Truth Claim of the Day

Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been or might become.

Please, discuss. The context is here.

The Man of Steel: A Fanboy Wishlist

In case you didn't know this about me, I like comic books. Not all comic books, of course, but I do like superheroes and the interesting questions they allow me to explore. I like the greats from the 1980s, work by Frank Miller and Alan Moore. I really liked Batman Begins, and I really liked The Dark Knight.  Superman Returns, not so much. (yes, I'm more of a DC guy)

So I've been thinking recently about what kind of Superman movie I'd like to see now that Christopher Nolan is supervising the project (although he won't be directing). I wrote a partial script for a Superman movie while I was taking a sci-fi film class as an undergrad. Yes, it was my final project; yes, I got an A; and yes, I know how cool it is too game the system by getting upper-division honors credit to watch and write about Blade Runner. The script focused on the alienness and humanity of Superman in the context of a Nazi death camp; if I had to sum it up in a sentence, I'd say "the last son of Krypton finds his humanity fighting for what's right, as a brilliant German scientist (reminiscent of Mengele) loses his humanity fighting for what he thinks is right."

But that's not the movie we're going to get, and no doubt all the better for the box office hopes of The Man of Steel. No, Superman generally needs to live in a modern context for the big screen. So given that restriction, I thought I'd waste my time and yours (not much of it, don't worry) talking about what I'd like to see in the upcoming movie, even it's never going to happen.

First let me say what I don't want to see:

I was a huge fan of the first year of Smallville, although it lost a lot of its appeal for me after that. I like Tom Welling as a young Clark Kent, and I've got nothing against Erica Durance as Lois. But no. Please, please no.

Now that we've got that out of the way, I think I can best communicate what I'd be looking for with some cast and crew ideas before presenting the premise of the movies (yes, as per the modern standard, there must be three in the series). Due to length, I'll put it below the jump.

Friday Video Extravaganza

Today we're mashing it up, so check out the musical mash-ups below the break.

Is Economist Robin Hanson a Supervillain?

Robin Hanson of GMU has a recent post arguing that survivalists play an extremely valuable role in society, despite the conventional view that they are crackpots.  He seems to be doing so because he sees them as kindred spirits to those who, like Hanson himself, wish to be preserved via cryonics. Their brilliance remains unappreciated by a society that values signals and expressions of loyalty to particular groups above actually doing things to save lives both now and in the distant future. (Of course, one could view Hanson's posts as merely attempts to signal that these views belong in the "intellectually respected" club, but if we all spend all our time accusing each other of signaling, what kind of signal would that send?)

I go back and forth in my view of survivalists themselves. I think it's pretty clear that they overestimate the risks they are reacting to, and their political and social beliefs are often difficult to comprehend. On the other hand, talking about the end of the world can make for fascinating reading, and I sometimes I think society in general underestimates the chances that things could go terribly, horribly wrong.

But the debate over survivalists isn't what struck me about this post. What struck me is Hanson's argument for why the survivalists might not be as nutty as they seem:

The world faces existential risk, i.e., a risk that the world will die.  Such a death is bad not only for those who live here now, but also for vast future generations who might descend from us now.  Cultures and ethnicities face related risks.  By preparing to save themselves under various disaster scenarios, survivalists also tend to make their culture, ethnicity, and world a bit less likely to die.  An effort for which future generations should be quite grateful. [emphasis added]

Hanson's argument is that survivalists might not be much benefit to society right now--in fact, they probably hold current society in disdain and avoid outsiders where possible. But the true beneficiaries of their peculiar brand of risk aversion are the untold future generations who might not exist without the efforts of lunatics and maniacs.

I've heard this argument before, of course. The stakes are described in the graphic novel Watchmen:

Each step had to be taken carefully, constantly striving to keep in mind the enormous scale of what was at stake! The Earth. Humanity. All we've ever known... "end of the world" does the concept no justice. The world's present would end. Its future, immeasurably vaster, would also vanish. Even our past would be cancelled. Our struggle from the primal ooze, every childbirth, every personal sacrifice rendered meaningless, leading only to dust, tossed in the void-winds.

Save for Richard Nixon, whose name adorns a plaque upon the moon, no human vestige would remain. Ruins become sand, sand blows away... all our richness and color and beauty would be lost... as if it had never been.

That's right, Robin Hanson is channeling the World's Smartest Man, Adrian Veidt, also called Ozymandias.

But the parallels don't stop there. Hanson prides himself on seeing the world differently from most people, realizing that most of our beliefs about the world are wrong when we get a more external perspective. Homo Hypocritus, he calls the human race. Man the hypocrite. Ozymandias agrees: "Hitler said people swallow lies easily, provided they're big enough."

Which of the two, Hanson or Veidt, said this?

An intractable problem can only be resolved by stepping beyond conventional solutions.

Or this?

I have a passion, a sacred quest, to understand everything, and to save the world.

They could have come from the same mind, if not the same voice.

But what does Adrian Veidt do in Watchmen? Oh yes. Saves the world. Through mass murder. Not that anyone who could do anything about it found out until after the fact:

"Do it?"  Dan, I'm not a Republic Serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.

Robin Hanson wants to save the world, but how? By educating people? Maybe. Maybe something else. "Canaan is devastated, Ashkelon is fallen, Gezer is ruined, Yendam is reduced to nothing, Israel is desolate and her seed is no more, and Palestine has become a widow for Egypt... All the countries are unified and pacified," says mighty Ozymandias.

Now, I have no reason to believe Robin Hanson is planning to clone human psychics or wipe out whole cities. But then no one had reason to believe Ozymandias was really the world's greatest supervillain, either. Just because I might over-estimate the probability doesn't mean the risk isn't there.

I guess that makes me a survivalist after all.

Well, at Least I Got a Friday Post Up

I've been immersed in teaching economic growth and trying to pull my research together, so my posting has been sporadic lately. And I'm in a wedding this weekend, which means I need to get weekend stuff done during the week. So I don't have a Video Extravaganza for you. All I've really got for you is a cartoon about how much fun I am to have around:

(courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal via behavioral economist Jodi Beggs)

I can link to a few videos I've been watching lately (they won't let me embed):

Old Spice Guy Sent Roses to Alyssa Milano

Old Spice Guy Offers Political Advice

(for those who don't know Old Spice Guy, aka actor Isaiah Mustafa, check out this commercial, and its sequel)

I Do the Maths

This semester I'm teaching Intermediate Macroeconomics for the first time. It's a tough course to teach, since I'm trying to present some of the key ideas in my field of research without (a) overwhelming the students with details they won't understand, or (b) lying to them about what real economists think and do.

I devoted a bit over half an hour of class time last week to explaining why we use so much algebra (and a little calculus, although we don't call it that) in the course. Rather than rhapsodize over the beauty and power of systems of non-linear difference equations, I decided to have them read a couple blog posts by one of the most famous development economists to grace the blogosphere, Dani Rodrik. In his first post, Rodrik uses a simple anecdote to illustrate the central reason economists translate the real world into the toy world of mathematics:

The moral of the story is that if you are smart enough to be a Nobel-prize winning economist maybe you can do without the math, but the rest of us mere mortals cannot. We need the math to make sure that we think straight--to ensure that our conclusions follow from our premises and that we haven't left loose ends hanging in our argument.

Of course, there are still points in our reasoning when economists are still vulnerable to bad logic. In particular, economists can make major blunders when identifying the most relevant parts of the real world--the parts that need to be included in the model--and when translating the implications of the models back into real world terms.  But this system is still much better than simply describing arguments in way that leaves room for sloppiness throughout the process. While we're in the mathematics of the model, we know that every result must certainly follow from the premises.

A key question I wanted my students to think about was this: Philosophers, Literary Analysts, and Journalists all make their living by presenting arguments. So why aren't they concerned about bad logic and loose ends? One student suggested the key was one of Rodrik's statements:

In explaining our extensive and demanding curriculum, I emphasize that development is too important to be left to mushy thinking.

 Essentially, the student said, economics matters more than those others. While I would disagree with this to a certain extent--journalism certainly matters because it influences public opinion, and philosophy matters because it influences future economists*--I do think there is a sense in which the consequences of bad economic policy, the inevitable result of sloppy thinking, are more costly and immediate than the consequences of bad thinking in many other disciplines.

*I don't mention literary analysts here because I don't know enough about them to know who they influence and how bad thinking in literary criticism matters. I assume it's got to matter to someone at least... right?

The second of Rodrik's posts essentially answers some criticisms of the first. Being an empirical macroeconomist, I was pleased to see Rodrik mention how much cooler we are than pure theorists; that's how I chose to read that particular comment, anyway. I also think he sums up pretty well the technical demands that are really at play when we do mathematical economics:

What matters most is a certain habit of mind--of being able and willing to break a complicated problem into its constituent parts and then put it back together. 

These are the skills I'm really trying to teach my students. Finally, I have to mention the commenter Rodrik quotes who wants to see some more humility in mathematical economic theory:

I am not supportive of economists who then forget that they have a "model", an abstraction of the world, and begin to believe that their model is the world. I find very few economists that are humble enough to admit that about their analysis.

Like Rodrik, I hope I am always humble enough to distinguish what models are helpful for and what they are not. If our interest is to help the people of less developed countries, formal economic analysis is only one component in the complex process of promoting growth. It's an important one, at least I think it is. But a sense of professional perspective is indispensable.

(Since this is an important topic to understanding how I do this, I'm going to cross post it at that other blog I contribute to. They probably won't mind.)