Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
RiM
A suggestion for the new RIM CEO: change the company name to RiM, standing for what you have to get on with: Rapid i Movement.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Knowledge/Ignorance
"As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."
- physicist John Wheeler
- physicist John Wheeler
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Original Sin and Maturity
Before we relegate the notion of Original Sin to the garbage heap of ideas, perhaps we could try recycling it in terms relevant to our more secular age (or the pockets of our age which are more secular-minded).
I am sometimes annoyed when I hear people insist that children are so pure and innocent. Sometimes they even say that about teenagers - usually when defending them against adults, whether abusers, predators, or agents of the law. This is an idealized view of children, analogous to our rosy view of "the good old days" or to our distorted view of someone who is the object of our infatuation. In this view, we are born pure and good, only to be progressively corrupted by adult-dominated society until we become irredeemably evil, or at best impure and guilty full-fledged adults.
Human beings, even very young ones, are much more complicated than that. The newborn, to the best of our knowledge, is an asocial bundle of needs and appetites. The first priorities are to be fed and to avoid discomfort and pain. Others are first perceived as providers and satisfiers. As a sense of self develops, the infant becomes egocentric, selfish, "loving" those providers and satisfiers as providers and satisfiers. It is only as a sense of empathy to others is developed that we can talk of goodness or purity as qualities of that child. In fact, it is one of the main duties of parents to encourage and nurture the growth of the child's empathetic, loving, sociable qualities, which otherwise might fail to develop enough to overcome the initial total selfishness.
Original sin can be understood as the state of the infant, that completely selfish and unsocial state which must be outgrown if the individual is to function properly even as a child. A big part of maturity is to continue the process, to gain the self-control to check the primal selfish impulses with love, empathy, and respect for others, while balancing both personal and social requirements. To a great extent, the criminal personality is one in which this process seems to have been interrupted and halted at an early stage. Such a person is an adult on the outside, perhaps even a seemingly functionally competent one for the most part, but whose emotional life is strongly affected by some early stage of development which has not been successfully completed. We often note that the behaviour of problematic adults reminds us of that of two-year-olds, or seven-year-olds, or fifteen-year-olds; this is not when we are praising their better qualities, but when we are aware of their worst failings.
There are some charming and life-affirming qualities which we notice in children and wish we could see more often in adults, but it is a mistake to overlook the fact that children are complicated beings on the way from a state of pure selfishness and ignorance to what we hope is a mature state in which empathy, love, knowledge, and competence in dealing with the world will be a large part of their self-identity and their identity as seen by others. From this perspective, maturity has a moral aspect, and immaturity - at least immaturity in the adult - can be regarded as sin.
I am sometimes annoyed when I hear people insist that children are so pure and innocent. Sometimes they even say that about teenagers - usually when defending them against adults, whether abusers, predators, or agents of the law. This is an idealized view of children, analogous to our rosy view of "the good old days" or to our distorted view of someone who is the object of our infatuation. In this view, we are born pure and good, only to be progressively corrupted by adult-dominated society until we become irredeemably evil, or at best impure and guilty full-fledged adults.
Human beings, even very young ones, are much more complicated than that. The newborn, to the best of our knowledge, is an asocial bundle of needs and appetites. The first priorities are to be fed and to avoid discomfort and pain. Others are first perceived as providers and satisfiers. As a sense of self develops, the infant becomes egocentric, selfish, "loving" those providers and satisfiers as providers and satisfiers. It is only as a sense of empathy to others is developed that we can talk of goodness or purity as qualities of that child. In fact, it is one of the main duties of parents to encourage and nurture the growth of the child's empathetic, loving, sociable qualities, which otherwise might fail to develop enough to overcome the initial total selfishness.
Original sin can be understood as the state of the infant, that completely selfish and unsocial state which must be outgrown if the individual is to function properly even as a child. A big part of maturity is to continue the process, to gain the self-control to check the primal selfish impulses with love, empathy, and respect for others, while balancing both personal and social requirements. To a great extent, the criminal personality is one in which this process seems to have been interrupted and halted at an early stage. Such a person is an adult on the outside, perhaps even a seemingly functionally competent one for the most part, but whose emotional life is strongly affected by some early stage of development which has not been successfully completed. We often note that the behaviour of problematic adults reminds us of that of two-year-olds, or seven-year-olds, or fifteen-year-olds; this is not when we are praising their better qualities, but when we are aware of their worst failings.
There are some charming and life-affirming qualities which we notice in children and wish we could see more often in adults, but it is a mistake to overlook the fact that children are complicated beings on the way from a state of pure selfishness and ignorance to what we hope is a mature state in which empathy, love, knowledge, and competence in dealing with the world will be a large part of their self-identity and their identity as seen by others. From this perspective, maturity has a moral aspect, and immaturity - at least immaturity in the adult - can be regarded as sin.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Political Quips
On Oct.14 Bush might have said, "We had to destroy the banks in order to save them".
Litmus test: Don't pay too much attention to anyone who professes, "No one could have foreseen this crisis", or "We were all taken by surprise". Anyone in a position to know who says this is either lying or was seriously deluded.
The good news is, the lower the markets fall, the smaller a 7% drop becomes in dollars.
Ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers showed poor judgement in letting Barack Obama into his life. Here he was, living in relative obscurity, apparently rehabilitated, when suddenly he's at the center of a major political controversy.
(But how about his recently published defense (April 6, 2008)- it looks like his rehabilitation process has a long way to go.)
If Hank Paulsen can be Treasury Secretary, why not John Gotti for Attorney General?
(alright, apart from the fact that he's dead?)
Theme of the Republican leadership convention: "Our country first - God second."
Litmus test: Don't pay too much attention to anyone who professes, "No one could have foreseen this crisis", or "We were all taken by surprise". Anyone in a position to know who says this is either lying or was seriously deluded.
The good news is, the lower the markets fall, the smaller a 7% drop becomes in dollars.
Ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers showed poor judgement in letting Barack Obama into his life. Here he was, living in relative obscurity, apparently rehabilitated, when suddenly he's at the center of a major political controversy.
(But how about his recently published defense (April 6, 2008)- it looks like his rehabilitation process has a long way to go.)
If Hank Paulsen can be Treasury Secretary, why not John Gotti for Attorney General?
(alright, apart from the fact that he's dead?)
Theme of the Republican leadership convention: "Our country first - God second."
Monday, October 13, 2008
Hoarding and Hedging
Like hoarding, cutting in line, and cheating at cards, hedging belongs to that class of activities which give advantage to those who practice it, but only if they get in early enough. After a certain optimum proportion of the involved population is reached, the game tips over into disadvantage for all. If you are worried that food prices are going to rise steeply in the near future, it is to your own advantage to quietly begin hoarding the types of food which can be stored for future use. However, if everyone is being advised to hoard, food prices will shoot up immediately as demand rapidly outstrips supply - and we all end up with a food shortage on top of the increased prices. If all the athletes use steroids, there is no particular advantage to any one athlete - and they all suffer the debilitating side effects. The stock markets supply many illustrations of the same principle; they are almost an embodiment of it, as anyone who bought Nortel at $125 a share is painfully aware.
The same principle works with hedging. The idea that risk - on holding mortgages, for example - can be shared and diluted, spread far and wide so that it becomes statistically insignificant, must have appeared to be brilliant a few decades ago when securitization of such "debt assets" was introduced. It obviously richly rewarded those firms which could take advantage of the practice. But as the practice spread to become almost universal, it increasingly resembled a pyramid scheme. Secondary and tertiary layers of hedging were created and sold as if they were assets of real value. Putting it another way, bets are made on bets: you bet that you can negate the risk you take in holding mortgages and I am betting that your bet will pay off. All of this activity was supposedly creating wealth, and many players and commentators once again believed that the basic principles of economics had been transcended (as they did during the heady days of the dot-com bubble). But, as the little boy pointd out, the emperor has no clothes: there is still real risk in the original transactions. And, as we have seen, if those original transactions are unsound, as in the subprime mortgage fiasco, we have a huge and complicated structure built on a rotten foundation.
The same principle works with hedging. The idea that risk - on holding mortgages, for example - can be shared and diluted, spread far and wide so that it becomes statistically insignificant, must have appeared to be brilliant a few decades ago when securitization of such "debt assets" was introduced. It obviously richly rewarded those firms which could take advantage of the practice. But as the practice spread to become almost universal, it increasingly resembled a pyramid scheme. Secondary and tertiary layers of hedging were created and sold as if they were assets of real value. Putting it another way, bets are made on bets: you bet that you can negate the risk you take in holding mortgages and I am betting that your bet will pay off. All of this activity was supposedly creating wealth, and many players and commentators once again believed that the basic principles of economics had been transcended (as they did during the heady days of the dot-com bubble). But, as the little boy pointd out, the emperor has no clothes: there is still real risk in the original transactions. And, as we have seen, if those original transactions are unsound, as in the subprime mortgage fiasco, we have a huge and complicated structure built on a rotten foundation.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Financial Godzilla
The Godzilla on the block is the derivatives bubble, perhaps over a quadrillion dollars (!). Perhaps the American taxpayers will pony up $700 trillion to make us all confident about those debts?
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