What this means is that a guy who has a lot of street smarts and practical wisdom can be 'enkratic' - i.e. always intend to do what he believes he should do. But in that case he could be 'played' by an ill-wisher who intuits this foible of his. It is safer to play a 'mixed strategy'- i.e. introduce a random element into your behavior such that you are less predictable and easy to manipulate. By contrast, following a rigid rule such that if someone can 'tamper' with your beliefs then she is pulling the strings of your intentions, doesn't sound 'street smart'. It does not sound like the 'phronesis'- i.e. practical wisdom- of wily Odysseus. It sounds more like what the Greek Church calls Akrebia- a rigid observance- rather than 'Economia'- a discretionary latitude which involves trade offs.
Economic theory comes in two varieties- one assumes that all possible states of the world are known while the other, which is called Knightian Uncertainty, holds that this is very unlikely. Economists of the first type developed a Decision or 'Rational Choice' theory which assumed people would maximize their Utility- or over all satisfaction. These economists were puzzled why this seldom happened in real life. A few Economists sought to develop a different approach- one which we may term 'regret minimization'. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is supposed to have used a 'Regret Minimization Framework' when deciding to take a gamble on quitting a good job to found a wholly novel type of enterprise.
The trouble with 'regret minimization' is that any formalization of it is bound to be inferior to its informal application. In other words, in the real world, where there is 'Knightian Uncertainty', 'phronesis' beats 'episteme', economia beats axiomatic akrebia, intuition and hedging beat betting the farm on a 'mathematical certainty'.
People with practical wisdom know that there is a 'reputational advantage' in being the sort of person who intends to do the things he believes he ought to do. Precisely for this reason, practical wisdom is parsimonious in matters of belief and its heuristics diverge widely from epistemic axioms. It does not rush into making commitments. It is cautious.
Suppose you are an innocent person picked up by the police in a criminal case. Your instinct might be to shoot your mouth off. After all, you have nothing to hide. The man with practical wisdom, however, is guided by the maxim 'say nothing to the cops till you have your lawyer with you'. This may appear to be foolish. Why waste money on a lawyer? However, it may be 'regret minimizing' because it is possible the cops don't care about catching the real bad guy. They just want someone they can keep questioning so as to get the Press, or the Police Commissioner, off their backs. In this case the right thing to do is to follow the heuristic which conventionally signals phronesis. It is not even necessary to say- 'look, my lawyer will straighten all this out for you. After all, neither of us has any time to waste.' because you are giving the detectives an opening which they will use to try to manipulate you. The regret minimizing rule is 'keep shtum and lawyer up.' In a sense, you just made the detective's job easier. He can tell his boss 'the guy lawyered up. We're gonna need more circumstantial evidence before we can shake that tree again.' The boss then says 'go after the guy who won't stop talking. Why hasn't he lawyered up? It's screwballs like him who snap and commit crimes like this.'
I suppose one might say- 'we have a duty to tell everything we know to be true to the Police. We should not 'lawyer up'. ' The trouble is, there is no such legal duty. Indeed, such a duty is not in fact categorical. Both the police and those they interview are operating in a fog of uncertainty. If you had nothing to do with the crime, you should lawyer up because the presence of a legal professional ensures that 'traffic rules' under 'foggy conditions' are observed. This prevents accidents- e.g wastage of police time or a miscarriage of justice.
There may be a superior alternative to lawyering up. The man with phronesis may know someone in the Dept. and come in with him to make a statement. Alternatively, like me, he could don his Batman costume and team up with Wonder Woman and bitch about how the Justice League wouldn't have to reinforce its underpants with lead if Supes wasn't such a perv.
Phronesis can be distinguished from epistemic Nous quite easily. It relies on a heuristics of mimesis. Epistemics, on the other hand, seeks to deduce everything from first principles. The trouble is we don't know whether such deductions have a 'concrete model' in the world. We do know that our mimetic target, or 'role model', can exist in this world. So mimetics beats reinventing the wheel though no doubt we might aspire to eventually coming up with something wholly original.
Even a super-genius does not try to recreate the whole of modern mathematics on his own. Like Ramanujan, she wants to migrate to where mimetic targets and rivalry obtain. At least, this seems true of STEM subjects.
What of the Liberal Arts? In this field, Professors tend to be more ignorant and stupid than those who 'reinvent the wheel' for themselves while earning a living in some other way. Perhaps these disciplines are 'adversely selective'- those who can, do, those who can't, cant. But, assuming Professors chose their successors and, at least initially, that there were at least one or two good Professors, why are all Liberal Arts Depts so uniformly populated by such complacent cretins? Mimetics supplies the answer. Silliness has to be simulated for an economic reason. Otherwise, the smart and knowledgeable savant would suffer the fate of the white crow pecked to death by the rest of the flock. Thus all that obtains is 'preference falsification' based 'availability cascades' of Credentialized Cretinism.
Agnes Callard has a paper about 'Aspiration' and higher education in the Humanities. This is the abstract-
Callard tells us that she gave up vegetarianism while visiting family in Hungary. She thinks this happened because she had a duty to enjoy food offered to her. Surely, meat had been offered to her previously? What made the food in Hungary special? I think the answer is that she felt a duty to accept her family there as appropriate mimetic targets and...well, the fact is, she now enjoys meat. Her other instances deal with perhaps being required by her values not to be wholly dismissive of those with different political views. Again, it is plausible, that she has mimetic targets who display this catholicity. In any case, the alternative would be to become more of a raging loony than Jason Stanley.
Callard mentions feeling a duty to read Kierkegaarden Gnome because her student was writing a dissertation on that sad sack of shit. Might this not have been so as to preserve her own status as a Tardean mimetic target?
I am not saying Callard is a hypocrite. After all, admitting to eating meat is a brave thing to do nowadays as is suggesting that Republicans aren't all Nazi scumbags. Rather I am suggesting that Evolution had a good reason, so to speak, for hiding our values from us. We have no Momus window into the soul because if we could 'hack' ourselves, so could predators and parasites. There are all sorts of things like 'Aspirations', 'Values', 'Intentions' and so forth which it is useful to posit and keep around such that the water is muddied and the regret minimizing fish evades both the angler and Rumi's 'universalist' solution which was to reach the ocean, where, being a fresh water species, it would die a horrible and futile death.
I find- as, I believe others do- Callard an engaging figure. Her aspirations were of a noble sort. But were they not essentially mimetic? Consider this passage-
Thus, in Callard's terms, I represent the ripened fruit of 'self-cultivation'. The mimetic aspect of Aspiration is absent in my identity as a drunken bum though in my occasional ravings the savant may find the Prolegomenon to all Future Socioproctology.
We all, at every moment, delete, not acquire, 'a new area of agency'. Our potential narrows because 'creodes', developmental pathways, are eliminated. What Mathematics teaches Socioproctology is that, as Uncertainty falls, Regret Minimization converges to Rational Choice theory albeit one featuring ontological dysphoric objects. This is why Socioproctology does not consider Mathematics an asshole and therefore dismisses it as a proper subject for its invigilation. The Humanities, however, can teach Socioproctology nothing, because assholes are utterly ignorant- though no doubt there is a salutary medical reason to finger them. Thus, it is vital to the health of a Society sufficiently close to senility that Socioproctology occur. But I'd rather profess it than practice the thing myself.
This is shit and where there is shit there must be an asshole. Socioproctology has already extensively critiqued decision theory. The fact is, some Econ models do feature mimetic effects- and aspiration is mimetic- because software applications of cellular automata theory are cheap. Incorporating Regret Minimization or Hannan Consistent learning strategies isn't that hard and there will soon be a smart phone app for it. Thus it is only the availability cascades kept in loose motion by eminent assholes which causes the nuisance represented by 'Liberal Education' as a pure signalling, rather than intrinsic worth enhancing, mechanism. This would be fine if it was a genuine Zahavi handicap like the peacock's tail. But we now believe it is the topos of a particularly adverse type of 'affirmative action'. Indians feel that only the most cretinous Indians are Ivy League Professors in non STEM subjects. African Americans must hold similar views. Women, themselves being a Liberal Education, are more open in their contempt for their ugly sisters. Indeed, Phenomenological Feminism failed in the early Seventies as an incipient Academic Research Program precisely because anyone having a bad hair day had the ability to be crazier than Shulamith Firestone. Thus, it could only survive as the project of everyone scratching everyone else's eyes out while cashing the pension checks of Dead White Males.
Callard says 'College education is
What 'Structural Causal Model' is Callard's claim re. Liberal Education based on? It is that Professors act either like an idealized bonus paterfamilias, or else like ideal suppliers of a commodity under information symmetry, or- her own 'third way'- Professors do something valuable when they 'articulate' distinctive benefits which Education provides 'the characteristically aspirational movement towards value' that some rando called the 'splendid opening out of the self'.
Sadly, things which are false- or merely bullshit- can't have a causal role. If Professors were paying for their student's education- or, at the least, a Friedman type 'Income Share Agreement' obtains- then, provided they genuinely were smart and good, we can expect culpa levis in abstracto to be minimized.
Information asymmetry in Knowledge Commodities can be remedied by certain mechanisms. However the current University system is a mechanism of an opposite and wholly mischievous type. As for Callard's own bullshit- I don't see how it could provide a mimetic target for anybody. She wasted her time doing Physics- she should be talking about Parrando Games- the sequence of losing bets that characterized her academic career as yet having made her a 'winner' or 'highly stable genius'- if she wants to convince us she isn't a complacent cretin- and then, dropping Physics, she wasted her time doing Classics because she didn't get that its sole purpose has to do with developing an elegant prose style.
Now she is wasting her time doing Philosophy. No doubt, we are supposed to cheer for her because stupid women are under-represented in some stupid branch of a worthless discipline. But how abject does your life have to be if Callard can kindle your aspirations and provide you with a mimetic target? The woman probably has a much higher IQ than I do. She isn't a drunken bum. Why hasn't she made a shed-load of money and used it to fund scientific research or artistic experimentation while she herself enjoys a life-style which might stir us to greater effort by reason of envious emulation?
Aspiration, sadly, is what kills Inspiration. Mimetics is what renders Maieutics a Credentialized couvade. Truth is a pathless land where nothing grows because credentialized assholes are always on the march incessantly trampling over it. Meanwhile, 'first order' work- people doing actual good- continues far away from those who seek to measure it or put their imprimatur upon it so as to secure 'obligatory passage point status' or gain a rent. But of those who aren't assholes, Socioproctology must remain silent. Indeed, the mission of this sublime discipline will only be complete when the drunken bum within us is no longer stung to cries of incoherent rage at the complacent assholes who step around our, now, not just stinking, but actively putrefying corpse.
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