85th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

A Serf’s Musings on Uncertainty
and a Compendium of Views by Well-known Commentators …

A Serf Musing:

Across the antique crowd at the antique fair.
I see your face so vulnerable and young,
Enclosed in the antique silver frame,
You seem to ask, ‘Why am I here?’
Cherished daughter, held in the silver frame,
A wisp of Venetian lace caught at your throat with real pearls,
You seemed secure within the family walls
But here you are, alone, without a name.

What sad events have brought you here?
A childless marriage? Perhaps your early death?
Relatives from overseas selling the estate, don’t know or care?
We all seek certainty but there’s none,
Except the certainty that things must change,
We collect antiques, shore up the family home,
But dynasties fall, plans soon come undone.

The Compendium:

Some early Greek philosophers…

So let the compendium begin with Heraclitus, the 6th century B.C. philosopher, who discovered the idea of change. Prior to Heraclitus, western philosophers viewed the world as a huge edifice, of which material things were the building material. As for processes, they were something that only happened within the edifice, changing the fluid but not the chalice, you might say. Heraclitus went further by describing the entire cosmos as a heap of rubbish, emphasising that everything is flux.

Heraclitus lived in a world experiencing a social revolution, change from the rigid world of Greek tribal aristocracies to a new force, the transformation to a democratic society. He strongly supported the ancient laws of his city against this new force. Of course we can’t be certain, but, after seeing everything as flux, perhaps Heraclitus wrested some consolation by discerning something stable in the process. Out of all this uncertainty he identified an unchanging law, an immutable law of historical destiny…

A serf observation regarding historical destiny. History, is not science. Discovering natural laws is a process of the physical sciences but not a process of human history. There has been a popular misappropriation from science to the study of history ever since Heraclitus and Plato after him, intuited a law of historic necessity. Hegel, Spengler, Marx are modern apostles of Heraclitus’ immutable law.

Regarding uncertainty, there’s Socrates, an inquirer after truth but not its possessor, said to have said, ‘ I only know that I do not know.’ Socrates the Athenian philosopher, conversing with young men in the city square, even advocating conversations with slaves,* asking innocent questions such as ‘What do you think about justice? ‘ ‘What do you mean by freedom? ‘ Encouraging the young men to be critical of their assumptions and avoid dogmatism. Was this why the oracle of Delphi, (who should know,) called Socrates the wisest man in Athens? *Karl Popper The Open Society and It’s Enemies, Vol 1. Ch 7.

There is, of course, the problem of discovering the real Socrates. Socrates never wrote anything himself, what we know of his life and ideas come from what others wrote about him, a composite Socrates. Little survives from the accounts of his disciples, a few extracts from dialogues describing the virtue of self knowledge, the main accounts were written by Xenephon, a citizen soldier, Aristophanes, a comic dramatist, and the philosopher Plato in ‘The Republic.’ Plato’s Socrates in the later part of The Republic exhibits a puzzling inconsistency with his earlier behaviour in The Apology. (Book 1.) Will the real Socrates raise his hand?

What does seem reliable is a composite of the extracted dialogues and Plato’s ‘Apologia,’ describing the Trial of Socrates for corruption of Athenian youth, in all of which Socrates focuses on the virtue of self knowledge. At his trial he tells the accusers that he is an asset to the democracy, he is their gadfly that stings them into self awareness when they become complacent. Given the opportunity to escape a death sentence, Socrates says that to do so would be a failure to respect the laws of Athens. He lives, and dies, by his principles.

The philosopher Plato, a past pupil of Socrates, like Heraclitus, went through a very bad patch in Greek history, the continuing battle between the tribal aristocracy and Athenian democracy, periods of famine and epidemic. Plato was born during the disastrous war between tribal Sparta and democratic Athens, and subsequent civil war, a rule of terror by Athens’ oligarch party, the Thirty Tyrants. Plato’s two uncles were among its leaders.

Plato responded to this experience by formulating his own historicist law that all things decay. But he believed it was possible to break this law by returning to the original form of things or ideas. In his dialogues The Republic, Plato described a political system that, by creating the static society, would arrest stressful change. He proposed a rigid social hierarchy where the aristocracy would rule and everyone else would be conform to roles of unquestioning obedience.

This was to be achieved by a Noble myth of the metals in men, gold for an elite class who would lead, and beneath them tiers of inferior metals, categories which would be rigidly upheld. It was hoped that even the elite class would believe the myth. In this hierarchy, only the gold elite are educated, but it is an education of received truths. To weaken dissent, individualism and private property are discouraged and even wives and children become common property. Members of the non-elite classes must unquestionably obey their leaders. Justice is whatever was in the interest of the hierarchical society.

A problem with Plato’s republican Distopia, other than its obvious lack of appeal to the tiers of inferior metals, is the vulnerability of this society to withstand the natural shocks that must come its way. How adaptable can a society be when it has been trained to obey and even its leaders aren’t educated to think critically but unthinkingly follow the dystopian blueprint? The blueprint doesn’t include a plan for dealing with nature’s uncertainties.

The Blind Watchmaker…

Mother Nature, sometimes referred to as the blind watchmaker, blind as meaning impersonal, impersonally creates not just mutations in living things, but plagues, famines and other natural disasters, reflected in the human record and also in literature. For the depiction of uncertainty in the literature, go no further than Thomas Hardy‘s ‘Far From the Madding Crowd.’

In Hardy’s novel, nature’s uncertainties and human fortitude prevail, the poor house is never but a step away. Gabriel Oak’s flock of sheep are killed in an unfortunate accident, he must look for work. BathSheba Everdene, who inherits a farm, almost loses the entire harvest in a Summer storm. The relationship of Bathsheba and Gabriel is beset with misfortune that truly could not have been foreseen, including the death of Bathsheba’s wayward husband, Troy. Does it read like a sensational serial story? No it doesn’t. Thomas Hardy set the characters in his novels in country he called Wessex, English wind swept moors a harsh reminder that nature is a powerful force, indifferent to the actions of puny humanity. Against this backdrop, characters’ casual acts leading to tragic reactions and consequences to others, are only too believable.

Two Modern writers and two birds of uncertainty.

How do we gain knowledge? Karl Popper, philosopher of Science, asks this question and argues that it is not by relying on past events to predict the future, a view known as induction. He describes the induction process using the thanksgiving turkey as an example. The turkey is fed by the kind farmer every day of its life until that last fatal morning, on the eve of Thanksgiving Day, when the turkey’s expectation from many past kind experiences is not vindicated.

Induction is a muddle based on a passive bucket theory of learning that cannot lead to the growth of knowledge, says Popper. (Karl Popper. Objective Knowledge Ch 2.) Popper proposed an alternative scientific method based on falsification. However many confirming instances may exist for a theory, it only takes only one counter observation to falsify it. Science progresses when a theory is shown to be false and a new theory is introduced that, provisionally, better explains the phenomena. This is a searchlight theory of learning, of conjecture and refutation that begins with a problem leading to a guess and test approach. Only if a conjecture can be critically tested and able to be refuted do we call this process the scientific method. The key point is that we are not able to confirm, but are able to disconfirm a hypothesis with one critical refutation.

Not much room for dogmatic certainty here. Our human knowledge, based on refutation, involves a precarious evolution of theories in which we are obliged to act under conditions of incomplete information.

Nassim Taleb agrees with Popper regarding dogmatic certainty. Taleb says that people like to think we live in Mediocristan, when we actually live in Extremistan. In the preface to his book, The Black Swan, using the metaphor of black swan events, Taleb describes how before the discovery of Australia, people in the old world believed that all swans were white, ‘an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence.’ As Karl Popper before him argues and Nassim Taleb observes in The Black Swan, one single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from hundreds of observations.

Taleb gives the name Black Swan Event to an event that is an outlier, that has an extreme impact, and makes us concoct explanations for why it occurred after the event. His book’s central theme is how blind we are to randomness. He asks us how many of the important events in our personal lives have come out of left field; perhaps our choice of profession, meeting our mate, sudden enrichment or impoverishment? How often did things unfold according to plan that could not have been predicted? If the terrorist attack of 9/11, 2001 had been reasonably conceivable on September 10th, it would not have happened.

Taleb cites research by Philip Tetlock that shows we are not good at predicting and research indicating that alleged experts are no better at predicting events than the man in the street. And experts are unaware that they live in Extremistan. They are prone to rationalize after an event, that the situation was unusual and they couldn’t be expected to be right, or that they almost got it right. Regarding uncertainty, Taleb is scathing about the experts‘ and governments’ attachment to the Bell Curve as a measurement tool.

The Gaussian Bell Curve and Mandelbrot’s Fractal Measurement of Uncertainty…

The main point of the Gaussian tool is that most observations hover around the mediocre, the average, and the odds of a deviation decline exponentially the further you move from the average:

Here is an Assessment of Wealth Distribution applying Gaussian measurement. People with net worth over 1 million pounds, – 1 – 63. People with net worth higher than 2 million pounds, – 1 – 127,000. People with net worth higher than 3 million pounds – 1 in 14, 000, 000. (Over 4 million becomes an astronomical deviation from the average. The precipitous decline in the odds of encountering something is what allows you to ignore outliers.

By comparison, Taleb argues, in estimating tail events, Mandelbrot’s measurement theory of fractal affinities in nature, the uneven shapes in nature’s tampering, repeated in smaller versions, as twigs resemble the tree and stones resemble mountains, gives a truer picture of an evolving and ever-changing world than gaussian estimations of randomness.

Compare the Bell Curve assessment of wealth distribution (above) with Mandelbrot distribution which doesn’t preclude the outlier. People with net worth over 1 million pounds – 1- 63. People with net worth over 2 million pounds -1- 250 . People with net worth over 3 million – 1- 500. The speed of the decrease does not decline.

Says Nassim Taleb: ‘Measures of uncertainty that are based on the bell curve simply disregard the possibility and the impact of sharp jumps and discontinuities and are therefore inapplicable in Extremistan.’ (p236.)

Conclusion

We live in uncertain times and always have done, so it seems… Don’t put your trust in the expert or in the Five or Ten Year Plan… hedge your bets, pay your debts… Keep a root cellar, be ready for anything… That’s all, folks!