An Increase of 1000%; a Decrease of 81%, and What's Left?

GameStop/EB in the news

Alerted by my guru, I read the big news in the financial markets last week that  GameStop shares are up 1000%.  In Canada, GameStop owns the EB stores which sell video games and accessories.  When some big hedge funds were shorting GameStop stock, a social-media network of smaller investors, described as "gamers and nerds," decided to squeeze the short-sellers--which they did with great success, raising the stock price and costing the hedge funds billions in losses. 

How Much is 1000% minus 81%

Andrew Left of the hedge-fund Citron, one of the short-sellers, remained adamant that "Nothing has changed with GameStop except the stock price," and the company is still a loser.  (I always have time for sour grapes.) This week the headline is "GameStop Stock Drops 81%." So, how much is 1000% - 81%?  Spoiler alert: that's not how percentages work. How many of us innumerates have a confident understanding of this basic fact of mathematics?

 Percentages and innumeracy

One of my golf buddies regularly lectures to nursing students and described to me this shtick that he uses in his classes.  Standing at his lectern he asks the class, "How many of you would pay me a dollar for a trick which I guarantee will increase your chances of winning the lottery by 100%?"   He moves around the room and collects his payments among the raised hands, returning to the lectern, he tells them "buy two tickets."  (He assures me that his profits are redistributed to the class at coffee break.) His point is that it is primordial for medical specialists to understand or, more to the point, not be fooled by percentages.  An increase of 100% is X2; of 1000% is X10. 

 

The First rule of percentages!

In Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos gives the example of a "new toothpaste which reduces cavities by 200 percent"  and muses on what this claim could possibly mean.  A clothing store that announces a 100% sale would presumably be giving everything away for nothing.  A 200% reduction would mean the store would be paying us.  Advertisements using percentages are generally meaningless.  The rule, the obvious question to ask, as Paulos points out, is:  "Percentage of what?"

A Case in point

When shopping for a new car in 2019, I took note of the ubiquitous ads from various car dealerships offering 10%, 20%, even 30% off MSRP.  Should I be ashamed to admit that I couldn't remember (if I ever knew) what "MSRP" stood for?  It means, as you, no doubt, already know, "Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price."  What the manufacturer "suggests" is not what the dealership charges for the particular model you want to buy. But it gets worse.  You (and I) might think you got a deal because you negotiated 20% off the MSRP, but according to Car and Driver, the MSRP is smoke and mirrors. The real price upon which you should begin negotiations is the invoice price; that is, the lower-than-MSRP amount that the dealership pays the manufacturer for the car.

 How Much should a t-shirt cost?

Despite being conscious of the "percentage of what" rule, I still got caught.  I have quite a supply of t-shirts (my wife would say an oversupply), mostly purchased at Costco for between $7 and $11 (CAD).  When I got a very personal-sounding letter from the Bay with a card promising a one-day 40% sale on all items, including those already on sale,  I couldn't resist.  I ended up buying a flashy red t-shirt which was already 40% off.  Practically giving it away, right?  This is what Paulos says in Innumeracy:

[ . . .] an item whose price has been increased by 50 percent and then reduced by 50 percent has had a net reduction in price of 25 percent. A dress whose price has been “slashed” 40 percent and then another 40 percent has been reduced in price by 64 percent, not 80 percent.

I calculated the price of my flashy red t-shirt (sticker priced at $36.98), using Paulos's numbers.  I paid $12.94:  About 30% more than I would normally pay for a t-shirt.

Percentages and politics

In "The 2020 Election by the Numbers," James M. Lindsay points out that "Biden won 81,283,098 votes, or 51.3 percent of the votes cast. [ . . . . ]  Trump won 74,222,958 votes, or 46.8 percent of the votes cast."  However, that 4.5%, 7-million-vote differential can be misleading. As Paulos instructs: "Numbers always have to be interpreted." With the electoral college system, if Trump had won another 42,921 votes in just the right places--Arizona (10,457), Georgia (11,779), and Wisconsin (20,682), he would be President again today.

Canadians have been known to roll their eyes at the electoral college system, but the Canadian system is certainly no more democratic.  In Canada, a party with 39% of the popular vote can form a majority government and claim 100% of the power.

 Percentages and polling 

These days I'm pretty surly about answering surveys.  I have come to the conclusion that, almost invariably, my answers will be used to concoct something that I don't agree with.  I have already written about a number of such cases.  Consider, for example, the silly online survey the Liberal government put together when they were pretending that they were still interested in reforming the electoral process.  In completing the survey I was forced to decide between a parliament with many parties or one that could get things done in direct contradiction to my conviction that a parliament of many parties could get things done and get them done better and more democratically.

Similarly, when I read the headline that 72% of Canadians agreed with PM Trudeau's decision not to intervene in the Meng extradition, I was suspicious.  Sure enough, when I checked the question that Angus Reid asked ("percentage of what?" remember), the reason for the result was obvious.  

In order to answer the question, one would have to accept the false premise, the bald-faced lie, that extradition in Canada is "an independent court process" and "a legal matter" that can be left "with the courts to decide." In other words, 72% of Canadians who don't know the law--that extradition is a political decision in Canada--agreed with the Prime Minister.  Actually what the survey indicates is that 100% of Canadians don't know the law, including the Angus-Reid people and the Prime Minister.

Percentages and health

In Innumeracy, originally published in 1988 and republished in 2001, Paulos points out:

That one out of eleven women will develop breast cancer is a much cited statistic. The figure is misleading, however, in that it applies only to an imaginary sample of women all of whom live to age eighty-five and whose incidence of contracting breast cancer at any given age is the present incidence rate for that age. Only a minority of women live to age eighty-five, and incidence rates are changing and are much higher for older women.

Breast cancer is a serious disease and must always be taken seriously, but presenting misleading statistics is the opposite of treating the disease seriously.  Based on the available numbers, Paulos calculated that "The typical forty-year-old has about a 1.4 percent chance of developing the disease before age fifty."

Hormone therapy and breast cancer

Discussing the statistics on breast cancer does not mitigate the significance of the disease, but raises the question of how misleading or miscommunicated percentages can be detrimental to women's overall health.  In an article entitled  "Hormone therapy and breast cancer: risk communication and the ‘perfect storm'," Dr. R.L. Reid notes that 

When the WHI [Women's Health Initiative] reported a 26% increase in breast cancer among women using combined estrogen and progestin MHT [menopausal hormone therapy], few readers understood that this relative risk was derived from the data showing 30 breast cancers/10,000 women on placebo and 38/10,000 women on hormones. The absolute difference was eight additional breast cancers per 10,000 women per year. This amounts to an attributable risk of 0.08% per year or less than a 10th of a percentage point increase per year of use. (Indeed, the 74% of the enrolled women who were first-time hormone users showed no increased risk yet this received no media coverage.) Had the findings been conveyed to the media and the public in this way, we would not have seen the widespread panic that followed the 2002 WHI report.

Despite the recommendations of both Paulos and Reid that women should be given more detailed, precise statistical data, the Canadian Cancer Society continues to report that "1 in 8 Canadian women will develop breast cancer" and a decrease in breast cancers in "2002 coincided with a large drop in the use of HRT [hormone replacement therapy] among postmenopausal women when its role in breast cancer was publicized." 

An Increase of 1000%; a decrease of 81%, and what's left? 

So what results when you have an increase of 1000% and then a decrease of 81%? The question is meaningless until you answer the question "percentage of what?"  Oddly, the article that tells us that GameStop stocks "have risen by 1,000 percent in less than two weeks," only gets around to answering the "of what?" question in a very convoluted, innumerate fashion: "the company's shares were changing hands at around $4 US a share. They hit almost $400 on Wednesday. First off,  if the stock rose from $4 to $400, that's an increase of 10,000% (ten thousand percent) not 1,000% (one thousand percent).  If the stock rose 1000% to $400 in two weeks, that means the stock had been selling for $40.

The article quoting a drop of 81% used the stock price of $483.  Therefore the stock lost $391 of its $483 value.  In other words and round numbers, the stock that was selling for $4 in 2020 increased in value by 1000% in 2021 to $40, then, in two weeks, increased another 1000% to $400 (and more).  Then it lost 81%.    The answer to the question:  an increase of 1000%, another increase of 1000%, and a decline of 81%; in this case, the result is $92.00.  Got it?  If you bought the stock at $40, you're doing well.  If you bought it at $4, you're doing great.

The Power of Insignificance

 

 [ . . . ] the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

                                     George Eliot, Middlemarch

The Greatest English novel of all time

Does anybody read George Eliot anymore?  I have come to believe that Middlemarch is the greatest novel ever written in the English language.  For sometime I was convinced that the accolade had to go to one of Thomas Hardy's many novels.  Hugh Hood, novelist and my professor of the 19th-century novel, assured our graduate seminar that the title of greatest and most influential novelist belonged to Charles Dickens.  The officious, online award of number one is invariably given to James Joyce's Ulysses--that novel that everyone knows about but almost no-one has read.

Literature is "an arrangement of words"

Literature, it is commonly claimed, is "an arrangement of words."  This may not sound like much, but stop to consider:  arrange a bunch of atoms one way and you get a slug, arrange them another way and you get Claudia Schiffer, another and you get Elon Musk.  (You can insert your own examples.) In writing, the range of possibilities is from an inarticulate twitter tweet to Eliot's Middlemarch.  Having been through the novel a couple of times now, I know that I can drop my index finger on any one of its 880 pages and I will discover a sentence that impresses me in its construction, its euphony, its rhythm, its humour or irony or pathos, but mostly I will find myself saying "ahah, yes that's exactly right and the right way to say it," or I find myself full of new questions, wonder and insights.

Durrell's Alexandria Quartet

When I was an undergraduate in the 70s, a local newspaper asked some of my professors to provide a list of their top ten great novels.  A number of them listed Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  I had to wait for retirement to find time to read its 896 pages (884 in some versions).  I understood immediately why it would be the choice of English professors.  For one thing, in my list of newly learned words (yes, I keep such a list), the Durrell novel accounts for about 80% of the entries.  Durrell's luxurious descriptions of scenes and scenery are comparable to the landscape paintings of the Dutch masters.  There is a texture, refinement and sensuality in his prose that is breathtaking. At the same time, getting to the end of the story is torture.  "Please, dear god, not another layered description of a tortured artist and heavy breathing against a purple horizon, without any clue about what is really going on!"  For reasons that escape me, we must read to around page 800 before Durrell reveals the plot which has governed the action of the novel from the beginning.  Prior to this point, we have been reading a philosophical prose poem.

The Age of pornography

We live in the age of pornography.  In this era, it is difficult to grasp the argument that Durrell was denied the Nobel in Literature because there was too much sex in his novels.  We might struggle to appreciate Eliot's subtle allusions and characters so trapped in decorum, propriety and protocol, that a hint of scandal would destroy a reputation and, consequently, a life, and a gesture or gestalt might alter a character's destiny.  Contemporary readers of Middlemarch will be tested because the first kiss of the young lovers whose fate ties the story together does not occur until chapter 83 of the novel's 93 chapters.  I wonder if the kind of readership that such literary works require isn't on the verge of extinction.

If you were young, beautiful and independently wealthy, would you marry this man? 

The patriarchy might well dismiss Middlemarch as a "women's" novel.  It was, after all, written by a woman, largely about women (in particular, the heroine, Dorothea Brooke),  and is addressed, arguably, to a female readership.  Mary Anne Evans was, doubtlessly, very aware of this likelihood when she chose to write under the pseudonym George Eliot.

Much of the mystery, intrigue and suspense of the novel is generated by the young, beautiful and independently wealthy Dorothea Brooke's decision to marry an elderly, sallow pedagogue, the Reverend Edward Causaubon.  The theme and plot of the novel might be disparagingly reduced to the search for a mate or, more precisely, finding the right husband (which invariably involves finding the wrong husband first), but the majority of classic English novels could be similarly reduced.

John Locke

The portrait above is not of Reverend Casaubon but of John Locke, the English philosopher, academic, political theorist and medical researcher.  It is via this portrait that we are told, in a dialogue between Dorothea and her sister, Celia, what Mr. Casaubon looked like:

"How very ugly Mr. Casaubon is!"  

"Celia! He is one of the most distinguished-looking men I ever saw. He is remarkably like the portrait of Locke. He has the same deep eye-sockets." 

         "Had Locke those two white moles with hairs on them?"

Dorothea's imagining that Casaubon approximates John Locke goes a long way in explaining her attraction to him.  In fact, the heroic male figures in the novel, both objects of Dorothea's admiration, Dr. Lydgate and Will Ladislaw, show clear intimations of Locke.

The Power of Insignificance

Nothing that I have written so far in this post is what I originally intended to say. My intention was to write on a theme that I had mentioned tangentially in previous posts:  the advantages of insignificance.  I have felt at ease expressing my opinions because, ultimately, they were not significant enough, not widely read enough, to cause a backlash.  As a relatively unknown, retired academic, I have the privilege of saying what I think without much risk.  I have even considered that I have the additional benefit of operating autonomously and independently within the "degrees of freedom" described by Daniel Dennett which I referred to in The Mystery of the Off Switch.  However, the morning after I published "The Mystery of the Off Switch" post, in which I said some unflattering, in fact, pretty damning things about big technology companies, I was suddenly and absolutely cut off from the internet.

On Being Rich, Famous and Powerful

This is probably the best example of "sour grapes" that I have ever written on this blog, but I have often felt that I was not as envious of men with wealth and fame and position as I should be.  No doubt, if I was offered any one of these possibilities, I would accept it, but mostly out of curiosity rather than a burning desire.  Even when I consider wealthy, famous, powerful men whom I admire, I find little evidence that they are/were happier than I have been over most of my life.  When I consider, in particular, the freedom which they have enjoyed--or not--I find myself concluding that important is the opposite of free.

How did I end up writing about Middlemarch?

As I was musing on "insignificance," I rediscovered the penultimate paragraphs of Middlemarch. [Spoiler alert:  If you are planning to read the novel for the first time, you might want to skip these quoted paragraphs.]

Sir James never ceased to regard Dorothea's second marriage as a mistake; and indeed this remained the tradition concerning it in Middlemarch, where she was spoken of to a younger generation as a fine girl who married a sickly clergyman, old enough to be her father, and in little more than a year after his death gave up her estate to marry his cousin — young enough to have been his son, with no property, and not well-born. Those who had not seen anything of Dorothea usually observed that she could not have been "a nice woman," else she would not have married either the one or the other. 

Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.

"We insignificant people" have the power to make the lives of many Dorotheas great, by making them difficult, by forcing them to defy us (as was done with Saint Theresa and Antigone).  We are the butterflies that cause distant hurricanes. "With our daily words and acts," we can also affect, for good or ill, the lives of those around us. Dorothea herself chose to be insignificant.  Her strength and virtue showed in her decision to be insignificant; her strength and virtue showed more clearly in relief against the foil of insignificance, but ultimately, she showed that there is freedom, power and virtue in insignificance.

Afterword

Today, I received an email "letter of apology" from my internet provider for the interruption caused to all of their subscribers which was beyond their control.  I wondered, self-mockingly, if I should send the company my "letter of apology," explaining that everyone lost their web access because of nasty things I had written on my blog.  No, I continue to believe in the power of my insignificance.  Although, I must admit, there was a moment when the thought crossed my mind that I had lost the power of my insignificance.  Thankfully, I am happy to report that I remain unworthy of anyone's surveillance but, at the same time, I am reminded that we must all work to protect the freedom of our un-surveilled insignificance.

The Mystery of the "Off" Switch . . . Solved! Sort of.

Where's the "on" switch?

Just when I was feeling so smart because I'd bought myself a new fancy-pants Mac computer, I had to spend 45 minutes looking for the power switch to turn the damn thing on.  Then I had the problem of figuring out the right way to turn it off.  In the early days of personal computers, people mocked the fact that you had to choose "on" to turn your computer off.  Though I thought myself more savvy when I bought my Mac, apparently, pressing the near-invisible "on" button was not the right way to turn it off.

"OK Boomer"

These "OK Boomer" moments became a motif--these days people say "meme"--in my encounters with technology.  Every time I dealt with a new "app" (why does everything have to have a nickname, abbreviation, initialism or acronym which obscures its meaning?  A sour-grape complaint for another day), I ended up asking "how do you turn it off?"   The millennial response was a look of wonderment which asked "How does one communicate with an alien life form from another planet?"  The more empathetic answer was "You don't have to."

It's called a light switch!

In my world, when you walked into a darkened room, you flicked up on a switch and the lights came on.  As you left the room, you flicked down on the switch and the lights turned off.  (Granted, some electricians don't get the whole up/down thing.)  Even if "I didn't have to," when I was finished with an application, I wanted to turn it off. Banking applications usually displayed "log out" or "sign out" possibilities (apparently "turn off" is verboten in the big-tech world).  Banks even recommend that after I "log out," I should "empty cache." (I should learn how to do that someday.)

Who knew there was a plan?!

Over and over again, I went looking for the "off" switch in a computer application, only to discover that it would take three clicks beyond a particular hotlink, if I was lucky enough to choose the right hotlink in the first place.  Often there simply was no off switch.  Then the application would suddenly appear on my screen when I rebooted my computer.  To turn off the application, I would have to delete it, but even deleting it was not enough.  I would have to "uninstall it" which meant buying "uninstall software" or deleting six or seven files in various folders.  And hopefully I would not delete the file which was essential for the operating system.  "These are terrible design flaws," I thought naively.  Then I watched the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.

The Dystopia is now!

The backbone of the film is a string of interviews with insiders from big tech companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc, etc.  In turn, they each confessed that they had created a monster.  Then, ironically, some admitted that they themselves were being consumed by the monster they had created to consume the rest of us.  They struggled to give the monster, the underlying problem, a name.  The groundwork for a near-future dystopia has been laid out, they tell us.  If, today, you are a typical teenager addicted to social media, then the dystopia is now.  The tipping point, we are told, was 2011, with dramatic increases in tween and teenage girls committing self-harm and suicide.

There Is no off switch!

Given the scale and the stakes, the anachronistic problem of a stubborn, aging Boomer who wants an off switch seems minor, insignificant, even silly.  But it tells us what the problem is:  there is no off switch.  The epiphany which The Social Dilemma provided for me was that social-media companies measure success by one single metric:  how much time does a user spend looking at a screen.   As I clicked one hyperlink after another looking for an off switch, becoming more aimlessly lost and pissed off, then went to Google and Youtube looking for a solution, all the while thinking how terribly these tech companies and designers had failed, at the other end, they were celebrating their success at having gotten me to extend my screen time.  (CGP Gray claims that getting me angry is what creates viral social media.  See This Video Will Make You Angry.)

Calling Social Media an "addiction" may be an understatement

Not surprisingly, in The Social Dilemma, the attachment to social media, particularly among the young, is described as an addiction.  Any behaviour which you are unable to control is aptly described as an addiction.  The word "addiction" brings to mind images of someone scruffy in a hoodie lurking outside a schoolyard selling cocaine and ecstasy.  The image to imagine in the case of "social-media addiction" is the user, a teenage girl for example, at one end, and, at the other end, an army of billionaire tech execs, engineers, psychologists, neurologists, designers, sociopaths and other influencers with one objective:  getting that user to keep staring at her screen.  Unfortunately, this image only brings us to the mouth of the rabbit hole.

 Free Will and determinism

In response to my post on Free Will and Determinism, two of my readers (thanks Seb and Ken!) recommended Daniel Dennett's work on the subject.  In his lecture, entitled Herding Cats and Free Will Inflation, Dennett argues that while the laws of physics may determine beginnings and endings, in between, there are inevitable instances of "degrees of freedom" (even when talking about machines).  These instances, these degrees of freedom, offer human individuals some opportunity for independence, for autonomy, for self-control.  In the abstract debate over free will, what really matters, according to Dennett, is our ability to act independently and autonomously.  In this context, Dennett underlines that "there is now a multi-billion-dollar competition among various giant companies to pull your strings, to control your attention."

Dennett argues:

The capacity of individuals and companies to distract you and to clamp your degrees of freedom so that you just don’t think about things that you really should be thinking about because you’re so distracted by all these other things which you can’t help looking at, and thinking about instead. The competition for your attention strikes at the heart of your freedom, your ability to think for yourself.

An agent who controls your attention controls you. 

Down the rabbit hole!

Further down the rabbit hole in The Social Dilemma, we learn the "agent" controlling us isn't an individual, isn't a group or a company.  In the first instance it is an algorithm and, inside the company, only a handful of people understand the algorithms, but even they don't know what the programs responding to the algorithms are doing or how they are doing it in real-time.  The machine (server plus software) has been instructed to get users to look at screens as long as possible.  The machine has been programmed to teach itself how to best accomplish this task.  The machine learns through trial and error.  It has billions of lab rats (that would be us) and can perform millions of tests in a relatively short period of time to figure out how (based on our personal data) to keep us looking at a screen.  What works; what doesn't, and everything in between. Based on the machine's study of my data and past behaviour, it calculates where best to hide the off switch from a Sour Boomer like me, while littering my path with images of the elderly man I would like to look like and a series of ab exercises sponsored by a local gym franchise.

Understanding the stakes

Jaron Lanier asserts and Dennett concurs that if you think a company like Facebook wants your data so they can sell it to a third party, you have no idea what game is being played.  Your data is too useful, too valuable, to be sold to a third party.  Certainly, Facebook has proven that your data can be successfully monetized by matching your data with the products of an advertiser. But even monetization isn't the whole story; after all, we are talking about companies that are already the richest companies in the history of the world.  They can change you, me, and the teenage girl who wants plastic surgery to look more like her filtered Snapchat photo.  Lanier argues that a subtle one-percent change in the world, in how we think and feel and are, is a greater measure of power than anything that can be accomplished with a few billion dollars.  Why would they do this?  For the worst of all possible reasons:  because they can.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-ceo-sounds-warning-of-algorithms-pushing-society-towards-catastrophe/

Free Will and Determinism

 The Choice is clear

Faced with a choice between free will and determinism, the choice has always been clear.  Neither our legal system nor our morality could exist without free will.  No-one could be accused of a crime or a sin, unless we accept that they had free will, that they had a choice.  In recent eras, the conviction that determinism is wrong has been reinforced by expressions like "biological determinism" and "social determinism."  

Biological determinism

"Biological determinism" is widely recognized as the fallacious belief which claims that the limitations and diminished social status of women are determined by their biology, not by patriarchal societies and cultures.  In fact, there is a schism inside feminism with French feminists recognizing some role for biology and American feminists denying biology.

Social Determinism

"Social determinism" allows the idea that members of the upper classes of society are in fact superior. Some 19th-century novels, in particular, Dickens' Oliver Twist, have been criticized for the alleged subtext that certain characters, like Oliver, were morally superior and immune from corruption because they were the biological offspring of a wealthy ruling elite. 

Christian philosophy

Christian philosophy has been particularly challenged by the incompatible, mutually exclusive dichotomy of an omniscient, omnipotent God and individuals who have free will.  If God knows what I'm going to do and chooses to allow me to do it, how can I be blamed for whatever I do?  Partially in response, John Calvin elaborated a new kind of deterministic Christianity which became the basis of Puritanism.  According to Calvinism, God has already chosen his "elect" and there is limited possibility for atonement for most of humanity. Anathema for Calvin was the Catholic practice of indulgences; that is, that I could buy my way into heaven by purchasing another gold chalice for the church. 

Puritanism

The word "puritanism" was first used, quite mockingly, to describe the most extreme anti-Catholics, who wanted to "purify" Christianity of any vestige of Catholicism.  One of the causes of the American revolution was that Puritans who had ventured to North America in part to practice their particularly fervent "Protestantism" (meaning "protest" against Catholicism) discovered that, under the Quebec Act, the English government had granted a landmass stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Mississippi Valley to French Catholics.

Physics and free will

Just when I was ready to relax and accept free will as an obvious state of affairs, I was introduced to Sabine Hossenfelder's "You don't have free will, but don't worry." In her vlog, Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist, presents straightforward, no-nonsense analyses, explanations and critiques of the current state of physics.  Her style--which is key to the vlog's appeal--is to do away with uncertainty and waffling.  She offers her opinions and judgments as ineluctable facts, and the alternatives as "rubbish" (one of her favourite words).  She is, as it were, the Judge Judy of physics.

I must confess that while I find it relatively easy to deny the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful God, I find it much harder to dismiss the laws of physics. Human brains and human bodies, Hossenfelder argues, are collections of particles and atoms and molecules.  We might feel that we are making choices and changing reality by exercising free will, but particles, atoms and molecules will do what particles, atoms and molecules will do.  This is what our brains do; they follow the laws of physics.  Our feelings of having made a decision are chronologically after our brains have completed the chemical reactions necessary in decision making. To put it simply--as Hossenfelder does--the idea of free will is incompatible with the laws of physics.

The argument is so counterintuitive that it is hard to credit.  However, counterintuitive does not mean wrong.  The argument aligns with Pierre-Simon Laplace's Demon, as described in Sean Carroll's The Big Picture:  On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself.  Laplace (1749 - 1825), the "French atheist mathematician," claimed that a Demon who had "perfect knowledge" of the present would be able to perfectly predict the future.

 Laplace’s Demon could say with confidence what the probability of every future history will be, and no amount of human volition would be able to change it. There is no room for human choice, so there is no such thing as free will. We are just material objects who obey the laws of nature.

Thought Experiments on free will

Despite the fact that Hossenfelder is not only a theoretical physicist but a German theoretical physicist, she does not seem very taken with Gedankenexperiments ("thought experiments" in English). As a counter-argument to Hossenfeld's, I performed the following simple thought experiment. I placed both of my hands on my desk. I told myself that I would then decide which hand--left or right--I would raise. After reflection, I raised my left hand. According to Hossenfelder, my decision . . . actually there was no "decision," my raising of my left hand was determined at the Big Bang. Like the falling of a domino in a chain of dominoes, the raising of my left hand was an inevitable consequence of the tumbling of the first domino, the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe.

Don't worry, be happy!

What does my thought experiment prove?  Not much--except perhaps how extremely counterintuitive the denial of free will is.  I'm left to wonder if every word that Shakespeare wrote was the inevitable consequence of interacting particles--not a reflection of the brilliance of the Bard.  Diminishing Shakespeare does seem to diminish us all.  But Hossenfelder tells us "not to worry."  We can think of our lives as stories or films, and we can carry on believing in our free wills until we arrive happily at the end of the story which is our inevitable, pre-determined conclusion.

Free Will as legal fiction

Sean Carroll presents the inescapable argument that life as we humans know it would be impossible without the concept of free will.  The legal system, human psychology, human sociology and human life, itself, would all be quite baseless without free will.  Whatever you might choose to do or not do in life would mean nothing because choice itself is an illusion and all consequences are already determined.  However, the fact that the concept of free will is necessary does not prove that free will actually exists.  Free will might, in fact, be another example of a "legal fiction"  (see my post on Terrorism and Madness); that is, something we pretend to believe because it serves a legal purpose.   If so, free will is the legal fiction of all legal fictions.

 

Free Will in The Swerve

In Stephen Greenblatt's remarkable research into Lucretius, the Roman poet/philosopher, and Poggio Bracciolini, the 15th-century "book hunter" and papal secretary, who saved Lucretius's work from ignominy, the existence of free will is once again in question.  Writing fifty years before the birth of Christ, in his poem On the Nature of Things, Lucretius repudiated all religions as cruel superstition, denied the existence of an afterlife and the idea that human beings had immortal souls.  He described the nature of all things, including humans, as collections of particles in constant motion; in other words, much as sub-atomic, quantum-theory physicists do today.

Greenblatt paraphrases Lucretius's Latin poem:

The swerve is the source of free will. In the lives of all sentient creatures, human and animal alike, the random swerve of elementary particles is responsible for the existence of free will. For if all of motion were one long predetermined chain, there would be no possibility of freedom.

The "swerve" is "an unexpected, unpredictable movement of matter," but how it proves free will is less than obvious.  Greenblatt asks rhetorically, "what is the evidence that free will exists?"  But what follows is more an inkling than an answer.  The analogy of a horse race invokes "the thrilling spectacle of a mental act bidding a mass of matter into motion."  Lucretius further argues that a man

may deliberately hold himself back: Both willing oneself to go forward and willing oneself to remain stationary are only possible because everything is not strictly determined, that is, because of the subtle, unpredictable, free movements of matter. What keeps the mind from being crushed by inner necessity is “the minute swerve [clinamen principiorum] of the atoms at unpredictable places and times” (2.293–94).

The Possibility of free will

In a seemingly unrelated vlog post, Do We Need a Theory of Everything?, Hossenfelder opens the possibility of a swerve and of free will.  She asserts: "There is no reason that nature should actually be described by a theory of everything." Nature might occasionally swerve outside of or from between the theories of physics.  The human being might be more than and different from the sum of her parts; therefore, capable of behaving unlike particles, atoms and molecules.   It seems more than possible that human consciousness, what physicists call an "emerging property," might actually, in moments of swerve if not beyond, affect the material universe--instantiating what we call free will.

 

The Truth about Money: Money Good; Money Bad

What is money?

Anything can be used as money:  paper, tokens, clay tablets, seashells, tree bark, pixels on a computer screen, strokes on a ledger somewhere, even people.  Historically, not just slaves and cumal were used as money.  The Bible tells us a man can beat his servant because "he is his money" (Exodus 21:20-22).  As Jacob Goldstein reiterates throughout Money:  The True Story of a Made-up Thing:    "money is money because we believe it’s money."

However, some things become like money (a soft way of saying they become money) even when people doubt, question or just don't notice.  Silver, data, Modigliani nudes, and, most importantly, "commercial paper" have all become forms of money despite doubts, questions and ignorance.

                        In 2008, the day after the Lehman bankruptcy, this Modigliani

                        sold for $150 million (USD). Someone was shifting

                        currency from the stock market to the art market.

Money Good

Goldstein quotes Marco Polo who wrote that his readers would not believe this but  "the Great Kaan [of the Mongol empire] causeth the bark of trees, made into something like paper, to pass for money all over his country."  The result of the Kaan's "bark of trees" money was a unified, stable and prosperous empire.  When the Ming Dynasty attempted to return to traditional (money-less) ways in China, the result was three hundred years of poverty, deprivation and starvation.  Even today, world-wide, getting food from farmers' fields to the shelves of your local grocery store is facilitated by; in fact, dependent upon money.

Money is infinite

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, one after another, representatives of the US Federal Reserve announced that they could provide a limitless supply of US dollars to support American businesses?  Of course, it's obvious that money is a product of our collective imaginations and is therefore infinite (or at least only limited by our collective imaginations), but it was unprecedented for the Fed to publicly confirm this fact.   

Wealth inequality versus poverty 

Steve Pinker was quite right to point out the difference between wealth inequality and poverty in his tome Enlightenment Now.  What Pinker calls the "lump fallacy" is the mistaken notion that the economy is a "zero-sum" game:  "that if some people end up with more, others must have less."  On the contrary, if history shows, as Pinker claims it does, that we have all prospered over time--even if unequally--we have nothing to complain about.

Pinker's point is well taken, but I suspect that in this argument he might be confusing wealth and money, the real economy and the financial markets.   Money is infinite but the planet itself is finite, and its wealth/resources are similarly limited.  The real economy becomes very much a game of winners and losers when the biggest winners are willing to sacrifice the planet for short-term gain through, for example, global warming (which, as Pinker later argues, is the real and most threatening problem of our time).

What every kid should know about money

Perhaps I need to remind you, dear Reader, and myself that this blog is about education.  I really don't know what is being taught in grade schools and high schools these days, but shouldn't every middle-schooler know how money is created? 

Goldstein concurs with every other source that I have consulted on the subject: "Most of the money in the world is not just stored in private banks; it is created by private banks."  I found it reassuring that Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, has a very straightforward explanation, directed at high-school students, of how private banks create money.  Khan displays the mathematical formula which shows that for every $1000 which the Federal Reserve introduces into the monetary system, private banks, using the fractional reserve system, create $10,000.  

The Federal Reserve was created at a "secret meeting"

As long as farmers are getting paid and the grocery store is getting paid and I have enough money to pay for groceries, who cares how the money was created?  Is it a problem that private banks create money?  To answer this question we would, of course, first have to acknowledge that private banks do create money. 

According to the "History" section of the Federal Reserve website, the Fed began with a gathering which included a senator, his secretary, an economist and three private bankers who met in November, 1910, on Jekyll Island.  (The name sounds like something from a Gothic novel, but the place does exist.  I played golf there once and even slept in the famous Jekyll Island Clubhouse which was pretty run down by the time I stayed there.)  The secrecy of the meeting is emphasized in the "Federal Reserve History."  Senator Aldrich . . .

went to great lengths to keep the meeting secret, adopting the ruse of a duck hunting trip and instructing the men to come one at a time to a train terminal in New Jersey, where they could board his private train car. Once aboard, the men used only first names – Nelson, Harry, Frank, Paul, Piatt, and Arthur – to prevent the staff from learning their identities. For decades after, the group referred to themselves as the “First Name Club.”

Despite the fact that the  Federal Reserve is a model for monetary systems all over the world (including in Canada, Russia and China), and there are widely available descriptions of how the system works, more than 100 years later, the shadow of secrecy still seems to hover over how the system works and how private banks create money. Consequently, as I outline in How Is Money Created, for conspiracy theorists, the Fed is part of a cabal of satanist bankers out to control the world while, for others, it is an altruistic gathering of civil servants.  Officially and perhaps most accurately, it is a mix of the private and the public.  However, which is the dog and which the tail, and who wags whom remains a matter of debate.

Commercial banks, investment banks and shadow banks

For most of us, a bank is a bank.  (However, if you googled "types of banks," you might be in for a surprise.)   As Alan Blinder explains in After the Music Stopped,

[ . . ] commercial banks do have deposits--that's why we call them banks.  Investment banks do not.  They fund themselves almost entirely by borrowing. Remember, with a 40-to1 leverage, capital constitutes a mere 2.5 percent of assets.  They must borrow the other 97.5 percent.

Blinder points out that "By most estimates, the shadow banking system was [in 2008]  far greater than the conventional banking system."  "The shadow banking system," as Blinder explains is "a complex latticework of financial institutions and capital markets that are heavily involved in various aspects of borrowing and lending."  The important takeaway here is that these shadow banks are non-banks and therefore not regulated as stringently as commercial banks.  Current estimates of the size of the shadow banking system put it at $1.2 trillion.

In a 2015 post, I reported estimates of the unregulated derivatives market as being between 710 trillion and 1.2 quadrillion US dollars.  At the time,  I remember thinking these numbers were too big to be believed.  How could there be an unregulated market that was 50 times greater than the GDP (the total value) of the US economy?  According to Investopedia the current (2019) value of the derivatives market is estimated to be over a quadrillion dollars or 10 times the GDP of the entire world.

Commercial paper is money

The mind boggles at the size of these numbers.  How are they possible?  What are the mechanics that allow such fantastically large amounts of money to be created? When I read that "financial institutions  . . . are heavily involved in various aspects of borrowing and lending,"  I interpret that they are creating money.   As Goldstein explains, the collapse of 2008 "is a story about money itself—a new kind of money that started flowing through a new kind of banking system that nobody quite knew was a banking system."  This new kind of money is "commercial paper."  It usually comes in denominations of $100,000  and is issued by commercial banks and investment banks on behalf of large companies seeking funding. 

Solutions

About having private banks create money, Goldman comments, "For nearly a hundred years, some of the smartest economists in every generation have said this is a horrible way to do money."  One solution, as Goldman describes, is "dazzlingly simple":

The root of the issue is that basic banks do these two, very different things. (1) They hold our money and make it easier for us to get paid and make payments. (2) They make loans. The dazzlingly simple argument from all of these great economists comes down to this: split those into separate businesses. Variations on this idea are usually called “100% reserve banking” or “full-reserve banking” (as opposed to the current, fractional-reserve banking system)  [. . . .]

Another solution now being debated and seriously considered, as Goldstein reports, is called "Modern Monetary Theory or MMT, for short."  The underlying principle is that the government should take over control of the creation and distribution of money to ensure full employment and sustainable development of available resources, reducing the money supply to prevent inflation when these objectives are met.  Oddly, much of what has been happening in the context of the 2020 pandemic, with governments distributing money directly to businesses and individuals, seems in line with Modern Monetary Theory.  We are in the process of discovering how the theory works in practice.

Whatever the future holds, it is inevitable, as Goldstein concludes:

that money will change. The way we do money will look as strange to our great-great-grandchildren as a world where banks print their own paper money with pictures of Santa Claus.

Addendum

In response to this post, one of my readers (Thanks D!) email a link to this Front Burner podcast on Modern Monetary Theory:  Never Mind the Deficit!

The Politics of Adjectives

"If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, what is baby oil made from? "

 

                                                                anonymous

"The Great Canadian . . . . whatever"

Have you ever noticed how many Canadian businesses and organizations brand themselves as "The Great Canadian . . ." something or other?  Ever wonder why?  In a brief article in the Catholic magazine Commonweal in 1929, Harvard Professor of Literature, Douglas Bush, asked the question "Is There a Canadian Literature?"  His answer was that in order for a Canadian literature to exist it must produce evidence of greatness, a great novel or poem or play--something great enough to be included in the established canon of great literature.  The sardonic response has been that in order for anything to be "Canadian" it must also be "great"; ergo, "The Great Canadian Bagel," "The Great Canadian Restaurant," "The Great Canadian Theatre Company," etc, etc. 

 

Canadian Nationalism:  An oxymoron?

During my enthusiastic Canadian nationalist phase in the mid-to-late seventies, I naively imagined that most Canadians would be eager to embrace Canadian literature, performance and art.  To my shock, Canadians, who would claim admiration for Dutch painting, Italian opera, Swedish cinema, German theatre, and English or American literature, reacted with outrage at the thought of having anything described as "Canadian" "shoved down their throats."  (The violence of this expression always took me aback.)   For the intelligentsia and literati inside Canada, "Canadian" invariably implied "parochial," "tribal," and that famously misunderstood expression "a garrison mentality."

 Does Canada even exist?

I must admit, I have long suspected that the name "Canada" came from Portuguese map-makers who labelled the topography of my homeland "ca nada" meaning "here nothing."  (See Pure Laine Québécois)  Frank Davey,  who is routinely described as “a leading authority on Canadian literature,” is quoted as saying that “Canada does not exist except as a political arrangement for the convenience of individuals accidentally happening to live within its arbitrary area.” Hugh MacLennan, author of what, for some time, was consider the quintessential Canadian novel, Two Solitudes, was also categorical that "there is no Canadian literature." Eventually, we came around to admitting that Canada does exist as a nation, a state, an imagined community of people and diverse peoples, a big piece of real estate with borders and a quirky history, and it was okay to call something Canadian because we had a flag and a beaver and a constitution and a police force mounted on horseback, and Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Celine Dionne and hundreds of thousands of other names worth mentioning.

 Is There an Anglo-Québécois Literature?

Always a glutton for punishment, as an English professor in Quebec, I went from defending the adjective "Canadian" to promulgating the modifier "Anglo-Québécois."  Reactions tended to be a rolling of the eyes rather than the visceral "shoved down our throats" response.  However, resistance to "Anglo-Québécois" was similar to what I had earlier witnessed in reaction to "Canadian." 

Josée Legault, in her book, L’invention d’une minorité : Les Anglo-Québécois, is adamant that   "s'il est indéniable qu'un certain nombre d'anglophones résidaient bel et bien au Québec, on ne pouvait toutefois parler de l'existence d'une 'communauté' anglo-québécoise"  ["even if it is undeniable that a certain number of Anglophones do in fact reside in Quebec, one can still not talk of the existence of an Anglo-Québécois 'community'."]  In an essay entitled  “Neil Bissoondath disait . . . .,” professor of literary studies Gilles Marcotte was equally adamant that “Il n’existe évidemment pas telle chose qu’une littérature anglo-québécoise [ . . .]."  ["There obviously exists no such thing as an Anglo-Québécois literature . . . ."] 

What the experts say

Just as professors, critics and authors who would seem to have a vested interest in the recognition of Canadian literature resisted the idea, English professors, critics and authors in Quebec, typically repudiated the notion of an Anglo-Québécois literature.  Jason Camelot is a professor of English at Montreal's Concordia University and the co-editor of a collection of essays entitled Language Acts: Anglo Quebec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century.   In his introduction to a special issue of the journal Canadian Poetry on Anglo Quebec,  Camelot agrees with Marcotte that “there is no such thing as Anglo-Quebec literature in the sense that there is now Can Lit and la littérature québécoise."  More surprising still, Linda Leith, author, editor and impresario, who has done more for and about English literature in Quebec than anyone, has avoided the expression Anglo-Québécois to describe her work and interests.

Thinking inside the box 

 I know we are all supposed to admire people who "think outside the box" but, really, I wish there were more people (like me) who could think inside the box.  I may not agree with Professor Marcotte, but I understand his logic.  For Marcotte, Québécois literature is by definition French.  Québécois literature in English, for Marcotte, would be the equivalent of a married bachelor.

The term "Québécois" only became the politically correct designation of a citizen of the province of Quebec in the late 60s and throughout the 70s.  Earlier, "Québécois" was understood to mean a resident of Quebec City. With "French Canadian" now signalling Francophones outside Quebec, inside my symmetrically-inclined, Canadian box, Anglo Québécois seemed all the more legitimate as a designation for Anglophones living inside Quebec.

The difference between a wine glass and a glass of wine

I must confess that when I began writing this post, a discouragingly long time ago, it was with exactly the opposite intention of what I have written here.  I intended to maintain my obsessive conviction that "grammatical mistake" should be "a mistake in grammar," and "comparative literature" should be "studies of literature in a comparative context." Any composition manual will tell you that placing an adjective in front of a noun is more succinct and elegant than following a noun with an awkward clause or phrase.  Additionally, an adjective in front of a noun has the potential of becoming the next big thing:  "post modernism" versus the more informative "modernism after 1965," "oral literature"  (a contradiction in terms since "literature" means what is written) versus "written representations of orality," and "block chain" versus "a chain of blocks"--this latter phrase at least gives an inkling of how this technology works.  Nothing whets the appetite of an academic more than the possibility of coining the next big thing, the next viral catchphrase.

Clearly, many of the phrases we accept are, to use one of my favourite academic expressions, "sites of debate." The problem I see is when we accept without debate. I still wonder why, when the Americas comprise two continents and 35 countries, the adjective "American" is typically, exclusively applied to the USA.  I spent four years studying the works of George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce as "English" literature, barely noticing that these authors were all Irish. Politics matters.

I recognize that the appellation  "Canadian literature" means something more than and different from "literature in Canada," or "literature about Canada," or "literature by Canadians."  But I also see that when all these things have been happening for some time, the political decision to use the adjective this way makes sense, even if we might pause and stumble over exactly what the adjective "Canadian" might mean in this case.

 

Ideology

 

ideology (noun)

1. the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group.

2. such a body of doctrine, myth, etc., with reference to some political and social plan, as that of fascism, along with the devices for putting it into operation.

3. in philosophy, the study of the nature and origin of ideas.a system that derives ideas exclusively from sensation.

4. theorizing of a visionary or impractical nature.

(Random House Unabridged Dictionary)

 

In Ideology: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton describes ideology as follows: 

 

A dominant power may legitimate itself promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself. Such `mystification', as it is commonly known, frequently takes the form of masking or suppressing social conflicts, from which arises the conception of ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. (5-6)