things. Both men and women prioritise different things in their spending patterns, and prices go up and down in accordance with those demands. Sellers will pitch their prices in relation to perceived demand and perceived elasticity. To that end, the products are not as similar as it may first appear, because they mean different things to different people.

Because value is subjective to the consumer, it is difficult to look at the system overall and exclaim it is unfair to one particular sex. Take smellies as a good example. I know very little about aftershaves and perfumes, but it is easy to tell from the range of products available that women value them more than men. There is a greater variety of women's clothes and women's bags for the same reason.

Consequently, just as one could frame the debate in terms of women paying more for similar smelly products, one could equally frame it in terms of men are getting less variety in their smelly purchasing options. But there's a good reason that neither sex minds this being the case. If men cared about how they smell as much as women, there would be as many aftershaves as there are perfumes, and aftershaves would be more expensive than they currently are. The people who lose out in this scenario are not just men or just women - they are men who are price insensitive but more discerning about the variety of products, and women who are price sensitive but less discerning about the variety of products.

Sellers are profit maximisers - they will try to get as much as possible for each and every product. Sell a plain rucksack and you might get £10 for it. Sell an otherwise identical rucksack with a picture of Spiderman on it and it may fetch £15-20. The reason is obvious: boys prefer a rucksack with Spiderman on it to a plain one. If there is a rucksack with a picture of Elsa from Frozen selling for less than the Spiderman rucksack, it is a signal that boys tend to care more about Spiderman rucksacks than girls do about Elsa rucksacks, even though the conceptual difference is negligible. Demands for price equivalence will only be realised if there is value equivalence - and when there is not, expect to see men and women paying different prices for very similar things based on how much they are willing to pay.

Ironically, the genuine cases of unfairness I've seen in the marketplace are when men and women should be paying different prices for similar things but are forced to pay the same price, thereby negating very important differences in the sexes. For example, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) once ruled that the long-established practice of setting insurance prices according to sex is illegal discrimination. The Court's decision forced members of the European Union to introduce a ban on sex-based pricing.

So, in basic terms, car insurers used to yield to market-based risk calculation (using a reliable tool called actuarial mathematics) and offer statistically safer drivers cheaper premiums (perfectly sensibly, as any sane person would agree). Then the EU decided that it's much better to ignore all this data and assent to a spurious anti-unfair-discrimination policy, while failing to see the irony that in penalising statistically safer people for purposes of parity they are unfairly discriminating against safer drivers.

This beyond absurd. The primary measure of unfair discrimination in actuarial analyses is not treating different people differently, it is treating different people the same. Women are statistically safer drivers than men, which means they are cheaper customers, which means to increase their premium to the same as men is to unfairly discriminate against women.

The reasons why women are safer drivers are well known. Women are, on average, less likely to have fast cars, they drive fewer miles, they drive slower, they take fewer risks, and they are less aggressive than men. Giving women a lower premium based on those facts amounts to a simple and rational statistical evaluation of risk.

The same is true of other considerations too - age, post code, miles per year, type of car, and so forth - each of these are important factors in risk evaluation, and the ECJ should leave well alone. The free market is the best tool for eradicating unfair discrimination in business, because pretty much any time a company decided to discriminate against women, black people, gay people, tall people, fat people, or whomever, they would pay for it with a reduction in profits*.

Of course, we know the probable motive in the ECJ's equalisation of the sexes - it is to guard against people with identical data having different premiums based solely on sex. But that misses the whole quintessence of how competition works in the free market. Suppose we have Jack and Jill, who are the same age, with the same car, same post code, and driving the same miles per year - the ECJ would have it that they should be given equal premiums because to do otherwise would be to discriminate on the only variable factor - sex.

But that is not what happens - while the data picks up facts like age, car type, post code, and miles per year, it doesn't account for those significant differences - speed of driving, risk-taking, aggression and other factors of mentality behind the wheel that make women more likely to be safer and have fewer accidents, and better candidates for cheaper premiums.

The ECJ is guarding against the general being applied to the particular - but this is part of what makes competitive business healthy. In a free market we can work under an assumption of cheaper insurance premiums for a safer driving record at the individual level anyway - so it's a law that only actually compounds what already happens.

But we can extend far beyond that too - competing firms can solicit new custom by offering deals to acquire that custom. This proves very effective in the insurance market: some providers specialise in good deals for modified cars (like my modified Subaru), some specialise in good deals for women, some specialise in good deals for the elderly, some for first time drivers, and so on.

Insurance companies have asymmetry of information when it comes to those vital premium-changers - they have transparency with data like age, post code, miles per year, type of car - but they don't have anything like the same transparency with things like speed of driving, risk-taking, aggression and other factors of mentality behind the wheel - which is where the actuary matters.

A company that's free to offer deals for women is acting on probability related to those invisible factors - but that also means women are free to look for insurers sensitive to such data, as are Subaru drivers, as are the elderly, and so forth. That's how beautifully the market for insurance rewards this innovation.

If women are consistently safer, then they are consistently on average cheaper customers, which rewards those companies that are prepared in response to lower the premium for women. But if the data is spurious and women are less consistently as safe as the premium indicates then those same companies will incur a loss and adjust their women-favoured premiums to accord with that. It's a hugely efficient system that the ECJ hasn't properly factored into its considerations.

Sometimes The Important Things Are The Hardest Things To Accept

The dogmatic interventionists, by whom I mean people enchanted by socialism and green politics, get so much wrong primarily because they have never understood the big tension that underwrites human beings' relationship with nature. That tension is one of conflict between order and disorder in the natural proceeding of things. Here's how it goes - and if I succeed in my task of making this easy to follow, some of you may acquire a fresh perspective on the matter of how we could view human beings and our interface with nature.

The fundamental axiom about being humans (or at least one of the fundamental axioms) is that we are evolutionarily primed to strive for order over disorder in just about everything we do. We may experience minor peaks and troughs, but the overall goal of each human is to be in a constant state of improvement - to favour ‘better' over 'worse’ and ‘right' over 'wrong’ and ‘true' over 'false’. The species wouldn't have been able to thrive without these qualities.

The human journey, especially in recent decades, has seen the explosion of millions upon millions of thoughts and ideas into standards and values that draw us gradually nearer to cultural and social convergence, and keep us pressing forward together in search of more and more improvement. Order instead of disorder is our cultural and social analogue. Whether it is a simple act like cleaning up some spilled juice, or pruning a garden, or something more complex like improving our own individual life, or trying to help a family get on the straight and narrow, or bringing about peace in a war ravaged country – progression is our shared preference. Where there is disorder we look to bring about order. 

But if you've been attentive throughout your life, you may have noticed that this puts us at odds with nature's natural tendencies. The reason being: nature tends towards the opposite direction - it tends towards disorder - and this is primarily due to the first two laws of thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy is conserved in any process involving a thermodynamic system and its surroundings.  That is to say, the increase in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of energy added by heating the system minus the amount lost as a result of the work done by the system on its surroundings.

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time. This is what is meant by the notion that nature's tendency is towards disorder, not order. In a closed system, disorder increases with time, but amongst the tend towards disorder, when one bit of the system becomes quite ordered, there will be an exhaust of disorder elsewhere to offset the decrease in entropy, meaning the overall effect still produces higher disorder. This process is what we call thermodynamic disequilibrium, which exhibits a driven directionality of time irreversibly (that's why we see time going in one direction not two - forwards but not backwards).

But as you have no doubt noticed, nature is not maximally disordered. If it was, we would not be here to talk about it. In biological evolution we see this directionality of order in action, because there is an evolutionary arrow of time which locks in organised complexity in biochemical systems. That does not mean we have to believe there is intentionality in the system, much less that evolution has an end goal – but in the sense of being good at surviving at the genetic level, the ratchet mechanism that occurs in the system creates pockets of order. This is the process that humans try to mirror in our own endeavours.

And here is where things get even more interesting, because although nature's tendency towards disorder puts humans in tension with nature as we try to bring about order, there is another one of nature's fundamental principles that humans have adopted to make the progress as efficient as possible - and that is the principle of least effort (also known as the law of parsimony). Because the total energy content of the universe is constant and the total entropy is constantly increasing, nature always prefers low energy, to tend towards maximum entropy - that is, it will make the least effort to reach any observable pathway it tends towards. That is why, for example, when light travels it reverts to the path of least time; and it is why a hanging chain reverts to the shape of lowest centre of mass; and it is why soap bubbles revert to the shape of least surface area and volume.

Similarly, in human nature, the physical mechanisms that underwrite our drive forward, our biological evolution, the global economy, and the state of living things in terms of the planet, are also all bound up in nature's thermodynamic principle of the law of parsimony. Whether we are talking about Newton's laws of motion, the biological mechanism of natural selection, electromagnetic radiation, the second law of thermodynamics, or running a successful clothing business, installing machinery in a new factory premises, trying to get from London to Brighton, or setting up a remote controlled railway system for your children at Christmas time, all these things are underpinned by the law of parsimony - that what works most efficiently is the path that takes least effort and uses the least energy.

Consequently, then, there is often a big price to pay for the kind of short-sighted meddling we frequently see in things like climate change alarmism, strivings for enforced equality, stifling competition, price controls, state subsidies, damaging regulations, censorship, and most taxes you can think of - the human state of affairs would be greatly enhanced if left to many of its natural paths of efficiency, and would progress a lot quicker than it is being allowed to with the meddlings of the socialists and the eco warriors.

I'm not saying that everything the state does is a hindrance to progress; and nor would I wish to gainsay the idea that some social justice warriors begin their endeavours with good intentions. But quite often the motives of the establishment are not conterminously aligned with the overall human drive for improvment, which is cooperation and mutually beneficial transactions according to the Nash equilibrium of whichever system is in play during the transaction. Because of humans pursuing their best possible approach as per Nash equilibria, the agents of participation have to negotiate strategies that identify risk in order to have sufficient transparency to obtain an optimal (or efficient) end goal. When there is negative outside interference that distorts this process and diminishes transparency, we get perverse incentives and less-efficient outcomes.

And lastly, this has a big implication on the other of society's big incompetence - the hugely pernicious model of fabricated equality, whereby people try to artificially level the playing field to achieve equal outcomes. Given that the underwritten hardwiring of humans is competition for fecundity and species resilience, it is inevitable that strivings for equality of opportunity are problematical (although not necessarily undesirable) and drives for enforced equality of outcome are mostly reprehensible.

Equality of outcome should not be enforced because of its ultimate futility - it is anti-human nature. It would be tantamount to forcing the species into a reduced level of prosperity on the basis of a highly questionable, undifferentiated uniformity. The reality is, if humankind was artificially flattened down to the common denominator of the most unskilled, least hard working, uncompetitive members, it would not be able to thrive as a species in the way it has.

There is transparent knowledge and empirical understanding of how reality operates, how humans thrive best, what helps our development along, what aids our psychological well-being, and what retards progress - and whether you choose to swallow the red pill or the blue pill is entirely a matter for your own conscience and whether you want to embrace reality, truths and facts, or dwell in the realm of illusion and denial. Just remember that no one really ever gets away with anything negative they do; and no one ever really fails to benefit from anything positive they do.

 

 

On Memes (Before There Were Memes About Memes)

I was scrolling through some of my archival writings when putting together one of my books, and in my 'Essays' folder I found this piece I'd written in 1997 about memes, which seemed oddly pertinent given today's news about the latest foolish EU directive to force online agencies to automatically filter out any copyrighted material uploaded.

I thought it worth sharing for one simple reason - not because I have anything fresh to say about memes, but because it did strike me that this is one of those rare opportunities to share an old perspective on something that may be widely in common parlance now, but that at the time of writing was a fairly esoteric term known only by those familiar with Richard Dawkins' seminal 1976 book The Selfish Gene, from which the term 'meme' was first coined.

So I'm sharing my meme essay, solely for the purpose of giving readers the chance to see what my younger self thought about the memes 21 years ago when he had no idea they would go on to be so widespread, and that the term would be co-opted to represent far more than in its inceptive use.

Reprinted below:

On Memes

A lot of people share ideas and views that are valuable (don't steal from your boss, look before you cross the road, white t-shirts are better than black ones on a boiling hot day, and so on). But a lot of people also share ideas and views that are foolish and damaging (give pregnant women thalidomide, price controls are a good idea, vandalism is cool, and so on).

One word can aptly describe why all this happens - and that word is 'memes'. Just like mutations in DNA, ‘memes’ are packets of information passed from mind to mind. Just about any piece of information has the potential to be passed on like a meme, so long as there is a reason for it to be passed on. When a pregnant woman thinks it's fine to smoke 40 a day, and when a leftie asserts that the world is unfairly unequal and that we need a revolution, they are both acting on past, often very subtle, information signals.

Consequently it is to be expected that people believe all sorts of great and foolish things, as society involves lots of meme sound-bites that get passed on rather like how germs get passed on - by contagion. The reason memes are somewhat analogous to genes in biology is that they have characteristics that lend themselves to being preferentially duplicated or repeated.

Of course, memes are not simply the copying of the same information over and over again; just like genetic mutations, they are susceptible to insertion (where something extra is added to an idea), deletion (where something is taken away) and point mutation (where a part of the idea is changed into something else), as well as straightforward duplication (the copying of an idea).

Memes are cultural, and as such they are Lamarckian in that they are acquired characteristics that are inherited. They comprise elements of cultural ideas, symbols or practices that transmit from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena - and as a consequence, they demonstrate both the wisdom and the foolishness of the human race.

They act as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures. If one thinks of examples such as catchy melodies, catchphrases, religious beliefs, superstitions, jokes, clothing, fashion and technology, we see that this gives evidence of the memetic propagation of language, terms and ideas. 

Here's an example. Suppose we have two memes with regard to girls’ hairstyles. Meme 1 involves a girl tying her hair in a pony tail, whereas meme 2 involves a girl tying her hair in barrel hitch knots. If tying one’s hair in a pony tail induces comfort, convenience, happiness and positive feedback, then meme 1 will be duplicated and repeated with increased frequency. If, however, tying one’s hair in barrel hitch knots induces more comfort, convenience, happiness and positive feedback, then meme 2 will be duplicated and repeated with increased frequency.

As a general rule of thumb, a meme will spread depending on how its characteristics affect the organism. The mark of a good meme is one that is often expressed in voluntary behaviour, relative to other memes, due to the fact that it has left the organism feeling rewarded. The fact that pony tails are popular and barrel hitch knots are not tells us everything we need to know about their selectability in girls' hairstyles.

Even as I observe the first few pages in today's edition of a friend's daily newspaper, meme theory seems well suited to describe the cycles observed in fashion trends (in today’s case, the rise and fall of skirt lengths depending on whether girls would rather be modest or feel suggestive), or the popularity of certain belief systems (in today’s case, the popularity that Buddhism is gaining as a reaction to the hectic pace of modern life, and the popularity that both Scientology and Kabbalah are gaining due to the celebrities that endorse them).

Not wishing to invoke any ‘conscious thinking’ to memes (at least, not in the sense we are discussing here), but given that memes are packets of information looking to get themselves copied through various kinds of receptacles (computers, newspapers, magazines, billboards, radios, letters, and most generally of all, brains themselves) there are inevitably going to be a great many bad memes that spread throughout populations causing harm to their hosts. 

In fact, in many respects a lot of the bad memes are more likely to be passed on than the good memes, because many of the ideas and beliefs that are most easily embraced are the overly-simplistic ones that we don't take enough time learning to resist. For example, a lot of beliefs are adopted because they facilitate polarising black vs white thinking, highly selective worldviews, emotional appeals for quick-fix solutions to complex problems, and attraction to the kinds of dogmatic certainty and trivialisation of contra-contentions that we see in cults and ideologically driven political groups.

Given the ease with which new memes are formed, and how rapidly they spread, humanity will always have memetic diversity, and this yields lots of competing ideas and human flaws regarding how to assimilate a multitude of ideas into a coherent worldview.

With genes there is selection for the fittest organism, where biological forms acquire traits that better enable them to adapt to specific environmental situations, which results in their improved evolvability due to the perpetuation of those beneficial traits in the generations that succeed them.

With memes there is nothing quite so effective. For memes, there is selection for the behaviour that the organism finds the most satisfying, easy to understand, personally self-congratulatory and culturally consistent - and this gives no guarantee that bad ideas won't endure - especially if, as seems inevitable, the world's population becomes more and more closely connected through increased technology capacity.

 James Knight 1997