Not exactly an in depth interview but still . . . if you want to know more details about Herzog’s work just play the commentary track on his films as released by Anchor Bay. Always such a pleasure to listen to this man. And yes he can make infinitely better films on a shoe-string budget – that’s why when you see his Hollywood bankrolled films, they are essentially crap and not befitting this maestro.
Hayek and Behavioral Economics
My chapter Mindscapes and Landscapes: Hayek and Simon on Cognitive Extension is published in this collection today. The full line-up as follows:
Foreword; V.Smith
Introduction; R.Frantz & R.Leeson
Friedrich Hayek’s Behavioural Economics in Historical Context; R.Frantz
A Hayekian/Kirznerian Economic History of the Modern World; D.McCloskey
Was Hayek an Austrian Economist? Yes and No. Was Hayek a Praxeologist? No.; W.Block
Error is Obvious, Coordination is the Puzzle; P.Boettke, W.Caceres & A.Martin
Hayek’s Contribution to a Reconstruction of Economic Theory; H.Gintis
On the Relationships Between Friedrich Hayek and Jean Piaget; C.Chelini & S.Riva
Cognitive Autonomy and Epistemology of Action in Hayek’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Thought; F.Di Iorio
Hayek’s Sensory Order, Gestalt Neuroeconomics, and Quantum Psychophysics; T.Takahashi & S.Egashira
Mindscapes and Landscapes: Hayek and Simon on Cognitive Extension; L.Marsh
Hayek’s Complexity Assumption, Ecological and Bounded Rationality, and Behavioural Economics; M.Altman
Subjectivism and Explanations of the Principle; S.Fiori
Satisficing and Cognition; Complementarities between Simon and Hayek; P.Earl
The Oversight of Behavioural Economics on Hayek’s Insight; S.Rizzello & A.Spada
Complexity and Degeneracy in Socio-Economic Systems; G.Steel & H.Hosseini
A Confederacy of Dunces
Here is a documentary film John Kennedy Toole: the omega point freely available to view. The subject matter, the greatest American novel of the 20th Century putting Toole (IMHO) up there with novelists of the order of Kafka, Musil, and Mann – and that based on one work alone.
Here is the excellent blog run by JKT’s biographer (and a producer on the film).
Here is the marvellous resource compiled by Leighton, H. Vernon.
An article from the Tulanian.
Here is another background piece.
Robert Anthony Byrne: In Memoriam by Maurice w. duQuesnay (mentioned in article above)
Walker Percy‘s Foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces
Perhaps the best way to introduce this novel — which on my third reading of it astounds me even more than the first — is to tell of my first encounter with it. While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown from me. What she proposed was preposterous. It was not that she had written a couple of chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class. It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it. Why would I want to do that? I asked her. Because it is a great novel, she said.
Over the years I have become very good at getting out of things I don’t want to do. And if ever there was something I didn’t want to do, this was surely it: to deal with the mother of a dead novelist and, worst of all, to have to read a manuscript that she said was great, and that, as it turned out, was a badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon.
But the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained — that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.
In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. I shall resist the temptation to say what first made me gape, grin, laugh out loud, shake my head in wonderment. Better let the reader make the discovery on his own.
Here at any rate is Ignatius Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of — slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one — who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt, in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, who between gigantic seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective.
His mother thinks he needs to go to work. He does, in a succession of jobs. Each job rapidly escalates into a lunatic adventure, a full-blown disaster; yet each has, like Don Quixote’s, its own eerie logic.
His girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff of the Bronx, thinks he needs sex. What happens between Myrna and Ignatius is like no other boy-meets-girl story in my experiences.
By no means a lesser virtue of Toole’s novel is his rendering of the particularities of New Orleans, its back streets, its out-of-the-way neighborhoods, its odd speech, its ethnic whites — and one black in whom Toole has achieved the near-impossible, a superb comic character of immense wit and resourcefulness without the least trace of Rastus minstrelsy.
But Toole’s greatest achievement is Ignatius Reilly himself, intellectual, ideologue, deadbeat, goof-off, glutton, who should repel the reader with his gargantuan bloats, his thunderous contempt and one-man war against everybody — Freud, homosexuals, heterosexuals, Protestants, and the assorted excesses of modern times. Imagine an Aquinas gone to pot, transported to New Orleans whence he makes a wild foray through the swamps to LSU at Baton Rouge, where his lumber jacket is stolen in the faculty men’s room where he is seated, overcome by mammoth gastrointestinal problems. His pyloric valve periodically closes in response to the lack of a “proper geometry and theology” in the modern world.
I hesitate to use the word comedy — though comedy it is — because that implies simply a funny book, and this novel is a great deal more than that. A great rumbling farce of Falstaffian dimensions would better describe it; commedia would be closer to it.
It is also sad. One never quite knows where the sadness comes from — from the tragedy at the heart of Ignatius’s great gaseous rages and lunatic adventures or the tragedy attending the book itself.
The tragedy of the book is the tragedy of the author — his suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two. Another tragedy is the body of work we have been denied.
It is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing. But he is not, and there is nothing we can do about it but make sure that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers.
Set-based particle swarm optimization applied to the multidimensional knapsack problem
Here is a recent paper co-authored by the very excellent Andries Engelbrecht, author of Computational Intelligence: An Introduction and Fundamentals of Computational Swarm Intelligence.
The Fate of Rationalism in Oakeshott’s Thought
However long Ken Minogue has been writing about rationalism he always has a knack of bringing something new and elegant to the topic.
Oakeshott was passionate about ideas, and in casual conversation he did not stint on expressing his disdain for folly, but his philosophical instincts were always to discover some element of rationality in what he most detested. Living in a generation of philosophers, some of whom were so enthusiastic about criticism that they adopted it as a self-identifying slogan, Oakeshott always regarded criticism as merely a preliminary to further understanding— not, of course, in the sense of tout comprendre, c’est tout pardoner, but as a vision of the world in which everything is a necessary evil. In the essay “Rationalism in Politics,” “rationalism” has few if any redeeming features. The interesting question is how he rethinks its character as he goes along.
Rationalism featured in the original essay as a vice of practical life, parasitic on history, science, and poetry—indeed, particularly on philosophy itself. The busy rationalist is unmistakably the most crashing bore in the conversation of humankind. Rationalism confuses part and whole. It corrupts the mind because it is both false and debasing (RP, 37). It offers a false dream of competence to the ignorant and cuts them off from whatever tradition is relevant to their enterprises, making them fancy that a doctrine is more flexible and responsive to reality than the inventive tradition that it merely abridges. Rationalism is idolatrous. In its political appearance it becomes a device for mechanically imposing some limited dream on an entire population. Individuals are corralled into abstract categories that suppress variety and aspire to uniformity. Rationalist projects inevitably fail, but in a rationalist atmosphere, an ignorant population can conceive of no better response to failure than to embrace some new collective project, so long as it promises an abstract social perfection. The outcome is an unstable political world, in political philosophy which what Tocqueville called la république, “the slow and tranquil action of society on itself,” is lost.
For Oakeshott the politics of skepticism is, at least in England, historically generated by legal assumptions and constitutes an escape from the abstractions of the politics of faith. Skeptical politics recognizes human beings as creatures responding to wants and ideas and as living in a contingent world whose spring of action is responsiveness to situations rather than in a world in which social conditions actually determine how people behave. It might well seem, however, that in escaping from the politics of faith by moving toward a politics of skepticism generated by legal thought, Oakeshott had merely substituted one kind of abstraction for another.
Oakeshott takes the view that the essence of the politics of faith is the failure to keep religion and politics apart. In all other cultures but our own, however, no such separation ever took place. In our current circumstances, “religion” has in any case become an ambiguous word. Humanism and secularism are beginning to take on many of the features of a faith. They increasingly parade their sensitivity to the presence of religious symbols (the cross, rosary beads, etc.) and demand an environment free of religious symbols. It is true that their concern is almost exclusively with Christian symbols, those of other religions being tolerated under the rubric of multiculturalism. For that reason, secularism has in part the character of a spiritual civil war within European states, and a secularism making such demands is clearly taking on faithlike attributes. We thus find ourselves in a rather paradoxical situation, in which for all our value of freedom, increasing numbers of Western people come to be subject to forms of supposedly enlightened despotism.
25 Years of Jazz at Lincoln Center
Right on Wynton – an amazing achievement.
His intense belief that jazz must be based on swing rhythms fused with elements of the blues and firmly rooted in black traditional music has long rubbed many in the jazz community the wrong way.
Hayek’s Speculative Psychology, The Neuroscience of value Estimation, and the Basis of Normative Individualism
An extract from the very excellent and versatile (economics and philosophy of mind) Don Ross.
In light of this history, it is not surprising that, as many commentators have noted, The Sensory Order was relatively neglected for a few decades, but has recently enjoyed a wave of scholarly appreciation. Much of this has centered on the ways in which Hayek’s philosophical psychology complements and completes his general model of adaptive complexity (Butos & Koppl, 1996; Horwitz, 2000, 2008; McQuade & Butos, 2005): both minds and markets are path-dependent incremental learning systems and distributed information processors that depend for their efficiency on freedom from executive planning bottlenecks. Thus the resistance of social processes to social engineering is reinforced by a kind of fractal reproduction of a ‘free market’ in information at the scale of the individual mind. Some cognitive scientists (Edelman, 1985; Fuster, 1995) have noted that Hayek’s high-level conception of mental architecture was substantively vindicated long after the fact. Regrettably, however, only occasional philosophers (e.g., Marsh, 2010) have drawn attention to his remarkable anticipation of sensible opinions that their profession spent decades groping toward, namely: that perception and conceptual filtering dynamically influence one another; that implicit procedural and explicit declarative knowledge form an epistemological continuum (Lycan, 1988; Wilson, 2006); that moderate functionalism is a sound view of the mind-brain relationship but radical functionalism that declares the brain irrelevant is nonsense (Clark, 1989); that consciousness is not the central planning commission of the mind (Dennett, 1991); and that Kant was right that categorical preconceptions structure mental experience, while empiricists were right that science can, does, and should ride roughshod over these preconceptions without limit (Humphreys, 2004; Ismael, 2007; Ladyman & Ross, 2007). As Marsh notes, Hayek even anticipated the ‘monochromeMary’ thought experiment (Jackson, 1996) that later distracted philosophers of consciousness (Dennett, 1991, 2006), but he immediately diagnosed its scientific idleness. [Some of the thought experiment’s philosophical proponents recognized the same thing eventually (Jackson, 2003).] No aspect of The Sensory Order is more impressive than its opening and closing philosophical framing, which remains fresh as paint.
Economic methodologists who study The Sensory Order tend to think that this issue is in turn important because the (relative) autonomy of intentional description and explanation is at the heart of the Austrian view of capital and of the principles by which the political economy best flourishes. Such an assumption is among the shared premises, animating lively debates over detailed implications, that is carried on by the authors collected in Butos (2010) when they take up a brief to explicate the significance of The Sensory Order for the study of the social order in both its positive and normative aspects. We might unpack the common premise in more detail as follows. Austrian social theory will enjoy a considerably shrunken pool of potential followers if it is thought to be hostage to the transcendental post-Kantian philosophy of human thought and action developed by von Mises (1966), because this underlying metaphysic of mind is uncongenial to most epistemological naturalists, and thus to most contemporary social scientists. In the current philosophical atmosphere, Austrian methodological and normative theory stands on much firmer ground if a semi-autonomous domain of intentionality is thought to spontaneously emerge from the interactions of brains and their physical environments. Happily (for pro-Austrians), such ideas are now widespread among scientists in a range of disciplines that study complexity. Still more happily, the aspects of this perspective that are derived from principles of neural organization and functioning were clearly and explicitly developed by Hayek in The Sensory Order; so we have evidence that Austrian social theorizing is not merely compatible with emergentist naturalism about intentionality, but is indeed part of its original intellectual context. This view is not wrong; Hayek indeed provides Austrian methodologists with a more satisfactory philosophy of mind than von Mises’s. However, many would be disappointed to think that all The Sensory Order does for them is show them that they don’t have to endorse von Mises’s declaration of independence from empirical behavioral science. I will argue, however, that Hayek’s philosophical psychology fails to provide any stronger support for Austrian economics or economic methodology. Two widespread, and interrelated, assumptions made by Hayek’s apologists have obscured this. First, there is a tendency to take for granted that the (relative) autonomy of intentional patterns from neuroelectrical and neurochemical patterns is directly associated with the (relative) autonomy of individual choices. If this is not the case, then rejection of neuro-reductionist foundations for economics yields no particular implications in favor of Austrian over neoclassical methodology or policy philosophy. Second, there is a tendency to assume that if brains implement distributed neural networks, then relative economic values must be computed by these networks through the sculpting of global vectors of weights in state spaces by conceptually mediated environmental contingencies. This assumption courts potential dialectical disaster, at least in the short run, for Austrian apologists, because the most flourishing current research programme in neuroeconomics is based precisely on denying it.
Iris Murdoch
This event could be interesting if like me you enjoy the intersection of the philosophical and the literary. Murdoch was of course a paramour of Oakeshott’s (see Bob Grant’s essay) and it is said based the character of Hugo Belfounder from Under the Net on Oakeshott. This is highly contentious and will never be satisfactorily resolved either way – Hugo could be an amalgam of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott. Anyway, her first novel is well worth reading – light and good fun, capturing bohemian London of the fifties.
The work of Iris Murdoch (1919-99) inspires growing enthusiasm and curiosity. Yet perhaps just because of her striking originality, her achievement is hard to place on the cultural map. Is she essentially an academic philosopher, a novelist, or a brilliant but unclassifiable individual thinker? And if we picture her as an iconic ‘woman philosopher’, is this a distraction or a source of insight?
Aaron Swartz: Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
Oakeshott Conference: Call for Papers: Modernity and Its Discontents
Here are the details for MOA ’13
