Precision can be a mean as well as an end of determinism, and determinism is the modus operandi of science. The great Albert Einstein was a champion of determinism (and his beloved classical physics) when he proclaimed “God does not play dice!”
So I am nervous about declaring determinism a major menace to good decision-making, but the truth – in the form of caution -- must be told.
Like everybody else, I am all for the precision, the truth and the determinism, and all the usual good stuffs that go with it, but not when they were applied prematurely.
Haven’t we have acted as if the earth is flat, although it is not when we examined it precisely later on? When we say that the earth is flat, we are roughly correct, not wrong, for otherwise we wouldn’t be able to walk on it. Two parallel lines meet in the distance, and when we walk towards the point of convergence, we found out that truly parallel lines never do meet. There’s another convergence point ahead of us. We live and learn. And the mean we do it with is the method of successive approximation.
The principle of RC to PC that I have been referring to is phrased a bit awkwardly, but the meaning in some deep sense is the same as “successive approximation.”
I am only saying that in the real world the probabilities are not with you if the determinism is your only companion.
Determinism works only if you are the sole scriptwriter of the whole play.
When I was at home in my native land, Time and Newsweek were hard to find. The authorities considered both magazines the propaganda arms of a big bad powerful imperialist. To find a stray copy or two, you needed to scrounge around holes-in-the-wall bookstores and pay a king’s ransom to get your hand on the newest issue.
If Richard Pryor had been in one of those old issues that I have gotten hold of, I would not have given a second glance. At that time, my eyes were peeled for two news items only: immigration reform in U.S. Congress and the latest trends in sciences and technologies. Immigration reformed will cut the wait in years for an entry visas; knowledge of trends in sciences and technologies will allow me to plan or forge a career path.
I thought I might have a chance to work in an area or a field that was been talked about in those popular weekly magazines. As I remembered it the magazines had glowing account of men managing the Vietnam War, and their arsenals of scientific tools. The magazines mentioned the management methods of Robert McNamara when he was a CEO of Ford Motor Company. Articles mentioned his “steel-trap mind,” helped along it appeared by the then popular acolytes of scientific management, such as critical paths, linear programming, game theory, artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc. etc.
As I made a survey of the topics however, I found myself at odds over the classical maximum-minimum principle governing the thinking over many of these fields of studies. Nor could I believe that Nature is as overly deterministic and bloody minded as the least action principle of classical physics seems to demand. The idea of the biggest bang for the buck did seems a big much.
Faced with such doubts about determinism, I did what anyone with an ounce of free will would do: force oneself to a belief that freedom (or flexibility) must also be an essential element of Nature.
We know that these two polar elements are orthogonal to each other. And therefore how does one goes about incorporating the two diametrical opposites -- freedom and determinism -- into the same bosom of Nature?
One way of incorporation is to demand Nature to go in stages -- from big bang to big bang – from the states of being free or flexible to the states that are deterministic or single-valued. Like walking, a step at a time, shifting weights from left to right (L-R) and right to left (R-L).
From such beginnings, one didn’t have to go far to see that the formulation with freedom and determinism is analogous to the concepts: of order and disorder from thermodynamics; of mind and body from philosophy; of wave and particle from quantum physics; of variation and selection from evolutionary biology; of linear and nonlinear from mathematics and so on and on at infinitum.
If you carry on with this kinds of analogies, you will end up noting that nothing in Nature exists without their own special pairs of opposites.
The principle “RC to PC” (“roughly correct to precisely correct”) is one among the multitudes. An awkward formulation perhaps, but the formula is extremely useful to me from the point of view of the problems that I set out to understand.
At the least, it gives me a good set of nose for a healthy skepticism. Certainly a tad more “scientific” measure of what works than what you would get from knowing that something is “too good to be true”. Instead of saying something is too good to be true, I might have said that something is “too precise” to be workable or believable. “Premature precision” is the word I sometimes use.
It’s a useful metric.
However, the application of the rule has not been as straight forward in some cases, but it does not disappoint.
A reader can certainly judge for his/her-self whether the principle of RC to PC could have been helpful in the following problem-situations.
1. A President’s Daily Brief
“Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States” was the headline item in the President’ Daily Brief (PDB) of August 6th. PDB predates the actual attack on 9/11.
Congressmen wanted to know what was the state of intelligence and what if anything was been done about it. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was the point woman of Bush administration. She started by giving a disquisition on the nature of information – the actionable information and the historical information [my italics]. She implied that August 6th PDB was a historical information, i.e. Bin Laden was a sworn enemy of the United States. Nothing new there.
She also said no one had briefed WH about “planes as missiles,” adding “No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon,” and the World Trade Centers.
Of course. God himself would not have drawn such a detailed picture of the catastrophe that followed, for even a God – if He/She is a part of Nature -- must follow the principle of RC to PC.
Data are dead and desiccated without the foliage from a hypothesis.
A corollary to the principle of RC to PC is, absence the background (the “hypothesis”) the figure (the “data”) belongs everywhere and nowhere.
To be concrete, before 9/11, who has given a penny worth of thought about young Muslim men attending aviation schools?
2. Dominoes & Determinism
The Iraq War was fought for Peace – peace in the Middle East and beyond. The grand scheme we were told was a democratic Iraq, acting as the catalyst of change for the rest of the Arab world. From the Euphrates to the Niles. A fine piece of diplomatic vision worthy of a presidential ambition of a great powerful country.
Let’s go back to another time and another place – the place called Vietnam. The War rationale then was if Vietnam had fallen, other Asian countries likewise would have fallen to communism. Asian countries as dominoes, falling one after another. Determinism grimly at work.
The history has not blessed either visions, the one based on hopes or the other based on fear.
3. WMD-sized Derivatives
The Financial Meltdown of 2008 arrived in the United States and spread to the world. Another Great Depression was eminent. Congress called in the FED Chairman Alan Greenspan to explain the why and wherefore of the great calamity.
The congressional records have provided the full details – the questions, the answers and the explanations. However, the overwhelming substance and tone of the Chairman Greenspan’s answers were about a faulty worldview, about academic theory that spawned WMD-sized financial derivatives, about stats and maths models that reside on the hard disks of the FED and Wall Street supercomputers.
Of the latter, he said: “A Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of the pricing model that underpins much of the advance in derivates markets. This modern risk management paradigm held sway for decades. The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year because the data inputted into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria.”
The businesses of the world were run on autopilot, and everybody was watching the numbers on their respective meters, totally unaware of the impending darkness that was descending over them.
Asked to comment on the failure of the Federal Reserve to properly warn of the Financial Meltdown of 2008Mr. Greenspan gave what I thought was a oracular answer. Risk models, according to the Chairman, were under pricing risk by assuming ever rising housing prices.
The Chairman appeared to be pointing the finger at the fragility of math models that the rocket scientists of Wall Street have built for themselves.
The next phase of life journey begun on an island in front of One Times Square Building on 42nd Street in New York. Two suit cases and a wife in tow. New immigrants. Exhilarated and fearful at the same time. We situated ourselves close to the Army Recruiting Booth, a place of safety in our estimation. Cannot remember if there were real persons inside, or just an empty booth with picture of Uncle Sam’s I Want You on the outside. No matter, a picture is always worth a thousand words.
Next, we crossed the street, planted ourselves in front of a large record store, waiting for a taxi to take us to a hotel. Browsing the display window, we saw a picture spread of a half naked man on an album cover. Dressed in a loin cloth and squatting as I vaguely remembered. An indelible memory marker of our arrival at the New World.
When we became hip to the ways of a Big City, we found out that the half naked man was no aborigine, but a white-hot comedian named Richard Pryor.
2009 Nobel Prize winners had been announced and awarded. I can name three without pausing to think: Paul Krugman, President Obama, andHerta Müller. A home town boy made good; my President, but who is Herta Müller?
She is the winner of Nobel Prize for Literature, and I found her win the most exhilarating. She is a German of Romanian origin, and her novels are about lives under a dictatorship of Ceauşescu: How people – the oppressed and the oppressors both– carries on. Scratching and hurting each other in innumerable ways. Very much like the characters in Florian Henckel von Donnersmach’s film “The Lives of Others.” I could have traded with Herta Müller a few of those stories, for I am sure that there is a deep well of common humanity underneath the veneers of cultural differences between countries.
A heroine in one of Müller’s novels is a seamstress who sewn her name and a message “Marry Me” into every trousers her factory exported to the West. I am sure a young Burmese girl in a similar situation of boredom and pettiness of lives under a similar regime could have come up with a similar solution. Only that no one has chosen to record it as yet.
But I have a real story to tell Herta Müller. Without the sensibilities of her talents and breadth of her experiences, I can show only the skin of the story.
The faculty at Rangoon Institute of Technology received a questionnaire asking us whether we are members of the BSPP (Burma Socialist Program Party), and if not where the application to join it can be obtained. The junior and senior faculty piled into too few private cars – a Hillman or two, a few Vauxhalls and a couple of Toyotas – and drove to downtown Municipal Building near Sule Pagoda. I ended up riding in a car where the Dean was a passenger. A provocateur in me said something provocative, and the Dean replied with a pithy Burmese proverb that silenced the provocateur in me. Were I able to channel Sara Palin, I could have said to the Dean “Only dead fish go with the flow.”
Now every time I saw a teen movie like “Grease” where everybody piles into available cars, all engines rev up and firing – ready to drive to a racing site or their own favored place to hang out – my memory invariably flashes back to that particular day at R.I.T! That day – more than anything else – was a “decider” [to borrow a word from former President Bush’s favorite locution “I’m the decider.”] for my decision to leave the country ASAP.
We were a group of boys aged 10 to 13 who congregated to play street games that involve hitting one object with another, usually from a distance. The projectiles are generally pieces of metal or other objects that slides or throws well. The arrangements of seeds from the local flora usually form the target. The seeds were our chips, our currency. Imagine if you will a primitive and free form of bowling without the pin setting machine or a set pattern of individual lanes. That was the game we played.
The nature of the game varies with the arrangement of the target negotiated before hand. It could be a vertical arrangement, one behind the other or a horizontal one, spread across, or some other designs. The object is always to knock out as many of the pieces as possible in one throw. Strategy and finesse, more than accuracy, are required to be a consistent winner.
We played in the street when the bullock cart traffic was no longer active. When it rained, we played a truncated versions of the same games under our houses which were built on long legs, with enough headroom for an adult to walk through with ease. The space sometimes doubled as refuge for some domesticated animals, when the weather was bad.
We preferred the street, played until dusk or the players’ quorum falls below some number, or when continued playing was no longer fun. We broke up when some of us were called to dinners by our parents.
It was an idyllic times in our lives, i.e. until the two brothers joined our closed circle of friends. They were children of farm hands, with darker shade of skins, their little bodies wound tight with muscles which we didn’t possess. They told us that they knew kick-boxing, and we believe them without any demonstrations on their parts.
They came to play our games, and before long the brothers were bullying us in all sorts of ways. Even the bravest and the brawniest among us refused to confront them, i.e. until the brothers and we agreed to a game which allow the winner to strike the loser’s hand planted as a target some distance away. In this game, the hand must planted and the fist hold tight as the winner tried to strike the loser’s hand with a projectile made usually of round glass beads. A child’s version of Russian roulette you could say.
I was considered a good shot among our circle of gamers, and so I was chosen to play against the older brother. I won and I won. The older brother’s hand was black and blue, and as the game progressed, his hand flinched, an instinctual movement away from the incoming projectile. His spirit also capitulated, and from that day on, we became friends.
Best, the normalcy returned. We grew up.
The story of the two brothers should end here, but it was only the beginning. A major life lesson was learnt.
When I was a boy, WWII came and gone as if it was a natural phenomenon. Like the rainstorms and thunderclaps of a monsoon, here today, gone tomorrow. No question of “why” WWII came to my native land ever arises in my mind.
1962 military coup in Burma was altogether different. It had cracked the shell in which I was living.
Vietnam War taught me a few things beyond the lessons of citizenship and politics. But I don’t feel that my understanding was adequate, mainly because my knowledge of the steps that led to it was second hand. I felt like the eyewitness who came after the fight had started: all you see are the bruised lips and broken noses.
In Iraq War my senses were better tuned. Before the sky of Baghdad had lit up with the bombs and the flares, I have the sensation that the fuse of war will be lit at any minute. There were thunderous speeches and drum beats for war, including what turned out to be some falsehoods dressed up in a dulcet tones of diplomacy. The demonstration at the UN lacked only the Bunsen burner.
No one vigorously opposed – or dared to oppose – the prevailing sentiments. Senator Hillary Clinton’s (now the Secretary of State in Obama administration ) YES vote in Congress for war authorization bill can be understood in such light.
Now we are in a pickle – in Iraq and on Wall Street.
We are in Iraq for the seventh year, and no one (except a few) fess up to been wrong.
As to what happened on Wall Street, the corpse is still warm, and there is no time yet for detailed autopsies to find either the causes or the culprits. But then why do I feel like the gas station attendant in the move “No Country For Old Men” who put nothing up in the coin toss, and yet his fate is being decided by the outcome of that toss?
I was traveling on a bus going uptown on 3rd Avenue in New York City. A young child and her grand mother sat in a double-seat immediately next to the rear exit door. I was a seat behind them.
A man was seen exiting, and as quickly he stepped back in and then he exited again. He was stepping up and stepping down the bus back exit with no apparent reason, and I was beginning to think that he was weird. Finally, the bus started to move, and the man was left standing on the sidewalk. When the exit door finally closed, the child cried out “Spider-Man!” while laughing heartily. It took me a better part of the journey to figure out the meaning of a happy little girl’s apt analogy.
It was huge leap of imagination for any one—let alone from a little girl—to see a parallel between a city bus and tall skyscraper buildings of Spider-Man movies! In her mind, the behavior of the man was something like the Spider-Man hopping on and hopping off tall skyscraper buildings.
This ability to see something as another thing can’t be the same stuff that went into computers to make them smart. Even computers that manage hedge funds, that plays master level chess, that manage orbital flights, that manage electricity grids oflarge cities, that suggest diagnosis of a complex disease must be considered dullards when we compare them with the brain of a human child.
Surely, the expertise in a narrow domain cannot hold a candle to the adaptability and creativity of human beings.
