cheese it, the cops!

i'd like briefly to take up the theme of self-esteem, still central to the popular understanding of psychological health and education, particularly for girls and women. now the notion is important in that self-loathing is a real possibility and is debilitating or literally destructive. but the form it takes in contemporary culture - which let's just say i may have encountered firsthand in let's say a marriage or something - is...impoverished. if self-esteem is conceived as a kind of distinct agency or quantity in your head, and of course a positive thing, then it is a moral catastrophe. or it could be. one might think to oneself that one should be the sort of person whom one can admire; then the need for self-esteem would make you better. however, of course one could be an admirable person and also have "low self-esteem," so people go to work directly on the quantity of self-esteem. then you get a situation like this. i am a good person. (i am!!) so whatever i want, it's what a good person would want, and whatever i do, it's what a good person would do. if i did it, it follows that it was right, because i am a good person. self-criticism is absolutely prohibited as being dangerous to self-esteem. any criticism by others is also false, and ought not to be heard at all, as it puts my self-esteem at risk. my self-esteem, in other words, is purely a priori, not an inference from but an inference to my actions and personality. then, let us say, absolutely anything can be justified on the basis of self-esteem; it becomes pathological.

what i'd say is: try to deserve esteem, whether of yourself or anyone else. then hope that this has the effect of making you feel ok about yourself. it might not. but if your basic commitment is to feeling ok about yourself come what may, you are a pretty disastrous  and self-deluded person. but it really is a dilemma, because if you dislike yourself, you're not at least going to be very effective as a good person, and nobody is very good after their suicide. perhaps we should conceive of self-esteem - like perception, for example - as a dialogue with reality. as, for example, ernst gombrich argues in the classic art and illusion, perception of reality would be impossible if you didn't bring to it expectations and schemata. but perception would also be impossible if these expectations and schemata were not corrigible in the face of the world. you have to be permeable, or else you are insane.

self-esteem cannot be an intrinsic property of persons; it is dialogic if it is a decent thing. when you act badly, you have to let this compromise your self-esteem, or you're never going to be any better. this is difficult, to say the least, and one of the very most difficult things is to know, really, whether you are a good person, or how good a person you are. self-reflection is a process of inference from funhouse mirrors. still, the point is to assess yourself as honestly and accurately as possible, not simply to believe of yourself that you are good. the goal has got to be to believe yourself to be exactly as good as you actually are. i actually want to loathe myself, if i am loathsome, and i have my moments. that seems like the likeliest way to get better. even self-loathing, in other words, has a moral function.

maybe we are all blessed children of god. maybe god doesn't make junk, only diamonds. maybe we are all entirely admirable. but that doesn't seem to correspond to our actual experience of ourselves or other people, does it?

of course, the girls/women/self-esteem nexus revolves largely around issues of appearance and attractiveness. here there is a lot of leeway, because standards of attractiveness are notoriously malleable and local. but even here, there's no sense in pursuing the thing at all without some reference to external truth. you could think you're grotesquely fat when you you're skeletally thin. that is a big problem. on the other hand, you could think there's nothing wrong when you're grotesquely fat, on the grounds that that would mess with your self-esteem. that is also a problem, though perhaps less common.

well, you can pull out a pro-choice argument from palin's struggles about whether to have an abortion, as ruth marcus does, or not. but i do agree with her that palin's honesty is bracing. also, it's quite typical of sarah, and i think represents a humanity or actuality that we rarely see in politicians, and that one way or another has to be fundamental to governing.

obviously if this account is anything like true, child porn charges are absurd. what is disturbing, rather, is just the routine mindless totalitarianism of the public school. so, the assistant principal hears something on the news about "sexting."  he calls in some random student and more or less demands to see the images on his phone. what? why? then it all goes into some nightmare of arbitrary surveillance, censorship etc. why in the world do these idiots feel that it's part of their responsibility to monitor communications or police their students' sex lives? that in itself should be prosecutable. there'll be the usual mindless, utterly vague appeals to maintaining an atmosphere for learning and so on. the truth is that your average high school assistant principal is a martinet, a little baby dictator who's not about learning in any form but only the exercise of arbitrary power. why, in a democracy, should a school be a zone of completely anti-democratic values, a kind of internment camp, run on the presumption that every kid is a potential dissisent, and every dissident must be crushed?

very excellent editorial in the nytimes this morning, re: torture.

see the problem is: say you're trying to oppose the bush admin's wars, enthusiasm for torture, surveillance, wack religious edges. then you're in bed with the left, with their insane gigantism, international regimes, unbelievable condescension toward the people whose condition they're supposedly trying to ameliorate: all they want in life is the state. but say you're worried about spending a trillion dollars every monday or insanely ambitious projects of universal social engineering. you're grooving on the militia movement, or at least feeling refreshed by it. then you're in bed with religious fanatics, militarists, or perhaps straight-up racists, ant-immigrant fanatics etc. the only thing you can do is just keep switching sides, trying to keep the biggest monster of the moment at bay.

look, roughly there are no americans left. there's no one who would not simply impose their little solution on everybody if they had a chance. this is as true of olbermann as hannity, or obama as bush. so we needed the left during the bush admin, screaming peace. we need the right now.

once more to the tea parties: the left doesn't understand the meaning of freedom, democracy etc. when bush was doin his thing, they were threatening to move to france or whatever, squawking and screeching, as well they should have been. that, obviously, had nothing to do with valuing dissent or free expression or something: it had only to do with the self-evident rightness of all their opinions: the sheer idiot dogmatism and unanimity. you can see this because now they argue that only evil idiots could object for a moment to the infinite obama-state covering the world in gruel. as you stomp on these voices, you're really going to see a rise in secessionists, militias, etc. more or less, i will welcome this development. the sadthing is: neither side actually values liberty: each only values membership, enlistment.

what's your view? that on matters of taxation and spending, people have no right, reason, or indeed obligation to dissent?

if you think these expressions are the manufactured, artificial products of foxnews demagogues, i think you'd better keep watching. the gigantically-expanding state really is a profound betrayal of the values of many americans, and this is going to grow, and grow. and by dismissing it, you will make it ultimately bigger and more extreme.

today's top stories:

stocks plunge on news of madden's retirement

pfizer to merge with mexican drug cartel

ashton kutcher, diddy marry in new york

biden annoying, say sources

a friend of my mom's asked me the other day what to read on the relation of evolutionary biology to art. i didn't really have a good answer except perhaps "ben-ami scharfstein," but let me make a few remarks on this matter. i think that this sort of question is not actually scientific because it proceeds from an a priori assumption. take any given thing we do, in any way we conceive it, and it must have an explanation in terms of natural selection. putting it mildly, that is false. now this case is particularly acute. we are thinking of 'art' in terms of more-or-less-by-definition useless objects: art defined precisely as what is not practically useful, what you just stare rapt at; art really defined in its distinction from craft. this is a conception that dates from the 18th century, or at earliest the renaissance: obviously that's miniscule on an evolutionary scale. personally i would proceed precisely in terms of craft: skill in making things is obviously of the utmost practical value for the kind of organisms we are. thus the idea that skill in itself is admirable would be a sensible evolutionary-type development: more or less why we have these relatively elaborate central nervous systems. but it could be fantastically elaborated into an admiration of skill for its own sake, detached from practical applications. this, it seems to me, accounts for at least some of the value we place on art works that have no practical applications, or to extreme skill in sport or performance (say, sleight-of-hand magic or circus-type skills). if you conceive of art in terms of impracticality, it is an evolutionary puzzle. but if you conceive it as one of many sort of fantastical or arbitrary implications or side-effects of actual adaptations, it at least makes a certain sort of sense. on the other hand, such side-effects could end up being utterly counter-adaptive, as we fiddle while the world burns. then again, even if it were counter-adaptive or even universally fatal, it wouldn't follow that art isn't the meaning of life.

perhaps only tarantino could make an incredibly bloody/incredibly funny/incredibly stylish japanese-gunfighter/american-samurai movie. well maybe someone else could. but only tarantino could do it as a re-make of shakespeare's henry vi - the war of the roses as scored by ennio morricone, cast with beautiful asians, and set in nevada - or at any rate such is my speculation. but one other thing. not all men, putting it mildly, have quite understood the incredible sexiness at the heart of feminism. tarantino does (cf kill bill). in sukiyaki western django, drunk grandma turns out to be badassest gunfighter of all. the film is not attributed to tarantino, who "acts" in it, as the only white dude. but i'm speculating more or less that he made it. one nice touch: the credits are all in unsubtitled japanese-looking script, so that it's origins remain obscure, at least to me.

for earth day, i hope the bold yet extremely conventional obama administration is working on a green military of the 32nd century. predator drones made entirely out of recycled materials. low-carbon-emissions phosphorous incendiaries. bradley armored vehicles that run on sunshine and love. resistance is useless. we will rain death on you from the skies.  but we will do it sustainably so that we never need to stop.

i think dowd pretty severely misunderstands what google is doing. so on the intellectual-property-type model, the nyt owns dowd's column, let's say. now the picture you get is that google copies this column and a bunch of other stuff from newspapers, makes a new newspaper, and markets it in rivalry to the nyt. but of course that's not what they do at all: they search its content and post links to it. now say the nyt wanted to and was able to prevent google from linking to its content. would this help its situation because now people wouldn't see google ads on the link page, and the advertisers and readers would have to come directly to the nyt? not at all, obviously. they'd just dramatically reduce their own readership. the google news aggregator should be conceived as symbiotic with the nyt, not as a rival. if the nyt really wants to go broke, then sue google or pass a law against linking to copyrighted material etc. that's just suicide.

some thoughts in response to andrew on top philosophers of now. one thing i should say is that i read impressionistically and across disciplines, and people know more than i do. true that we have in the last few years lost a cohort: quine, nozick, rorty, rawls, baudrillard, derrida, etc. some of that generation, more or less, remain. i often introduce the work of arthur danto to my classes by saying he is the best and most eminent living philosopher of art, but he had tackled the whole range of issues in his time. is saul kripke still out there somewhere kicking analytic ass? robert brandom is an interesting example of developments in analytic philosophy toward something a bit more open. on the continental tip everyone has been reading slavoj zizek, a wildly creative and various figure who seems to take the provocative stance that marxism is beautiful. i saw him on c-span the other day. what an insane collection of unwatchable tics. but what really disturbs me about zizek is that his work has dramtically delayed the moment where we could just euthanize lacan. alain badiou, also a maoist or something? actually is one of the most interesting people writing today, has re-thought 'truth,' for example, profoundly. my friend karmen mackendrick is an eccentric american continentalist and genius.the world of political philosophy has seemed dominated by rawls v. nozick interpretations of classical liberalism vs. sandel/macintyre communitarianism. philip pettit has revised classical republicanism as an alternative, and his book republicanism is as big as (or, almost) a theory of justice or anarchy, state, and utopia, and maybe as important. more will occur!

there is a notion abroad that we have been brought to crisis by unbridled capitalism. no. we've been brought to crisis by unbridled state/capital identifications/configurations, by squishy totalitarianism. a situation in which the treasury department is essentiall indistinguishable from goldman sachs is not, putting it mildly, one of dog-eat-dog undisturbed private competition. the markets were highly regulated by the state, only the state and the institutions it was regulating were intertwined and symbiotic. this should not be conceived as private-sector dominance of the state, but as the continuing merger of the two into a single system or even a single institution. and in my view theobama people are not amewliorating but intensifying this relationship. it's anachronistic to call that socialism.

in the context of teaching the philosophy of religion, i have been re-reading william james, and realizing again how extremely admirable and fundamental a thinker and writer he is: extremely clear, extremely smart, extremely reasonable, but extremely bold. one example: the lecture is life worth living?, which is partly a pre-capitulation of the fundamental defense of religious faith "the will to believe." (that and pieces of varieties of religious experience are on my syllabus, and are standard texts for such a course.)  but you know, how many contempoary philosophers would have a straight go at the question of whether one should, or should not, commit suicide? how many could actually fairly, squarely face the whole darkness, the whole of our suffering and death and so on, and then still find a real way to affirm life anyway? and even if there are some thinkers who would do such a thing, how many would do it as clearly, as straightforwardly, and as truly? well, my brief answer is 'none.' i don't actually accept james's particular answer in terms of religious faith in a supernatural plane or context of existence, but the whole is utterly admirable, indeed, i want to have a crack at the topic myself, and might hit you with that one day.

krugman's column today is a good example of the fact that you don't actually have to reason when you're preaching to the choir. if there are protests about the taxing and spending policies of the obama administration, this is certainly entirely legitimate, as legitimate as, say, anti-war protests. that the admin is throwing a trillion dollars a week might be, as krugman thinks it is, obviously necessary or even, as he also thinks, too little. but it might also be ruinous. and that people assemble to provide some demonstration that enthusiasm is not unanimous and that people want some input into how they're being taxed and what the government is spending on what is exactly why we have things like freedom of assembly. then to just toss in the last six wacky things that right-hand pundits or politicians say to discredit the whole thing as insane is, putting it mildly, tendentious and irrelevant. i guess krugman's readers can't possibly get enough of the amazing observation that rush limbaugh runs the republican party: hearing that 80,000 times leaves them hungry to hear it again, each time gasping with delight at the witty incisiveness and originality. if people on fox approve - glen beck, say - that does not itself discredit the idea except to people who already disagree with it. if someone like krugman thinks protest or free expression is important when he agrees with what the people are saying - as, let's say, during the bush administration - he should acknowledge its legitimacy here as perfectly in keeping with our democracy, if any.

what i hate about contemporary politics is that everyone is for freedom for themselves, and restraints on the insane monsters that reject the deliverances of pure reason, i.s. the pet theories of whomever's yapping.

well. stanley fish on conscience. it's worth pointing out, as we deal with hobbes's concept of conscience, that hobbes was a screeching totalitarian. nowhere is that more evident than in his concept of conscience, which vitiates the whole idea. one might be better off consulting john woolman or henry david thoreau or, well, anyone.

you know i'll peg a few remarks about the environment, nature, etc on a tom friedman column. i think we really need to reconceive this thing in a profound way. the basic models are: the world as an arena of resources, and a kind of "cult" of nature. the former model ranges from just "so let's strip the planet" to a more circumspect friedman-style economic model of renewable resources or "sustainability." that is, we still think of the environment as something we use or a technological object, but we have been chastened by various difficulties, and we're worried about long-term economic or health implications etc, esp energy. then there's a kind of picture of nature as a benevolent mother (or whatever), conceived in terms of a beautifully balanced system which we're disturbing, the romantic origin of the natural/artificial distinction. i would write about this for hours, but just a few basic principles: we are nature. there is no conceptual distinction between human effects on the environment and those of bees or beavers or volcanoes. probably once you get rid of the artificial you have gotten rid of the idea of nature as well, and that's ok; you cannot conceptualize this in terms of a separation or duality of any kind. second, "nature" or the environment or whatever is, as our activities but also geology or evolutionary biology show, volatile - as deranged as it is arranged, as chaotic as sensible, as destructive as nurturing, as stupid or arbitrary or fatal as benign. it's always subject to change from the excellent (from a species view) to the disastrous. there are provisional equilibria (like say the water cycle or something) and also conflagrations, collisions, mutations. if the earth is heating up, let's say, that is a perfectly natural event, and perfectly typical in the history of worlds. 

the main claim to fame of the bush administration is that it "kept america safe." and the real disaster would have been if there had been a series of terrorist attacks in the u.s. then there would have been ever-more consolidation of power, ever-more oriented to the emergency, and ever-more distant from any constitutional principles etc. they were gearing up for that with the "unitary executive" stuff: the idea that executive power is unlimited with regard to national security, which could be used (and was being used) essentially to put us under martial law. we would have been lucky to have a peaceful transition of power, and actually even if we did it's likely that the republicans would have won the election. i do think it shows whatever decency was left that they didn't swing into fullon fascist mode, with faked attacks, finding planted wmd's in iraq etc, though i think the claims that real plots were actually foiled by interrogation under torture (claims which cheney is still making) was moving along those lines.

it's worth reminding ourselves, with regard to the smerconish-type position below, that there really is an american authoritarian right that more or less ran the country for eight years, from which we had a very fortunate escape. i think the arguments of the sort smerconish was formulating - and which are so familiar - are moronic, just pitiful, reaching for any rationalization of tyranny. also that the attempt to square the various positions is ridiculous. if your position is that the u.s. government can intern and torture anyone on any pretext without any supervision or redress, then don't come to me with words like "freedom," "democracy," "constitution" etc. as we debate about whether obama is a socialist - a question that if you ask me is perfectly legit though kind of anachronistic - then remember that the debate about whether cheney or ann coulter or limbaugh are fascists is also legit.

on the other hand it is also worth pointing out that many on the right ought not to be tarred with this brush, and that there's still a libertarian movement in this country and that whatever ron paul  may be, he's the opposite of a fascist.

we owe a lot to mark danner , who has done great work on the bush admin torturers and black site secret prisons, and who published the extremely disturbing red cross report in the new york review of books. i was watching hardball this evening, and michael smerconish, the philly columnist, radio host etc was making the following argument. we don't need any investigation, criminal charges, truth commission on this. he said we don't need to "re-litigate" it. he said we need to focus on the future, not the past. he said he has a hard time feeling sorry for terrorists. he said we already know everything and who's responsible (he wanted to put it all on john yoo). he said that it would be a public relations disaster for the united states government, various agencies, and foreign governments. then because these vicious fools have nothing else, he re-hashed the ticking bomb justification.

ok. well. can't re-litigate it since it's never been litigated. seems odd to say we already know everything, when new information appears all the time. let me ask you this: how many black site prisons were operated by the cia or other agencies? how many are still operating? where were they? how many people were held? who? why? and what happened to them there? how many people died in american custody? how? like these chumps have been doing for years, smerconish asserted that the torture victims were terrorists while also arguing that the government has no necessity of producing any evidence in any forum that they are in fact terrorists, either a touching yet bizarre faith in the truthfulness of anyone representing state power, or a pathetic begging of all the relevant questions. we need to nail everyone who pushed for yoo's memos and many other such cover documents, and everyone who took them seriously as guidelines for action. and we need to get ahold of any similar documents as may still exist. it's just sick to rest fundamental questions of moral identity and the adjudication of crimes on the order of kidnapping, torture, and murder on public relations effects. but of course the truth is just the opposite: a continuing cover-up confirms everything every anti-american ever said, and coming clean is obviously the only way to address one of the worst public-relations disasters in national history. and obviously, if we keep coming up with the same ridiculous rationalizations, the future will be exactly like the past anyway.

i truly do not understand how anyone could think that all the evil and stupidity - which, by the way, we actually paid for - should not be exposed, much less keep on justifying it after all the justifications have been eviscerated.

if, as predicted, the hurricane season is average that will be due to the extreme acceleration of global warming, because if it weren't for global warming, the season would be severe or mild. of course a severe season would be the fault of global warming, resulting deaths on the head of the bush administration or general motors or clean coal. no hurricanes at all would of course demonstrate the astonishing unpredictable changes we're inducing.

um, yeah. one response to regulation is to compexify your instruments so that (1) the regs don't clearly apply to them, or (2) they become completely incomprehensible so that no one knows whether or how or under what rules or bureaucracy they coould be regulated.

i think it might be appropriate to be a bit disappointed with david brooks, philosopher. that moral claims are more or less merely emotional preferences based on our social nature is not a result just produced by scientists at the university of virginia. it was a doctrine of various ancient greek sophists. it was stated with perfect clarity by david hume in the eighteenth century. it was a doctrine of the logical positivists. etc. on evolution and cooperation, the classic remains kropotkin's mutual aid (1902). now the problem, not even assayed by brooks, is that there's no way to avoid the collapse into relativism. and if our moral preferences, such as they are, are just ways we include ourselves in, they're also ways we exclude others, etc

also one may just note that these are all debates within philosophy. you might have empirical evidence about the ways people do reach value judgments. the normative status of these results is a philosophical question. and the position that the empirical material is supposedly converging on is an ancient position in the debate.

well, if we were trying to drop brooks into the taxonomy of contemporary political philosophy, he'd be a "communitarian," which we might provisionally say is a conservative relativism. that's ok, but it leaves us with a kind of brute chauvinism and preference for whatever brooks tells us our culture is, and makes any rational deliberation about our values delusory. of course there's the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back, and brooks throws reason back in there somehow.

at any rate, communitarianism is of course interesting. and all these questions are interesting. but brooks - obviously a very bright guy -is demonstrating the limits of his intellectual scope.

just for the hell of it, i say to you that this doctrine that we're by the microsecond judging every aspect of experience is jive, or is the description of an illness.

my maryland terps, uniquely i believe, his year beat both teams who are in the championship: unc and michigan state. pretty impressive, as the terps were not particularly big, not particularly fast, and not astoundingly talented.

it'd be interesting to know, with regard to the north korean rocket launch whether the japanese and/or americans consciously reached a decision not to try an intercept, or whether they were taken by surprise and couldn't launch, or whether they reached the conclusion that they couldn't effectively intercept.

been reading the courtier and the heretic: leibniz, spinoza, and the fate of god in the modern world, by matthew stewart. now actually i think popularized or kind of novelistic presentations of intellectual history are in order: i might try my hand at such a thing, if i haven't already. also leibniz and spinoza are extremely interesting as characters as well as thinkers, and it's a good yarn. stewart has his moments as a writer, as in the very first sentence: "It is our good fortune to live in an age when philosophy is thought to be a harmless affair."

on the other hand, the conventions of this genre and stewart's application of them are quite ridiculous and irritating. to jack up the significance or motivate people to read, he just gushes. "It is clear that the two greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century remain unsurpassed, and should perhaps be considered the twin founders of modern thought." wait. really? let's start with bacon, descartes, hobbes, locke, newton. leibniz and spinoza are important, also extremely idiosyncratic or in certain respects downright bizarre, and i think any of the thinkers i just mentioned has a much better claim on the titles stewart gives l and s. the latter were influential, also in important senses dead ends. they don't, in order to be worth writing about, have to turn out to be the two greatest thinkers ever. and what can it mean to say that they remain unsurpassed? that leibniz is more important or influential than hume or kant, or that he wasn't drilled a new one by voltaire? or that frege wasn't the better logician?

or how about this: "Not since the days when Socrates stalked the agora in order to alert his fellows that the unexamined life is not worth living...had the world seen a philosopher so dedicated to his quest as Spinoza." bitch please.

so blow, like many others, is worried about the revolutionary rhetoric of the right, and presumably rejects resistance to authority in any form. of course, the united states originates in a revolutionary tradition, in which an actual president might say things like that the tree of liberty is nurtured by the blood of patriots. i'm sure that when, say, nicholson baker was speculating novelistically on the propriety of assassinating bush, and the whole left was decrying the rise of american fascism (as was i, actually) , blow was counseling peaceful capitulation to the authorities, and getting ready to blame baker or al franken or keith olbermann for any moment of actual violence that might have ensued. and though there is a moment of revolution in the american tradition, blow is certainly right that our bravest and most pervasive tradition is enthusiastic passivity in relation to infinite bureaucracy, and that even merely the rhetoric of resistance is dangerous and ought to be repressed.

watcha listenin to, crispy?

been fairly obsessed with the new solo album by the black keys' dan auerbach. when then keys hit, i associated them with the white stripes, for a variety of reasons. maybe emma brought both albums into the house. the names, of course. but actually something intrinsic: they both took roots music, in the keys' case blues, and did something both pointedly traditional and somehow amazingly fresh with it. i had been waiting for that move for a long time, but i couldn't have foreheard what it would actually sound like. the bands, too, had something similar at the base of their sound: for one thing a big, almost rigid drum track, and also a kind of perfect combination of excellent professional musicianship and a real roughness or at-this-moment performance quality that was very compelling.

auerbach delivers here on all of that and develops it in a whole bunch of ways. the keys were steaming blues rock; this record has that in excellent forms, but also quiet moments, and serious engagements with a number of roots styles, including country, folkie stuff, classic rock, and, especially, soul. auerbach has grown as a singer, and he delivers all these modes beautifully and with great intensity of expression. i actually like the quiet stuff as much as any of it, like the first track, "trouble weighs a ton," which sounds like it was written both in 1925 and in 2025. the lyrics on the whole album are extremely compelling (again in some relation to jack white): both direct and slightly bent, in various traditional modes with something ineluctably now: basic blues and surrealist poetry.

at any rate, a very strong thing.

this notion of pricing risk appears rational, or even mathematical, and indeed the whole insurance industry depends on the concept, which originates in the probability theory/inductive logic of people like pascal. but the question is beset by innumerable difficulties. it's not at all clear that by any standard the risks were underestimated, even in a situation wherein we see the risks realized. first of all, the traditional way to generate the relevant probabilities is in terms of past frequencies. but though, say, the collapse of securities has happened before, both the securities themselves and the context in which they collapsed had been radically transformed: the analogies under which the frequencies are delineated are extraordinarily complex and subtle. in some ways, each moment of climate or financial history is similar to all the others and more similar to some of them than others, in myriad or indefinitely many respects. in other ways, each event is incomparable. the current problems are in a billion ways similar to 1929 or whatever, in a billion ways entirely different. actually pricing the risk of some new security or credit default swap is beyond complex: it is in principle impossible, more or less, especially because the swap itself is a pricing of risk, thus involving you in an infinite regress.

so let's say your reference-class in assessing the risks of some security is the performance of similar securities in the past. then you'll price the risk very low until the collapse, very high afterward, and that is roughly as good as you can do, if you are required to proceed in this manner. of course the risks were underpriced twenty minutes before the collapse by the standards of twenty minutes after the collapse. on the other hand, if you're speculating that there may be a collapse given a new set of circumstances, then previous performance might be largely irrelevant or actually (pace more or less all inductive logic) counter-predictive. the better the previous performance in some sense the higher the risk: that's what we call a bubble.

say you're a health insurer. it might seem that you're pricing risk well as you rake a small profit consistently. until the unexpected epidemic: then the models all collapse. insurance always works within this paradox: it ticks along, then collapses all at once when the hundred-year hurricane comes.

well, the frequency theory of probability, according to which the probability of an event is fixed within a certain range by the frequency of similar events in the past is only one approach, and has to some extent been superseded by computer-modeling. but the models themselves are, of course, derived from information deriving from the past and present. what is the chance of some unique or incomparable event happening at the level of a global ecosystem? i'm not sure this is even a well-formed question.

yet another approach is to use bundled knowledge or intuition: to make betting behavior of large groups (or "the market") a measure of risk. it goes without saying that this is trivially anti-productive in the case of stocks etc, or else there would be no bubbles and busts.

now that we're under risk is not in question. but that risks in situations of extreme complexity can be rationally priced at all is certainly a question, not a fact on which to ground a critique or make policy. this problem infects what friedman rather cavalierly calls "wise regulation": it was not at all clear what sort of regulation would have been wise with regard to credit default swaps before the collapse; they had established a long-term record of steadiness and profitability; indeed they appeared to be forms of insurance against risk rather than forms of risk.

i think in some ways the intuitions of informed persons are probably better than mathematical models, that your best chance with credit default swaps was someone who'd been thinking about it saying: smells funny. but that's a hard way to defend an expensive regulatory regime. and of course those intuitions are based on things like frequency, perversity, social consensus, personality of the intuiter etc.

we live, as it were, by trying to eradicate risk, though we also court it, and both are perhaps adaptive and counter-adaptive. but i'll tell you this: at the level of driving to work or the level of infinitely complex economies, we're never going to be without it, and ultimately would not want to be. if it could be accurately "priced" it would no longer be risk.

but my main point is just this: by definition, induction or probability-as-frequency does not brace you for the crisis and does not provide you with a reasonable assessment in its aftermath.