Contradictions, The Academic Establishment and Matt Ridley.

Complete freedom entails freedom to undermine freedom. 

The content behind the word "Libertarian" is problematic. At one time the far left claimed this content: Libertarianism's implicit anti-government and anarchist connotations were comfortable concepts with the far left: In Marxist eschatology a centrally managed state run socialism was supposed to eventually give way to a decentralised stateless communism; in Marxist theory the state really only serves the function of protecting the interests of the ruling class; therefore once this class was done away with no state would be required - so they thought*.  It is huge irony, then, that today the "libertarian" sentiments have been taken over by the far right whose lack of influence (up till now!) makes them naturally suspicious of central government intentions. They also affect to believe that decentralised market choices and the entrepreneurial spirit are the best expression of democracy; maybe the only valid expression of democracy (See this wiki page for more on the subject of Libertarianism)

But "Libertarianism" with  its connotation of freedom, freedom of choice, freedom to exercise responsibility to build a successful life, freedom of speech and above all a fancied freedom from government has inherent contradictions  For in a world full of zero sum games we have more often than not this constraint:

 My freedoms + your freedoms  = constant

That is, too much freedom for me may subtract from your freedoms. Freedom then is about balance & community, and good community means taking into account the freedoms of others.  This is just as true of so-called "free speech" as it is for access to material resources: A vociferous campaign of free speech against another party can curtail their freedoms. Language can be used as an instrument of coercion; that becomes especially clear when we remember that social connection & status are among humanities strongest motivations and speech is the first port of call to be used to assert pecking order. Absolute "free speech" is a contradiction if we are to respect community.

The anti-government stance of extreme "libertarian" leftists and rightists is an affectation: When they claim to be anti-government what they really mean, of course, is that they are anti status quo and anti-establishment; they are in effect anti those institutions of state over which they have little influence. If the revolutions which they aspire to ever took place you can rest assured that these extremists would soon install the strongest forms of government in order to coerce and maintain their vision of society i.e a dictatorship:  As I said in my last blog post:

Looking at the mix of potential plutocrats, domineering characters and the well armed quasi-militias (in America) who make claim to the name "libertarian" it is easy to imagine a would-be-dictator arising from their ranks. And it wouldn't be the first time that "liberty" and "hegemony" have walked hand in hand; let's recall the outcomes of the English civil war of 1642, the French revolution of 1789, the October revolution and Mao's China. Idealism and hegemony are closely linked.

It is likely that Ayn Rand's vision of a sociopathic "libertarian" idealism, if implemented, would very quickly lead in this direction. I've got more than a sneaky feeling that the putative libertarianism of left and right is motivated by a mix of misguided idealism and sour grapes: i.e. those who want power or want more power want the status quo to move over...or else.

So with this background in mind I thought I'd have a little walk over to Matt Ridley's website to see what he's saying about covid-19.  After all Ridley styles himself (unwisely in my opinion) as a  "libertarian" whatever that abused term actually means in his case. Moreover, covid-19 has rather curtailed the freedoms of many and some extremists on the right are quite sure this is a well orchestrated deep government plot (or conspiracy) to suppress people rather than being just another black swan afflicting humanity.

So was Ridley going to join the Trump supporting conspiracy theorists? Well no, he's far too clever for that I'm glad say. In fact in reading his blog I found a lot of good and intelligent stuff there that I wouldn't want to take issue with and could recommend. But there remains the question of which tribe, if any, does he identify with? There are to my mind indicators to be found in his writings that he identifies with the tribal right-wing. Here are three examples where Ridley betrays his right-wing tribal sympathies:

Example 1
Take this blog post here where Ridley discusses the apparent slow down in technological advance in various industries, an example being aircraft: I had long noted this one myself: My father's life time saw progress from the first rickety bi-planes right through to space travel. But in my life time jet aircraft, although more refined and complex, seemed to have plateaued in their performance envelop. Manned space travel has also plateaued in my time. The same is probably also true of automotive technology. I put this down to the limitations within the platonic world of technological configuration space which is constrained and controlled by a physical regime over which we have no power to change. Delving into  this space is a bit like mining for gold; there comes a point of diminishing returns where more and more effort is needed to get out less and less out. Consider for example computerisation; Moore's law applies for a while and fast progress can be maintained initially, but not indefinitely. For we know that there are physical limits on what can be stored and processed using the current physical paradigm. If we are to do better, new (and often unforeseen) technological breakthroughs are required. There could be another revolution in computerisation if breakthroughs in quantum computing take place. Likewise we would see huge market changes if there are ever breakthroughs in portable fusion energy, zero point energy or anti-gravity; in fact such changes would likely require new and revolutionary understandings in theoretical physics to be made first.

I'd be the first to admit that market catalysed innovation and wealth can be suppressed and/or discouraged by cultural and political factors. But for a right wing trouble-shooting political animal like Ridley politics is his first of port call: In Ridley's mind, not to mention the minds among his class affiliation, bad government regulation is the usual suspect suppressing progress. That the platonic world of configuration space has an important bearing on progress hasn't come into his consideration here. Ridley's "libertarianism" sets him up for a default which means that government regulation of business must come under first critical scrutiny. But if Ridley and his tribe, as they make a grab for wealth, think they can leave the poor as a trickle-down-after-thought then they are encouraging alienation & disaffection, and handing society on a plate to the revolutionaries.

Example 2
Let's now look at a blog post by Ridley on covid-19. The post is largely filled with sensible and informative observations - it's worth reading. But Ridley may well betray his tribal affiliation when he gets to this:

,…. This idea could be wrong, of course: as I keep saying, we just don’t know enough. But if it is right, it drives a coach and horses through the assumptions of the Imperial College model, on which policy decisions were hung. The famous ‘R’ (R0 at the start), or reproductive rate of the virus, could have been very high in hospitals and care homes, and much lower in the community. It makes no sense to talk of a single number for the whole of society. The simplistic Imperial College model, which spread around the world like a virus, should be buried. It is data, not modelling, that we need now.

Once again the Ridley is found rubbishing the establishment, this time the (undoubtedly left leaning) academic establishment. Ridley's response here is very reminiscent of the right-wingers I mention in this blog post  where we find these right-wingers expressing suspicion of "modelling" and even going as far as to suggest that modeling isn't science; rather they want something "empirical"! The right-wingers I mention in that post are so stupid as to be unable to see that modelling is all about modelling empirical reality and therefore in science modelling and data go together like coach and horses.

But the problem Ridley and his tribe have is that "modelling" usually comes out of university theoretical departments. The right-wing tribe, as a rule, don't like university departments because they don't have too many allies in that sub-culture, a sub-culture which is not particularly motivated by profiteering and market choices, but whose income is pretty much tied to taxation; i.e. universities are a department of government! Therefore they must be bad!

Of course we never know enough and we always need more data but that doesn't stop the building of models which attempt to join the data dots we do have in order to understand that data. That's what science is about: i.e. building and testing models: No model, no testing and therefore no science.

Seldom, if ever, are models anything other than approximations and simplifications of a more complex reality.  But what's the point of accumulating more data if one then doesn't use that data to update, enhance and sophisticate one's models? As Hume showed data samples in and of themselves are meaningless and useless; what makes that data cohere are the underlying ideas we have about that data (i.e. models). Only models can give us a chance of making predictions; an inventory of disconnected data can't do that because as soon as one makes predictions using that data  one has necessarily moved over into the realm of interpretation and models.

A few minutes of mathematical jiggery-pokery is all that is required to come up with our first crude covid model: The exponential growth in time G(t) of a breeding organism is given by:

G(t) = Exp[a_i log(R_i) t]

1.0

...where R_i is the R-value for a the ith demographic and a_i is a constant which typifies the time between "multiplications" and t represents time.  Crude simplification though it is, equation 1.0 nevertheless is very instructive and points in the direction of where to go for refinements. It tells us that the R-value for a demographic is uselessness without a_i. The R-value for a demographic will not likely be the same for each transmission but like a_i, R_i  is merely a typical value, a value averaged over some presumably normal distribution.  The model that equation 1.0 represents can be made more sophisticated by adding more "i" terms as data comes in about those demographics.

The above equation is the result of a few minutes mathematical deliberation by a non-expert; so if I can do this in a few minutes you can be sure that the bright sparks at Imperial College have got the time, space and aptitude to do a lot, lot better. Of course there is always room for criticising and enhancing the most sophisticated of models - but the modellers at Imperial will be well aware of that too!  In any case the R-value averaged over a variety of demographics does give us some indication of the realities although if substituted into a single demographic equation like 1.0 it wouldn't return very accurate predictions. Even better than simplifying analytical equations is to carry out as near as possible a very literal simulation inside a super-computer.

Unless wholly misconceived models should not be buried in favour of meaningless lists of data, especially if the model is at the very least a first approximation. Approximate models are the starting point and foundations on which more sophisticated models can be built and their subsequent predictive value is a measure of how close they are to converging on a depiction of reality. To my mind it's a good thing Imperial College's model has spread across the world - the more hands-on-deck critical analysis (and subsequent enhancements) it gets the better.

Now I'm sure a guy as bright as Ridley really understands all this, so what's his little game? My guess is that Ridley, as might be expected of the tribe he has thrown his lot in with, just doesn't like left leaning universities and the stuff which comes out of their tax funded departments. So Ridley has to make the kind of noises needed for his tribe and so scepticism of academia's models is something they like to hear about. All this is of a piece with Ridley's scepticism of the academic establishment's climate change models.

Example 3
Ridley's right-wing tribal affiliations and credentials were confirmed when I spotted this blog post where we hear about Ridley's audio appearance on the show of conspiracy theorist and Mormon Glen Beck. Beck isn't quite in the same league as batshitcrazy Alex Jones although not that far from it. According to Wiki:

During Barack Obama's presidency, Beck promoted numerous falsehoods and conspiracy theories about Obama, his administration, George Soros, and others.

Writer Joanna Brooks contends that Beck developed his "amalgamation of anti-communism" and "connect-the-dots conspiracy theorizing" only after his entry into the "deeply insular world of Mormon thought and culture".

But I'm glad to say the conversation Beck had with Ridley was worthy of Ridley's intelligence and didn't plumb the depths of Beck's aptitude for daftness: In their conversation there was no hint that covid-19 is anything other than a natural disaster that we need to cope with as best we can. In contrast, however, there are numerous references to conspiracy theorism throughout Beck's Wiki page and this conspiracy theorism seems to be what Beck is really all about. So what was Ridely doing on this show? There's only one answer to that question that I can think of; namely, Ridley's right-wing tribal affiliations mean that his social connections make the Glen Beck show a natural stage for performance because he's not likely to get polled for authoritative comment by "leftist" institutions (like the BBC?!) So where else does he go?

ADDENDUM 1 June 2020

As this post is about the contradictions found in right-wing tribalism I must make note of the paradox of Ridley's promotion of economic Darwinism; I'm not going to read it, but I'm fairly confident that this Darwinist slant is the world view out of which Ridley's book "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves" emerges. Moreover, I'm sure Ridley's thesis chimes well with Ayn Rand's sociopathic philosophy. Needless to say a Darwinist line of thought would not go down well with the Christian right-wing who either support young earthism or de facto Intelligent Design. And yet economically and politically this is who Ridley is in bed with.

Footnote
* They also thought that since a communist society was supposedly "classless"and a place where everyone's interests were supposed to harmonise & coincide there would be no more social strife (!). Tell that to the marines!