Tag: greatest hits

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Equality v FAirness

The concepts of fairness and equality significantly overlap, but they are not the same. A recent study showed how people’s perception of fairness of equal outcomes varied depending on what rewards were being offered. It seems that most people think equality is fair up to a certain level; after that treating unequal contributions equally is unfair. Modern philosopher John Rawls in his theory of a “hypothetical contract” argued we could imagine a fair society if we imagined a situation where all of our individual identities were temporarily unknown. What rules would we all set up if we didn’t know what role we were going to get to play? This kind of analysis is bound to produce equality and you can see this kind of thinking at work for SOME things.

The sun also shines on the wicked

People tend to believe in equal distribution when they believe rewards are random or unearned. That makes sense to me too. If you cannot make reasonable distinctions, your best course of action is to treat everybody equally. People are even more generous with things they don’t feel they earned. The best time to ask for a loan is after someone has come into an unexpected windfall. Do the thought experiment yourself. How different would be your response to a friend asking for ten of dollars if (1) you just found $100 on the ground or (2) you just spent 12 hours washing dishes to earn $100 (maybe $60 after taxes and fees)?

And think of how much more generous you could be if it wasn’t even yours. I remember as a child, friends would sometimes let friends skip in line … but almost always in BACK of them. No cost generosity can be appealing.

So people believe that fairness is pretty much the same as equality when rewards are random. They also tend to believe in minimums. Few people think it is morally wrong for a starving man to steal bread from someone who has more than enough. It is interesting to consider how the evaluation changes when one starving man steals bread from another starving man. Most of us believe in basic equality, i.e. some minimum level.

Outside games of chance, the world offers few examples of complete randomness.

After that, fairness and equality diverge and their fairness requires unequal treatment of unequal inputs. It is a very imperfect calculation. There is a lot of random chance involved and that makes judgment more difficult. And it was difficult already, since the amount contribution might be hard to see. The contribution of someone who thinks for a couple of minutes and then makes the effective move might be worth more than someone who struggles all day doing the wrong things.

We also come against the problem of previous expertise. There is the story about the man who locks himself out of his house. He calls the locksmith, who wisely quotes a price of $50 BEFORE solving the problem. After they agree, the locksmith takes out a little hammer, whacks the lock and it opens.

“Fifty dollars,” the man complains. “All you did was hit it once. I want an itemized bill.” The locksmith hands him a bill – “$.05 for whacking the lock; $49.95 for knowing how to whack the lock.”

Those least able to make meaningful distinctions tend to favor equality of outcomes

It is no coincidence that the love of equality is most ardent among the young. They have not yet had much of a chance either to earn anything or see anybody else earn it. With experience comes a greater appreciation for fairness. Interestingly, the young tend to believe in economic equality, but can be ferociously unequal in other ways. The degree of social stratification among teenagers is something most adults never see. You can see what they think more about and what they know more about.

A modern society makes it harder to judge fairness too. In an agricultural society, everybody’s efforts were literally on view. Laziness or ineptitude would show up in a farmer’s crops. If there was bad luck, such as weather or unexpected bugs, everybody would be aware of that too. A man who worked hard only to have his crops destroyed by a hail storm clearly deserved help, the drunk that never bothered to plant at all, not so much.

Did the ants marginalize the grasshopper?

The old fable of the ants and the grasshopper appeals to an agricultural society. Retelling in our contemporary context often has the grasshopper saved by the generosity of strangers. I am sure there is a version that taxes the ants to pay for the grasshopper’s welfare and criticizes the narrow-minded, if hard working ants, for their insensitivity to grasshopper culture.

People are much more willing to tolerate suffering in themselves or others when choice is involved. Physically hard work is less common than it used to be, but people are willing to put themselves through grueling physical suffering in pursuit of sports. Nobody feels sorry for the Olympic Marathon runner, but imagine if someone was forced to go through that much agony to earn a daily living. The difference is choice

I liked (and still like) to drink beer and on some occasions have consumed enough to suffer severe “flu-like” symptoms the next day. Chrissy makes no attempt to mitigate my suffering and in fact boldly opens drapes and stomps around the house in the early morning (i.e. before 10 am) hours. Her behavior is very different if my flu-like symptoms are caused by actual flu. What causes the difference? Choice.

It is just plain cruel to punish someone if he has no choice and cannot change his behavior. On the other hand, if someone can choose, it makes sense not to protect him from the consequences of those choices. In fact, allowing someone to persist in error when he has the capacity to change is a morally questionable and cruel thing to do. Should you let a child walk into a fire because he is fascinated by the flame?

This is the moral hazard of insurance. Insurance is great to the extent that it spreads the risk of random events so that no individual is destroyed by bad luck. However, if individuals start to engage in riskier behaviors BECAUSE they can take advantage of others through insurance, you have a moral hazard as well as higher system-wide costs.

Free will or determinism

I think that current debates between liberals and conservatives often come down to the age-old debate about freedom and determinism. You can see it in the way they use language. Consider the case of the drunken farmer reference above. When asked why the fields went untended, a conservative might say something like, “He just wouldn’t stop drinking long enough to do the work,” while a liberal might say, “He was unable to stop drinking …” or even “He didn’t get the help he needed to stop drinking ….”

There has never been a definitive answer in the free will debate. The most nuanced approaches talk about free will exercised within the limits of constraints, but this just moves the discussion argue about the height of the walls of the constraints.

Somewhere between stimulus and response is a choice

A poor man might have fewer opportunities than a rich one, but how much is his behavior DETERMINED by his poverty and how much exercise of free will does he have? Nobody has complete freedom and nobody accomplishes anything completely on his own. But we are not animals. Somewhere between the stimulus and our response is a region of choice.

It is not always bad to start off or be economically less well off. For example, I am happy that I grew up in modest means. It has made my life easier in the respect that I didn’t have to “live up” to a high standard of the previous generation. Some of my richer friends have never escaped the shadow of their parents’ wealth, and it seems to fill them with anxiety and guilt. They might have really nice baggage, but maybe it is better not to have to carry it all.

The bottom line for me is that it is not unfair that some people are rich and others are poor. My own prejudice would be for some limits, so that we could relieve existential poverty and I believe that great wealth is morally corrupting, especially great unearned wealth. But that is just my prejudice.

I think there is a moral hazard in wealth redistribution. The test for me would be sustainability. If “society” can “invest” in you and there is a reasonable chance that this will help you become a productive and independent citizen who will someday make contributions (not only economic, also social, artistic etc.) in excess of the investment, it is the right thing to do. You have the choice not to play in this game, but others should have the reciprocal choice not to give to you. In other words, nobody should have the right to make demands w/o offering something in return.

Reciprocity is one of the basics of civilization

Most of us do not expect perfect reciprocity in every transaction, but you expect something. If you are generous to me today, you might never expect something back from me specifically to you, but you do expect that I will at least be grateful and/or be generous to someone else in the future.  Remember that movie “Pay it Forward”?

Freedom is more than another word for nothin’ left to lose

We have choices. We often call the sum of our choices “freedom”. Sometimes people ask what freedom is good for and we might try to answer that it helps create wealth or that we can help the poor more etc. It does these things. Free countries tend to be richer, cleaner and generally more pleasant. But freedom is not the means to a goal. Freedom is the goal for which we are willing to sacrifice other things. If we created a perfectly “fair,” “just” or “equal” society at the cost of freedom, which includes the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail, we have accomplished nothing.

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Snowy Cracks in the Façade of Civilization

This year has been especially cold and there has been more snow than usual. The snow in December filled and exceeded last year’s whole year averages. It looks like we are going to fill this year’s quota by the end of next week.

Northern Virginia does a good job of keeping the streets clear – too good, IMO.  The snow is supposed to start tomorrow morning, but the crews are out already “pre-treating” the roads with salt so that the initial snow falls will melt and there won’t be that crust when the plows go through.

Of course, Virginia has a kinder climate. The temperatures might drop below zero after a snowfall in Wisconsin or Minnesota.  This literally freezes in ice and snow. In Virginia you can be pretty sure that it will get fairly warm soon enough after even a heavy snowfall the warm sun will hit the road surface and melt off whatever the salt and plow missed.  

Nevertheless, the thought of snow fills Washingtonians with dread and makes them question their very survival.  I went to Safeway today for routine shopping. The place was packed and people were stocking up on necessities. One old guy scooped up a dozen packages of baloney.   Bread was gone.  As you can see in the picture, we managed temporarily to produce Soviet style conditions.

It is silly. In the worst case scenario the snow will tie us down for two days. Even then, the paralysis will not be complete. Who in our modern and prosperous society has a cupboard so bare that he cannot go for a day or two w/o shopping. You can actually go longer than that w/o eating at all and I have not seen many people these days who couldn’t live off their fat for longer than that. 

The lines at the checkouts were long. I got into a line that was for the self-checkouts. I didn’t want to use them because I had a fair amount but I also didn’t want to get into another line, so I did my own.  It was a problem.  I use my own shopping bags. I got them ten years ago and they are still like new. They are much easier to pack and they are eco-friendly. As I recall they are made from recycled plastic from old bags. But they make life hard at the self checkout. The self checkout wants you to use their bags and gives you a hard time if you don’t.  It also evidently weighs your purchases and when I put a new bag of my own on the scale, it thinks I am stealing something.  I felt sorry for the people behind me, but people were cheerful despite my ineptitude and the dread of snow. The clerk had to reset my counter a couple of times, but I got through.

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Baked Potato Season

You can just about live off potatoes.  I mostly did that during my years in graduate school.   A baked potato topped with a little butter and green beans or sauerkraut is a good meal and really requires nothing else. Potatoes have an unjustly bad reputation. 

They got a bad rep from the Irish Potato famine (the monuments above commemorate the refugees who fled Potato Famine and became fine citizens of Massachusetts) but more recently they have been attacked for being a high carbohydrate, high calories food.   A potato has no more calories than an apple of around the same size (potatoes tend to be bigger). The calories come from all the crap we pile on them; it’s the butter, bacon bits, sour cream, cheese and all the other things that add that fat and calories.

Despite their ubiquity central and northern European diets, Potatoes are a native American food.   It took a long time to get Europeans to eat them. Like most “ancient traditions” it is not really very old.  Many people thought they were poison.  The green tubers and sprout are indeed poisonous.   Potatoes and tomatoes are members of the nightshade family and most of the siblings are as dangerous as the ominous family name implies.  But the bigger reason was just habit.   Potatoes are strange.  They are not like other root crops such as carrots or turnips.  In fact, they are a lot more like an apple.  The French even call them pomme de terre or ground apples.

The French Revolution and the generation of violence it provoked across Europe was the catalyst that thrust potatoes firmly into European cuisine.  The edible part of the potato plant grows below ground and so is less at risk when marauding armies trample or burn the crops.   Of course, potatoes were not as good back then.  The potatoes most of us love were developed by Luther Burbank in 1872.  Like the corn & tomatoes, potatoes as we know them are largely a man-made modern creation.   

I still eat baked potatoes seasonally.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First is that potatoes are available and cheap in the fall.   You can get a ten pound bag of potatoes for a few dollars in November or December.  That is why I ate them as a poor graduate student.  (You can get a week’s worth of meals for around $10 even at today’s prices.)  Beyond that, I don’t like to bake during the warm weather months, but it is nice to let the oven warm up the house when the weather turns cold.   I learned to be a cheapskate long ago and I see no reason to change now, especially when my potato habits make sense and potatoes are so good.

Anyway, potatoes are easy to cook, cheap and basically good for you when you add some vegetables and not too much butter or sour cream.  I suppose that is the reason why they are an integral part of a hardy meal.

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Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothin’ Left to Lose

The only other time I was in Alabama was in March 1974, almost thirty-five years ago. It was cold in Wisconsin during the spring break so I decided to hitchhike to Florida. I memorized a map, but I got it wrong and ended up two days later in south Alabama.  It took me that long to figure out that I didn’t have enough money and no plan, so I turned around and headed home. This trip was my first big adventure and the first time I understood that being on your own was not always much fun.

I got a ride all the way from Nashville to Alabama state highway 10. This was a very local rural road back then. A guy in a pickup truck picked me up.  He talked to me for about ten minutes, and I understood not a word.   It worried me.  It was like being in a foreign country.   He dropped me off about two miles down the road, where a farmer was out working in his field.  He came over and talked to me (people were very friendly).  He had an accent, but it was easy to understand.  I mentioned my earlier problem and he just laughed.  “That’s old James.  He’s the town drunk.  Ain’t nobody understands old James,” he told me. 

My turn around point was a cemetery near Brantley, Alabama on the way to Opp.  I found the place and you can see it up top.  I spent the night there, actually right outside.  That was not my plan. I was talking to some guys at a local gas station.  They warned me about the poisonous snakes in the tall grass.  Now I understand that they were just giving me a hard time. As I walked out of town in the dark of early evening, I saw nothing but tall grass, until there was some short grass.  I thought it was a roadside, so I spread out my blanket and went to sleep.   

In the morning, I saw that it wasn’t a roadside.  I was sleeping near the tombstones not far from a graveyard.  Had I known where I was, I think I would have slept poorly.  As it was, I spend a peaceful night with the quiet neighbors but that was enough.  I was hungry and lonely and I wanted to go home. I took a picture near the spot where I think I was.  Those leyland cypresses were not there yet.  There was just I was grass and some bushes.  Just being there brought back the feelings of those days.  I did lots of stupid things when I was nineteen, but I think this was the stupidest, on balance.  Above and below are pictures are Brantley what used to be the business district thirty-five years ago and some houses along the road.

I started to hitchhike back north from the spot on the top picture outside Brantley, Alabama.  (For the last thirty-five years, I have believed that I turned back south of Opp.  I remembered that name because it is odd and I saw it in writing.  Now, however, I am 99% certain that the spot above is indeed the high water mark of my first lonely travel adventure.) I made it to Nashville by that night. 

I might have gotten there earlier.  I had a ride going all the way up there, but I got out near Decatur.  The driver was drinking whiskey.  He claimed that he was going to kill his wife and his former best friend.  The wife had run off with the friend. This didn’t seem to bother the guy too much, but they had also taken a couple hundred dollars of his money. This pissed him off. His story sounded a little too much like the words from a Hank Williams, Jr song.  I remembered the words of the old Roy Acuff song, “Whiskey and Blood on the Highway” (There was whiskey and blood all together; mixed with glass where they lay; I heard the moans of the dyin’; but I didn’t hear nobody pray) so I bailed.  I tried to pay attention to the news the next day and didn’t hear about any spectacular murders, so I figure he was just talking … and drinking.  People who picked up hitchhikers often were just looking for someone to talk at and they often are not serious.  But guns, booze, anger and cars are not things you should mix or mess with if you can avoid it.

I spent my last $7 on a bus ticket from Nashville to Evansville, Indiana.  I didn’t particularly want to go there, but that was as far I my money would take me.  What I really wanted was a warm & reasonably secure place to spend the night and the bus was the best I could do.  I arrived in Evansville just about dawn and set off up Hwy 41.  It was 5 below.  They had an ice storm the day before and then it got really cold. Hitchhiking was hard and I picked up only short hops.  The worst was when some A-hole dropped me off directly in front of a sign that said something like, “Rockville Prison.  Do not pick up hitchhikers”.  I later found out that it was a woman’s prison, but the sign didn’t specify. 

I got up to Chicago about the time it was getting dark and a really nice guy drove me all the way home to Milwaukee. It is probably not a good idea to depend on the kindness of strangers, but I was glad that I ran into some good people. Besides the Rockville Prison guy and the homicidal boozer, everybody I met treated me okay, some were very friendly and shared lunches with me. I would have been a lot hungrier if not for that. 

The whole adventure lasted only four days, but it made a deep impression on me, so much that a half a lifetime later I can still recall details. This was the first time I was really alone and unconnected. I realized that a guy could just disappear.  I remembered how it felt to be “homeless” as I drove back from Brantley to my reserved room at Courtyard in Troy, Alabama. It is comforting to have a place to go. The most disturbing part about wandering is looking around for a place to bed down at dusk and hoping that it doesn’t rain or you don’t get rolled.  It is nice to be able to come & go when you want, but in the words of that great country philosopher Kris Kristopherson, “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

It was a good lesson and not a very expensive one for me.  It was good to learn it early, but it wasn’t smart to set off with no map, no plan and almost no money. I can’t even put myself back in that stupid young-man mindset.  I make much more sophisticated stupid old-man choices today.  I have always been lucky and luck can substitute for intelligence and foresight … until it doesn’t.

I didn’t stop hitchhiking, BTW.  That is how I and many car-free students got around in those days.  And I subsequently hitchhiked around Europe.  But I prepared better.

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Politics + Science = Perdition + Tyranny

Back off Man; I’m a Scientist …

Should scientists be politically active? Individual scientists should participate in debates as citizens. They should bring their knowledge and expertise to every subject, just like others do. But “scientists” as a group should not be political animals because there is a big difference between “A” scientist and “THE” scientist.

… Dr Peter Venkman

What is a scientist anyway? Do you have to have a science degree? Is BS enough or do you need a PhD? Do you have to do experiments? What kind of science qualifies as science? Sociologists and psychologists sometimes call themselves scientists. Political scientists even have that name in their titles. Some historians thought they were scientists. The term is very elastic.

Western civilization is based on the scientific method

Anybody who uses the “scientific method” in his work or to draw conclusions could legitimately call himself a scientist, but that would make scientists out of a lot of business people, most engineers, many farmers and almost everybody who works with actuarial tables. There is a field called “scientific management.” For that matter, all those body builders at Gold’s Gym are scientists, given their constant experimentation with their bodies and familiarity with chemicals. Successful modern farmers, builders & business people certainly approach their work scientifically? Everybody could be included sometimes and any definition that includes everybody is not a useful definition. This is not what most people have in mind.

Science and politics are methods to address different problems

But even when we exclude sociologist, body builders, engineers etc, we still have a problem and the problem is that science and politics are almost polar opposites. Science is iterative. It never comes to final conclusions. It tends to narrow inquiry and make scientists experts on narrow fields. Science doesn’t permit extrapolation. Extrapolation is what politics is all about. Politicians are rarely troubled when they are not sure of the precise truthfulness of their statements. Scientists MUST be.

Science provides options, not decisions

Probably the most important impediment to science in politics is the very nature of decision making. You cannot “let science decide” because decisions are exactly what science does NOT do. Science provides inputs into decisions. Science can give you a probability that if you do X you will sacrifice Y, but somebody has to decide on the relative values. Maybe X just doesn’t matter to you. Science cannot make that decision.

Think of a decision about a medical procedure. The doctor can use science to tell you that there is an 80% chance the operation will be a success, but a 70% chance you will be incapacitated by the procedure. On the other hand, if you do something less invasive, you have only a 50% chance of survival, but you can make a full recovery if you survive. You could come up with a complete breakdown of the odds, but you still have to decide, based on non-science values, what you want to do. One person might choose the greater risk of death for the greater health later. Others do the opposite Science cannot help. Once it gives you the options and odds, the job of science is done unless new information comes to light.

BTW – when we reach a near certainty, we no longer have decision making. We all agree that we will apply the rule of physics when flying in an airplane. No matter what anybody says about alternative reality, he doesn’t believe it when it comes to that. Decisions are ONLY needed in areas of disagreement or uncertainty.

Science informs; it doesn’t decide

Most “scientists” understand this limitation. Those scientists who want to be political might not get it. They want to use science as a trump card, but it doesn’t work. Decisions are made based on values. Science is value neutral. Therefore science cannot decide.

20th Century tyranny was “science-based”

When science becomes political, it stops being science and starts to become tyranny. In fact, science works a lot like religion when mixed with politics. It invests too much “certainty” into a human political process. It might start off “good” but politics corrupts it, because politics is not science, but politicians – especially bad ones – like to use science, as they once used religion – as a weapon to pummel their opponents into silence.

Stalin and Hitler had scientists working for them. Marxist and Nazi systems were “science-based” in the minds of their creators. Nazi science was chillingly precise. There was “scientific racism” and the eugenics movement was firmly rooting in the science of the time. We now tend to call them “pseudo- scientists” but they were trained and passed scientific muster at the universities of their times. They were pseudo BECAUSE they were political, not because they were not trained as scientists.

I would also point to the case of Nobel Prize winning chemist Fritz Haber. W/o his work literally half the world population would probably go hungry. Some of his other inventions were less felicitous. He had the most impeccable scientific credentials, but his political judgment was perhaps not so good.

Leave the lying to the politicians

This broad political road that leads to perdition is posted and brightly blazed all the way. Scientist should stay on the steep and narrow trail to truth. Leave the lying to the politicians. That is what they are good at.

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Sustainable Health &Fitness

Alex was making fun of my workout.   He said that I didn’t work out that long, I went too fast and my form was not good. He is right.   But I explained to him that he was missing the point.  My workout is SUSTAINABLE. I have been consistently working out w/o significant breaks since I was in 7th grade that is more than forty years.  So I figure have the right to pontificate about these things.

My weight workout consists of only eleven exercises three times a week.  I use the machines at Gold’s Gym and I can do the whole thing in less than ten minutes if nobody gets in my way. Of course, somebody usually does get in the way. Some people have the obnoxious habit or resting while sitting on the machines, but that is a subject for another post. 

The exercises are balanced to let one set of muscles rest while the others work.  I don’t know what the exercises are really called, so I will just name them what I think they are.  In order they are curls on the isolation pad, complete pull down to knees, sitting bench press, sitting rowing, flies, wing pull downs, inclined bench press, pull downs, bench press, dumbbell curls, military press.  Moderation in all things is important, so I don’t push the weights up too high.  My highest weight is the bench press where I use 240lbs. I have learned NOT to push too hard or add too much. 

I think warm up and stretching are overrated. I get warm up enough riding my bike over to the gym.   I also think hydration is overrated.  I never bother to drink during workouts, even when I run or ride my bike and am out for hours.  There is time enough to drink before and after. I drink from bubblers if I find one, but otherwise I go with Coke Zero.   I sometimes put ice in the glass. I also like to eat watermelon or pineapple when I am thirsty.  And I think water is overrated.   I spent a year in Iraq hydrating with Coca-Cola, BTW.  I don’t say everybody should follow my idiosyncratic habits, but it works for me.

I have been running regularly since 1973.  I started out of necessity. I used to like to be in the woods, but the woods near Stevens Point, Wisconsin (where I was an undergraduate) were so full of mosquitoes that I had to move at a trot to avoid being eaten alive. But it wasn’t really running for workout until 1978.  That was about the time they invented decent running shoes. I had some “waffle stompers” and used to run along the lake trails in Madison or through Warnimont and Grant Parks along Lake Michigan. 

My system for running is actually time, not distance based. You have to run at least twenty minutes to get a decent workout.   When I go to a new place, I run out for twenty minutes.   Usually I walk back, which is good exercise in itself.    Now I have several variations of the run. My favorite local runs are around the Mall in DC.   But I have run in some great places. In Norway, there was a run through a place called Bygdoy. It was a mix of forest and nice farm fields with crops and good looking cattle.  The King of Norway owned the farm.   He evidently didn’t need to make a profit, so it was beautifully maintained in a traditional form.   In Poland, I used to run in Las Wolski, among some of the most magnificent beech forests I have ever seen.  As I have written on several occasions, running is more than exercise, but it IS good exercise. 

I think it is nearly impossible to be truly fit w/o running, but I bet I log more total aerobic hours on my bike.   I ride for transportation and I almost never ride just for pleasure.   But it is a pleasure to ride.   My ride to work is seventeen miles, or it was to SA 44. It is around 15 minutes less to my new office, but I still have to ride to the old SA 44 Metro stop.  I just have to finish the ride after work. I am allowed bring my bike on the Metro after 7pm, but it is way too crowded by the time it gets to Foggy Bottom.  Oh yeah, I have compromised on the riding both ways.

BTW – You see the picture of my bike and me at the top.  Notice that I don’t have those silly lycra tight shorts.  Below are storm clouds gathering over the Potomac, seen from my office window.

I ride to work in the morning, when it is relatively cool, but I take the Metro home.  I think this actually means I ride MORE total miles because I do it almost every day and it extends the biking season.  I don’t like to ride in the dark or the twilight.  I work until 6pm or later and it takes around 1:20 to get home, so that means that if I need to ride home my biking season doesn’t start until April and is over in early September. The one-way trip buys at least another month on both sides of the season. I also admit that I am lazy about the ride home.  I used to do both ways, but I more often found good reasons not to use the bike.  I also used to get caught in afternoon thunder showers a lot.  Now I know if it is not raining when I take off in the morning, I am probably okay.  Besides, it is mostly up hill on the way home and often against the wind.  The Metro is a good choice.

I could ramble forever, so let me get to the bottom line. Every good exercise program must include both strength and aerobic training.   To be sustainable, it must be integrated into daily life and cannot be so hard that you will avoid doing it. That means that you sometimes have to compromise.  Sometimes it is good enough.   It is great to pursue excellence, but most of those people fall off the edge before they reach middle age.  It is also good to have something you can do cheaply and by yourself. It is hard to find any activity that is less expensive than running or walking.   You have to buy a new pair of shoes maybe once a year.   Biking is also cheap. I bought my bike in 1997 for around $700.   I have replaced a few tires and tubes and I had to replace a sprocket once. I expect to have the thing for several more years, so I figure it costs less than $100 a year.  If I figure in the gas and Metro fare saved, I bet I actually made money. 

The caption on one of my old running poster says it all about exercise in general, “the victory is not always to the swiftest or the contest to the strongest.  The winner is the one who keeps running.” 

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Hateful Weirdoes at the Cemetery Gates

I have never before encountered anything like it.   As I rode my bike out of Arlington, I noticed about fifty cops and a dozen protestors.  One protestor carried a sign that said, “God Bless IEDs.”  I couldn’t believe that she knew what IED were, so I stopped to ask her. She said something about an IED being a blessed device that killed soldiers.  When I told her that I had been in Iraq and people I knew had been killed or maimed by IEDs, she told me that was a good thing and that I must be a coward for coming home alive. It was an almost instant escalation with all the weirdoes yelling at me, calling me names and screaming that I was going against God’s plan. They didn’t specify how.  

When I asked what kind of horrible and vengeful god they worshipped, since I didn’t recognize the one they were talking about, they really went wild and threatened that he would strike me down. I noticed that they had started to tape the meeting (I may appear on the “Nutcase News tonight).  I figured that they wanted a show, so I gave them one.  Doing my best channeling of Charlton Heston I theatrically spread my arms and challenged their false god to strike me down. I mentioned as a side comment that the true believers might want to stand back so as not to be collateral damage from the expected lightning bolt.  This didn’t amuse them very much.   They told me I was an “arrogant bastard” and that their god would indeed strike me down, only later. I guess he has been busy or just really lethargic, since he has not got around to me yet.  

I didn’t learn who these people were. They showed no desire to explain anything to anybody and fomenting hatred seemed to be their only goal. It worked.  I hate them and I know why there were so many cops around. Lacking the protection of the authorities, my guess is that these clowns – advocating the violent death of American military personnel while standing at the gates of Arlington Cemetery – would quickly get a beat down by decent folks.  I was sorely tempted to toss the first stone myself, but they probably would have enjoyed that too much. 

I am not a religious scholar but I am reasonably sure that if you go to hell, these are some of the people you will meet down there. It is amazing and frightening that such people exist.  I have seen lots of “peaceful” protestors, but never such that could be so appropriately labeled evil.   Maybe there still is some need for this striking down thing.   If I notice a thunderstorm forming over the Potomac I will assume their time of reckoning has arrived.

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The Tao of Leadership

In a classic episode of M*A*S*H, Father Mulcahy grows some sweet corn.  After a summer of hard work and anticipation, he harvests the crop, turns it over to the chow hall cook and everybody looks forward to the hometown taste of fresh roasted corn.  But the cook has removed the corn from the cob and creamed it into the kind of slop he usually dispenses.  Insulted by the complaints, he replies indignantly, “I was just trying to be helpful. Next Fourth of July you can eat it on the cob for all I care.” 

Above is General Grant in front of the Capitol.  Grant was an unassuming man.  He could easily pass unnoticed.  They said that the only way you could tell if Grant was around was that things started to happen.   Grant was a great general, but he failed at everything else.  Is it enough to be really good at one thing? 

Leadership can be like that.   Sometimes it takes more time and effort to make a mush than to do the effective thing.   It is usually a good idea to lighten up and consider whether your problems are because of instead of in spite of your best efforts, but often the hardest thing to do is nothing.  Most of us have a kind of piece-work mentality.  We think we earn our money by how much we do.  Leadership often means that we add the most value by what we choose to leave undone.

A leadership technique that seems to work is to “get lost,” just be inaccessible.   I know that this goes against every fiber of the stay-connected zeitgeist, but sometimes you add no value and generally when you add no value in an organization, you are sucking up value by getting in the way.   At times when the problem is best solved by someone else, but you know that others may want to consult or defer to your judgment, the best response is to get lost. Doing nothing, BTW, is a very proactive strategy and is the appropriate one only in some situations.   It doesn’t mean you just sneak off to play golf, although in some cases that works by chance.  There are some places where things progress a lot better when the boss is not around and I am not talking about prescribed non-action here.

Of course, the whole technique presupposes that you have already built an environment of trust and autonomy, so that colleagues and subordinates will not merely cower in fear and indecision until your triumphant return.  And that is the big caveat. You are not allowed to reverse the decision for trivial causes and you can never get angry that it was made w/o you.  If you are prone to the character flaws that lead to these behaviors, you need to stay away from this technique, but recognize that your organization will never work at top performance because you won’t allow it.  And stop complaining about all the work you have to do or about your incompetent subordinates. That is the world you created by making yourself indispensable.   Live with it or change it, but in either case shut up about it.

And as the great Charles de Gaulle said, “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”

I liked the “Book of the Tao” since I first discovered it when I was around twenty.  I bought a book at a used book shop for $0.25 called “The Wisdom of China and India.”  It was published in 1943.  They would never publish such a book today, since it lumped together these two great but very disparate cultures and presumed to aggregate the collected wisdom of most of Asia in one volume.  But it was a great book and I still have it.  The binding disintegrated when I gave it to Alex to read last week, but a little duct tape postponed its day of reckoning.

The philosopher Lao Tzu has some sage (really) advice on leadership and since this wisdom has persisted through various iterations and hundreds of generations, maybe there is something to it. For example:

“The Tao abides in non-action, yet nothing is left undone.  If kings and lords observed this, the ten thousand things would develop naturally.”

or

“Nothing is softer than water, yet nothing can be better at overcoming the hard.”

and

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”

If you translated this wisdom into more modern terms, you would say that this sort of leadership taps into the intelligence and imagination of the people.  It makes them partners.  This is especially valuable when innovations are needed.  (Please refer to my posting re management gurus.) Centralized, directive leadership can almost never identify and develop innovation because whether they mean to or not, they bring the power of the organizing to bear to defend the status quo or permit only incremental and usually ineffective change.   That is the paradox that when you abide in non-action, you leave nothing undone.  I would refine it a little.   Leadership’s task is to create conditions favorable for progress and innovation, but it does not directly create anything.  To employ my favorite analogy, it is like when I use proper silviculture on my forests.  The thinning, fertilizing, planning etc allow the trees to grow better, but I cannot micromanage wood or leaf production.    BTW – Below is the exchange from M*A*S*H: 

Father Mulcahy: Don’t I know it. All week I’ve been dreaming of getting butter on my cheeks, juice on my shirt, and a niblet wedged between two molars.
[walks up to the table]
Father Mulcahy: Where is the corn?
Cpl. Igor Straminsky: You’re looking at it. The mushy stuff.
Father Mulcahy: You… You creamed it!
[on the verge of tears]
Father Mulcahy: You… you ninny!
Cpl. Igor Straminsky: [everybody yells at Igor] I was just trying to be helpful. Next Fourth of July you can eat it on the cob for all I care.

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Great Books … At Least Useful Ones

Below are CJ and the boys near Mt Washington in NH in 2003.

I found this while going through some old emails.  I wrote this to Mariza when she was off to college.  My “great books” for her first year are a little idiosyncratic.  Some books are influential because of the things you are going through in your life when you read them.   When you reread the book, you realize that it is important to you because of what you read into it. 

You have to interact with ideas.   Nobody can be right all the time and I have never come across a book that is good through to the very end.  The authors that influenced me gave me good starts, but none of them lived in my circumstances and I had to modify them accordingly.    That gives me an ideal escape clause.  When I recommend books, I assume that you will interact with the ideas.  Some will be useful; others not.  And even best author or philosopher will say at least a few really stupid things and sometimes a fool can have a useful insight (even if he doesn’t recognize it himself.)

Anyway, I left the note as it was in 2003.  I would make a few changes and additions if I wrote it today.   I personally find it interesting because I can remember some of the things I was thinking about and going through when I wrote the note.  For example, in 2003 I was studying pragmatism, so it was more prominent in my thoughts than it would have been before or since.  Everything depends on contexts, times and places.

Books

Now that you are off to your education, I want to share some of the books that have influenced me for the better.  Few of these things were assigned to me in school.   But I think they formed the basis of the education I use today.

“In Search of Excellence” – Formed the basis of my management and leadership style.  Also influenced my view on human relationships in general.   I bought my copy in 1983, when just before I started my MBA at the University of Minnesota.  It just hit the right chord.  I still have the book I bought, with my underlining and notes.  It is amazing how much I internalized those thoughts.  

“The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” – This is the “execution” book of my life and provides the “how”.  It helps me know how to act with integrity and purpose when I might not be sure what to do.  I read this book in 1990 and compared the ideal to the best bosses I had known.  (I worked for a guy called Brian Carlson at the time and he was a great example.) I tried to be like them and like the person the book made me want to be.

“Two Cheers for Capitalism” by Irving Kristol – I found this book by chance in the University of Wisconsin library in 1978.  It made clear to me that I believed in the free market. It set the dominos in motion that sent me to business school with vigor and enthusiasm and then into the Foreign Service to fight world Communism.  On a related item is “The Communist Manifesto” and excerpts from “Capital”.   One of my leftist professors made me read them in 1977.  It had the opposite result from the one I think he wanted to achieve.  I found them to be such unmitigated crap that I was permanently soured on socialism. 

“The Bible”, especially Mathew, St. Paul and Ecclesiastes – I am not strongly religious, but the Bible provides the foundation of faith that I need in my life.  It is the essence of things hoped for; the evidence of things unseen.   I have never read the entire Bible, but have read several times the parts above and heard it in church more times than I can remember.  I am not sure how Ecclesiastes got into the Bible, since it seems a little cynical and world wise, but I like it.  It is a good antidote to things like Amos. 

“The Peloponnesian War” by Thucydides.  Thucydides was my favorite historian when I was an undergraduate.  I read his work in English and part in the original Greek.  It is the classic tragic view of history and one I regrettably share.  His account of the Syracuse campaign actually has all the aspects of tragedy in the technical sense and the Melian dialogue is a classic of power politics.  I would add Polybius and Tacitus and everyone should be familiar with the Iliad and Odyssey.    Although I have long since forgotten the particulars, I recall the sweep.   As for classic philosophy, I can’t recommend Plato or his ilk, except the “Apology of Socrates” which is short and well worth reading.  It was the first work I read in Greek.

“Decision Traps” – In this book I learned about how decisions are made in the real world and how to factor inevitable error into my own decisions.  I learned a little humility and at least one valuable technique for learning from experience:  make specific written predictions; put them aside; later analyze them in the light of how event transpired in fact and improve the decision making process.   I read this book for the first time in 1990.   I would add another book to this one as an influence in the same direction, “Against the Gods”, which I read first in 1997.  As I write this (April 19, 2003) I am reading another book, “The Blank Slate” which seems to be supplemental to many of the things I learned in “Decision Traps.” 

Pragmatism – Various things by and about people like William James, Charles Pierce and John Dewey, especially “the Metaphysical Club” This is the most recent wrinkle in my ideological skin.  I find many pragmatic ideas very useful, which is itself pragmatic.  I especially like the idea of the evolution of ideas and the concept that ideas are creations in a human context.  I found many of these ideas embedded in concepts I got from other places, such as the decision traps complex or the “Seven Habits”.   I will also lump into this category Emerson’s essay on “Self Reliance”.  It is not pragmatism, but James et al read it.  It influenced them.  

Biography – this became my favorite form of literature in the middle 1990s.  I guess it comes with age.  I can’t cite a particular book, but in general, seeing history though the lives of great people has been instructive.   It shows how much can hang on an individual decision and how fast failure can turn to glorious success or the reverse.  The biographies that stand out in my memory are: Truman, Eisenhower, Robert E. Lee, Ben Franklin, and the joint biography “Founding Brothers”, which is interesting because it shows how individual human flaws can actually enhance the performance of a group.  It is sort of a portfolio theory of human events.

Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu – I loved these guys when I was an undergraduate.  I always like to try to act logically.  Taoism provides the non-logical basis on which a logical edifice can be built.  In the same vein, I would cite “Emotional Intelligence”, which I read in 1997.  Logic can provide the “how” (that I got from the Seven Habits), but preference in based on emotion.  Emotion can never be fully suppressed and we should not try to do so. 

Declaration of Independence, Constitution Preamble, Gettysburg Address, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Four Freedoms (FDR).  America’s contribution to world literature is in the language of freedom.  These are some of the best.   

Anyway, these are a good start.  You will find a lot more.  Never stop looking. 

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Internet Idiots

About a week ago, somebody sent a couple blank email messages to a large number of State Department recipients, me included.   I supposed it was a mistake and deleted them.   Most people did the same, but not everybody.   Dozens of our cognitively challenged colleagues insist on sending “reply to all” messages complaining about getting messages.   I suspect there is more than just stupidity at work.   My latest is from an ambassador who evidently is affronted that he cannot turn off the flow with a wave of his mighty hand.   It goes to show that high intelligence and high position do not always correspond perfectly.  

A couple messages created dozens more and are still creating them.  Some fool always wants to get in the last word.   Maybe some sociologists can understand this.  I can’t.  I just keep on deleting them. 

I want to write back on email to these idiots and explain the situation to them, but then I would just be among them.  I just have to get this frustration over with, so I am putting it here on the blog.  If anybody who responded to all in this recent email chain is reading this (and you know who you are) please understand that you are too stupid to be allowed to use Internet.  Turn off your computer and go away.   I know that it is unlikely that any of my readers are in this group, but I am sure we have all suffered from this sort of thing.