Taking the Big Banks to Task
By: Robbie Lindauer
Why Big Banks?
The largest banks in the United States, those deemed "Too Big To Fail" have a monetary advantage over the rest of us. Their ability to borrow money directly from the Federal Reserve Bank at special rates not available to every citizen makes them a government-subsidized privileged class. Their special position as insurance beneficiaries of the FDIC, NCUA and FSLIC makes them "too big to fail". The special tax break for mortgage interest is an effective tax incentive to be in debt to them and giving them an unfair business advantage thereby. The government backed mortgage banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, provide liquidity for intermediate mortgage banks by assuring them that these mortgages are going to be re-sellable. These several Federal Subsidies for the Banking Industry combine to give the industry as a whole, and the largest most powerful banks in particular, a gigantic government sponsored economic advantage.
They've used this advantage to become primary holders of almost every major publicly traded corporation worldwide and many, many privately held corporations, and they've done this at the expense of the American Tax Payer, especially the Middle Class and the Poor. Their symbiotic relationship with the Federal Government via their constant and well funded Lobbying and Political Action Groups gives them effective control over both the economy and the government of the United States and by extension the world by using the US Military. This power they use worldwide to continue to consolidate their power without regard for human or environmental well-being, resulting in Wars, Famines, Oil-dependency, Globalization, "economic downturns", the lack of a social safety net, etc.
Failure to address this core problem is failure to address any of the resultant problems - as long as the power to control our economy and political process remains in the hands of a very small number of people there can be no justice, no peace, no prosperity and no sustainable freedom for Americans or any other citizens of the world.
What to do about it?
That much, you probably already know, and if you're sympathetic with the 99% of people in the world who aren't in control of the government and economy of the World, you may be interested in finding out how to stop this Injustice. Now is a time of increased awareness of these problems and increased willingness to do something about it. Bank Transfer Day proved that we can act together as a group to change our system. But it didn't -work-. How, then, should we direct this energy and awareness?
That's the question I hope to answer in this short essay - How can we break the power of the American Banks over our Political Process?
How Can We Win?
This is not going to be easy. The people that have that much power didn't get it overnight and don't have any desire to give it up and have demonstrated their willingness to use force to preserve their power. They've used that symbiotic relationship to make the possibility of even introducing legislation to control it odious by artificially inflating the price and complicating the process of running for office; as a result those seats of power are now effectively bought and paid for. In Oregon, for instance, you can't even get onto a ballot without a year's advance notice and a significant outlay of cash. The result is a two party system where both sides are "the lesser of two evils" from one point of view or another - and rampant political cronyism in "both" parties.
But we can win, with Solidarity and Concerted Action.
Understanding the Problem - An Economic Path
The best way to understand the scope of the problem is to look at Mortgage Lending since the pain from the last sting on that topic has not subsided and it is the core income system for the industry. The availability of easy credit effectively defines the ability of people to buy houses. When there is abundant credit, more people can buy houses, when more people can buy houses, the prices of real estate goes up and the demand for new building goes up. Demand for new building sparks economic activity in construction, advertising, human resources, etc. driving the whole economy into perceived "prosperity" - everyone has a job and a house and things are looking up.
On the other hand, when credit is tight fewer people can afford to buy houses, prices of housing goes lower, demand for new homes goes down, people lose their jobs and the whole economy goes into a slump, a recession. Sound familiar? This is exactly what happened in 2006 when the Federal Reserve Bank raised the prime interest rate from .5% to 5% over the course of 17 adjustments in a single year. The result has been catastrophic and culminated in two enormous taxpayer funded bailouts for the country's largest banks - TARP 1 and TARP 2, together "The Bailout". But without ending the credit squeeze, the market for housing is still slow, economic activity is low and the recession continues. This contraction of credit is decided unilaterally by the Federal Reserve Board, which is made up of members chosen by the country's largest banks (Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc.) and independently of the elected government of the United States. The Bailouts, first authorized by a Republican - George Bush - and second by a Democrat - Barack Obama -, have only had the tendency to further benefit those large banks. Chase, for instance, used the money to show a 94 Billion-Dollar Profit in the same year that they received their bailout under the category "extraordinary gain" - a bailout that they now say that they didn't even want. (Of course they could simply return the money if they didn't want it.) The stated intention of the bailout was to loosen the credit market to stimulate economic activity but instead many of these banks put that money back into the Federal Bonds market - easy money - rather than into the job-starved US economy. Why risk money when the US government could be on the hook for it?
That leads us to how banks make money. Banks make money on the difference between the cost of having money (interest paid out) and the cost of loaning money (interest received). As long as their cost of money is low and the rate of interest they charge on their loans is high, they make money. The more loans they have and the higher the interest on those loans, the more money they make. It's that simple. This is why we receive the constant barrage of offers of credit and why they solicit your savings business.
The Move Your Money project was a good first step. Consumer Savings provides an abundant source of cheap money (the .05% you earn on your savings is consistently less than the overnight rate the banks get from the Federal Reserve Bank and less than the interest they charge on their consumer loans by far). Taking away that source of very cheap money is a great idea. It slims the profit margins available to banks by increasing the cost of the money to them. But it does not solve the problem because the Federal Reserve Bank can provide as much cheap money as necessary to the member banks as they want. Yes, that's exactly right; banks are encouraged to borrow from each other to cover short-term expenses but can borrow as much money as they want from the FED to cover their expenses as long as the FED agrees. But since these giant banks run the FED independently that amount is effectively unlimited. This subsidy will be very hard to change without legislative action and as we've seen, this is unlikely given the current status of national politics, but more on this later.
This leaves one other way we can affect the business of the largest banks - the margin. We need to cut off their ability to make a margin on their loans. This means lowering the interest paid on loans and/or their overall return on those loans. What is needed is a method for accomplishing that goal.
In fact, banks take losses on a small percentage of their loans all the time and write them off as bad debt. This happens when someone goes bankrupt or just decides not to pay them back. They also occasionally rewrite interest rates on specific loans rather than taking a complete loss on them. Typically the bigger and less secure the debt, the more likely they are to be interested in renegotiating the matter. Thus if it's a mortgage, they're much less interested in renegotiating terms because they believe that people will not want to lose their homes. For credit cards, they're likely to renegotiate more readily. Debt Relief firms try to do this for individuals at a price with varying degrees of success. But that's a limited number of people who go through the debt relief process and the amount lost through this process is part of the business plan of these banks - they know that some of their debt is going to be bad. On the other hand, what if LOTS of their debt was bad, or even ALL of their debt was bad. If that happened, the bank would suffer losses, driving down their stock price and leaving less for executive bonuses and lobbying efforts.
Group Action
The potential for Group Action here is tremendous. If a lender sees that a very large segment of their debt is at risk, they're going to want to mitigate that risk. If the cost of recovering some of those at-risk assets is large they're even more likely to be willing to negotiate them. Individual debtors seldom have enough debt to make negotiating with them useful but large groups clearly do and would. If there were a powerful Debtors Union this problem could be solved by pure economics. For instance, if all 48 Million Mortgage Holders simply stopped paying their mortgages the banks would have no ability to respond because they would have no cash flow to pay their lawyers to initiate and complete the foreclosure process. And if that union were well organized they would be able to defend themselves legally further driving up the cost of trying to collect on those loans.
In most states a Demand for the Original Note is sufficient to initiate the process and suspend payments to the bank until they are able to produce the original signed mortgage document that states that they own the debt on the property in question. Parallel processes exist for credit cards, auto loans and other kinds of debt.
This leads me to my first conclusion - we need a Debtors Union with divisions for Educational, Home, Credit Card and Auto debt armed with the ability to make group negotiation of terms easy and for the exclusive benefit of the buyers.
A Political Path
The other side of this problem is political. At this point the largest banking conglomerates have managed to gain tremendous influence in congress, in the white house and in the judicial branch - so much so that they're able to leverage that influence to their advantage in many, many ways. They will surely continue to do this, perhaps even making the idea of Debtors Unions illegal, for instance. We can't let this happen either. This means putting an end to 'business as usual politics' by interrupting that process.
At local levels where city politicians are required to be more responsive to their constituency this is possible. City recalls of city governments are more often effective and the numbers of people likely to agree on single subject in specific localities are high.
This means running candidates and generating referendum legislation for local issues in order to put in place laws at the city level to protect people from the predatory behavior of the big lenders. A great example is the Oakland County Foreclosure Prevention Initiative, which punishes banks in a variety of ways for foreclosing or holding foreclosures after the date of the foreclosure. If every jurisdiction in the country adopted this law banks would have much more incentive to negotiate with homeowners rather than foreclosing on them. More aggressive measures could clearly be adopted, e.g. insisting that all foreclosed properties be sold immediately at auction to the highest bidder, or by putting more stringent laws into effect for initiating foreclosure processes and for finalizing them.
Similar measures can be taken for Student Debt, Unsecured Credit Card Debt, Car Loans, Small Business Loans, etc.
This leads me to my political conclusion - we have to stop looking to Washington to solve these problems - it's not on their agenda. But we can solve them at home - right in our backyards - by effecting city-level policy that is beneficial to the 99% of Americans who aren't benefitting from the Debt system to which we are as a country currently enslaved. This means Occupying the City Councils of small cities throughout the country and Ashland is as ripe as any for some change.
A Final Word on Solidarity
America has changed a lot since I was a child. When I was 5 and 6 my family lived in Burlington, Kansas, population approximately 1000 people total. It was a community of farmers and Native Americans. One family's farm had a bad year and the mortgage they'd taken out on their farm to finance the feed was too much for them to pay, and the bank initiated a foreclosure process on them. The judge ordered the family's possessions and house auctioned to the highest bidder on a certain date. On the auction day, the sheriff set up on the highway and redirected traffic away from the foreclosure sale location, and so only people who knew exactly where it was were able to attend. Those in attendance, the neighbors who knew where the auction was, all bid a dollar for every piece up for auction including the farm itself. The total won at auction by the bank that day was around $300. The family now destitute left the auction heartbroken. But then something miraculous happened. Outside the auction, every person who'd bought something at the auction offered to sell the items back to the family, including the farm, for the dollar that they'd paid for it. The family, as you've guessed, didn't even have the three hundred dollars to pay for their own stuff at the auction price. The judge who ordered the foreclosure proceeding then lent the family the $300 required to buy back all of their things and said they could pay him back whenever they got around to it.
I don't know what happened to THAT America of my childhood. I loved THAT America. I hope that this America can be THAT America one day.
In conclusion - if we want to solve our country's problems, it's got to start locally with group actions aimed at removing the Debt by whatever means possible. I've made an attempt to start such a union on Facebook here (https://www.facebook.com/groups/moveyourdebt/) but I could use your help, please help - with solidarity we can make this work by identifying the mortgage, credit card, student loan and auto-loan holders able and willing to take group action to stand up to the Banks holding our country hostage.
Thanks for your patience and attention
In Solidarity,
Robbie Lindauer
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Monday, April 27, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Money
700 Billion or 700 Trillion no longer sound like the large amounts of money they did in years past.
In 1916, less than 100 years ago, there was exactly one billionaire, JD Rockefeller. Now a billion dollars flows out of the US mint like it was so much cow manure.
That it may be. Money is easy to find and products harder to come-by, we're in for inflation. That can be good and bad; but if our economy needs constant inflation to survive we have a problem - and looking at the growth in the money supply since 1970 versus the population growth compared to the same period in 1870 - 1910 we've got a major problem on our hands - US money is becoming worthless.
Part of me says HURRAY - money is the root of much evil, if it becomes worthless then people will stop pursuing it. Part of me, like many of you, may be scared by this.
Whatever is of fear is sin.
Don't be afraid. What power does the world hold over you but death? Of what value would you be to the powers of this world dead?
If the answer to this is lots, then don't be surprised when it comes, but be blessed, remember that Zechariah was killed in the temple.
If the answer to this is none, then don't worry. But pray to become like Zechariah whom the prince would have killed.
In 1916, less than 100 years ago, there was exactly one billionaire, JD Rockefeller. Now a billion dollars flows out of the US mint like it was so much cow manure.
That it may be. Money is easy to find and products harder to come-by, we're in for inflation. That can be good and bad; but if our economy needs constant inflation to survive we have a problem - and looking at the growth in the money supply since 1970 versus the population growth compared to the same period in 1870 - 1910 we've got a major problem on our hands - US money is becoming worthless.
Part of me says HURRAY - money is the root of much evil, if it becomes worthless then people will stop pursuing it. Part of me, like many of you, may be scared by this.
Whatever is of fear is sin.
Don't be afraid. What power does the world hold over you but death? Of what value would you be to the powers of this world dead?
If the answer to this is lots, then don't be surprised when it comes, but be blessed, remember that Zechariah was killed in the temple.
If the answer to this is none, then don't worry. But pray to become like Zechariah whom the prince would have killed.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Axiomity
Continuing the discussion of Logic without Axioms
A big question sitting out there in the minds of the anti-historical is "what does logic without axioms look like?"
As no surprise to many, no doubt, it looks like rhetoric for that is the disdainful name given to it by our pseudo-culture. But it takes many forms, and starting with a list is sometimes a good thing.
Law - The laws of people ("You may not bring an elephant into a licensed bar") is a reasoning system without axioms. There are different laws in different lands, and the enforcement of laws and the standards of enforcement and the methods of interpretation, etc., differ from people to people, from land to land, from time to time. In the United States we have a "highest law" - the constitution - but that too is fungible. We have treaties and amendments that occasionally change the substance of the "highest law" and court rulings that fail to change the wording of said laws, but succeed in changing their meaning daily. We are, in that sense, Oligarchical Collectivists in that we can change the meaning of words willy-nilly. 2+2 sometimes equals 5 and sometimes equals 4.
The force of law is literal violence - failure to accord with the law results in torture, imprisonment, fines, injunctions and sometimes death. This law is then normative in a relative sense, normative in the sense that if you don't obey it the enforcers of the law will come and get you. "In the day that you eat of it you will surely die."
Capital - In capitalist society, the practice of getting a good deal is extremely important - you need to pay as little as possible in order to get as much as you can in order to sell it for as much as possible in order to have a profit left-over. This rule, the rule of capitalism I call it, requires cunning and the practice of that cunning is the skill called negotiation. If two people know the rule, the negotiation is harder. Understanding the universal application of the rule is the skill of a good negotiator - someone who can give and take information with the right grains of sand in order to come out "ahead".
The force of the law of capitalism is loss. Failure to living in accord with it makes one poor, downtrodden, sometimes destitute and dead. The extent of this law is limited by the first group of laws - the literal laws of the state. This law, then, is also normative in the sense that if you don't obey it, the enforcers of the law will come and get you, that is, they will make you destitute or make you conform.
In an oligarchist society, the need for "progress" as a rhetorical tool for negotiation is critical. In negotiations there are, generally, winners and losers according to the law of capitalism. Ishmaelites might think of them as "Takers" and "Leavers". However, the destitution of the destitute can become a problem - it must be solved. For if the destitute fail to continue to lose at their negotiations, from whom will the winners gain their profit? There are two answers to this question and they are our other two rhetorical tools in use today.
War - when the losers need an explanation for their losses, they can either look at the winner across the table or they can be directed to look elsewhere. Simultaneously, when the loser-class becomes better at negotiations, the opportunity for winning becomes diminished. Both rhetorical needs are served by War. War expands the class of losers ad-hoc - whenever there is a need for more losers, one conquers them, kills them and subjects them to losing. At the same time, the "losers-at-home" can regard themselves as becoming winners, reaping the rewards of the conquered nation(s). Lastly, the losers are willing to continue to make sacrifices for "the war" because they are led to believe (by negotiation) that winning it will lead them to becoming the winners themselves.
The law of war is obviously also the law of force. If you fail to obey it, you will become conquered, enslaved and possibly killed. We see all around us the activity of the law of war today.
Science - The law of war is limited by the physics of our planet. There are just these continents, just this arable land, just this water, just this coal, just this oil, just this air. There is a lot of it, no doubt, but as the number of winners and losers increase and the losers continue their learning-to-be-winners-at-negotiation the need for Progress is inevitable. Progress takes many forms for science. First is improving the ability for the winners to win and maintain their winning position. Second is the ability for losers to lose more gracefully and come back more quickly. Third is the ability to wage war more effectively.
These logics - Law, Capital, Science, War - are the eternal logics of civilization. We have seen them since the time that Cain killed Abel or that the Inuits made their trek north to escape the onslaught of it (civilization).
There are, perhaps, pre-existing laws, the laws of God so to speak. These are the basic laws that may have, in a sense, been formative in the development of our human laws - at least that's a story we like to tell now. Everyone to live must eat and excrete, be kept reasonably warm and procreate. These human characteristics were handed to us by evolution or God, however you like to think of it. We can imagine, I expect, different kinds of life-forms - that have no need of eating, reproducing or being warm. We imagine, I suspect, rocks being eternally "alive" in some sense. (No, we don't know what life is without food and reproduction, I think.) Humans eat other (the remains of, in general) living things. Not so with all living things. Some living things can metabolize non-living things. Perhaps we could alter ourselves to do this, I don't know.
In any case, the penalty for breaking the laws of evolution or God is death, clearly enough. To live we must eat. To eat we must kill. Our situation is, in that sense, pre-destined. We can't help but be what we are - we don't choose our births. Although we can imagine developing different laws altogether - different laws of human society, different laws of science, different laws of war, our situation is vampiric.
The notion of "Logical Law" does not appear here, except perhaps as a footnote to the law of negotiation, as a precursor to war and science. But if there are logical laws, then, they were not given to us, as it were, by God or evolution. God never said "Thou shalt deduce p from q in these circumstances." That would no doubt have been interesting. Instead we have been given choices - we choose how to deduce, what to deduce when, etc. And these laws of logic which we have created are idolized, and rightly so, by the minions of civilization. For as a negotiation tactic, it's important to be able to control the language of the conversation which are the terms under which the negotiation can happen at all. If these terms are idolized - made into Gods themselves - they become unquestionable in the mind of the minion.
But do the makers of idols believe in the Gods? There's a story that Abram's father was an idol-seller. Abram destroyed the idols in his father's shop and blamed it on one of them in it. His father rightly noted that idols can't do that, they're made of stone, not alive. "Why do you worship them, then?" said Abram. Platonism is this kind of idol-worship, really. We make laws and pretend they were given to us from eternity by the Gods themselves. But we know them to be powerless, smash them and watch what their fathers do.
A big question sitting out there in the minds of the anti-historical is "what does logic without axioms look like?"
As no surprise to many, no doubt, it looks like rhetoric for that is the disdainful name given to it by our pseudo-culture. But it takes many forms, and starting with a list is sometimes a good thing.
Law - The laws of people ("You may not bring an elephant into a licensed bar") is a reasoning system without axioms. There are different laws in different lands, and the enforcement of laws and the standards of enforcement and the methods of interpretation, etc., differ from people to people, from land to land, from time to time. In the United States we have a "highest law" - the constitution - but that too is fungible. We have treaties and amendments that occasionally change the substance of the "highest law" and court rulings that fail to change the wording of said laws, but succeed in changing their meaning daily. We are, in that sense, Oligarchical Collectivists in that we can change the meaning of words willy-nilly. 2+2 sometimes equals 5 and sometimes equals 4.
The force of law is literal violence - failure to accord with the law results in torture, imprisonment, fines, injunctions and sometimes death. This law is then normative in a relative sense, normative in the sense that if you don't obey it the enforcers of the law will come and get you. "In the day that you eat of it you will surely die."
Capital - In capitalist society, the practice of getting a good deal is extremely important - you need to pay as little as possible in order to get as much as you can in order to sell it for as much as possible in order to have a profit left-over. This rule, the rule of capitalism I call it, requires cunning and the practice of that cunning is the skill called negotiation. If two people know the rule, the negotiation is harder. Understanding the universal application of the rule is the skill of a good negotiator - someone who can give and take information with the right grains of sand in order to come out "ahead".
The force of the law of capitalism is loss. Failure to living in accord with it makes one poor, downtrodden, sometimes destitute and dead. The extent of this law is limited by the first group of laws - the literal laws of the state. This law, then, is also normative in the sense that if you don't obey it, the enforcers of the law will come and get you, that is, they will make you destitute or make you conform.
In an oligarchist society, the need for "progress" as a rhetorical tool for negotiation is critical. In negotiations there are, generally, winners and losers according to the law of capitalism. Ishmaelites might think of them as "Takers" and "Leavers". However, the destitution of the destitute can become a problem - it must be solved. For if the destitute fail to continue to lose at their negotiations, from whom will the winners gain their profit? There are two answers to this question and they are our other two rhetorical tools in use today.
War - when the losers need an explanation for their losses, they can either look at the winner across the table or they can be directed to look elsewhere. Simultaneously, when the loser-class becomes better at negotiations, the opportunity for winning becomes diminished. Both rhetorical needs are served by War. War expands the class of losers ad-hoc - whenever there is a need for more losers, one conquers them, kills them and subjects them to losing. At the same time, the "losers-at-home" can regard themselves as becoming winners, reaping the rewards of the conquered nation(s). Lastly, the losers are willing to continue to make sacrifices for "the war" because they are led to believe (by negotiation) that winning it will lead them to becoming the winners themselves.
The law of war is obviously also the law of force. If you fail to obey it, you will become conquered, enslaved and possibly killed. We see all around us the activity of the law of war today.
Science - The law of war is limited by the physics of our planet. There are just these continents, just this arable land, just this water, just this coal, just this oil, just this air. There is a lot of it, no doubt, but as the number of winners and losers increase and the losers continue their learning-to-be-winners-at-negotiation the need for Progress is inevitable. Progress takes many forms for science. First is improving the ability for the winners to win and maintain their winning position. Second is the ability for losers to lose more gracefully and come back more quickly. Third is the ability to wage war more effectively.
These logics - Law, Capital, Science, War - are the eternal logics of civilization. We have seen them since the time that Cain killed Abel or that the Inuits made their trek north to escape the onslaught of it (civilization).
There are, perhaps, pre-existing laws, the laws of God so to speak. These are the basic laws that may have, in a sense, been formative in the development of our human laws - at least that's a story we like to tell now. Everyone to live must eat and excrete, be kept reasonably warm and procreate. These human characteristics were handed to us by evolution or God, however you like to think of it. We can imagine, I expect, different kinds of life-forms - that have no need of eating, reproducing or being warm. We imagine, I suspect, rocks being eternally "alive" in some sense. (No, we don't know what life is without food and reproduction, I think.) Humans eat other (the remains of, in general) living things. Not so with all living things. Some living things can metabolize non-living things. Perhaps we could alter ourselves to do this, I don't know.
In any case, the penalty for breaking the laws of evolution or God is death, clearly enough. To live we must eat. To eat we must kill. Our situation is, in that sense, pre-destined. We can't help but be what we are - we don't choose our births. Although we can imagine developing different laws altogether - different laws of human society, different laws of science, different laws of war, our situation is vampiric.
The notion of "Logical Law" does not appear here, except perhaps as a footnote to the law of negotiation, as a precursor to war and science. But if there are logical laws, then, they were not given to us, as it were, by God or evolution. God never said "Thou shalt deduce p from q in these circumstances." That would no doubt have been interesting. Instead we have been given choices - we choose how to deduce, what to deduce when, etc. And these laws of logic which we have created are idolized, and rightly so, by the minions of civilization. For as a negotiation tactic, it's important to be able to control the language of the conversation which are the terms under which the negotiation can happen at all. If these terms are idolized - made into Gods themselves - they become unquestionable in the mind of the minion.
But do the makers of idols believe in the Gods? There's a story that Abram's father was an idol-seller. Abram destroyed the idols in his father's shop and blamed it on one of them in it. His father rightly noted that idols can't do that, they're made of stone, not alive. "Why do you worship them, then?" said Abram. Platonism is this kind of idol-worship, really. We make laws and pretend they were given to us from eternity by the Gods themselves. But we know them to be powerless, smash them and watch what their fathers do.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
The Epidemiology of Bias
Think of social/political/religious and psychological factors as
"diseases" infecting our rational processes. (This still assumes that
there is an underlying "rational" process which is really what's at
issue here.)
Let's say we have a population and we want to estimate the likelihood
of infection of any given individual (theorem, piece of information,
etc.) (not of a particular individual, but purely of the chances that
any one of them might be infected).
There will be "factors" affecting our estimation in some ways. Here
are the factors I see (admittedly limited by my perspective) - height,
width, depth, time.
________________
The height of the problem is this:
How dependent on our lower-level abstractions are our higher-level
abstractions. I mean this:
Say theorem N depends on theorem M, M depends on L, ..., B depends on A.
Let's imagine that our acceptance of some, possibly all, the theorems
is infected, we don't know how much, by social/psych factors.
If we were to estimate the "damage" done to N based on the infection
of (A ... M) we could come up with some kind of number (it would be a
wild guess) as to "how infected N is based on the probability of
infection of (A .. L)".
If we estimate the damage to be "random" 50/50 chance of produce a
false theorem at every step, we get roughly 0.006103515625% chance of
N being "true". If we estimate that higher, say 80%, we still get a
very small likelihood that at the level of 14 "theorems high" that the
result is "true".
It seems to me that the further the distance between the base axioms
(in this case A) and the proved theorem (N) the greater the likelihood
of infection across the entire ratiocination.
Let's call this the "remoteness" problem.
"The longer your string of reasoning, the more likely it will include
factors that are infected." I think it's a corollary of Murphy's Law.
______________
The width of the problem is this:
How many different disciplines and axioms (or axiom-systems) are
affected by this problem?
Let's say there are 100 "scholarly disciplines". Of them, a certain
number are likely to be infected by social/psych factors.
We can't say which, since to say which would be to be in a position to
decide which of our reasoning methodologies are socially determined,
which would, in turn, presume to give us an answer to which ones are
not.
We can, however, make an estimate. We might say "The more scholarly
disciplines we have, the more likely that some of them will be thusly
infected."
We'll call this the "sprawling" problem.
_________________________________
The depth of the problem is this:
What is the extent of the infection? "How bad is it?" It may be that
some "truths" are only lightly infected by the social factors
surrounding them and don't transmit them to other areas. It may be
that they are massively infected beyond salvage and they are
constantly causing infections in other areas.
Likely the depth of infection may be related to their height, BUT it's
possible that some of the worst infections are at the root (we would
liken this to having the disease itself in the population of
individuals we're deciding whether or not they're infected, or perhaps
there is a "carrier" parent who infects the entire population by
exposure, but that parent is not itself showing symptoms.)
It may be that some of the infections get worse - that small
infections then become carriers, etc.
We'll call this the "deepness" problem.
_____________________
The temporal aspect of this problem is also multi-dimensional:
SPREAD:
The problem grows. Disciplines increase the number of "bits of
knowledge" in them as a matter of practice. We "learn more things",
"derive more theorems", etc. These increase our height, width and
depth as particular "bits of knowledge" all carry with them the
possibility that they may be "infected". Thus the ancient wisdom "The
more we know, the less we know."
MUTATION:
The nature of the infection may be changing. "Cancer" is "one thing"
but there are varieties of cancer. 'AIDS' is one thing but there are
varieties of the infection. Influenza is one thing, but there are
varieties of it, etc. What if influenza could become cancer? How
would we "doctors" identify the problems?
REACTION:
A cure proposed for one issue may cause more problems elsewhere.
People die of leukemia, but they also sometimes die of the treatment.
Quinine is effective as a prevention for malaria. But if you take too
much it kills you. That is to say, as we involve ourselves in the
problem of "fixing the problem" we may cause more disease.
INTERACTIONS:
While a cold may not kill someone, a person with chronic heart disease
can die of a cough caused by the cold. So too in knowledge,
interactions of different kinds of pathology - religious AND political
AND economic views tend to be behind the Gay Marriage debate, for
instance. Some interactions are new, as new problems are created by
us, the thinkers.
We'll call this the "complexity" problem.
____________________
In short, the problem of the fallibility along the lines of deepness,
sprawling, remoteness and complexity of thinking(s) is pervasive in
human "rational" activity. I think it turns out that our epistemic
situation is worsened by progress.
__________________
The "skeptical solution to the skeptical problem" is thought by some
to be worse than the disease.
But I think this is roughly right - there is no standard of
rationality and any attempt to say that there is is just denial or
political play.
Pretending there are no stones in the field will not make it easier to
plow, though.
If we recognize we have problems, though, we can usually find a way to
work around them.
"The cure" is to swallow the pill - there is no "better logic", no
"correct way of reasoning", no "absolute truths", no "pure empirical
facts", etc. There are only possible pathogens and apparently healthy
activity and various degrees of each. More and less useful ways of
talking and thinking, different standards of usefulness, different
standards of goodness, and no one to decide among them.
"diseases" infecting our rational processes. (This still assumes that
there is an underlying "rational" process which is really what's at
issue here.)
Let's say we have a population and we want to estimate the likelihood
of infection of any given individual (theorem, piece of information,
etc.) (not of a particular individual, but purely of the chances that
any one of them might be infected).
There will be "factors" affecting our estimation in some ways. Here
are the factors I see (admittedly limited by my perspective) - height,
width, depth, time.
________________
The height of the problem is this:
How dependent on our lower-level abstractions are our higher-level
abstractions. I mean this:
Say theorem N depends on theorem M, M depends on L, ..., B depends on A.
Let's imagine that our acceptance of some, possibly all, the theorems
is infected, we don't know how much, by social/psych factors.
If we were to estimate the "damage" done to N based on the infection
of (A ... M) we could come up with some kind of number (it would be a
wild guess) as to "how infected N is based on the probability of
infection of (A .. L)".
If we estimate the damage to be "random" 50/50 chance of produce a
false theorem at every step, we get roughly 0.006103515625% chance of
N being "true". If we estimate that higher, say 80%, we still get a
very small likelihood that at the level of 14 "theorems high" that the
result is "true".
It seems to me that the further the distance between the base axioms
(in this case A) and the proved theorem (N) the greater the likelihood
of infection across the entire ratiocination.
Let's call this the "remoteness" problem.
"The longer your string of reasoning, the more likely it will include
factors that are infected." I think it's a corollary of Murphy's Law.
______________
The width of the problem is this:
How many different disciplines and axioms (or axiom-systems) are
affected by this problem?
Let's say there are 100 "scholarly disciplines". Of them, a certain
number are likely to be infected by social/psych factors.
We can't say which, since to say which would be to be in a position to
decide which of our reasoning methodologies are socially determined,
which would, in turn, presume to give us an answer to which ones are
not.
We can, however, make an estimate. We might say "The more scholarly
disciplines we have, the more likely that some of them will be thusly
infected."
We'll call this the "sprawling" problem.
_________________________________
The depth of the problem is this:
What is the extent of the infection? "How bad is it?" It may be that
some "truths" are only lightly infected by the social factors
surrounding them and don't transmit them to other areas. It may be
that they are massively infected beyond salvage and they are
constantly causing infections in other areas.
Likely the depth of infection may be related to their height, BUT it's
possible that some of the worst infections are at the root (we would
liken this to having the disease itself in the population of
individuals we're deciding whether or not they're infected, or perhaps
there is a "carrier" parent who infects the entire population by
exposure, but that parent is not itself showing symptoms.)
It may be that some of the infections get worse - that small
infections then become carriers, etc.
We'll call this the "deepness" problem.
_____________________
The temporal aspect of this problem is also multi-dimensional:
SPREAD:
The problem grows. Disciplines increase the number of "bits of
knowledge" in them as a matter of practice. We "learn more things",
"derive more theorems", etc. These increase our height, width and
depth as particular "bits of knowledge" all carry with them the
possibility that they may be "infected". Thus the ancient wisdom "The
more we know, the less we know."
MUTATION:
The nature of the infection may be changing. "Cancer" is "one thing"
but there are varieties of cancer. 'AIDS' is one thing but there are
varieties of the infection. Influenza is one thing, but there are
varieties of it, etc. What if influenza could become cancer? How
would we "doctors" identify the problems?
REACTION:
A cure proposed for one issue may cause more problems elsewhere.
People die of leukemia, but they also sometimes die of the treatment.
Quinine is effective as a prevention for malaria. But if you take too
much it kills you. That is to say, as we involve ourselves in the
problem of "fixing the problem" we may cause more disease.
INTERACTIONS:
While a cold may not kill someone, a person with chronic heart disease
can die of a cough caused by the cold. So too in knowledge,
interactions of different kinds of pathology - religious AND political
AND economic views tend to be behind the Gay Marriage debate, for
instance. Some interactions are new, as new problems are created by
us, the thinkers.
We'll call this the "complexity" problem.
____________________
In short, the problem of the fallibility along the lines of deepness,
sprawling, remoteness and complexity of thinking(s) is pervasive in
human "rational" activity. I think it turns out that our epistemic
situation is worsened by progress.
__________________
The "skeptical solution to the skeptical problem" is thought by some
to be worse than the disease.
But I think this is roughly right - there is no standard of
rationality and any attempt to say that there is is just denial or
political play.
Pretending there are no stones in the field will not make it easier to
plow, though.
If we recognize we have problems, though, we can usually find a way to
work around them.
"The cure" is to swallow the pill - there is no "better logic", no
"correct way of reasoning", no "absolute truths", no "pure empirical
facts", etc. There are only possible pathogens and apparently healthy
activity and various degrees of each. More and less useful ways of
talking and thinking, different standards of usefulness, different
standards of goodness, and no one to decide among them.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Rational Revisability of Logic
Science is provisional in this sense - while we are striving to find "The Absolute Truth", we are also aware that the world via new discoveries, and consequenctly changing ideas can cause us to rationally revise our theories based on new evidence. They can even, occasionally, cause us to want to be more tentative with our judgements in light of various complications regarding a theory.
For instance, with Quantum Mechanics we have many "interpretations of the formalism" from which we have no obvious way to choose. This could change. Our empirical situation might change, our understanding of the mathematics and geometry of the matter might change. We may discover new techniques or new relevant data from other areas that might help us decide among them.
However, what we do know is that we currently don't possess a good "interpretation of quantum mechanics" - good in the sense of there being a definitive reason to choose it from amongst the options. There are many other ideas floating around in "the standard model" that have a similarly tenuous nature. (Godel's theorem, for instance, raises many questions of interpretation.)
For these "tenuous" parts, we objectively give science a pass - we allow it to continue until the matter is decided hoping for the best, sometimes expecting the worst - and we consequently suspect attributing "absolute truth" to those tenuous aspects of our knowledge, recognizing that we may have to revise our ideas. It may turn out that there is a better formulation of quantum physics that someone simply hasn't thought of that would have all the same empirical results but was deterministic. It may turn out that there are better logical and mathematical laws under which Godel's theorem is not derivable.
Those ideas that are "most closely associated with philosophy" also tend to be the ones about which we suspend our judgement. We don't assert that the "standard model" implies the existence of God because we're willing to suspend our judgement about the nature of causation. But we don't assert that the standard model denies the existence of God either. We don't assert that Godel's theorem is "absolutely true" because we don't assert that all the unproved axioms which allow its derivation are themselves known firmly, mostly because the arguments for them tend to be "philosophical" rather than definitive.
The ability to rationally revise our ideas based on evidence is a core scientific value. It is one of the many things that is intended to separate science from non-science.
This revise-ability needs to include our notion of rationality, which is said to be defined by Logic. Logic is the study of the quality of inference - validity, truth preservation, etc. To study this with an eye toward providing a framework in which good inferences are generally made and bad inferences are generally not made is to have a pragmatic view of it. We want our "rules of inference" to allow us to make good inferences - be flexible enough to cover new situations while conservative enough to prevent us from flying wildly off the deep end, so to speak.
If our logical systems were not thusly revisable, what would we call them but philosophy? They would become dogmas, there would be schools, and they would have no grounds by which to decide the matters. Those schools would be motivated primarily by political, economic, religious and psychological factors that have nothing to do with the matter at hand and which would be decidedly anti-science. I think this is the condition we find our philosophy in today.
(Anecdote: A boy at a funeral hears that the dead man is going to a house where there are no friendly neighbors, no roof, no floor and no door. The boy exclaims "Pappa, they're bringing the dead body to our house!")
In philosophical logic we have schools. Intuitionism and Platonism being the "most largely populated" of them, but like democracy, strength in numbers doesn't determine the justice of the matter, only who wins. There are many sub-opinions and even completely conflicting opinions. And, as in politics, the subjugation of the minority views only tends to create disharmony and strife, eventually revolution. The current "malaise" in philosophical logic should be regarded as the symptom of this irrational subjugation. Progress in philosophical logic is being stilted not by lack of interest, but by the inability of the practitioners to treat it as a science - as open to development and even major paradigmatic change - this despite the fact that the tenets of the various schools are the closest to "philosophy" of any scientific practice - the unproved axioms of (insert your variety of logic here).
How can we move forward? The political aspects (and here I mean to include the psychological, political, religious and economic aspects) of logic have already dominated the field, for millennia. Is there any way to remove those aspects of the science that are "inherited" from these political factions and move forward and somehow revive this science, make it more than the mere rhetoric it (effectively) is today. If we could identify them, obviously, different factions might disagree on which ideas were purely political and which ideas weren't.
I submit that there is no removing the purely political from the supposedly rational in this essential science by any rational means.
Any 'rational means' would presuppose an adequate definition of the term "rational" for which the science of logic is searching. If we presume an answer to this question, it would likely have to come from these pre-rational ideas that are the motivating factors in our logics today - politics, religion, economics, psychological idiosyncrasies.
For instance, I started this note by appealing to the scientific notion of rational revise-ability. Good scientific theories, I say, are rationally revisable. If we took this to mean also Logic as a science is rationally revisable, we could use this as a standard for picking a logic - we would pick a logic that allowed us to revise its standards as necessary. But that wouldn't be our only criteria. And many people would object even to this criteria as it, no doubt, wouldn't fit their own political, religious, economic or psychological paradigm. As a result, the only real way to regard my idea of science as rationally revisable beliefs, is as part of a political program (which in my case is obvious enough).
But will the others in the game admit their bias?!
Doubtful, but I'm open to revising my opinion.
Robbie Lindauer
For instance, with Quantum Mechanics we have many "interpretations of the formalism" from which we have no obvious way to choose. This could change. Our empirical situation might change, our understanding of the mathematics and geometry of the matter might change. We may discover new techniques or new relevant data from other areas that might help us decide among them.
However, what we do know is that we currently don't possess a good "interpretation of quantum mechanics" - good in the sense of there being a definitive reason to choose it from amongst the options. There are many other ideas floating around in "the standard model" that have a similarly tenuous nature. (Godel's theorem, for instance, raises many questions of interpretation.)
For these "tenuous" parts, we objectively give science a pass - we allow it to continue until the matter is decided hoping for the best, sometimes expecting the worst - and we consequently suspect attributing "absolute truth" to those tenuous aspects of our knowledge, recognizing that we may have to revise our ideas. It may turn out that there is a better formulation of quantum physics that someone simply hasn't thought of that would have all the same empirical results but was deterministic. It may turn out that there are better logical and mathematical laws under which Godel's theorem is not derivable.
Those ideas that are "most closely associated with philosophy" also tend to be the ones about which we suspend our judgement. We don't assert that the "standard model" implies the existence of God because we're willing to suspend our judgement about the nature of causation. But we don't assert that the standard model denies the existence of God either. We don't assert that Godel's theorem is "absolutely true" because we don't assert that all the unproved axioms which allow its derivation are themselves known firmly, mostly because the arguments for them tend to be "philosophical" rather than definitive.
The ability to rationally revise our ideas based on evidence is a core scientific value. It is one of the many things that is intended to separate science from non-science.
This revise-ability needs to include our notion of rationality, which is said to be defined by Logic. Logic is the study of the quality of inference - validity, truth preservation, etc. To study this with an eye toward providing a framework in which good inferences are generally made and bad inferences are generally not made is to have a pragmatic view of it. We want our "rules of inference" to allow us to make good inferences - be flexible enough to cover new situations while conservative enough to prevent us from flying wildly off the deep end, so to speak.
If our logical systems were not thusly revisable, what would we call them but philosophy? They would become dogmas, there would be schools, and they would have no grounds by which to decide the matters. Those schools would be motivated primarily by political, economic, religious and psychological factors that have nothing to do with the matter at hand and which would be decidedly anti-science. I think this is the condition we find our philosophy in today.
(Anecdote: A boy at a funeral hears that the dead man is going to a house where there are no friendly neighbors, no roof, no floor and no door. The boy exclaims "Pappa, they're bringing the dead body to our house!")
In philosophical logic we have schools. Intuitionism and Platonism being the "most largely populated" of them, but like democracy, strength in numbers doesn't determine the justice of the matter, only who wins. There are many sub-opinions and even completely conflicting opinions. And, as in politics, the subjugation of the minority views only tends to create disharmony and strife, eventually revolution. The current "malaise" in philosophical logic should be regarded as the symptom of this irrational subjugation. Progress in philosophical logic is being stilted not by lack of interest, but by the inability of the practitioners to treat it as a science - as open to development and even major paradigmatic change - this despite the fact that the tenets of the various schools are the closest to "philosophy" of any scientific practice - the unproved axioms of (insert your variety of logic here).
How can we move forward? The political aspects (and here I mean to include the psychological, political, religious and economic aspects) of logic have already dominated the field, for millennia. Is there any way to remove those aspects of the science that are "inherited" from these political factions and move forward and somehow revive this science, make it more than the mere rhetoric it (effectively) is today. If we could identify them, obviously, different factions might disagree on which ideas were purely political and which ideas weren't.
I submit that there is no removing the purely political from the supposedly rational in this essential science by any rational means.
Any 'rational means' would presuppose an adequate definition of the term "rational" for which the science of logic is searching. If we presume an answer to this question, it would likely have to come from these pre-rational ideas that are the motivating factors in our logics today - politics, religion, economics, psychological idiosyncrasies.
For instance, I started this note by appealing to the scientific notion of rational revise-ability. Good scientific theories, I say, are rationally revisable. If we took this to mean also Logic as a science is rationally revisable, we could use this as a standard for picking a logic - we would pick a logic that allowed us to revise its standards as necessary. But that wouldn't be our only criteria. And many people would object even to this criteria as it, no doubt, wouldn't fit their own political, religious, economic or psychological paradigm. As a result, the only real way to regard my idea of science as rationally revisable beliefs, is as part of a political program (which in my case is obvious enough).
But will the others in the game admit their bias?!
Doubtful, but I'm open to revising my opinion.
Robbie Lindauer
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
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