Fifty-fifty

“Are you Edward?”

Sometimes I'm asked whether I am any of the characters in a dialog I write, and by “sometimes” I mean I was asked once, a long time ago, whether I'm Edward. The answer is, of course, no. And yes.

The answer is “no” because (1) I have previously written myself explicitly as a character in a dialog, which should suggest that, in a Yogi-Berra-sorta-way, I'm being myself only when I am myself, and (2) it's a little dishonest, intellectually, to make a fictional character mouth one's own words wholly and completely.

But the answer is “yes” because every word in every dialog is my own, so I suppose I am all of my own characters and am being a little bit dishonest.

Douglas Hofstadter

I stopped blogging reading logs and decided instead to try to work into my posts my reading material whenever and wherever applicable. An example is with this post from a few months ago, in which I explain some of my thoughts inspired by reading a book on philosophy.

Lately I've been reading I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. I'm only three chapters into it, and thus it's too early for me to write about, but I will say this of Hofstadter's more famous book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: beyond being one of the most joyous and inspiring books I have read, it was GEB and not any of Plato's works that taught me the value of the dialog format for expressing ideas. What better way to anticipate the skeptic's questions but to write him into the essay and have him duke it out with the author? Done well and the concepts come alive within the narrative. Done poorly and it's still better than a poorly written essay.

Hofstadter's books are on the frontier of what we know about complexity. Specifically, they're about a peculiar subset of self-referential complexity from which arises consciousness and thinking. That his books are modern and yet so metaphorical and unscientific demonstrates, I think, that our collective body of knowledge lacks a rigorous and quantifiable understanding of complexity: a science of complexity. It's not merely that we lack sufficient ability to think about thinking; we lack sufficient ability to understand what complexity actually is.

Why did Rome fall?

I find it disturbing that after fifteen hundred years of thinking about it, we still can't figure out why the Roman Empire collapsed (or even agree that it did collapse rather than evolve into feudalism), and yet we expect to know how to run our own nation and solve our own contemporary problems.

I suspect we'll never know why Rome collapsed because at a minimum we'll always lack necessary firsthand data to formulate a rigorous conclusion. For example, we can only estimate big-picture metrics of the classical era such as GDP, yet alone can we figure out with suitable accuracy stats such as the empire's annual budgets for road maintenance. I further suspect that any useful explanation of Rome's collapse will necessarily involve some explanation of complexity and the general pattern of growth (the increase of complexity and heterogeneity) and decline (the decrease of complexity and heterogeneity).

Today's world

That brings us back to today. We can't figure out Rome's problems, even with the benefit of hindsight, and yet it's becoming increasingly clear, at least to many of us, that today's complex world is sailing towards a modern Charybdis and Scylla. In short, on the one hand, our current recessionary problems highlight our need to grow the economy to reestablish solvency within both the public and private sectors, and on the other hand, our environmental problems highlight our need to shrink the economy to something sustainable and lasting. Odysseus chose to sail towards Scylla and lose only a few of his men rather than lose his entire ship to Charybdis. My question is: which monster is which in our current predicament?

Only a foolish and superficial study of history emboldens one with the belief that human progress is at all smooth or even monotonic. History is rife with ups and downs, rises and declines, beginnings and new beginnings, and it takes a great fool to think that our civilization will be different in these ways. But it takes a different kind of fool to think that this wonderful bubble that is the First World can be timed or predicted. Malthus argued that the decline was near during the initial years of the Industrial Revolution, which makes him wrong by about two hundred years and counting. Currently, many environmentalists and economic pessimists think the decline is near, again. Maybe they're right; maybe they're wrong. I don't see much difference, in terms of accuracy, in predicting the fate of a civilization and predicting the stock market. In both cases we're only taking stabs at it.

Not too long ago I told my dad in some detail about some of my ideas of where I think things are heading in the financial markets. We're not crass individuals, but we do enjoy discussing market news. To me it seems no less frivolous than discussing politics or professional sports. I can't remember what I was arguing for that day, though it probably had to do with retracting money supplies and deflationary spirals. My dad listened patiently through my spiel and after I had exhausted my fuel, he calmed said: “You know, I think you may be right.” I said, “Really?” To which he replied: “Yeah, I give it fifty-fifty odds.”

Yes, fifty-fifty. But here's to striving to make it an interesting and cohesive fifty-fifty.