Ascribing intentions in language

  • Jan 8, 2009

Let's play the game of analysing language.


My position on language is that when we can see disrepancies between what is happening and what is said, there is usually a deeper reality, and the disrepancies in language can be ascribed to linguistic pragmatics (the science that studies language in it's context). Natural languages are not formal languages.

Hamas is trying to achieve some political gains out of this. Now first there is the problem of ascribing intentions to a group. Are intentions only personal, or are there two kinds? What about if different individuals have different intentionswithin the same group. What's the group's intentions then? But putting that aside for now. Now it may be possible that no one on the Hamas front tries to achieve political gains by getting their asses kicked by the Israelis. It may be possible that they are all fighting valiantly their opponent. Who, one could ask, in their right mind, could put their lives at risk just so they can score points "on the arab street"? Yet, to an outsider, perhaps an opponent of Hamas, they can see the effect that their dogged resistance can have: perpetuating the conflict and gaining popular support and sympathy through their struggle on the arab and muslim street. Is this valid?

There are maybe three things: the intention of the actor.
2 
Let's consider an animal: the dog is trying to 


There is in our brain the intetional side: the conscious side that makes plan and can explicitly describe his actions and intentions. I'm trying to put the glass on the table. Then there is the non-conscious, habit driven or whatever. For example, the dog is not trying consciously to 

Outlooks on an economic recovery from a policy POV

Disclaimer: sometimes it may sound like I know what I'm talking about, but I really don't. These are just my intuitions and a high flying analysis of what I hear from policy makers, pundits and economists on the state of the economy. At worst, I'm mostly going on a whim. I'm just a yobbo!

Here is a new article on Keynesianism dressing the table for us: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123137373330762769.html#



The premises

The upcoming stimulus package is designed to step in for the consumer: we have been riding two bubbles in the past 20 years (tech and housing) and the consumer has been spending well above his capacity, exhibiting national negative savings rate at one point. 


Hypothesis

Now that the consumer's wealth has been slashed severely, and that multiple lenders have gone bankrupt, the consumer will change his consumption pattern for several years to come, fundamentally altering the mechanics of the economy.


The dangers for policy makers

In the long run, such a change in consumer behavior could be for the better: his savings rate will be better, and he may have gain a healthy dose of caution. However, this could also mean that policies may become unaligned with reality: the bailouts and stimulus may try to recover levels that we grew accustomed to during the bubbles era while the background economic reality becomes disaligned with economic policy and measures. In other words, the effective economic reality is running below those now come to be expected growth curves. It is a dangerous case of wishful thinking. This, I repeat, is due to a fundamental change in consumer behavior.  I believe that this is what leads economist Feldstein* to fear for the worst: that the economy may become dependent on the stimulus plan and once we remove the cash injections down the road, in 2 years or so, the consumer still won't be there to pick it up. This brings about the dangers of a swelling and continuing debt.

As is often stated, we are in uncharted territory. But the remedies that we bring to a patient whose disease we are unaccustomed with cannot be used willy-nilly, even though it can be tempting simply because actions must be taken. 


Deficit

 In particular, what will it mean to run such a large deficit? So far, the feeling I have gotten from pundits and experts is that we need to do something now and that we can cross the deficit bridge once we get there. Indeed, the stimulus package that should be announced in the weeks to come seem to make consensus amongst economists and policy makers. I fear that there is a general lack of care regarding the issue. I'd be interested in learning how big the forecasted deficit will be, how we plan to pay it off (the Bush tax cuts were suppose to pay for themselves through increased growth - it obviously hasn't turned out that way yet), and also how will the new expanding deficit compare historically.

We have a recent example in our last business cycle. In the 1990's, one of the government's top priority was debt reduction in the US, Canada, and Europe. Someone could thus maintain that our economies were emerging from the early 1990's recession where they had to spend a lot of money. However, there seems to be a consensus that this is not a regular boom - bust cycle.


Public works 

Public works, even ignoring for a moment the potential for corruption and general money wasting that these tend to lead to, are also a dubious alternative. We are a mature economy. Roads need to be maintaned, but they cannot lead to the economic synergies that they do elsewhere or have done in the past: they do not have the investment value that they have say in Chain today or in the Hoover damn era. Infrastructure for our economy, by in large, must be viewed as a maintenance cost much more than as an investment venue. The job creation and stimulus effect is thus short term and punctual.


Solutions

The lesson from the past two years seem to be that we must refrain from the excesses that neo-liberalism has brought about and that a new direction must be taken. However, we must refrain from sinking into a socialist - keynesianist style policy making: you cannot buy yourself out of a recession. 

The stimulus really are bailouts, much more like a bandaid than a fix. The synergetic and multiplying effects that money injunctions and public works have are limited at best. They must not be allowed to take center stage in our national discussion of economic reform.

What we need to do is take a few pages out of Global Political Economics, by Robert Gilpin, and go back to a more directed economy in the shape of a gradual yet modular economic plan for the next 5, 10 and 20 years. What we need is direction and fostering of certain sectors, in a moderate, conservative fashion. 

The comeback to that is that governments can't pick winners and must let markets sort it out. That is true to a large extent and America is very good at applying those principles of market forces. That's the fundamentals, that's the canvas we can work with. 

Yet there are obvious loosers that we can deal with: car makers for example. Once, Detroit was the subject of a strategic target. Now, it does not deserve it anymore because the economy has moved on to other focus points of economic drive and development. I believe that an "organized bankruptcy" and supporting temporarily the workers, as the Bush administration is doing right now, is the right way to go. 

Also, there are also obvious winners: pharmaceuticals and medical research, and IT research. A greater investment fromt he government in those fields will be small in comparison to the bailouts plans yet it can trully bring about greater benefits for the economy in the years and decades to come.

A national economic plan with a focus on the long term also means reinvesting in education. Education standards in the US have fallen behind in the past years. It must redress if we are to keep our edge in creativity and enterprise.

We must not forget that the US faces fierce competition on the international stage and is starting to loose it's edge in cutting edge products and development. Developing an economic plan that focuses on just that will both be beneficial to the US economy and will foster the leadership of the US politically and economically internationally. Right now, a political economic plan is sorely lacking. Without that, we are chasing something that isn't anymore with stimulus and government direct money: the inflated economic levels of the bubbles era. The lack of a dynamic, forward looking economic plan also opens the door to yet another danger: protectionism.

The protectionist backlash

(...)

*The Charlie Rose show, 6th Jan 2009.
** There will, of course be bubbles again: I don't not mean to imply they can be fully eradicated. They seem to be tied to fundamental human traits like the "bandwagoning" behavior. Bandwagoning, however, usually works: a good idea catches on. Eventually, however, it can lead to ill effects (there is an over inflation of interest for that one thing). This could be yet another lesson on human rationality: our brains have developed cognitive adaptations (sometimes "hard wired", sometimes more cultural) that work wonderfully, but sometimes can be tricked into giving the "irrational" answer. All kinds of illusions are of this kind, or errors found in human judgement in the study of statistics for examaple.
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The theory of Everything in Astrophysics, Metaphysics, and ataraxia

I once commented on the limits, so to speak, of the theory of everything in Astrophysics. Namely, it is a theory about the phusis, that is, nature, and leaves some questions opened. Those questions belong to the metaphysical realm. Questions about our fundamental relation with this phusis. In this respect, multiverses and strings - even if they end up being confirmed by observation, will be in no better standing than the cosmogonies conjured up in Miletus, 26,000 years ago. Our theory of the physical world - including descriptions of ourselves and our functioning, cannot answer questions raised a century ago by phenomenologists, and yet others more recently within the so called post-modern movement. 


For me, ataraxia, peace of mind, would come once I can settle this metaphysical question - in fact it is the only metaphysical question. This question can only be resolved rationally and not empirically. In it's ultimate form, it can also only be resolved privately, and can only be helped along publicly, not taught. It is a akin to the teachings of a zen master who guides his students through the absurd looking indications found in that literature on to the path of serenity and one-ness with the universe. Only, in the case of philosophy, such a process cannot be obtained through revelation or emotional communions with the surroundings, or with concepts; it must be obtained the old fashioned way - the philosophical way. 

Perhaps an answer is not possible. Like Sextus Empiricus, I fear that we must satisfy ourselves with a suspension of judgement, or of belief. Perhaps. But the mind doesn't like ambivalence: it strives for symmetry. Skepticism is indeed a disease of the mind.

One day, I wish to tackle this problem head on, and make progress. I feel like I've been stuck for too many years.

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Land of opportunity

[To the reader: Skip this]

But when I'm listening to Paulson or Bernanke or other experts, and look at their records and actions, and the innacuracy of every forecaster 2 years ago. Nobody could tell us what is happening now, and nobody does much better now at understanding it as it unfolds. At least the problem is with the future of things. The past is our data mining . This is true from a phenomenological perspective as well as from an scientific. The problems pertains to the episteme field in general, ie that any sentient being behaves on a perceptory and cognitive side.

I am wondering how much about this recession has to do with phenomenas more commonly found in social psychology, namely role playing, script following, and the types of phenomenas akin to self-fulfilling prophecies, or naturally organizing phenomenas. IE, what we see here is a virus thrown inside the system, which propagates in such a way that it gives rise to unintended consequences, and the system re-organizes himself to a new face. In this case: a polarizing effect of fear and hide response. At case: even if they are given the credit now, as has been tried already in numerous cases, the bankers and money movers are reluctantly to do anything with it since its value / rarity has dramatically changed and the mood for a time period exceeding the expectancy of this cash is pessimistic. Are you pessimistic or optimistic for the future? That is something central bankers would always wish to be able to modulate, but they cannot, and have very limited influence over it, because they took too much credit for when it was going well and now they appear as having lost all credibility as they are fumbling now. It's like the old peasants blaming the king for the weather type of thing and the king being caught in a control system that doesnt work (namely religious offerings and (monarchical) pleas).

A bear market is where clever people get rich, I think the rationale goes. In a high flying market, everything is saturated with money as everybody is looking for a share of the pie. When the pie appears to be all eaten, people retract their stakes for fear of getting burned. So the idea is to pick the right horse just when the race is about to start again - just when the bear is about to swing to bull. It can be the same thing in business. Although this depends slighlty on the industry your business is in, it in any case affects all those who need to borrow money, or to go public for financing as the lenders and investors are not there.

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Turning point

  • Dec 7, 2008

Friedman, the journalist, tried to imagine inflection points in the course of history, or something of htat level of abstraction in human affairs. The idea seemed gimmecke, or the kind of stuff that ends up applying to too many situations, but doesn't really inform us about how. Yet, there remaines watershed decisions in human behavior.

(...)

Memento(2001)

This movie can be viewed as a cinematographic interpretation of some of Descartes' fundamental worries in the Meditations: about experiences of consciousness taken in a phenomenological angle, pushing to an extreme the level of doubt and the analysis of fondamentalist beliefs and intuitions giving rise to validity and consciousness.

I thought this movie was brilliant beyond and above itself in that way, but the movie also has merits of its own on a cinematographic level.

The story is very convincing and plays like an investigatory affair, going backward in time and seeding doubts about the order of events. Sometimes it is hard to tell what really happened or which of the characters is to be trusted. It builds suspense and tension but you have to make an effort to follow it. It's not an easy movie. It's a psychological thriller.


Memento philosophical themes

  • Time
  • Modulity in interpretation (of the past), Facts
  • Discontinuity in phenomenological experience
  • Identity = Memory
  • Doubt, Skepticism
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The history behind this recession

The great fueling of the US economy by Greenspan, Bush, and that external event called China

 

(Random thoughts about the storyline leading to today’s recession.)

 

I’m trying to analyze the events that led to our current economic recession.

 

When the tech bubble burst, both the fiscal policy side and the monetary side reacted very quickly and very sharply. The results, it seemed, were immediately palpable. Growth was sustained thanks in large part to the absence of inflation. The authorities took credit for their actions, but a larger effect on the rapid recovery came from one external factor of growing and gathering impact: China. The effect that China had on the world was known, but it wasn’t reflected through policy. Indeed, China provided a steady contribution to the US from the 1990’s onward. More pointedly, China was responsible for sweeping the US back onto it’s feet, providing cheap products to it’s consumers in return for business opportunities and a resurgence in certain sectors (notably mining, engineering).

 

Now these over laxive economic measures spurred and sustained consumer spending and the price of property. What went wrong with the american consumer? First, a housing bubble: price of property was ahead of itself. But this wasn’t quite as bad as some people thought: Prices of property have slowed and receded in the past years but not nearly as much as in 1992 (?). What went wrong had to do with the margin of error that buyers kept in financing their dream house. Interest rates were very low for too long. Savings levels were low throughout that period. Prices of bonds were out of wack with the normal healthy signs of an economy.

 

The overly optimistic house buyer was sustained and made more dangerous with the diffusion of debt through new financial products. In my opinion, the fault here is that risk was made an object of speculation. No matter how rational, educated, mathematicised the decisions on creating and then trading these risk assets, the fact that now many investors traded small parts of a huge debt that is ultimatelly redeemable only at one major bank or another, where the investor does not have the liability of the debt as a whole, but only for his share. This is a failure of markets. The market ran ragged, untamed by his master.


There was one alarming stat that got mentioned but maybe should have been acting upon: savings rate. America was fuelled by it's consumer spending spending spending.

 

Artificially created systems of enough complexity can have unintended consequences, and the global economic system is one of the most interesting living, artificially made system to study.

 

Now as soon as something else came up (rising gas prices, thanks in large part to China and to structural effects in the petrol industry), or for that matter, any other thing that happened, the house buyer with no savings couldn’t keep up. Sub prime loans started to bust, affecting their lenders and the trail of debt sharers financing them. Defaults on those were then so great that it brought housing companies to their knees, and then big banks. A credit shortage in that sector created shortage for all other sectors and now liquidity is sparse and problematic everwhere. Now we are seeing falling numbers in corporate investments.

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Two arguments to couch Realism

1) Game theory and evolution

 

Take the following sketch.

 

Peaceful nations will only be succesful if other nations are peaceful. Cooperation is possible in peace. Warring nations however, by breaking the circle of confidence, can take undue advantage of other peaceful nations, as covered in games theory.

 

By acknowledging that any ethical theory is accessory to these types of such game theoretic political relations, we can avoid the pitfalls of idealism, such as political liberalism.

 

Now, you might say that it is pretty weak to justify a political personality based on the dubious application of a theory about rational choices. Well, game theoretic choices are an appropriate description of countless of choices that humans make on different levels – from the real life interrogation rooms to the strategic nuclear actions nations make. Caution! Realism is certainly not a theory of behavoir. Countless other factors affect the behavior of an individual, or a nation – sometimes contrary to rationality, or sometimes just irrelevant to whatever realism says, which is just another piece of intellectual artefact. No, Realism is an ethical choice, it is a guide to action, but it is also rooted in the belief that the adoption of its principle will advance a unit in a competitive environment. (Competitive means scarcity of different sources and endangerement to reproduction.) So in a way, there is a prediction made about the bahavior of something: the prediction is made about a population, about those who will reproduce – ie those who will exhibit the correct or optimal game theoretic answer, either by choice or by accident.

 


2) The nature of ethics


Ok, suppose that you still reject this argument. Then I have another one that is independent of rational choice theories. This has to do with a critique of our ethical reason, a la Kant – except I do NOT come up with the same results. His results are manifestedly wrong when you look at his treatment of lying. Out ethical sense is not rooted into anything transcendantal. You can find the error in Kant in just 2-3 paragraphs, where he commits an illegal operation. To illustrate, he first starts to question and doubt the common ethical sense and then asks where can its source be? The problem is that he asks the question only rhetorically, only as a litterary or oratory face front for his answer which he already has. This was the common method of writing and arguing in the 17th 18th c. I guess and his results suffered accordingly. The answer is that there is no answer to the question of source in ethics. If there were, ethics would be a science, which it is not. I mean we can make a science about ethics – which is kinda what I’m doing here, trying to describe the beast, but ethical choices cannot be justified by natural laws. Natural laws can inform the ethical choice – and indeed, perhaps we could push it and try to say that science is servile to our ethical sense, which would be appropriately pragmatic, but ethical guidelines cannot be elevated to the rank of natural law – ever. The two discourses are anti-thetical, and many a mistake was commited when the boundaries were trespassed.

 

(…)

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MMO IP

Features:

  • One world - no realms, no shards. Same as EVE: servers host part of the world and are hidden from the player besides for loading screens.
  • Vast expenses of territory to permit building and land development/exploitation over time. Moving boundaries of countries or tribes controlled by human governments, i.e. player associations.
  • Player economies: in former games, the role of the player in an economy was auctioner (finding yourself in possession of an item and trying to sell it to someone) and crafter (crafting something and selling it). In the new MMO, players will also run workshops and farms and will own land that he will need to augment and protect. Everybody can be a land owner, that my friend is a political revolution. The economy will also have a localized aspect, and there could be more than one currency.
  • Combat: combat will be strategic and deep. Will attempt to simulate "physically conceivable" mechanics, even if that ends up delving in the magical or bending of the laws to create a supernatural.
  • Politics: form different lvls of association of players: clans, towns, counties, alliances.
  • Too much for any professional development team to accomplish in a 3/4 year time span you say? I don't think so. What I propose is akin to Bioware producing only the toolset of their product, without the campaign. It's about finding the right variables to set a complex system, and let it go and take awe at the unexpected consequences (and hope for the best).
  • The driving influence should be to reproduce a dumbed down but meaningful model of small scale geo-political early human history. With it's internal structures political structures, it's industry and resource gathering, it's warfare, it's diplomacy.
  • On and off the game. The game will make use of other mediums such as web based to manipulate and follow the world. If there are votes or ponctual events that could affect you out of game. There will be crackheads, or the game will be asking too much of a player.
Addendum: well since the player stands much to loose when he is away from the game, an insurance policy can be applied deus ex machina style. And who controls your farm wasn't always and doesn't necessarily need to be over dramatic. The destruction thereof is more, but there should be a penalty or a tradeof to the would be ravagers.

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Warhammer criticism

Warhammer's shortcomings are interesting to dissect.

They made one fatal mistake: they felt the need to immitate WoW to have any chance at success. They had a great idea initially: RvR, but they felt queasy, didn't have full confidence in their idea and felt compelled to bring the game closer to WoW to justify all the efforts and money spent on development.

Water cooler quests

It was reported not long ago after launch that WAR was delayed when WoW:BC came out due to quality differences in PvE content between the two games. Mythic recognized WoW was blowing their game out the water. They then spent the rest of development putting more energy into developing the PvE side of their game. Result: although smaller in size, the PvE content is fun and competitive by most reports. However, the big looser in this is RvR. Basically they imitated wow and created something only half as good as WoW and left their real creative idea into the gutter.

By all accounts, the RvR (i.e. end game) is buggy. It is in a state of incompletion and there is a lot of confusion about it's workings (nobody seems to know if it's working as intended or not!). Yet, it seems to be the most popular issue people want to see improved. Just look at the forums: the most posts in any subcategories is in the RvR category. People's complaint usually revolve around RvR giving too litlle XP, being broken or something concerning it. I've seen very little complaints from people about raiding and PvE - and it's not because it works perfectly. It's probably because customers get what Mythic don't: people aren't gonna play the lesser version of the PvE current wining modle - they will go to Wow for that which does it much better and are inovators - not copiers, in that category. RvR is what WAR is all about and if that fails, then the game has nothing more/new to offer and will perish in a very ugly death.

Population issues, realm balance and match making issues

This is absolutely unacceptable! In a game where playing with and against others is so fundamental, how could the problem be ignored all the way through development until release? They had WoW's battlegroups staring them in the face for all this time. For a game that is a lot more commited to Scenarios/Battlegrounds than WoW is, you'd figure they would provide a better and improved version to WoW. There are several solutions, most of which involve battlegroups/ divisions.

I surmiss there was just a lot of miscomunication between those who were developing the world and not making it large enough to support larger populations and those who took concerns about population and matchmaking up above. This here is a big total fail.

Is the game salvageable?

I think they are already taking a big hit after the first month. A lot of people are not going to renew their subscriptions. However, I think they get the picture now and will be putting more efforts in finishing the RvR and making it the focus in the game that it should be.

So, yes. Yes the game is salvageable. I am hopping for is that 3 or 4 months after release, they will release a big patch that reinvents to some degree and fix RvR and make this an interesting game to play. They are the only one out there right now that can/claims to offer RvR. If they get it right next time, they will get their money.

In fact, it seems a lot easier in terms of development to make good RvR than PvE. It's the difference between writing and implementing a complex story (quests) vs giving players the tool to have fun and make their own stories (RvR). 

In my opinion, Mythic was simply mis directed by the people responsible for steering the boat (Barnett). This guy's forte seems to be PR more than jetting down the big lines of game design.

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