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[Linguoboy]

I recently watched some episodes about the fictional Bengali detective Byomkesh Bakshi.

Sounds neat! And hard to translate. (Unless I missed something in the Wikipedia article, or they did, the stories haven't appeared in English.)

They have; I own a volume of them. To be honest, I found it tough going. The cultural expectations of what a detective story looks like are so different that I found the couple I read pretty unsatisfying and haven't gone back to it.

[bradrn]

I recently watched some episodes about the fictional Bengali detective Byomkesh Bakshi.

Sounds neat! And hard to translate. (Unless I missed something in the Wikipedia article, or they did, the stories haven't appeared in English.)

They have; I own a volume of them. To be honest, I found it tough going. The cultural expectations of what a detective story looks like are so different that I found the couple I read pretty unsatisfying and haven't gone back to it.

I’d be interested to know exactly what made them feel so different.

[keenir]

To Rotting Bones,

I wish to retract my earlier statements that you should avoid Vulcan philosophy and also retract my statements about your thoughts regarding Stoics et al.

Instead, I wish to suggest you give a look at the lifestyle and philosophy of the Samuri(sp)...such as the focusing & calming techniques such as flower arranging and caligraphy.

I've decided to become a Vulcan. I can't afford to become depressed whenever I read the news. Emotions are for rich people. Dif-tor heh smusma.

Plus, I have a big problem with traditional Stoic positions like accepting your place in society. Marcus Aurelius also has what I thought were some shockingly anti-intellectual positions about reading books,

[keenir]

Honestly, you seem to lose your ability to parse sentences when discussing RB's posts

I try...but yeah, i notice that too - but when I read over what I replied to, my brain gives me the same reply, or one close enough that a change probably wouldn't be noticed.

What rubs him wrong is not "atheists going insane and committing random crimes" by itself, but that in the stories they're doing it "because atheism",

There were a number of characters in the tv series who were like that - boasting of their atheism and how its superior and it makes them better than the religious quacks, etc...but I can't think of anyone who committed a murder because of their atheism - murdering to keep a secret or to remove a romantic rival, sure, but not Because Atheism (if thats a trope)

(i think in my prior post, i tried being sarcastic or flippant, and fell on my face in the attempt when i posted earlier)


here's the version I'm familiar with: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2215842/

which is a flippant way of saying what I said above - because they lack the hope and guidance provided by faith.

A lot of the crimes (at least, from the % i can remember, which i grant is far from all or most) were committed by people who never stated what faith they held -- granted, some of them were villagers whose denomination was left unspecified beyond "they do/don't attend church"...Father Brown visited them in police custody & questioned them for clues, no matter what their faith.

[hwhatting]

@keenir - RB and I are talking about the books, you're talking about a tv show. I can only assume that the religious background is toned down in the show, due to Chesterton's views being not very suitable to contemporary sensitivities. Now, as I said, it's never fully on-the-nose in the stories either, but in some of them it's spelled out quite clearly that, to repeat it, lack of faith leads to lack of hope and guidance and therefore may lead to crime.

[Linguoboy]

I try hard not to be too prescriptivist but someone I know just posted "Eid Mubarak to all of our Moslem friends" and I had an immediate cringe reaction.

[Raphael]

Does anyone else have the impression that pretty much all the most popular arguments for free trade, including those made by celebrated economists who seem otherwise intelligent, effectively come down to some variation of "If some amount of X is better than none of X, then clearly more of X must always be better than less of X"?

Do these celebrated economists apply the same kind of "logic" to watering their houseplants or taking their medication?

[zompist]

Does anyone else have the impression that pretty much all the most popular arguments for free trade, including those made by celebrated economists who seem otherwise intelligent, effectively come down to some variation of "If some amount of X is better than none of X, then clearly more of X must always be better than less of X"?

Yes and no. Economists do tend to reduce everything to numbers, which allow them to be tracked and compared. This allows scientific conclusions that couldn't otherwise be made. And it's what makes philosophical treatments (such as Adam Smith's) frustrating today: he will identify a factor but cannot say how much it's a factor.

The practice even makes for rather elegant models of concepts like "enough" or "the right price", which would otherwise be largely vacuous. Note that this partially answers your question: the "right price" is a balance of opposing tendencies, so there's no idea that it would be better if it was higher.

But you're quite right that the numbers ultimately mean something, and that can get lost. If a country has $1 trillion in GDP, should it try for $2 trillion, because that's twice as good? Maybe, maybe not, but the mere numerical comparison can't tell us.

An observation from psychophysics might help: human preferences (and I believe animal ones) seem to operate on a log scale. If people like a pound of chocolate a certain amount, they don't like 10 pounds ten times as much— it's more like twice as much. (This in turn doesn't address things that are good at some quantity but toxic at a higher quantity.)

[Raphael]

Thank you, interesting. I thought of this because I just finished Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist, and while much of the book is interesting, Chapter 9 is, IMO, pretty dumb and filled with fallacies. That's the chapter where he argues for unlimited free trade by pointing to countries (e. g. North Korea) that had or have very severe restrictions on trade and did or do poorly as a result, as if this meant that there must never be any restrictions on trade. That's what looks like the "If some amount of X is better than none of X, then clearly more of X must always be better than less of X" fallacy to me.

In the same chapter, he's also full of praise for Ricardo's idea of the comparative advantage - but still, again in the same chapter, he praises various economic trends and policies for promoting the industrialization of non-industrialized countries, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that, if he really buys into Ricardo's idea of the comparative advantage, he should oppose the industrialization of non-industrialized countries, since they're clearly best at producing raw materials for other countries' industries.

[Ares Land]

Ricardo's comparative advantage theory explains why mercantilism ultimately failed. That's important historically of course, but still very relevant today. The thing is, it's counter-intuitive, so most people -- including politicians -- fall for mercantilist fallacies. (See some of Trump's most inane comments about China; less dramatically we also worry about the balance of trade a lot more than we should).

The theory shouldn't be taken further than it should; it explains why you won't take a direct loss through free trade; but applying tariffs (for instance) in order to build a specific industry 100% makes sense.
It won't tell us a thing about where the profit you make trading end up. (The country seen as a single entity will benefit if you extract natural resources and sell them to other countries; it absolutely does not preclude all of the profits ending in the same guys' pocket which is often what happens.)
Also, hidden costs aren't generally factored in. (Like, for instance, CO2 released while transporting goods from China to Europe, say.)

My general impression is that right-wing or centrist pundits have a good but superficial command of economics; they will tend to apply models unthinkingly.

(A good, if somehow caricatural example is unemployment. I mean, of course, if unemployment is the only thing you take into account, then of course lowering the minimum wage and at-will firing will bring unemployment rates down. Even though that sort of policy has an overall negative impact.)

[zompist]

Ricardo was extremely clever for 1817. The two big problems I see:

One, his theory offers no guidance for the country that wants to improve its productivity, absolute or relative. It's not impossible to do it without import protection, but most developed countries did resort to that, including the UK and US.

Second, it's not accidental that countries promote free trade at the precise moment when free trade makes them rich. Britain benefited greatly from free trade in the 19th century; the US did in the 20th century.

(But that doesn't mean that all import protection is good, or all free trade is bad. The problem with the "we'll develop on our own, dammit" school, whether extreme as in North Korea or mild as in India, is that you end up without much development.)

[Raphael]

Third, if you only do what you're best at doing, you're effectively only doing one thing, and then you run into trouble when, for whatever reason, you can't live as well of it anymore - perhaps someone else comes along who does it better than you, or the product itself becomes less needed or less desired, or, if it's a finite resource, it runs out.

As I said before, in the language of internet slang, the problem with Ricardo's model of the comparative advantage can be phrased like this:

Shorter Ricardo: It is economically good for a place if the local economy mainly specializes in one main thing.

Shorter Reality: No.

Perhaps before Tim Harford wrote his chapter praising that theory, he should have traveled to the North of his native England and checked out how doing the one thing they were best at, for generation after generation, worked out for them in the end.

[malloc]

Regarding the doctrine of Occultation in Shia Islam, where in a general sense do they believe the 12th Imam is located? I mean, do they believe he is somewhere on Earth but really well-hidden or in another plane of reality? Sorry if this sounds like an attack on Islam or something. That is hardly my intention.

[Linguoboy]

Regarding the doctrine of Occultation in Shia Islam, where in a general sense do they believe the 12th Imam is located? I mean, do they believe he is somewhere on Earth but really well-hidden or in another plane of reality? Sorry if this sounds like an attack on Islam or something. That is hardly my intention.

AFAICT, they still believe he is located somewhere on Earth. The Kaysanites, who first introduced the concept of occultation, reportedly believed that the imam Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya was living in seclusion on Mount Raḍwa in present-day Saudi Arabia. I haven't heard any speculation as to where the Hidden Imam is physically located, but given that some Shi'ite leaders reportedly believe that the USA and other forces of Satan are gathering intelligence in order to prevent his return, that's perhaps understandable.

[Raphael]

Interesting. Now I wonder about the evolution (no pun intended) of various Christian groups' beliefs about where heaven and hell are located.

[Raphael]

Having read a bit about economics recently, I must say that I'm very unimpressed by Rational Choice Theory. It seems to be basically unfalsifiable - no matter what choices people make, proponents of Rational Choice Theory can always claim that people made the choices that, after considering all tradeoffs, reflected their rational preferences.

"Our researchers have observed that when people see large banknotes lying on the sidewalk, they will bend down and pick them up!"

"Of course. People rationally maximize their financial benefit. Perfectly rational!"

"Our researchers have observed that when people see large banknotes lying on the sidewalk, they will just walk on instead of bending down and picking them up!"

"Of course. People have considered all the tradeoffs and rationally decided that they prefer the increased physical comfort of not having to bend down to the financial benefit of getting free money. Perfectly rational!"

So Heads proponents of Rational Choice Theory win, Tails opponents of Rational Choice Theory lose. Very convenient.

[Raphael]

Short, new, somewhat tongue-in-cheek blog post:

https://guessishouldputthisupsomewhere. ... ool-years/

[hwhatting]

Short, new, somewhat tongue-in-cheek blog post:

On your question in that blog::

So, why is there so little mention of high school age teenagers playing baseball in US pop culture? Any ideas?

I'm not American, but maybe because it doesn't serve any of the stereotypical roles required in High School Drama as well as the other sports? If you need your jock to be an athletic hulk, you take a football player; if you need an agile, acrobatic star, that's best served by a basketball player, and baseball is somewhow between the extremes?

[zompist]

maybe because it doesn't serve any of the stereotypical roles required in High School Drama as well as the other sports? If you need your jock to be an athletic hulk, you take a football player; if you need an agile, acrobatic star, that's best served by a basketball player, and baseball is somewhow between the extremes?

That could be. Also, maybe, baseball is not as big a high school sport. Some rough estimates, all for US high schools:

football - 1 million (mostly boys)
basketball - 1 million (half girls)
soccer - 800,000 (roughly half girls)
baseball - 500,000 (mostly boys)
volleyball - 500,000 (mostly girls)

[Linguoboy]

That could be. Also, maybe, baseball is not as big a high school sport.

Not surprising given that it's a summer sport in the USA. Football is played in the fall and indoor sports like basketball can be played year round.

I kind of question of the original assertion though. Has anyone actually counted? I remember lots of baseball in the books and stories we read.