Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"The core of managerial expertise was now defined as a distinct set of skills and techniques, focused upon a mastery of quantitative methodologies. Decisions based on sleep numbers were viewed as scientific, since numbers were thought to imply objectivity and accuracy... "Before that, 'expertise' meant the career long accumulation of knowledge of a specific field, as one progressed from rung to rung within the same institution or business... Auto executives were 'car guys' -- men who had spent much of their professional life in the automotive industry. They were increasingly replaced by McNamara-like 'bean counters,' adept at calculating costs and profit margins. "[This trend] morphed into the gospel of managerialism. The role of judgment grounded in experience and a deep knowledge of context was downplayed. The premise of managerialism is that the differences among organizations -- including private corporations, government agencies, and uni...

"Taylorism was based on trying to replace the implicit knowledge of the workmen with mass production methods developed, planned, monitored, and controlled by managers. 'Under scientific management,' [Taylor] wrote, 'the managers assume... the burden of gathering together all the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, formulae... Thus all of the planning which under the old system was done by the workmen, must of necessity under the new system be done by management in accordance with the laws of science.' -- Jerry Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics, pp.32-33.

Well, now I have a problem: when I agreed to review Kirzner, I thought the book would be new material. No, it is good material, but 80% of it I had read before. So I am not plowing through it at the speed I thought I would be moving at. And meanwhile, Jerry Muller's excellent book, The Tyranny of Metrics , which I also am slated to review, arrived in the mail. So, I guess I am going to review Muller first... well, except I also just got asked to review a paper on WebAssembly , so... I don't know: maybe I should write a joint review, interspersing my take on all three together? In any case, let's start in on Muller: this book has a target, which Muller calls "metric fixation." Muller's critique of metric fixation overlaps my work on rationalism, as shown by his statement of one of the "key components" of metric fixation: "the belief that it is possible and desirable to replace judgment, acquired by personal experience and talent, with numer...

"The concept of infinite God, the the divinity of the soul, of the link between the affairs of man and God, the concepts of moral good and evil, are concepts involved in the distant history of man's life that is hidden from our eyes, and those concepts without which life and I myself would not be, and rejecting all this labor of mankind, I wanted to do everything by myself, alone, anew, and in my own way." -- Leo Tolstoy, Confession

So, I've now come full circle, back to software engineering, after detouring through studying rationalism in economics , politics , philosophy and urban planning . And I have realized that long ago I had recognized the rationalist mistake in my own field of software engineering. It was present in the words of the critics of UNIX for not being designed according to some grand, theoretical blueprint, and instead being "hacked" together to fit the needs of the Bell Labs researchers. But even more so, it was present in the waterfall modelers and software managers requiring "complete specifications" before any coding starts. One goal of this effort was to be able to hire really dumb programmers, whom one could pay very little. As T.S. Eliot might have put it, "They were dreaming of systems so perfect that no one had to be intelligent." But the dream is impossible to achieve: it was like the Soviet Union's five-year plans that would envision all ...

Has been the development and completion of the critique of Enlightenment rationalism. The figures who accomplished this included: Edmund Burke Alexis de Tocqueville Fyodor Dostoevsky Lewis Carroll G.K. Chesterton T.S. Eliot C.S. Lewis Kurt Gödel Ludwig Wittgenstein Michael Oakeshott Eric Voegelin F.A. Hayek Michael Polanyi Paul Feyerabend Thomas Kuhn Jane Jacobs Alasdair MacIntyre Nassim Nicholas Taleb The job was difficult, because it required using theory to show the limits of theory. (Gödel's incompleteness theorem was an especially clever instance of accomplishing this.) But it is now done, and all that is required is to make the accomplishment more widely known.

"The great economist Ariel Rubinstein... refuses to claim that his knowledge of theoretical matters can be translated -- by him -- into anything directly practical. To him, economics is like a fable -- a fable writer is there to stimulate ideas, indirectly inspire practice perhaps, but certainly not to direct or determine practice. Theory should stay independent from practice and vice versa -- and we should not extract academic economists from their campuses and put them in positions of decision making." -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile , pp. 211-212.

Is now online .

Here John Gray does it : "or a sceptical view of the power of human reason (as in David Hume and Michael Oakeshott), conservatives distrusted any attempt to remake the world according to the dictates of high-minded ideals and abstract models." This is a common mistake made by people who do not understand Oakeshott was an idealist philosopher. Oakeshott was not "sceptical" about human reason. He did not say that rationalism is good reasoning , but still even the best reasoning comes up short of the mark. To the contrary, what he said was that rationalism is irrational . It is an attempt to replace concrete thinking with reasoning that is abstract, and therefore partial and defective. An analogy: imagine that some people's image of top notch free throw shooting was formed by watching Andre Drummond . They tell everyone, "The way to shoot free throws is the Andre Drummond way." Now Oakeshott comes along and says, "No, that way is nonsense: he...

We often find people saying something like, "If Americans can serve in the military at age 18, it is contradictory not to let them drink at 18 as well." ( An example  of this sort of accusation.) But these complaints rest on a confusion. When we want to build up a system of mathematics, such as geometry, we state propositions (theorems, axioms, lemmas, etc.) and work out their consequences. We should worry about the consistency of our propositions, because if two of them are contradictory, anything at all can be proven in our system. But the law does not consist of propositions with logical consequences, from which we try to prove something further. It consists of rules of conduct, with consequences for the breaking thereof, which serve to help guide and improve our practical life. In general, the only important sort of proposition that laws contain is that X is illegal and Y is legal.* Therefore, in general, laws can be contradictory only in declaring X to be both l...

If someone asks me what my greatest achievement in political philosophy is, I would answer, "Providing a precise, non-question-begging definition of ideology." I offered this, in Oakeshott on Rome and America , in Aristotelian terms: ideology is the attempt to treat as theoria was is instead a matter of phronesis (practical wisdom). Let us consider the matter of my getting to work. When I need to get to campus, what I do is consider the current circumstances I face in getting there, and then choose the best means to get there, given what I face. Some days, the G train is a perfectly adequate means. But other days, I find the G train is running slowly, or skipping stops, or I am just running a few minutes late, and I get a cab. But what route should the cab take? Well, I check my phone, and look for traffic jams. In fact, I've taken 5 or 6 different cab routes to get to work. But the "travel ideologue" will have none of this. There is a single correct wa...

Part one here . So how is it that liberalism became so tied to the position that rational argumentation is the primary way by which people change their opinions and behavior, despite all of the evidence to the contrary? To answer that question, we must understand liberalism as an attempt to solve a very serious problem, that of religious civil war. With the Catholic Church's loss of authority over the moral life of Western Europe, the region had become subject to a series of terrible civil wars over just who would possess that authority. All sides still agreed that reason alone, without guidance from a properly oriented will, was liable to drift off into mere self-justification. But how should we decide whose will is properly oriented? Charisma? Faith alone? Faith plus good deeds? The performance of miracles? Apostolic succession? The battle over these questions devastated Western Europe. People were desperate to find a way to stop the fighting, and liberals suggested one: ...

"[A] possible approach is to define an 'ideal' apart from historical considerations and seek its implementation regardless of the situation at hand. In [this] case, what should exist is thought to be obvious from the ideal itself. The 'idealist' does not welcome reminders of the actual experience of mankind, full as it is of evidence of the limitations of human beings, or of the restrictions imposed by existing circumstances... To adapt the ideal to a historical situation is to subvert it. It is historical circumstances that should be adapted to the ideal. To have some sort of respect for historically evolved patters of life is misguided, the idealist contends." -- Claes Ryn, A Common Human Ground , p. 88 For instance, one could take an abstraction like "equality" and decide that it means all people should have equal access to all goods. Then one could decide it is obvious from this ideal that private property must be abolished. As a result, ignor...

Theodore Dalrymple is feeling listless : "T.S. Eliot said that some people dream of a society so perfect that nobody would have to be good. Likewise, some people (managers mostly) dream of processes or forms so comprehensive that no one will have to think."

I encountered an article recently -- I am not going to bother even looking it up and linking to it, because similar sentiments are a dime a dozen -- arguing that the American way of using a fork while eating is "inefficient," and thus should be replaced by a more European style. But... what does "efficiency" have to do with table manners? If our goal, when sitting down at the table, was to simply get food as "efficiently" as possible into our mouths, we would just plunge our face down into our dish, the same way our dogs eat. Civilized eating is precisely about checking our tendency to eat like an animal, and constraining our appetite according to cultural rules as to how we may eat. To evaluate our table manners based on whether the American way of eating with a fork is more or less "efficient" than eating with chopsticks, or one's fingers, is to completely misconstrue what table manners are about: they exist to reduce our "effi...

E. H. Carr critiqued it at a crucial moment in Europe's history.

Not some kinky threesome: instead it is a preview of my forthcoming paper in Cosmos and Taxis , where I respond to Walter Block's critique of my paper, "Liberty Versus Libertarianism": ________________________ Professor Walter Block has done me the honor of penning an extended critique of portions of my paper, “Liberty Versus Libertarianism.” His response which addresses my comments on the work of the professor himself, and on his mentor, Murray Rothbard. A vigorous attack being a much more complimentary response to a paper than is a placid indifference, my thanks are sincere. Nevertheless, I think Block has misunderstood the essence of my thesis, particularly in his contention that I am only arguing “utilitarian” points, and I contend that his reply would have been more cogent had he paid more attention to the other parts of my paper. In writing this response, I hope that I can motivate a mind as sharp   as Professor Block’s to actually engage with my en...

Yesterday, I also got to watch my tutor figure out how to prove something that he had, perhaps, been shown long ago, but had long since forgotten. Proofs have often puzzled me: given a statement like "Prove that x is a Y if z(x) is prime" (I'm making that up but it's the right flavor) I would have no idea where to start. What I saw yesterday is you really don't have to have any idea how the proof itself will start: you start by just writing down everything you know about the problem, and then begin "messing around" with the equations you have. Sooner or later, you (hopefully) will see the "finish line," as my tutor put it, and you will have your proof. Then you can clean things up, and get the concise, knee proves one finds published. No book has ever indicated to me that proofs are done that way! And this is a very Oakeshottian point (or Polanyian, if you like your case for apprenticeship from a scientist).

Michael Oakeshott sometimes referred to the rationalist attitude to politics as "politics as the crow flies." As I understand his meaning here, he is criticizing the notion that, if in political life we detect some problem, we must immediately enact the first legislation that comes to mind that seems to correct the problem. The flaw in this approach is that it ignores the complexity and inter-connectedness of social life. The direct fix for problem A may easily create problems B and C, and they may be worse than problem A. Police personnel being drawn from the neighborhood in which they are to serve can create problems, since they may tend to favor their friends or relatives from the neighborhood. And police may not want to live in a troubled city. So states have moved to strike down residency laws , and some cities, like New York, forbid officers from serving in the precinct where they live.* But such moves may solve one problem at the expense of creating even worse ...

I believe I was the first person to note in print just how Aristotelian Oakeshott's analysis of rationalism is, although I must credit Noel O'Sullivan for dropping the hint that got me going in that direction. Here is the kind of thing I was getting at: "At the start of the Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle observes that moral action does not arise from deliberation. In order to think clearly about virtue, one must first already have a virtuous disposition formed by good habits. Aristotle drily remarks that the endless ethical debate of some philosophers is really just a sophisticated way of doing nothing. You become virtuous – and thus able to understand virtue – by acting virtuously. Nobody ever reasoned their way into right living." "...the endless ethical debate of some philosophers is really just a sophisticated way of doing nothing": Peter Singer springs instantly into my mind!