Donald Pittenger has a post over at 2 Blowhards, which quotes a remarkable series of predictions made by Milovan Djilas in 1974, about where the world would be in 2024. He was the only one who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. (There was a good discussion in the comments, to which this humble blogger contributed.)
Month: August 2006
Macfarlane on Causation
John Jay’s post, below, entitled Terms and Models discusses the mental models people develop to understand the world in a non-mathematical way which is based generally on the weight to be given to various variables in a partial differential equation, and it reminded me of something I had read by Alan Macfarlane. The best discussion I have seen of the idea of multiple- rather than mono-causality, with the added complication of weight for each link, and the timing of each link, is in the remarkable concluding chapter to Macfarlane’s The Savage Wars of Peace: England Japan and the Malthusian Trap. The book is excellent, and I unequivocally recommend it.
Hayek on Tradition
Just as instinct is older than custom and tradition, so then are the latter older than reason: custom and tradition stand between instinct and reason — logically, psychologically, temporally. They are due neither to what is sometimes called the unconscious, nor to intuition, nor to rational understanding. Though in a sense based on human experience in that they were shaped in the course of cultural evolution, they were not formed by drawing reasoned conclusions from certain facts or from an awareness that things behaved in a particular way. Though governed in our conduct by what we have learnt, we often do not know why we do what we do. Learnt moral rules, customs, progressively replaced innate responses, not because men recognized by reason that they were better but because they made possible the growth of an extended order exceeding anyone’s vision, in which more effective collaboration enabled its members, however blindly, to maintain more people and displace other groups.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
(I remembered this passage when reading Shannon’s prior post, entitled On Tradition.)
On Tradition
I have absolutely no patience with people who believe that an object or idea possesses intrinsic merit because it is old.
It is equally foolish to reject an idea merely because it is old.
Good Source of Info. on Cuban Events
Word is that Castro is not long for this world or indeed has already departed. Babalu Blog has the latest reports and rumors.
(I am wondering what the proper etiquette is here. Should we send a sympathy card to Oliver Stone?)