All Life Is Problem Solving

For a long time now, progressives have been looking for lines in the sand. They’ve been trying to get progressive members of Congress to commit to vote no on any health care reform bill that doesn’t include a robust public option, and they’ve also been after the President to clearly state his unwillingness to sign a reform bill without one. Today, in his weekly radio address, and framed by his characteristic eloquence, the President has offered not one but a number of lines in the sand. He said:

”I want to be very clear: I will not sign on to any health plan that adds to our deficits over the next decade. And by helping improve quality and efficiency, the reforms we make will help bring our deficits under control in the long-term. . . [Read more →]

Today the news of Walter Cronkite’s death reached me at the same time I heard about an exchange between Glenn Greenwald of Salon and Chuck Todd of NBC on torture investigations. The juxtaposition of these events, in such close proximity, highlighted for me the existential threat to American Democracy that we now face. Not from al Qaeda, or other terrorists, but from our own fears, an increasingly elitist society, and a mainstream press without morals, a clear sense of its mission in a free society, or the courage of its forebears.

The exchange between Greenwald and Todd was preceded by an appearance of Todd’s on the MSNBC Morning Joe show where Todd, under the guise of his role as a “reporter” contended that torture investigations would be a distraction from the really important things this administration had to get done. Glenn Greenwald followed with a very cogent blog spinning out the full implications of Chuck Todd’s position, including its advocacy of the position of one side of the torture issue, and he then invited Chuck, who graciously accepted, to do a radio podcast with Glenn, the transcript of which is here. [Read more →]

President Obama thinks that the best thing to do for an economy that has yet to turn around on jobs is to wait to see how the stimulus bill works, before seeking a second stimulus. This may seem reasonable, especially in the face of the widespread reports about opposition to a second stimulus from Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats. But, here’s the problem. Let’s say the stimulus works as intended. Given the “lack of complete information” about the full depth of the recession the Administration had when it crafted the stimulus, its effect is unlikely to bring unemployment down below 9%. So, the Republicans will call it a costly failure, while saying that there is no need for a further stimulus, because it too will be ineffective and also because we can’t afford another ineffective stimulus. The result will be that if it works, there will be no further stimulus. [Read more →]

In this blog I continue my discussion of reflexivity by clarifying the differences between sequential and simultaneous reflexivity. If reflexivity is sequential, then the effects of our actions on the world and on our thinking at a later time, that is, “the interference” is sequential. Specifically, we cognize and come to an understanding of situation A, including developing expectations about how we can impact that situation in our favor by acting. We then act creating situation B; we may or may not meet our expectations. Whether our expectations are met or not however, we now have situation B to cognize and understand. And so we proceed through life. Now, in this, there is no special ontological or epistemological problem of “reflexivity.” Yes, as early reflexivity thinkers have pointed out, we can act in such a way as to cause a prediction, that would have been false, to come true. We can also act in such a way to cause a prediction, that would have been true, to become false. But when this sort of thing happens, and goes against what we intend, it is not due to some new idea about “reflexivity,” but rather to the fact that we’ve made an error in our expectations, an error in our theories about the world, and when we acted upon those mistaken theories we helped to create a new situation characterized by results that are unexpected and perhaps unpleasant. We can view this as “interference” in the sense that our actions, based on our mistaken understanding, change reality in a way different from the change that would have resulted if we had a true understanding of reality and acted on the basis of it. But this kind of “interference” is only the situation that results from error, and then from acting on the basis of error. Such “interference” is not even exclusive to social situations and the social sciences. If we approach a natural phenomenon and develop a mistaken understanding of it, and then act on the basis of that misunderstanding, we may well change reality in a different way than if we had acted upon the basis of a true understanding. [Read more →]

One of the concepts George Soros emphasizes the most is “reflexivity.” Here’s his presentation of the idea from The Age of Fallibility (pp. 6-7).

”On the one hand, we seek to understand our situation. I call this the cognitive function. On the other hand, we seek to make an impact on the world. I call this the participating function. The two functions work in opposite directions and they can interfere with each other. The cognitive function seeks to improve our understanding. The participating function seeks to improve our position in the world. If the two functions operated independently of each other, they could in theory serve their purpose perfectly well. If reality were independently given our views could correspond to reality. And if our decisions were based on knowledge, the outcomes would correspond to our expectations. But that is not the case because the two functions intersect, and where they intersect they may interfere with each other. I have given the interference a name: reflexivity. . . .” [Read more →]

George Soros has written a number of very interesting and influential books over the past 20 years including, among others: The Alchemy of Finance, Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, The Age of Fallibility, and The Crash of 2008 and What It Means. All of these present and apply a conceptual framework he has worked with since 1963, and which has served as a heuristic for him in both his business and political work. He views the framework as “a new paradigm” because it denies the determinism of mainstream economic theory and its commitment to the idea of market equilibria, and asserts instead the difficulty of economic prediction, the importance of human agency, and the existence of far from equilibrium conditions as the norm in society and economic systems. The key ideas in the framework include “fallibility,” “reflexivity,” “the human uncertainty principle,” “the enlightenment fallacy,” “fertile fallacies,” the denial of “the unity of method,” “the pursuit of truth,” “radical fallibility,” and “far-from-equilibrium states.” In this and forthcoming blogs in this series, I’ll discuss these ideas and his framework. In this blog I’ll begin with his treatment of “fallibility,” and compare it to Karl Popper’s. [Read more →]

This talk by Jane Hamsher to Congressional Staffers on July 8th distills what this American fight for health care reform is about, and what is at stake. It also provides a good feel for the hard slogging that is going on to being forth a bill that will introduce real change and begin to break the overweaning plutocratic power of the Health Insurance Lobby (the fifth plague of Egypt illustrated above) and its daily threat to the economic survival, health, and well-being of American citizens. [Read more →]

Again, it’s funny how US Administrations can’t simply admit error and then act accordingly. No, they have to try to persuade us that their error wasn’t really an error because of x, y, or z. President Obama has now tried to ”correct” Joe Biden’s statement about “misreading” the economy by saying that there was no “misreading,” only “incomplete information” on which to base the stimulus package.

So, does that mean that Paul Krugman, Joe Stieglitz, Nouriel Roubini, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Dean Baker, Jamie Galbraith, Brad DeLong, Robert Kuttner, Robert Reich, and a host of other economists including some on the conservative side, who all advocated larger stimulus packages all had more complete information that the White House? Forgive me, but I think this is just so much baloney, and improves the situation not at all. “Incomplete information” wasn’t the problem. Instead, the economists the Administration didn’t listen to just had better theories than the Administration, whose forecast about what would happen to the economy if the stimulus bill passed was just plain wrong. [Read more →]

It’s funny how US Administrations can’t simply admit error and then act accordingly. No they have to try to persuade us that that everyone else committed the error in question too. Remember, the Bush Administration’s insistence that no one could have anticipated an attack on high value US targets using hijacked airliners? The Bush Administration was hewing to that line long after the Press had pointed to a number of well-known fictional scenarios that had postulated just such an attack. The Bush Administration also insisted that every major intelligence service in the world made the same mistake as the US in thinking that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And later on, it claimed that no one could have anticipated that New Orleans would be struck by a Katrina-like storm when there were clear forecasts of the likelihood of such an occurrence broadly available. Finally, they ignored warnings about the impending crash of the economy appearing in 2006 and 2007, and later claimed that no one could have anticipated the crash of 2008. [Read more →]

Step One: The Democratic Leadership in the House and the Senate both come out in support of the single payer bills currently introduced in their respective Houses, introduced by John Conyers (D-MI) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), explaining that they are doing this because a majority of Americans favor single payer. They then whip single payer, getting enough Democrats to pass it by majority vote, or at least getting close enough to doing so that the healthsters will have to wonder whether they’ll continue to remain in business. [Read more →]