July 30, 2012
Monday

Constructionism and Determinism is how our species organize our day to day survival strategy, and it works pretty good, but there are many a dangerous flaw; Friedrich Hayek saw it as The Fatal Conceit; Heinz Pagels' Cosmic Code, wrote about Albert Einstein's opposition to the New Quantum theory... his quip, "God doesn't play dice." Einstein was saying he believes in 'determinism', that 'probability' was abhorrent and that nature was 'put together with mathematical precision' and could be understood and predicted. It appears even Einstein could be wrong.

Back to present day Economy, about to "go off the cliff"; Professor Hayek wrote 140 pages of exposition, the Evolution of Economics... aka The Fatal Conceit; The Errors of Socialism. This will be where eyes glaze over and the parrot will prevail, but... if you want to know how IT works...  140 pages, a highlighter, a sharp pencil to underline, notes in the margins... parallels of Einstein's inability to accept that God too plays dice with "probability". This is key to understand intellectuals inability to accept that "centralized planning" - micro-managed - by elitists... fails.

Short version; world wide human civilization and the values we consider to be "the norm" have evolved over thousands of years.

- excerpts from The Fatal Conceit -

"Disliking these [evolved] constraints so much, we hardly can be said to have selected them; rather, these constraints enabled us to survive." - "Modern economics explains how such an extended order can come into being, and how it itself continues an information-gathering process, able to call up, and put to use, widely dispersed information that no central planning agency, let alone any individual, could know as a whole, possess or control."

"The manual worker readily assumes that it is indeed his employer's job to know, if anyone does, what needs the work of his hands will ultimately satisfy. But the place of individual intellectual work in the product of many intellectuals interacting in a chain of services or ideas will be less identifiable. That better educated people should be more reluctant to submit to some unintelligible direction - such as the market - thus has the result that they tend to resist just what would increase their usefulness to their fellows."

"Perhaps this hostility and susceptibility would diminish if such persons understood better the role that abstract and spontaneous ordering patterns play in all life, as they no doubt would do if better informed on evolution, biology, and economics. But when confronted by information in these fields, they often are reluctant to listen, or even to consider conceding the existence of complex entities of whose working our minds can have only abstract knowledge."

The result is that such persons are tempted to interpret more complex structures animalistically as the result of design, and to suspect some secret and dishonest manipulation - some conspiracy, as of a dominant 'class' - behind 'designs' whose designers are nowhere to be found." - "For intellectuals generally, the feeling of being mere tools of concealed, even if impersonal, market forces appears almost as a personal humiliation."

These key points are from Professor Hayek, not to inflame or incite, just to share interesting correlations between genius stumbling toward their instinctive search for "The Theory of Everything" and our current political debacle, where it seems we are 'toes on the edge of another very careful, and painful mistake.'

Hayek understood the history of economics from baseline into the statistical vapor of probability... and saw that 'tinkering' with the question - can a mind - the product of a brain - comprehend reality? Judging by what we have seen in congress, judges, educators, politicians, government world wide... got to ask yourself  "Parrots can talk, but do they understand?"

Ken Bylund
Ketchikan, AK

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