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Quote of the Day: Socialism and Humility
“Socialism presumes that we already know most of what we need to know to accomplish our national goals. Capitalism is based on the idea that we live in a world of unfathomable complexity, ignorance, and peril and that we cannot possibly prevail over our difficulties without constant efforts of initiative, sympathy, discovery, and love.” – George Gilder
I’ve had the great good fortune over the last three-plus years to play a very small part in the development of the first supercomputer in world history to reach exascale performance. A lot of very smart people worked on this system from design to implementation. As you might imagine, it is extremely complex.
When I was an engineer at Amazon, back in the early 2000s, one of the things I learned was the propensity human beings have for developing superstitious explanations for the visible phenomenon of complex systems. The last talk I gave to the engineering organization there was called “Superstitious Architectures: How to Avoid Them.” The gist of that talk was that complex systems can only ever be understood by beginning with the humility to recognize the limits of your present understanding. Taking the trouble (and it’s a lot of trouble in really huge systems) to gather and analyze hard data is a prerequisite for understanding. You simply must presuppose your own ignorance.
One of the very best data scientists I know will, when asked what he does for a living, tell people “I’m a data scientist but none of us really knows what we’re doing.” It is this fundamental recognition of his own limited grasp of what he’s doing that makes him such an excellent data scientist. Humility is the magic juice that creates the necessary motivation to actually learn.
One of the things that has always made me skeptical of the doom and gloom claims about the climate, as it happens, is the over-weaning self-assurance of the Chicken Littles of global warning. Their authoritative pronouncements are just too long on sanctimony and too short on humility, especially for something as complex as a planetary climate. At Amazon, the most operationally competent company I have ever worked for, we couldn’t even get all the measurements we needed from our own computing infrastructure. A lot of the time we didn’t even know what measurements we needed. The idea that climate scientists can measure an entire planet with sufficient comprehensiveness to illuminate what they claim to know is, well, dubious.
Gilder’s quote should be memorized by every politician who thinks that he possesses any understanding whatsoever whenever he’s tempted to put his hands on the levers of the economy. The best politicians are those with an acute sense of their own limited understanding of something as complex as an economy, to say nothing of their rank ignorance about the richly diverse lives of the real human beings who comprise a nation.
The politicians we need are those who stand ready to leave us all alone. Such politicians will, by definition, never be part of the socialist herd. At least not before they’re elected.
Published in General
I agree that humility is an invaluable asset in so many areas of our lives. Too bad that “humble politician” is an oxymoron.
Same problem in biomedicine as we saw during the pandemic. I tell my students we basically suck at complexity.
I gave up on the Climate Crisis argument as I watched “An Inconvenient Truth” with friends.
The moment that Al Gore stated “hockey stick” I realized what a sham this is.
I had witnessed “hockey stick” economic predictions that went bust, because no one in the world of Big Finance wanted to question the “hockey stick” projections of this or that company.
The first company that I watched fail in the “hockey stick” projections was Atari in the 1980’s. It had cornered the market on the newly emerging video games market. Its products were fully in demand the first several years of its existence, because so many people wanted decent exciting computer games for themselves and their kids.
But the world of finance stated “hockey stick” projections were in the mix. That Atari’s customer base could only continue to explode at the exact and quite overwhelming customer acquisition rate that it had been experiencing in the 12 months prior.
This financial assumption stunk because the world of personal computers and personal gaming was in its infancy.
I suspected one of two things:
I also knew people who worked at Atari. They had some major dis-satisfactions with their jobs. In one case, a man with excellent credentials was given the job of VP in marketing. Only he was never invited to key meetings, never given anything to do, and he simply sat at a desk getting paid huge amounts of money.
So he went off to discuss things with his boss. His boss finally let out that R. had the job he had so that the boss could claim to manage as many VP’s under his charge as a rival was managing inside the company but in another division.
At that point, my friend began to bring a novel he was working on to work with him each day, as he was tired of twiddling his thumbs.
Atari’s stock tanked sometime in the mid-1980’s. I often wondered if the financial geniuses who had predicted it a company too wondrous to ever falter had shorted the stock before it went down.
Related post at Grim’s Hall: Patchwork.
Great post.
Exactly so!
They’re not paid to be humble, they’re paid to make people feel safe and cared about.
Politicians have to pretend to understand a lot more than they do. The problem is that millions come to believe them, and that they, and the supercrats who have so much power, can actually run the country. They can’t. If you’ve spent any time in government you understand that the bureaucrats just work within their organization to advance its interests and of course their own. They have to occasionally address some things congress wants, but even most congressmen don’t understand much beyond their immediate interests. Even folks who distrust big government don’t understand just how blind to the nation folks in Washington are. In addition to the expensive bureaucratic monstrosity, we have digital company leaders who just keep getting more power as they enjoy falling costs but understand very little outside their immediate interests, indeed they have more power than anyone, except, of course the Chinese.
Way, way too many Republicans don’t understand the menace of central planning anything that absolutely doesn’t require it.
The left is about ideology and the fact that they don’t exist unless they produce more public goods either by generating problems or lying about them. Then you get ordinary Democrats buying into socialism either blindly or otherwise. It helps them that central planning is a proven stupid concept.