The Algorithmic Nature of Christianity

 

Christianity has many cases whereby if you don't experience the primary truth, you cannot know all the other truths that emerge from it. I call this the Algorithmic Nature of Christianity. An algorithm is a set of instructions or rules to solve a specific problem or perform a particular task. For example, the Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two preceding ones (starting from 0 and 1). The algorithm involves defining the first two numbers and then generating subsequent Fibonacci numbers based on the sum of the last two. So, the sequence begins: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on. Cooking is another example of something that's algorithmic, in that the recipe provides step-by-step instructions on how to make a meal. If you don't know the recipe for a dish, you can't know how to cook it.

Even more profoundly, the Algorithmic Nature of Christianity provides us with some incisive wisdom, especially regarding what atheists can't possibly see if they don't have or know certain things, and how Christians might bring this to their attention. This is important because Christians can spend inordinate amounts of time debating numerous topics surrounding God's existence, convincing and unconvincing evidence for the Christian faith, reliability of scripture, whether the world looks like God created it, philosophical, moral and ethical propositions around God's existence, and so forth. But while those discussions are interesting and worthwhile for augmenting our understanding, they are not what's fundamentally at play here when Christians and non-Christians discuss the truth of the faith. Because the Bible shows in several places that if non-Christians lack the algorithmic base for discovery and revelation, they cannot possibly arrive at the truths at which they claim they want to arrive.

Here are some examples. The issue with which the majority of atheists are preoccupied is why God seems invisible to them, and why, according to them, He's never given them the kind of personal appearance they crave. But Jesus declares in John 14:8-9 that anyone who has seen Him has seen the Father. He then reproaches Philip with the question "How can you say, 'Show us the Father'?". Atheists who utter the demand 'show me God' are making the same error. Additionally, in 1 John 2:23 we hear Jesus' truth restated "No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also". The algorithm here is basically "If you want to know God, you have to recognise that Jesus is Lord". That is, it's impossible to know God exists without having revelation that Jesus is God and the Saviour of the world (see also, John 14:6, where Jesus says, "No one comes to the father except through me"). All the time that unbelievers are arguing about the many things they argue about, they are merely formulating artificial distractions that are averting their attention from the crux of the matter.

The same is true with loving God; "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love" 1 John 4:8. The algorithm here is basically "To know God is to love Him, and to love Him is to recognise Jesus as Lord." If an individual does not know who Jesus is, they can't love God; and if they can't love God, it's impossible to know Him. This is confirmed further in 1 John 4:15 "If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God."

Another example connected to 1 John 4:15 is that in order to know God, an individual has to have the Holy Spirit living inside them. St. Paul affirms in 1 Corinthians 12:3 that no one can say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Holy Spirit. The algorithm here is basically "If you don't have the Holy Spirit, you can't know God". That is, without recognising Jesus as Lord and without the Holy Spirit living inside of you, it's not possible to be aware of God's existence in any intimate way, because the personal encounter only comes from the Holy Spirit.

Now a third example, about the concept of sin; there is an algorithmic truth expressed in 1 John 1, which says, "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." And right after, "If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us". The algorithm here is basically "To have the truth in us, and to apprehend the Bible as the word of truth, we must recognise the nature of our sin". If you don't acknowledge the truth of sin in the world, then you cannot recognise your own sin, and therefore, you cannot recognise the grace that saves us from sin. And not being able to recognise sin and grace means we cannot accept Jesus as Lord, and we cannot receive the Holy Spirit.

Just the above components of the Algorithmic Nature of Christianity already speak an awful lot about the barrier unbelievers have in recognising who God is. They will not find it possible to believe in God if they do not know who He is. Another algorithmic consideration is brought to bear in the quality of humility. Without humility, I do not believe we can have the door opened to knowing God (Road to Damascus encounters like St. Paul’s may provide the odd exception, but the rule generally holds). Proverbs 22:4 says, "The reward for humility and fear of the Lord is riches and honour and life", and in James 4:10 each of us is told "Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you". The algorithm here is basically "If you want revelation and exaltation from God, you must seek with humility".

We can see already how all the above is connected algorithmically, where humility is what leads us to understand sin; and understanding sin is what leads us to understand the need for the grace of our Saviour; and recognising Jesus as our Saviour leads us to understand the price He paid for us on the cross; and from that we know God's truth through revelation imparted by our being in receipt of the Holy Spirit.

For the atheist, then, who persistently argues against the Christian faith with claims of not enough evidence or feeling devoid of any person revelation, the algorithmic considerations above are of paramount importance, because it is not possible for them to have their demands for God's existence and revelation satisfied if, algorithmically, they do not yet have the recipe required.

Letters To Troubled Youth - Excerpt 2: Climate Extremism: A Waste of Energy

 

One of my little ‘work in progress’ side projects is an epistolary called Letters To Troubled Youth. It’s a mix of good cop, bad cop letter writing, aimed at the younger generation, warning them about all the highly damaging nonsense they are letting in to their souls, and encouraging them of the greater rewards found in more rigorous truthseeking. I might share the occasional excerpt as a blog post on its own stranding.

Excerpt 2 – taken from Letter 17: Climate Extremism: A Waste of Energy

“Let's go back to basics in economics. For any quantity of a good or service, there is a demand price and a supply price. The demand price is the price at which consumers want to consume, and the supply price is the price at which suppliers want to sell. There is only one quantity for which the demand price and the supply price are in equilibrium. If external forces are acting so that consumers are paying less than the demand price, competition among consumers will bid up the price; or if suppliers are receiving more than the supply price, competition among suppliers will push down the price. For that one quantity of good or service whereby the demand price and the supply price are in equilibrium, competitive forces must be acting optimally with no external interference in the price system. When the quantity is lower than equal, the demand price will be higher than the supply price; when the quantity is higher than equal, the demand price will be lower than the supply price.

Lots of external factors contribute to or act upon the price system to offset the logic outlined above - taxes, price controls, subsidies, queues, shortages, over-consumption, social costs, product waste, and so forth -  and it is only a relatively free trade and competitive forces that ensure that suppliers receive the desired supply price and demanders pay the desired demand price (remember, this optimal measurement is measured at the margin). The important corollary here is that when the above conditions are met, the quantity is the only unique quantity at which the demand and supply prices are optimally set at the equilibrium.

If you understand the logic behind why optimal prices are contingent upon supply and demand, you also understand that prices act as vital information signals, and that they are all inextricably connected to each other. The price of chocolate biscuits for supplier A is driven by what suppliers B, C and D sell them for, but also by the price of jam doughnuts, cream cakes, fruit and cereal. The price of your cinema ticket, your railway ticket, your blue suit, your Asus laptop, and so forth, is driven by the millions of substitutes (of the same kind and different alternatives) available in the marketplace. And if you understand all those things, you can apply the same logic to other areas of human incentives and behaviour.

If all the above is making sense, we can turn this on to the subject of climate change. For the past 150 years, humans have seen a progression-explosion in terms of material wealth and increased living standards, and that has been primarily driven by capitalism and science. The engine that has fuelled this great enrichment has been the harnessing of cheap, affordable energy. Globally, the predominant cheap, affordable energy has been fossil fuels, and it still will be for the foreseeable future. Pretty much everything that drives the economy and helps prices stay close to equilibrium involves fossil fuels (either directly or indirectly). It will be good when we have found alternatives to fossil fuels (or offsetting techniques) that meet all the criteria for optimality I laid out earlier, and we are doing that, and will do it at an even more expansive rate in the future - but right now, we are not advanced enough to dispense with all fossil fuels or reach the point of so-called 'net zero'.

Given that climate change agendas never involve the kind of language, logic or arguments I've outlined above, it should be evident for any who still need convincing that the climate 'net zero' project is miles short of the requisite level of sound reasoning or understanding of the full complexity of the reality - it is a socio-political project driven by narrow self-interest, fear and tribalism. If we can't yet do without fossil fuels, and if a significant proportion of the world's population still requires them to a) continue to build up their industry and advance further on their journey of progression to higher living standards, b) purchase them most optimally in accordance with the price system's information signals, and c) not have the price of their most demanded natural resources bid up artificially by self-serving, narrow-minded politicians, then what the climate extremists are imposing is absurd, unrealistic, selfish, harmful and immoral. Anyone can oversimplify the world and make ridiculous demands on politicians that sadly seem all-too keen to accede to the madness - but it has very little basis in reality, and pays almost no proper regard for how the world actually works and the complex considerations attached to these propositions.”

The Relationship Between Science & Christianity

 

First published today on Network Norfolk:

In this age, the most science-friendly, progressive and technologically enriched age, many people believe that the world has little room for Christianity anymore. There are two false premises here: first, that science can ever act as some kind of substitute for Christianity; and second, that science is like our mother, and Christianity is like an annoying cousin that will soon pass away and only live on in the ashes of our memory.

Both premises get this wrong: Christianity is more like our parent, and science is more like its daughter. Christianity helped give birth to science - it laid down the truth-seeking, fact-finding qualities that would eventually help usher in empirical science, which began its infancy in about the 12th century, and has taken the shape of an upwards curve ever since.

Now, given what I've just said, this next part may seem counterintuitive - but that does not mean that we needed Christianity, or any religion, for science to come along. Science would have demonstrated its utility on our progress whether we were religious nor not. The fundamental reason for this is because science is only a tiny subset of how we interface with the world - it is like a daughter because it comes along after to explain things we've already partially discovered. It is like putting on a pair of glasses to give focus to an otherwise blurry vision.

Given that Christianity is explaining something outside of the purlieus of science, yet also heavily reliant on science as its canvas or substrate, it can only be enriched by science in the same way that other things in life are enriched by science - through explanatory methods. And we mustn't therefore put the cart of science before the horse of initial probing, because we usually find the causality is the other way around. Biblical accounts of salt preserving food from decay happened long before we understood how the preservation works. The same is true of canned food - we were putting food in cans long before we knew about how germs operated to food's detriment. We knew that penicillin kills bacteria long before we learned how it destroys the cell walls of bacteria during gestation.

But just as scientists were more the beneficiaries of new technology than the benefactors (and not the other way around as so many think), so too was science a beneficiary of Christianity, not a rival to it. There's no doubt that extremist religiosity has retarded the progress of science over years too, and that is a shame, because the rewards of Christianity and the rewards of science, while different in scope, are part of the same goal - improvement and transformation.

Whether science helps you cure a disease, travel to Africa as a missionary, print Bibles, speak the gospel through a microphone in an auditorium, feed the hungry or shelter the homeless, it is not a rival or a substitute for other human progressions. Similarly, the methods of science, such as empirical enquiry, logic, analysing data, and interpreting facts and test-based evidence are very much part of the domain of interpreting the truth of Christianity too. Even Plato said that philosophy begins in wonder.

Religious language sits on the border between the revealed truths and the truths still shrouded in mystery. It exists at the gateway between what is revealed and what remains mysterious. Theological language, such as that found in the stories, metaphors and allegories in scripture, opens the gate so that that which was too profound and complex to be fully expressed, could be partially expressed in hints of what is to come. This process is also central to the Incarnation, where God became a man in Christ in order that we could know Him and know the true depth of His love for us.

Why Anselm's Ontological Argument Is Better Than You Think

Anselm’s ontological argument basically goes like this:

1) God is defined as the absolute greatest conceivable being.

2) Something that must exist is inherently greater than something that might not exist.

3) If we entertain the idea that the greatest conceivable being (God) might not exist, we open the door to imagining something even greater.

4) However, it becomes illogical to think that there could be something greater than the greatest conceivable being.

5) Therefore, the conclusion is that the greatest conceivable being, God, cannot be thought not to exist and, consequently, must exist.

It’s an argument that’s been widely dismissed by those who don’t know what it’s like to know God, and perhaps even widely misunderstood by those who do. Let me assure you that if you think Anselm’s argument simply means thinking about certain concepts in a way that argues them into existence, then you’re not giving this kind of thinking its due gravitas.

It’s not that the “absolute greatest conceivable being” is conceived, and therefore, because it’s conceived it must exist in the form of God. It’s that the absolute greatest conceivable being, if such a thing exists, has to be something that we mean when we talk about God, because God is the absolute greatest conceivable thing, and His absolute greatness is a property of His being, rather like how oxygen is a property of combustion. If you begin to think what good, better and great mean in relation to an objective standard, we can make progress. In a maths exam, good might be getting all your arithmetic right; better might be getting your algebra right too; and great might mean solving a complex problem that no one else has solved. A plugged-in microwave is better for cooking than one that is unplugged. A chair with four legs is steadier than a chair with one leg missing. A better maths paper, microwave or chair is one that is close to the optimal properties and functions of the object than one that is defective. Good, better and great are part of the thought process that leads us all the way to greatest.

God is not only what we mean when we talk about the absolute greatest conceivable being, we also mean that the absolute greatest conceivable being is a fundamental property of God. The difference is subtle, but essential in examining our morality, our philosophy and our psychology, where there is a hierarchical value structure of better or worse, until we hypothetically conceive of the highest. To conceive of the highest means acknowledging the reality of God at the top, it doesn’t mean we understand it – just as we can conceive of the size of our universe in terms of light years, without being able to comprehend it on such a scale. The “absolute greatest conceivable being” is where we arrive conceptually when we keep trying to climb up higher on our hierarchical value structure, and the three person God is who we meet when we understand that He is at the top of it as the “absolute greatest conceivable being”.

Anselm is more correct than even perhaps he himself realised (although that might be doing him a disservice) – in that, in the hierarchical value structure, there does exist a higher and higher standard that, if we keep going upwards, leads eventually to the notion of perfection – the very quality we understand about God Himself. You may be tempted to say that perfection is an idea we can conceive, but that it doesn’t actually exist in real terms. But this presents a problem of limited vision rather than limited ontological scope – because we know the hierarchical value structure exists in an objective sense, so we are on shaky grounds if we deny that the thing at the very top of it exists.

We can now apply this to existence itself. In the hierarchy of ontological reality, the highest form of existence is something that has a necessary existence, not a contingent existence. A thing that has a necessary existence is also something that we speak of in terms of one of the fundamental properties of God (called Aseity), in that God cannot ‘not’ exist. In our own conceived hierarchical structure, being perfect has a higher objective standing than the set of all imperfect things, and having a necessary existence has a higher objective standing than the set of all contingent things. Both of those attributes are properties of the God who has made Himself known in Christ (as per Psalm 18:30, Psalm 90:2 and Colossians 1:17). To know God is to know He exists; but if we knew Him fully, we’d know why He cannot possibly not exist. 

Further Reading: Exploring The Ontological Argument For God's Existence

Edit to add:  Some critics argue that a definition alone cannot bring something into existence - and they are right. We cannot define unicorns or perfect chairs into being. But Anselm's insight is not simply definitional. Rather, he points us to the structure of our value-laden reality, where the concept of “the greatest” is not arbitrary but embedded in how we understand good, better, and best - not just morally, but metaphysically. The argument becomes not that God exists because we define Him, but that the very possibility of objective greatness presupposes a grounding being at the top - one whose existence is necessary, not contingent.                   

The Self's Internal Litmus Test Of Credibility

 

A combination of psychological literature and an honest appraisal of our inner self make it pretty clear that we don’t easily think things through with careful consideration, using rigorous logical and empirical analysis as tools to arrive at our views and then respond with the appropriate behaviour. We actually become driven by our emotional needs and utilitarian enticements in establishing what we want to believe, and then we employ the confirmation bias in looking to justify those beliefs. That is, we put the cart of incentives before the horse of truthseeking and the reins of reason, when it should be the other way around.

That doesn’t mean this method is always wrong; emotions and will are great signposts towards many profound discovered truths and artistic expressions, and should not be gainsaid or trivialised complacently. But with matters involving complex considerations, dynamical reasoning and important facts, then this cart-before-the-horse tendency is a malady on the human condition.  

In a world which seems to have gone a bit mad, and is overrun with climate loonies, the triggered wokerati, snowflakes, extreme political ideologues (both left and right), religious crackpots, conspiracy theorists and journalistic snake oil salespeople, here’s what you should do to check if you’re on the right side of the empirical propositions in question. Make a list of the political, religious, socio-cultural, economic and scientific beliefs that are important to you, and rank them regarding how certain you feel about your position on them. Then take all the ones you feel less certain about, and even have inner doubts about (don’t worry, you’ll know which ones they are – your gut will tell you and it won’t lie to you).

And then take each one and search yourself inwardly, with as much honesty as you can summon, to distil how these beliefs make you feel. What do those views do to you when no one is looking; do they make you feel strong or weak, proud or ashamed, comfortable or uncomfortable, confident or doubtful? This authenticity is what you need to be measuring. You’ll ask yourself; am I really giving this my best shot? Have I really got a good grasp of the situation? Am I being overly-simplistic? Have I given this the proper investigation or just been too easily convinced by someone else? And if the latter, what do I think of those people – do I really trust them, and do I think their motives are good?

There’s not a person who can fail to benefit from this examination, and it’s just about certain that if you do this with a passion for knowing the truth, and are prepared for the full consequences of the adventure and journey on which you’ll find yourself, you will be greatly enriched.

TV Drama: The Dreaded Second Season

I saw an article in The Spectator by a contributor called Sam Leith, and this excerpt very well echoes my own general issues with TV dramas in the contemporary age:

“Hooray, I thought. There’s a new season of The Tourist. I remember liking that, I thought. It was that thing with the bloke in Australia, wasn’t it? And I was all set to settle down for a good binge, when I realised that I had almost literally no idea what had happened in the first season. One thing I knew is, it was confusing. There was a bloke in, yes, Australia, who had had a bump on the head and didn’t know who he was, except he was Jamie Dornan. I remember there was a bit with some LSD, and recalling the plot was quite like that too. Someone was trying to blow him up (or maybe he was trying to blow someone else up). He made friends with a sensible but troubled policewoman and a sexy waitress who seems to have known him in a past life. There was a vicious gangster who had a brother who didn’t exist but then did, or something. And a suitcase. Was that important? There was someone called Lena Pascal, who was very important but I had no idea why. And at the end: did Jamie Dornan…turn out to be a baddie? Or was he dead? Nope, it’s gone. All I have is a selection of random images and half-connections.”

Yes, I think Mr. Leith has hit on a very pertinent issue with modern television – with so much choice available, and so much money floating around with which to make second, third and fourth seasons – it is proving practically difficult to keep picking up the thread with every new season of the shows we enjoyed in season 1. As I said on social media last year, “Generally, I don’t want a second series of TV drama shows - I mostly wish they didn’t exist. I know all the financial incentives behind making second and third series, but I usually want the writers and producers to show the skill and creative efficiency to wrap things up in one series.”

I enjoyed The Tourist, but like Sam Leith, so much has happened in life since then, with so many shows, films, books, people, creative projects, etc competing for our time and our short-term memory capacity, I really wish the show could have been wrapped up neatly in one season. Naturally, it’s a difficult balance to strike. Some shows (This is England, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Line of Duty, Black Mirror) are so good that I never mind a new series coming out. But the majority of shows – even the good ones – become burdensome if the producers don’t know when to stop, especially given the plethora of other competing shows, and the commitment costs to viewers of an overcrowded market.

There are other downsides too, like diminishing marginal utility derived from an overabundance of episodes or seasons. And alongside the decline of these incremental gains, there are opportunity costs, both in terms of what the audience could be watching/doing instead, and what the writers, producers and actors could be creating instead. Great screenwriters adhere to the mantra “Enter Late, Exit Early”, which means entering a scene at the latest possible moment, and exiting at the earliest possible moment. This rids the script of extraneous dialogue, and keeps the pace of the story relentless.

The art of good storytelling is knowing when to start and when to stop, and ensuring a balance between creative integrity and economic profitability. Sadly, too many producers of TV dramas and movie franchises know when to start but not when to stop – where what could have been a neat, nicely wrapped up single TV series (like Broadchurch, Westworld, Yellowjackets, Killing Eve, Big Little Lies, The Handmaid’s Tale, etc) goes on for one or more seasons too many.

The Mystery, Wonder & Existence of Santa Claus

I know a couple who refused to introduce the concept of Santa Claus to their 2 young children. They believed this went against their much-valued scientific principles of only teaching their children facts. I think this is unfortunate. Even aside from the sense of fun, it’s good to do the Santa thing with your kids when they are very young – it introduces them to a sense of wonder, and it teaches them that sometimes their everyday experiences are connected to a meta-reality that won’t reveal all its mysteries and secrets at once.

The idea of Santa Claus helps kids learn about deeper curiosity, and about propositions bigger than themselves that they can’t quite understand. And in some small way, to young budding minds, it teaches them some of their first deep considerations about existence itself. As any who have seen the marvellous film Miracle on 34th Street will know, the ontology of Santa Claus is a rather complex set of considerations, especially on top of the propositions about existence contained in the works of Descartes, Hume, Kant and Russell. 

As a young boy, I was told about Santa Claus, who supposedly visits every house on Christmas Eve, leaving presents and indulging in mince pies and alcoholic beverages left for him. Having observed the logistical challenge of visiting millions of homes in a short time, I questioned how Santa could accomplish this feat. Realising my parents were unprepared to answer, I decided to investigate by hiding in a cupboard. This prompted more anxiety, especially since the surprise gift they bought for me was also concealed there. Attempting to divert my curiosity, my dad warned that Santa would only come if I had been good, leading to an unwanted discussion about the nature of goodness. "Come on now, bedtime, son," he urged.

I’m not surprised my agitated father tried to rush me off to bed. The question 'what is good?' is just as profound now as it was then, but it’s easy to see today why, back then, my father had difficulty satisfying my curiosity. The truth is, goodness in its primary form resides in the person of God; all earthly goodness, wonderful in itself, is but a pale reflection of Divinity.

And this is what I think we see in the meaning of Christmas. We celebrate the birth of Jesus, and we share in those celebrations with our family and friends by trying to bring goodness, happiness and love into their lives. I fancy that Christmas is so widely seen as the most special time of the year because it’s the time when we more Christ-like in our goodwill to others, and in our desire to bless those we love.

As an adult, thinking about Santa Claus, it makes me ponder the qualities children have that Jesus encourages for us in discipleship. G.K. Chesterton once made a good point about children and stories:

"We all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door."

I think that's a salient observation that can be connected to the wisdom of Christ in Matthew 18 too ("unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven"), and how the child still sees what the adult has learned to unsee. Like Blake's 'Doors of Perception', that have been cleansed in childhood, only to have been closed up through age, till all is seen through the "narrow chinks of the cavern". One of the great features of childhood innocence is the willingness to embrace real life as an exciting and enchanting story, without the embellishments demanded from youth and adulthood. The youth and adults are enthralled by the romance, thrillers and drama mixed into their stories, taking the extraneous as boring. But the young child finds nothing extraneous - it is all, in a sense, romance, thriller and drama, because it hasn't yet been uncharmed by the prosaic breath of fiction or stunted by the cold chill of reason.

I recall C.S. Lewis saying he found children's books the hardest to write. But he also made the great point that a children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a very good children's story - which I guess is why it takes great skill to write a good one. I think even the child would see through a writer’s attempt to tailor too specifically to children, and an adult certainly would. It’s like the wisdom about originality – you can never try to create an original work for originality’s sake, just like you can’t try to be happy for happiness’ sake.

Similarly, the great children’s works are good simulacra to children-adult conversations. An adult becomes creatively childlike when taking an interest in the child, and a child becomes more adult-like through talking seriously to an adult. That’s probably why children tend to advance more quickly when adults speak to them with unaffected adult communication. So, a children’s book is similarly good for adults in the way that a garden is beneficial when we are tending to it, as well as when we are enjoying it in relaxation. A garden that could only be enjoyed during relaxation would not be a garden that gives the full experience that gardens elicit.

Returning to the opening line of enquiry - my advice would be this; Don’t be afraid to allow your kids to enjoy the idea of Santa Claus. The chances are, it will open their mind to metaphysical horizons that will hopefully bear fruit later on, when they think about who Jesus is, and the gift of salvation He brings to us all.

Letters To Troubled Youth - Excerpt 1: Low Calibre Leaders & Low Calibre Environmentalism

One of my little ‘work in progress’ side projects is an epistolary called Letters To Troubled Youth. It’s a mix of good cop, bad cop letter writing, aimed at the younger generation, warning them about all the highly damaging nonsense they are letting in to their souls, and encouraging them towards the greater rewards found in more rigorous truthseeking. I might share the occasional excerpt as a blog post on its own stranding.

Excerpt 1 – taken from Letter 18: Low Calibre Leaders & Low Calibre Environmentalism:

“I think the only genuinely realistic hope of awakening the modern folk from their sleep is for them to fall in love with the truth that good ideas and interconnectedness are the most vital of combinations for progressive problem-solving. Because the reality is, ideas come together in an exchange, and they evolve and mutate far faster than any physical limitation that can retard them. The combinatorial search space of ideas is far vaster, broader and deeper than any other combinatorial system in the physical world (certainly in the Newtonian world). 

The global population is like one big problem-solving collective - it does not go about its business as though the world is going to stay the same; it works on the basis that problems, like climate ones, usually (though not always) work on steady arithmetical ratios, whereas the human ability to solve these problems usually works on geometrical ratios. That is why progression tends to work at an exponential rate - it's the exchange of ideas at an increasing pace, and the more people there are to exchange those ideas, the more readily we can combine to create this explosion of problem-solving relative to problems themselves. But that involves a kind of freedom that so many are keen to retard.

The reason that politicians are of such low intellectual calibre is because they are selected to represent an electorate of low intellectual calibre. For example, extreme left wing voters tend to be of a lower intellectual calibre than more central left wing voters, which is why extreme left wing politicians are more likely to be of an extraordinarily low intellectual calibre (think Jeremy Corbyn and his Shadow Cabinet as prime examples). But why is the electorate of such low intellectual calibre when it comes to understanding politics well enough to vote in better politicians? Oh, that’s easy too – it’s because being highly competent and well-informed comes at a cost – you have to put in a lot of time and effort to understand any subject well. With politics, the cost incurred for being politically astute confers only a tiny benefit in terms of election outcomes, because only a fraction of the benefit of good political policies goes to you. Just as you wouldn’t spend £500 of costs to gain £2 of benefit, similarly, you won’t see much personal benefit in becoming a well-informed member of the electorate. That’s not a reason not to become well-informed – there are many other benefits to it – but it’s a reason why the vast majority of people do not become politically well informed; the costs are just not worth it to them.

The above also extends into other more specific socio-political areas. For example, this has particularly detrimental societal effects when it comes to things like climate change. There has been a systematic attempt by politicians, the establishment and the media to have the population believe that we are in a climate crisis. They do this in three primary ways: by appealing to our desire for drama, by appealing to our desire to congratulate ourselves, and by appealing to our desire to belong in mutually affiliated tribal groups. The proposition that we will use our collective ingenuity to solve climate problems is not as dramatic or as interesting as the spectre of climate catastrophe. It is the latter that generates sales, subscriptions and clicks. So-called climate justice makes the adherents feel good about themselves, because they get to indulge in moral posturing and sententious mutual back-slapping. And climate alarmism brings people together for a common cause that satisfies their social need to be accepted and validated within a tribal group.

The upshot is, irrespective of whether these views are based on truth and facts or not - what people claim to believe, how they conduct themselves, and the actions they take are largely driven by narratives that give meaning and purpose to their life, motivations that help them feel good about themselves, and causes that make them feel part of a tribal group and give them a sense of belonging. Climate alarmism has replaced Christianity as the national religion, which is why, apart from a few exceptional cases, most climate alarmists are not Christians.

The other thing about extreme environmentalism – or climate lunacy in some cases - is that it is what large parts of economic socialism has morphed into; especially now that only the economically uninformed have any belief in socialism as a viable form of politics, and history has repeatedly shown its failings and its culpability in the cause of human suffering. Deep down I think virtually all socialists always knew how foolish socialism is – they advocated it like those in the Asch conformity tests, being swayed by the wrong answer even though they suspected it wasn’t right. Most extreme environmentalists are still socialists, of course - but extreme environmentalism enables red socialists to turn green, and espouse a cause that is still relatively contemporary in human history, and not as widely and historically discredited as socialism has been.

What extreme environmentalism lacks in terms of a balanced, intelligent set of considerations, it gains in the form of a sense of group identity and belonging, a perceived ethical cause, self-congratulation and a Gaia-type idol to act as a religious substitute. Without those four things, it is hard to fathom how anyone could adopt such foolish beliefs and behave in such a selfish, narrow-minded and intellectually bankrupt way – but those four substitutes for reason and critical thinking have always proved powerfully seductive for leftists, and that will likely remain the case whether the colour is red or green.”

Getting Religion & Science Wrong

I saw this comment about religion from economist David Friedman the other day, and I thought it worth commenting on, as it often typifies people's misconception of religion.

"Religions serve at least two purposes, both important to humans. One is to help make sense of physical reality, explain, for instance, why living things appear to be brilliantly engineered creations. The other is to make sense of life, to answer questions about what we ought to be doing and why. The development of science over the past few centuries provided a strong rival to religion for the first purpose, an explanation that not only covered the same territory but came with much stronger evidence for its truth."

I think there's so much wrong with this set of statements, it needs several correctives. Regarding religion (by which we should mean Christianity here, as it's the only true religion), I think David Friedman has both definitions slightly misjudged; I don't think religion is primarily to help us make sense of physical reality, nor to tell us what we 'ought' to be doing in the sense of morality. Of course, religion can inform us about both, through the right lens of interpretation, but that is not religion's primary purpose.

Religion's primary purpose is to help us to know God and enter into and sustain a relationship with Him. Science is the primary tool to help us make sense of physical reality, and morality is an evolved phenomenon that helps us construct value judgements in line with what our conscience tells us about right and wrong. God uses those things, and many more things too, to point us towards the higher standards found in Him, and to the adventure we can undertake in order to find the full meaning and purpose of the creation story.

This is why David Friedman's conclusion, that "The development of science over the past few centuries provided a strong rival to religion for the first purpose, an explanation that not only covered the same territory but came with much stronger evidence for its truth." is wrong in a twofold sense. In the first place, science was never a strong rival to religion, because both were always asking different questions; and therefore, in the second place, it did not come up with stronger evidence for its truth.

The main problems regarding religion and science are to do with people's misconceptions of the purpose of both. As a Christian, I can tell you that if you perceive a conflict or contradiction between Christianity and science, then you're either getting one of them or both of them wrong in terms of your individual interpretation. There are big costs on the integrity of your worldview when this happens. If you retain your Christianity but compromise science, you end up believing absurd things about physical reality that belong in the realm of counterfactual religious fundamentalism. If you retain your science and give up or reject Christianity, then you become mired in the quagmire of narrow scientism. And if you refuse both Christianity and science, you'll very likely end up in one hell of a mess, where instead you'll probably let in and embrace all kinds of low-grade substitutes, like extreme politics, environmentalism, and countless other idols, superstitions and forms of egocentric, narcissistic expressions.

Banks Could Only Dream Of Being Like Casinos

 

I happened upon this article in The Banker, which expressed concerns that the government’s attempt to enable more competitive banking to boost London’s growth might lead us towards the dangers of ‘casino capitalism’.

The casino metaphor is flawed, because it misunderstands both how banks work and how casinos work (see my blog tab ‘Banking/Financial Risk’ on the side bar for more on this subject). Both deal with probabilities, but in different ways. Probability theory tells us that in n number of incidences, we expect certain values as a result. The more incidences of n, the closer we expect to get to our predicted value. So, for example, in coin tossing, the greater the number of trials, the closer we expect the heads-tails ratio to be 50-50. 

Casinos operate in this way – they cannot predict the precise outcome of every gambling event, but they predict stability in the long term, which means a high probability of turning a profit. Your big win at the casino one Saturday night will be cancelled out by the broader probability landscape, where net losses for the totality of customers secure the solvency of the casino.

To see why banks are not like casinos, we have to understand the distinction between risk and uncertainty. A risk involves an incident where we are not sure of the outcome, but we know the probability. Uncertainly means we don’t even know the probability. Gambling £100 on a coin toss is risky, because there is a 50% chance you could win and a 50% chance you could lose. Whether your mortgage will increase after your next fixed-term ends, and if so, by how much, is a matter of uncertainty. 

Casinos operate under a risk model where the known probabilities guarantee a stable income; banks operate under a model that is a small mix of probability and a larger mix of uncertainty. Government guarantees aside, it would be much harder for a casino to go bust than a bank. If the banking sector had operated like casinos in the past 15 years, an awful lot more would need to have gone wrong to have brought about a similar crash to the ones the banking sector endured.

The reference to banks being in danger of ‘casino capitalism’ was a quite unfortunate and misjudged comparison. If banks had the same long term model as casinos, their risk portfolio would be a lot healthier. But then they wouldn’t be banks in the way we know them – just as oranges would no longer be oranges if they were yellow, bent and grew on banana trees.

On Kant's Synthetic A Priori

 

I haven’t done a philosophy post for a while, so let’s rectify that with a blog about Kant’s synthetic a priori. To start us off, here’s a useful reminder of my summary of epistemology in 400 words.

Make any statement about reality and it will be incomplete in some way. If it is a statement that you can prove with logic or mathematics then it falls short of describing anything conclusive about any reality outside of mathematics or logic; if it is a statement about physical reality then it falls short of anything that can be conclusively proven to apply in all cases (in the black swan sense); if it is a statement of fact then it cannot be established by logic or by reason prior to initial experience; if it is a logical proposition then its subject/predicate content must be verified outside of the proposition; if it is an allusion to an inner concept then it is not knowledge (justified true belief) of the perceivable world; if it is an allusion to an inner perception of outside reality then it escapes your certainty; and if it is a statement about a metaphysical interpretation then in its proprietary form it is entirely subjective.

Everything is derived from experience (this is the basis of Hume’s fork – everything is classified as either Relations of ideas and Matters of fact), but in distinct ways: a priori is knowable without having to consult experience, except initially to understand the terms (“all bachelors are male”); a posteriori is only knowable by consulting experience (“London has a higher population than Birmingham”); analytic statements (A is A) are true by virtue of the meaning of the terms, synthetic statements (A is B) are true by virtue of meanings in relation to facts; physical statements are in relation to the material world (“the chair has four legs”), metaphysical statements are subjective ideas formed as a result of relation to the objective world (“Love and grace triumphs justice and revenge”); and necessity and contingency are related to whether or not a statement is conditioned by how the world happens to be.

Relations of ideas and Matters of fact describe everything, including all the notions like a priori and a posteriori, necessity and contingency, the physical and the metaphysical and the analytic and synthetic distinctions – they are part of our matters of fact derived through experience, and our relations of ideas that result from that experience.

Every possible distinct description of experience is covered above, because everything is either a fact (an impression) derived from experience, or a relation of ideas based on those impressions from experience.

Regarding Kant, the general historical method is that we identify all the possible mental configurations with the class of analytical and synthetic truths, and ascertain our success in tailoring models to reality. Because there is a quite seamless blend regarding the way experience requires an up and running interpretation component and how perception naturally integrates with the outside rules of nature, analytical truths and synthetic truths are really just different interpretations of the same empirical structure built from experience.

To that end, I’ve never really understood why Kant made such a mountain out of the synthetic a priori so-called problem in philosophy. I think if he’d have been steeped in 300 years of empiricist science and philosophy, as we are today, he wouldn’t have exhausted so much of his time over it.

Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction was posited to identify two types of knowledge related to our experiences of the world. In the Kantian terms, analytic statements are statements in which the concept of the predicate is included in the concept of the subject - so for example 'All triangles have three sides' or 'All bachelors are unmarried' are analytic statements because the predicate is found in the subject (i.e. a triangle, by definition, must have three sides, and a bachelor must be unmarried). Synthetic statements do not have the predicate found in the subject - so for example 'All life on earth is carbon based' cannot be shown to be true by the subject and predicate alone, it must be constituted as knowledge by external evaluation and repeated experience of the world.

The easiest way to put this to bed is to say that we cannot have any knowledge without attaining that knowledge through experience of the world. Although there is a secondary distinction regarding experience of the world that remains useful; a mind needs to experience reality to acquire all our knowledge and familiarity with patterns in that reality, so the issue of whether something can be worked out without needing to consult external facts or ideas was a pertinent philosophical question. This is where Kant’s famous example of 7 + 5 = 12 was considered as a synthetic a priori judgement. It is a priori in that we do not need to consult the world and experience 7 things and 5 things grouped together to know that they are 12 things, but it is synthetic in that there is nothing in the concept of 7 or in the concept of 5 that implies twelve; it is only when the two are combined (synthesised) that we can get twelve.

Understanding this an as empirical landscape deadens the mystery Kant was trying to illuminate. In subjecting our mind to Kant’s arithmetic, we would have these ideas formed without experience of the world, but equally at a secondary level we need not consult external facts to know that 7 + 5 = 12, so this is why the analytic-synthetic model works on those two levels.

I do not think Kant’s ideas or definitions were strong enough to capture fully the relationship between definitions and their relations regarding predication, but it wouldn’t have been so problematic to him if he was writing under a stronger empiricist framework. Our dealing with reality and our ideas about causal relations are very much grounded in both perception, experience and ideation, so they are not mutually contradictory - they are complementary, and can give a fairly accurate signpost towards sound epistemology.

A priori knowledge is claimed to be knowledge which is known not through experience. But it’s better to think of all knowledge as being acquired by experience, and analytic propositions as describing a way of knowing but not extending knowledge already acquired. The primary distinction is about how they are determined; we always discern the analytic judgment by extension to what is contained in the proposition, but it's the structure we are determining, not what it contains. That’s why structurally 'All triangles have three sides' works the same way as 'All bachelors are unmarried' even though the subjects are different. Kant’s issue with synthetic, a priori knowledge seems to me to be a twofold combination of him not fully developing why it was supposed to be a problem and, as a consequence, not reaching the conclusion that it isn’t a problem.

On Cancel Culture

Here are a few thoughts on cancel culture. By ‘cancel culture’ I mean the hostile and belligerent desire to see some people silenced, have their work censored or removed, lose their jobs, and in some cases, have their whole character publicly assassinated.  A lot of people, especially young people, seem to have bought into the notion of cancel culture. Personally, I’ve never wanted to cancel anyone, even those who I think are utterly wrong. If I have no desire to cancel people, I assume many other people share that lack of desire. 

Cancel culture of this kind is fairly new. It’s a minority exercise, and it’s almost exclusively undertaken by people with a predictable personality profile; that is, entitled, not very bright, imbalanced, reactive, tempestuous, left-leaning and attracted to identity politics. The fact that people who have bought into the notion of cancel culture fit a fairly predictable profile of individuals tells us a lot about what we are looking for as common properties - of which I think there are five primary ones:

The first property is dishonesty. That is, it’s obvious that in the vast majority of cases when proclamations of moral outrage are uttered, it’s as plain as day that the person under accusation is not actually being sexist or racist or >something<phobic – they are, at worst, being clumsy and slightly provocative, and, at best, merely spouting an opinion that the cancel culture folk wish to aggressively disavow. By and large, then, to be complicit in cancel culture, you have to be willing to accuse people of things of which you don’t really believe they are guilty.

The second property is spite. People have a lot of spite inside them, especially people who are still insecure about who they are, how smart they are, and what they will amount to later. Cancelling others gives them an opportunity to behave spitefully in a controlled way, and it has the added bonus of making them feel self-righteous while doing so.

The third property is attention-seeking. Claiming to be hurt, damaged or traumatised by other people’s words and opinions is a classic attention-seeking method. It helps them be listened to, not on the merit of what they have to contribute, but on the feelings they claim to have. Coveting offense and victim-status gets you attention, and even support and encouragement from like-minded people.

The fourth property is belonging. Find like-minded people and fight these causes together, and it soon taps into the tribalistic desire to be part of an established group, with all the tribal perks offered within the group, and all the benefits of taking the fight outside of the group to engender a sense of purpose and solidarity. 

The fifth property is power. The above four properties give people perceived power, and this power may even be used to intimidate professionals, politicians, media outlets and some of the general public.

I’m not decrying every case, and I believe there are likely instances in which brave voices need to speak up for their cause. But they are in a tiny minority, and generally speaking, most individuals complicit in cancel culture are, I would say, acting dishonestly, with perverse incentives and ignoble motives.

Who Is Looking Out For The Strong & Wise People?

People who are consistently strong and wise are valuable to others in so many ways; they offer support, they give sound guidance, they come up with solutions, and they are a real force for good in the world. Because their strength of character and wisdom is a real blessing to many, they are naturally popular too, and in high demand.

Which leads to my somewhat rhetorical question: Who is looking out for the strong and wise people? Are they getting the support they may need?

Here are some things to consider about these forces for good. They are likely to be the smartest and strongest people in most interactions (be they individual or group interactions), they are going to be an absolute rock for some people, and highly sought after by many others, and they will provide a lot more strength and wisdom than they receive. All this is to be expected – those who have the most to offer usually carry more and deliver more than those who have less – in fact, there is probably a weighty responsibility for them to be that force for good.

But these forces for good in the world are playing a kind of guardian role too - and the chances are, they are so accustomed to being the strong, wise one, that they may not have many people (if any) they feel they can turn to, to meet their own emotional, practical, psychological and spiritual needs. They are so used to being a tower of strength and a vehicle of good counsel, that they may often (if not always) feel unable or unwilling to ask for help, to show weakness, to express vulnerability, or to confide in someone to solicit guidance. They are so used to giving, that they have forgotten how to receive; they are so used to being strong for others, that the ability to be vulnerable for themselves has elapsed; and they do so much for the needs of others that their own needs have been neglected to the point of being largely unconsidered. I don’t just mean unconsidered by others – I mean it’s likely that they can become so familiar with a reality in which their needs remain consistently derelict that they neglect to adequately process their own internal needs, vulnerabilities and perceived weaknesses, because there isn’t any sufficient outlet for their external attendance.

I believe we can make the world an even better place by ensuring we look out for the strong, wise forces for good in our world; check in on them, offer to be a listening ear, and be mindful that in being such a light in so many people’s lives, their own needs might often fall behind - perhaps even to the point they feel quite emotionally isolated and barren, where their own requirements and well-being are left perennially unchecked. Even the strongest and wisest people need people too.

 

Why The Falling Birth Rates?

 

Birth rates are falling - almost no country in the world has a higher birth rate than it did 50 years ago. The world population hit the first billion in roughly 1804 - then it took another 123 years, to 1927, to reach the second billion. Then the world hit three billion by 1959, then four billion by1974, then five billion by 1987, then six billion by 1999, and it reached 7 billion in 2011.

Birth rates are falling, in part because of birth control, in part because of increased prosperity, and in part because of female emancipation. But there are three less obvious reasons too.

The first is decreasing infant mortality. Yes, that's right - it is counterintuitive, but the lower the levels of infant mortality, the fewer children are born on average. This is because if a woman thinks there is a good chance that her children will die young, she will have more of them, whereas if she feels there is a good chance her children will survive, she will have fewer of them.

The second is economic freedom. The freer the society is, the more liberty for the individuals, and the less they are a slave to their reproductive cycles.

And the third is more people are gravitating towards cities, and cities with intense competition for housing can work against larger families. World cities already contain over 3.5 billion people (nearly half the world's population), and that figure is predicted to rise to 5 billion by 2025. What's also interesting is that despite half the world's population living in cities, they only take up 3% of the planet's land area.

On Women Being Attracted To Bad Boys

It is frequently believed that bad boys are attractive to a significant proportion of women, especially younger women. Andrew Tate's current popularity (and men like him) seems to give exhibition to this idea. But I don't think the theory is quite right. Women aren't generally attracted to bad boys - bad boys tend to make poor, unreliable and ultimately unsatisfying partners. It's more the case that women are attracted to certain traits, like confidence, extraversion and machismo, that are found in excess in many bad boys, but are misleading signposts in the quest to find a high quality beloved.

I will tell you what I think it's like with an analogy. When I was a child, we had some family friends who had a house in fairly bad repair, but with a fantastic swimming pool and an awesome games room in their outside garage. As children, we loved to go there for the pool and the games, but being so young, we were largely oblivious to the state of the rest of the house. Over time, the house declined into an even worse state, and eventually, by the time we were teenagers, even the swimming pool was neglected to a point where it became a grotty eyesore.

Similarly, bad boys have characteristics, like the swimming pool and games room, that in the short term superficially attract women who are more likely to be swayed and charmed by things like confidence, extraversion and machismo - but because the rest of the house is in such bad disrepair, the long-term prospects are full of hazards and disappointments. 

The swimming pool and games room made the house visits more appealing, but the quality of the house, and how it is attended to, like the bad boy, can only be measured properly when everything is taken into account - where it is then found to be lacking.

Church Set-Up & Varying Human Beliefs

 

When on the church set up team, one of our jobs is to put down the mats for the kids to play on. As you can see from the picture I took above, there are four colours, and for aesthetic effect we endeavour to place the mats so that no two adjacent mats are the same colour. There is actually a mathematical precedent for this - it's called the four colour theorem, and it states that no more than four colours are required to colour the regions of any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same colour.

The four colour theorem has been proven, although the heuristic for the proof is fairly long-winded. This is in contrast to something like the Twin Primes Conjecture (there are infinitely many primes p for which p+2 is also prime), where it has not yet been proven, but yet the heuristic makes the explanation fairly tractable. Then there's Gödel incompleteness theorem (G(F)), which shows that any finite system of axioms is insufficient for proving every result in mathematics, and that any formally mechanised system in which a categorical set of axioms exists cannot be fully captured without leaving a state of incompleteness.

These varying mathematical propositions gave me pause to think about commentary I frequently make on human behaviour, on smart and dumb thinking, and on how certain beliefs are embraced wantonly, even when they are obvious nonsense. This ties in with the other reliable rule of thumb too, that the amount of effort needed to refute incorrect thinking is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to come up with it. There is a complex relationship between the beliefs themselves, the reasons people believe them, and the motivations they have for not questioning them very rigorously (or often not at all).

I think there are three important things to bring to attention about the formation of beliefs. The first is that most of your beliefs are likely to be partially wrong or faulty - the chance that you've thought everything through with precise rigour and without cognitive error is infinitesimally low. The second is that the number of possible wrong interpretations of reality we can produce is immeasurably large, whereas the number of possible right interpretations of reality we can produce is vanishingly small in comparison. And the third is that you have very strong emotional, psychological, cultural and tribal incentives for your beliefs - and the chances that you've managed to address them comprehensively and honestly, without any biases distorting the picture for you, is practically zero.

Consequently, the formation of rational and correct beliefs and viewpoints involve a big ask; they involve precise, careful and attentive reasoning and truthseeking; they involve understanding how complex the search space is; they involve the ability to sift through a lot of data and select the right beliefs from an astronomically larger number of incorrect beliefs; and they involve the willingness to discern and confront our own intellectual biases and emotional prejudices and filter them out as best we can to leave us in support of the bare truth and plain facts. That is a gigantic ask.

And, assuming a willingness to seek the truth honestly, we find that, like the mathematical examples above; in some cases it is hard to sense precisely why something is wrong, but not that hard to determine the steps needed to arrive at the corrective; and in some cases it's easier to sense why something is wrong but harder to determine the steps needed to arrive at the corrective. This is because human error is riddled with complex fault narratives, ranging from intellectual ineptitude, scarcity of knowledge, emotional biases, tribal pressures, paths of least resistance, indolence, weak support networks, and other competing trade offs that compromise the success of the task.

This means the mind is fighting to reconcile a number of foggy inner conflicts; sensing a belief is wrong but lacking the incentive to find out why; finding it convenient to hold a dubious viewpoint because it lessens burdens elsewhere; making assumptions based on outsourcing your thinking to people whose views subliminally serve your own interests well; compromising the truth in an attempt to attain status within an assortative mating pool within sexual selection; assenting to a black and white mode of thinking because it helps you manage negative emotions - the list goes on.

Given all the above, here is some guidance you may find useful. If you hold a view and you suspect deep down that it may be wrong, ask yourself a candid question. Do I really care about being right on this matter? In other words, am I prepared to pay the costs of trying to understand why I'm wrong, what the correct alternative is, and the costs of changing my mind (there may be social, familial, cultural and professional costs of a public change of mind). The vast majority of people who are wrong on a particular issue don't really care about being right. If they were prepared to pay the costs to be right, they usually would have done so by now.

If the answer to the question "Do I really care about being right on this matter?"  is yes - and you'd better pray it is yes - try analysing why you believe this wrong view; think about how you arrived at this belief; think about the incentives of those who also claim to believe this wrong view; think about what experts and others who disagree with you believe about this matter; think about how much you understand the counter arguments to your belief; think about whether this belief makes you feel good about yourself or uncomfortable; think about what would convince you your view is wrong; think about what your best arguments for the opposing side would be if you had to argue for their case in a court-type of scenario.

If you care about being right on a particular matter, and you subject yourself to the above questions and are prepared to go where the indications lead you, there's a decent chance that you will arrive at the right viewpoint. Two words of warning, though. First, if you sense you're not willing to subject all your views to this level of scrutiny, you are probably not taking things seriously enough. Second, if you hold a wrong view and you have no inkling that it's wrong, you need to locate the means by which you might possibly recognise the view as wrong. This can be difficult because the fog that clouds vision can often feel like the vision if you don't sense the clear horizon in the distance. Being wrong but not knowing it, doesn't feel much different to being right; being closed-minded doesn't always feel like close-mindedness; and cognitive errors don't always feel like defects, especially when they are enslaved by passion for a cause.

Anarcho-Capitalism & Benevolent Libertarianism

On a recent video episode of mine, I talked with the brilliant anarcho-capitalist economist Dr. David Friedman about his views on economics and the state. David Friedman believes that everything that the state provides can be provided by the market, but he acknowledges that such a transition would take some time to materialise, as we gradually wean ourselves off state services and onto market-based provision. I’m fairy sure he and I agree on virtually everything to do with the benefits of capitalism and the inefficiencies associated with state provision, but I’m not as confident as Dr. Friedman that his ultimate no-state model is realistic – I think it is more complex than most anarcho-capitalists think.

In my eponymously titled book Benevolent Libertarianism, I tried to come up with an original term that perhaps most accurately summarises my economic and political ethos – and it’s one that gets to the heart of the complexity better, in my view, than the anarcho-capitalist model. Below is a rough post-it-note summary of my views on this matter.

Good economic principles are based on the successes of the free market - trade, innovation, supply, demand, prices, labour, productivity and consumerism - but also in using that framework to take it to an even higher level of personal responsibility and benevolence towards others. That, I think, is the biggest challenge in the modern globalised market, where the world is interconnected and economically unbound by national, cultural or ethnic boundaries; it is to conflate the qualities of the free market with the virtues of loving one's neighbour as oneself, on top of charity, prodigious generosity, and helping the poor become self-sufficient and with a greater standard of living. My economics book attempts to factor in all the social elements, and people's other incentives too.

Humans face a tension between choices which serve ourselves and family, and choices which serve the social group, and sometimes the zero-sum decisions create competing forces between self and community. Humans are motivated by social relationship factors even more than they are material wealth – once material wealth goes above a certain threshold of utilitarian functions (food, drink, safety, shelter, warmth, health etc), then material acquisition becomes bound up with the complex social world of status and impression on others. Even status has a significant social value for many. That is one of the blind spots of the raw capitalists – they miss the chaotic perturbations of feedback capitalism, especially the division and tension in the social aspirations around identity and belonging.

Humans emerged from the complex biological world of adaptive systems, which rely on both central and decentralised methods of adaptation. This requires complex informational signals that cannot always be effectively distributed bottom-up, because the Smithian ‘invisible hand’ method of local incentives and trial & error processing is too computationally protracted to deal with large-scale problems that require some coordinated top-down intelligence. If Benevolent Libertarianism is to have any influence, it must concede that the decentralised market patterns are sometimes inadequate to the task of factoring in all the complex social motivations that feed into status, group identity and community cohesion.

Although I’m not at all party political, it’s obvious from observing party politicians that the great chasm between the left and right is that the right believe society does best by innovation and self-determination, and the left believe in the ideals of community and wealth distribution. It’s clear to me that one’s group affiliation is the key driver in who one prefers, and the policies and economics come second. In reality, a successful society is a complex blend of community ideals and market competition, but both sides are naturally suspicious of the other, and are unlikely to ever change, because capitalists don’t touch base enough with people's social motivations, and the socialists live in an idealised delusion about how the world actually works.

A centralised democratic government, if it has one useful function, would be one that bridges the gap between the two polarities – offering the best of innovation and self-determination, and what the left believes in the ideals of community and wealth distribution – but it usually fails, because almost all voters are in one camp or the other, with few being able to balance the two.

The challenge, therefore, is to find a way to incorporate the qualities of a kind of socialist-individualist-libertarian triumvirate at the personal level with the qualities of the free market and its concomitant mechanism for price theory to efficiently balance supply and demand. Otherwise, we won't make any significant inroads into the deep-seated prejudices, indelibly stamped cognitive limitations and exiguity of epistemic resources available to the individual mind.

Humans are not adroit processing machines like computers, they are adaptive systems that are fed from the minds of other humans, and this communication is replete with incentives and blind spots around status, self-preservation, security, social connection, tribal biases, and individual persona and identity. This means that humans can subject their data to an honest enquiry to the best of their ability and still end up reasoning poorly and getting their facts wrong.

Groupthink and community in-group biases can be advantageous for the individual agent because it short cuts some of the cognitive processing functions and spreads them more thinly across the group. Just as this can be advantageous in learning how to cook, hunt, codify ethics and tell stories, it can also mean that some of the views we have are not subjected to enough individual scrutiny and remain unchallenged, as we become a little more dehumanised by being embroiled in the mistakes and cultural taints of the wider community. We are creatures who incur both costs and benefits of distributing computational power too readily among other minds and both costs and benefits of distributing computational power not readily enough.

Markets contain non-linear feedback systems, which are likely to yield chaotic market instability that brings about stress and insecurity for humanity. The first part of this problem is that humans are only cognisant enough to operate within a set of values that place the individual self, the family, and other strong ties at a primacy, which makes it harder to factor in the global effects of their decision-making.

My big personal problem with the state, as it has evolved in the past few hundred years, is that I find it profoundly difficult being governed by people who are so incompetent at the things they manage, and by people who are so self-serving, partisan and narrow minded that they do not deserve the power they have, and operate within a system that makes it nearly impossible for it to be radically undermined or peacefully overthrown. This is a big philosophical and moral problem. But the other side of the philosophical and moral problem is that most people in most nations do not want to live in a world without the state. The state would not exist with such prominence if the majority of individuals had not empowered its proliferation in size and scope – but if the state’s existence is a central part of our socio-personal psychological make up, then the increased freedoms enjoyed from its eradication would likely encroach on the freedoms of those who value it and deem it necessary. Of course, we could contend that if only people just became a lot smarter and understood how fraught the state model is, they would join the libertarians in desiring its diminution, but the “If only things were x, then y” propositions are usually not very robust arguments.

The thing that I think anarcho-capitalists neglect to understand most is that, being complex adaptive systems, humans are continually caught between the lines of an ex ante (before the event) assessment of the world and a post facto (after the event) projection of how things will play out - and bottom up systems do not always contain the foresight and central intelligence to simultaneously plan for varying eventualities and at the same time adapt fast enough as the situations evolve. For example, things like welfare provision, disease research and virus prevention seem to require a delicate balance between centralised and decentralised information structures, and it is hard to imagine how pure market initiatives could administer the foresight and central intelligence to allocate resources efficiently and with adequate execution time to keep the institutions up to speed with changing environments.

Centralised intelligence also keeps in check the chaotic perturbations that emerge from feedback loops and non-linear instabilities, and create hazards and distortions. It’s true that politicians are hopelessly incompetent at managing these situations, but it’s also the case that leaving all this to market mechanisms would be an inadequate solution for the top-down complexity of the task. Markets with too much freedom underwhelm the necessary big picture thinking, and governments with too much power overwhelm big picture thinking – and therefore, the optimum balance is likely to occur with a much freer market than we have now, with a much smaller state than we have now.

I’m not even sure it’s realistically possible to get rid of the state. Given the inevitable power law distribution of wealth, and the natural hierarchies that emerge from differentiated power and competence and status mongering, I suspect that even a concerted attempt to produce the hypothetically ideal anarcho-capitalist society would soon find itself succumbing to the formation of a structure where acquisition of authority and rule was at the heart of the society, because it will probably always be the case that there are a majority of humans who wish to delegate responsibility to those who promise to govern them according to their wishes and principles. In most cases, central planning will never have the knowledge, incentives or resources to act on our behalf better than we can ourselves from a bottom-up standpoint; but on the other hand, in some cases, bottom up decision making also lacks the knowledge, incentives or resources to centrally plan and distribute resources with the foresight and big picture thinking required to support the free market. The upshot of all this is that a healthy combination of market and state is highly likely to be an inevitable coaction on the journey of human progress.