Good morning.
- The 10 rules of mystery fiction … which apparently are not set in China, just don’t tell Master Li and #10 Ox.
- Darwinish awards.
- Society, progressivism and the brothel. What could go wrong?
- Of fasting and prayer.
- Mr Obama, Mr Morsi and the Coptic variant of the Arab Spring.
- The other side of the spectrum from the .22 LR.
- Dallas and communism’s fall.
- Considering Skyfall.
- Seriously?
- MOOCs here and here. Higher education gets you two things, credentials and skills.
- Drones.
- Abuse of the little man sometimes has consequences.
- A game.
- The trailer piqued my (and my #2 daughter’s) interest. How about you?
- East/West and some theological considerations.
- A liberal attempts to understand the conservative point of view. Fails.
5.Mr Obama, Mr Morsi and the Coptic variant of the Arab Spring.
hmmmmm….
It’s amazing. Apparently Friedman thought the Muslim Brotherhood would be more democratic than Mubarak. Now he’s surprised, completely surprised, that things didn’t turn out that way.
I’m sorry, how is an elected President who decrees the juidicary cannot review some of his actions still not more democratic than an absolute dictator? (Complicating the story, of course, is the fact that most of the judges were appointed from the former dictator).
As for being ‘friendly’ to the US. Here’s the issue, the Arab Spring was not a US policy but an organic uprising of Arabs against oppressive, undemocratic governments. The alternative to Egypt’s current gov’t is not the Mubarak gov’t circa 2005. It would be a dictatorship of a hated man, nearly dead from old age, that would have to be imposed either directly by the US or with vast amounts of aid from the US resulting in wicked hatred of the US.
10.MOOCs here and here. Higher education gets you two things, credentials and skills.
You forget to include two other things:
1. A social network.
2. The synergy of mutltiple courses taken together in a brief period of several years. Perhaps you could rephrase this as a type of character development. Or you could view this as a type of initiation into a shared culture, which isn’t easy to achieve if you take courses one at a time.
That makes 4 things college gives you, skills, credentials, network and synergy. I think the network and synergy account for a good 65-70% of the value of a college degree whereas the first two are 30% at best.
This is problematic for online education, esp. free form ‘wiki’ style like coursea (which I recommend trying out). Online education probably has a competitive advantage in producing skill training and credentials but a disadvantage for the latter two categories.
Boonton,
Re #5, Guess you should be a NYTimes pundit, you’re far less surprised than Mr Friedman, after all you anticipated all of this.
Re #10 … seems to me networks can privide networking. Eh? And, if you’re actually doing your college education online entirely you’re likely taking a full courseload, at which point it seems to me you’ve no arguments against online at all.
I don’t think online credentials are very good now. If you apply to a job with “I got an online degree” I think that will be regarded skeptically by employers.
Boonton,
Answer. In my lede for this item, I used the work Copt as the Greek word for Egypt not to indicate the Christians in Egypt. But … be a Christian in Egypt today and you’ll discover you had more freedoms under an absolute dictator … does that answer your question?
Would Coptic Egyptians be in a better position had they thrown all their weight around propping up the old regime? Given its collapse, what would compromises to one’s ethics would one have to have made to have artificially extended its lifespan? And when it finally died what would the consequences have been for those who made it so clear which side they were on?
Boonton,
Liberals like yourself pointed out the problems with Bush’s support of democracy qua democracy. You seem to have forgotten your points of criticism. One of the most democratic gathering of all after all is a lynch mob. Praising a mob for removing a tyrant is not wise. It’s not to say you have to prop up the tyrant, but you don’t have to pretend that the mob is a turn for the better. So. Don’t.
Mob is a term that’s a bit misused here. Who exactly was keeping Mubarak in power? Granted it was a mob that had control of the army, secret police, judges and the state in general but at the end of the day it was just a group of people who acted in coordination to hold power. What makes that mob ‘legit’? All you can come up with is some variation on ‘might makes right’….in which case why wouldn’t a more democratic mob representing a larger portion of the population be better?
Boonton,
Misused by whom? Not me. You’ve decided that military officers working in heirarchical structures are a mob just as those semi-rioting assembled people in squares. One group is called a mob in common parlance. It is your misuse of the term to decide the military/secret police &c are to be called a mob.
Now if you want to talk what legitimizes authority … I’d recommend Jouvenel’s book Sovereignty as a starting place as it is a readable discourse by a contemporary philosopher on exactly the questions of legitimate authority.
Egypt, though, is not ruled from a group gathered in a square:
One of the most democratic gathering of all after all is a lynch mob. Praising a mob for removing a tyrant is not wise. It’s not to say you have to prop up the tyrant, but you don’t have to pretend that the mob is a turn for the better
Whose pretending? I’m hearing a lot of criticism based on the premise that Egypt’s current gov’t is not ideal. No argument there but it wasn’t an ideal gov’t the ‘mob’ overthrew a year or so ago.
I agree revolutions are always dangerous and can end up making things worse, but do we have practical alternatives to possibly transition from tyranny to a respectable democracy?
Boonton,
Well, in the last 25 years every country in the Soviet bloc moved from hard autocracy many to respectable democracies (others like Belarus not so much). That’s a dozen or more examples some like Poland or the Czech Republic did quite well. So we have good and bad examples. Who’s publishing studies on those and demonstrating clearly the missteps? That might be a job for the US State department to educate those in the Middle East who contemplate the move. The point is in answer to your question we do in fact have lots of good (and bad) modern examples.
I’m not clear how Egypt or Tunisa are that different from your examples. There were protests in a square in Egypt. I remember Boris Yeltson with protestors in Moscow. Neither had a revolution in the sense of a defeat of the controllers of the gov’t by armed actors. In both cases the rulers agreed to leave power after extended periods of protests by ‘the mob’. Libya and Syria appear to be examples of a true revolution, outcome uncertain.
Boonton,
That would be the crux of it, to whit establishing practices and things that “work/don’t-work” when establishing a salubrious society.
My “examples” were how many 15 states? Which arrived at a variety of results, some good, some not so good (Yeltsin and Russia for example are perhaps a middle of the road result perhaps?). What things worked. What didn’t. Those states in the Middle East, are they doing the things that worked or not? If not, why not? You don’t seem to know, and neither do I.
Wiki? note: Politics section.
I’m still looking for a systematic analysis.
Boonton,
So I ordered this for $4.
You might want to also consider that any pattern you find might simply be spurious. Revolutions might simply follow a Markov process
Boonton,
So why study economics or history at all?
Boonton,
Some interesting ideas on how to stimulate/influence revolutions.
History – I think its good to know how things went down, even if that may not let you predict what will go down in the future.
Economics – Best of both worlds, you got mathematical modeling and thinking combined with philosophy, history, and logic. Witness the slaughters I inflict on your arguments on a weekly basis. Do I credit my inherit greatness? Certainly not, but I will credit economics.
If revolutions are essentially a Markov process, that would be useful info, don’t you think? It would mean any revolution is a risk, that you can’t just do a riskless revolution by following some pattern of steps to ensure a transition to some ‘nice government’.
Boonton,
*Economists* call it the dismal science because of the failures to apply those things to the real world. You however, are more confident. Why? Dunno.
It’s unclear on why you think it’s a random walk or that only the present state matters (recent or further back history is ignorable). That’s a testable hypothesis, does any past influences affect the present and near future. If you find some, then it’s not a Markov process.
These two sentences have no logical connection. If revolutions are not a Markov process it doesn’t follow that they are not high risk.
It’s unclear why a survey of revolutions, methods, and results can’t arrive at a list of “things not to do” and “good things to look for”.
Why? So you can assign blame?
*Economists* call it the dismal science because of the failures to apply those things to the real world. You however, are more confident. Why? Dunno.
It got that name because of Malthus whose model predicted that any increase in prosperity would be offset by an increase in reproduction to return the popultion to the brink of starvation…..which is more or less true for animal populations. Later on Riccardo demonstrated that an economy will reach a steady state of 0% growth after the accumulation of capital ceases. Do you think things would be less dismal if these models hadn’t failed to apply to the real world as much?
To a lesser extent it is also called dismal because it explores the trade offs of decisions in detail. Hence the motto ‘there’s no free lunch’. No one, of course, likes someone who throws cold water on big ideas they are excited about.
These two sentences have no logical connection. If revolutions are not a Markov process it doesn’t follow that they are not high risk.
Not really, if you uncover factors that determine revolutions with good outcomes from those with bad, you’ve eliminated risk. Give you a revolution and you’ll be able to tell if it will end up good or bad.
It’s unclear why a survey of revolutions, methods, and results can’t arrive at a list of “things not to do” and “good things to look for”.
do the survey but keep in mind with small samples you may mistake a random walk for a pattern. Sitting in a casino you may see 3 50-somethings in a row win big jackpots. This may lead you to conclude 50-somethines are better gamblers, or the casino is biased. But over thousands of jackpots you’ll see that random patterns will produce various ‘winning streaks’.
Boonton,
Well, thank for the etymological origins of the term “dismal science”, but when modern economists use the term in the context of their own science often it is to bemoan the inability either accurately predict outcomes and/or to distinguish between differing theories on the basis of muddy data.
Yes. Really. No connection at all.
The definition of a Markov process means that prior state of the system does not determine or influence future events. Do you pretend that historical events are Markov processes? That nothing in the past leads to the future society? The background culture, history, and beliefs of a people have no influence on their future. Surely you jest.
This sentence is just plain incorrect:
Let’s put that in another context. Say you’ve uncovered some design features that distinguish safe automobiles from unsafe ones. Have you eliminated risk related to driving? Because that what you would pretend that a list of tendencies would do. That’s a straw man. And the answer is … a resounding no! You will still have traffic deaths even if you have less of them. No elimination. If you determine some common features of revolutions that lead from autocracy back to autocracy and some features of autocracy to free society that doesn’t eliminate risk. It gives indicators that things might be better or worse.
It’s unclear on what you are disagreeing.
when modern economists use the term in the context of their own science often it is to bemoan the inability either accurately predict outcomes and/or to distinguish between differing theories on the basis of muddy data.
No even today it’s used in the same way.
The definition of a Markov process means that prior state of the system does not determine or influence future events. Do you pretend that historical events are Markov processes? That nothing in the past leads to the future society? The background culture, history, and beliefs of a people have no influence on their future. Surely you jest.
The question is which model works better.
Let’s put that in another context. Say you’ve uncovered some design features that distinguish safe automobiles from unsafe ones. Have you eliminated risk related to driving?
Mixing too different meanings of risk. One means something bad will happen. Jumping off ten story building is risky as there’s a 99% chance you’ll end up dead.
But it can also mean you don’t know what will happen. You’re a mob boss, consider pushing your enemy out of a ten story building versus knifing him. Going at him with a knife is pretty uncertain. You may kill him, but you may only wound him and he may come for revenge….or he may take knife from you and kill you. But pushing him a ten story building? That’s the end of him most likely.
If you find a perfect system for predicting revolution, then they are no longer risky…you’ll know if they will end up good or bad given the circumstances. If it’s random like drawing a card from the deck, then you got a Markov process like process.