prior probability

For me it’s three. In addition to my main inbox, which serves as a holding pen for my most pressing matters (i.e. messages that I must respond to before I go to bed), I make use of only three email folders as follows:

1. “Action this week” folder: Everything that requires a response before the end of the week. (I will respond to these on Friday afternoon; my way of getting revenge on the person or organization who sent me the original email in the first place.)
2. “Happiness” folder: Emails that brighten my day or make me happy in some way (e.g. a thank you note from a student, an acceptance of publication from a journal, or other good news) go here.
3. “Zafacón” folder: I dump most of my emails into this massive catch-all folder (out-of-sight, out-of-mind!), just in case I may need to reference a particular email again, or if I am otherwise unwilling to hit the “delete” button. (In Puerto Rico, the word “zafacón” is slang for a general or all-purpose category.)

Via Wikipedia (citations omitted): “In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than 1,600 acres (6.5 km) of the city centre. An estimated 22,700 to 25,000 people were killed ….” Victor’s justice aside, why wasn’t the bombing of Dresden by the Allies a war crime?

That is the title of a spoof college essay posted by Alexis Pereira (@MrAlexisPereira) on Twitter the other day. (See picture below.) According to Wikipedia, Tom and Jerry is a series of animated short films created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera in the 1940s that “centers on a friendship/rivalry (a love-hate relationship) between the title characters Tom, a cat, and Jerry, a mouse.” The thing is, I used to watch Tom and Jerry cartoons (among other things) after school when I was a child, so I wish Mr Pereira would post the entire essay!

 

Once upon a time, the academic economist Harold Hotelling (pictured below, left) developed a formal mathematical model called the median voter theorem to help explain elections. According to this influential theory of politics, a majority rule voting system will select the outcome most preferred by the median voter. But what if this model is wrong or incomplete? Rachel Bitecofer (pictured below, right), who is a professor of politics at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, has developed a new way of forecasting elections. This excellent essay by David Freedlander (via Politico Magazine) summarizes her ideas about voting this way: “Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place.” Freedlander adds: “To her critics, she’s an extreme apostle of the old saw that ‘turnout explains everything,’ taking a long victory lap after getting lucky one time. She sees things slightly differently: That the last few elections show that American politics really has changed, and other experts have been slow to process what it means. If she’s right, it wouldn’t just blow up the conventional wisdom; it would mean that much of the lucrative cottage industry of political experts—the consultants and pollsters and (ahem) the reporters—is superfluous, an army of bit players with little influence over the outcome. Actually, worse than superfluous: that whole industry of experts is generally wrong.”

Maybe they are not yet big enough! Check out the following excerpt from this report by David Roberts (via Vox; link in original): “It is impressive as an engineering feat, but the significance of growing turbine size goes well beyond that. Bigger turbines harvest more energy, more steadily; the bigger they get, the less variable and more reliable they get, and the easier they are to integrate into the grid. Wind is already outcompeting other sources on wholesale energy markets. After a few more generations of growth, it won’t even be a contest anymore”

 

The headline of a front-page story in last Friday’s New York Times (7 Feb. 2020) states that an estimated $1.6 billion in Hurricane Maria insurance claims remain unresolved. This sounds like a serious crisis of epic proportions, one requiring more governmental regulation of the insurance industry, but buried in the 13th paragraph on page 21 is this sentence: “Out of an estimated $8.5 billion in insurance claims filed since Hurricane Maria, $6.9 billion have been paid ….”

Review (part 2 of 2) of Matthew W. Slaboch, A Road to Nowhere: The Idea of Progress and Its Critics (U Penn Press, 2018).

In my previous post, I mentioned that the concept of progress might have a cultural or spatial dimension, one of the most important ideas I learned from reading Slaboch’s book on anti-progress. Here, I shall discuss another insightful idea in Slaboch’s book, what I call “the paradox of the anti-progress canon.” Simply put, why should anyone bother to improve man’s lot or change the course of history for the better if the ideal of progress is bullshit?

Slaboch presents this dire paradox in the chapter devoted to Henry Adams (Chapter 3), who attempted to apply the law of physics to the study of history. Briefly, Adams’s view of world history was a pessimistic one (p. 80): social and political collapse are inevitable; all such systems will “grow old and die.” At the same time, Adams deplored the venal nature of American democracy. For Adams (p. 76), politicians are not only corrupt; the citizens they represent are stupid and depraved! But as Slaboch astutely notes, these two positions–one macro (world history); the other micro (American democracy)–are in tension with each other (p. 81): “on the one hand, [Adams] freely castigates American government and society for their decrepitude, while on the other hand … [he] professes the inevitability of such decay.”

In other words, if all social and political systems must eventually “grow old and die,” to borrow Adams’s own formulation, how can one complain when history unfolds just as your theory of history predicts? Worse yet, if decline is inevitable, then any effort to reverse this decline is doomed to fail! Furthermore, this tension can easily be generalized to all critics of progress. Although Henry Adams is easy to dismiss as a crank of a bygone age (after all, who still believes that history is governed by the laws of physics?), the works of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, by contrast, have withstood the test of time, and if you find either Schopenhauer or Tolstoy’s critiques of the concept of progress to be persuasive (as I do), i.e. if progress is either a futile or dangerous ideal, then what is to be done?

This ominous contradiction reappears in Chapter Four of Slaboch’s book, where the author turns to the leading 20th-century critics of progress: the German historian Oswald Spengler, Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and American cultural critic Christopher Lasch. All three thinkers rejected the idea of progress: Spengler, for example, famously diagnosed “the decline of the West” (p. 89) and predicted the outbreak of war between the forces of liberalism and socialism (p. 95). For his part, Solzhenitsyn emphasized the finite nature of our natural resources, describing the idea of perpetual progress as a “nonsensical myth” (p. 99), and denied that an ideal form of political organization existed (p. 101). Likewise, Lasch lamented Western decadence (p. 106) and believed that Americans are unwilling or unprepared to deal with the future (ibid.).

The problem, however, is that if any of these criticisms are true–if war is inevitable, if resources are finite, if Western culture is materialist and decadent–how are we to avoid the dangers of nihilism? Slaboch acknowledges this danger in his conclusion, and this is why I recommend A Road to Nowhere. Slaboch’s beautiful book is worth reading because it poses and answers two significant questions for us today: why should we be skeptical of the ideal of progress, and how should we act given this skepticism? In the course of addressing these questions, his book makes two important contributions to the anti-progress literature. One is purely historical: Slaboch goes back in time and reacquaints us with the leading 19th- and 20th-century critics of the ideal of progress. The other contribution is at once philosophical and practical. Slaboch identifies a paradox in the anti-progress canon. Simply put, if progress is an incoherent concept or an unattainable goal, to what great purpose or end, if any, should we devote ourselves to in the here and now? Is it even possible, in principle, for a critic of the concept of progress to solve this paradox?