Also pre-Christian thoughts on greatness of soul in the Hellenistic Levant :The Pagan Virtue of Megalopsychia in Pagan Syrian by Glanville Downey (Historian of Antioch on the Orontes).

Note that humility in pre-Christian ethics was an insult.The Arabs translate it literally: كبير النفس

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Walk most of the time, sprint as fast as you can on the occasion; never jog.

Fast for long periods of famine, then feast; never diet.

Endorse Nick Clegg & David Cameron, in combination, never labor.

For social life, a linear combination of Fat Tony & philosophers outperforms the frequentation of middle brows.

Go for city-states under loose empires, never nation-states.

Be a flåneur, lounging most of the time; then work as intensely as possible for a maximum of one hour; never work at low intensity --the 4-Hour Workweek.

Do nothing most of the time, then workout like a nut as intensely & unpredictably as possible.

Invest mostly in close to no-risk, (cash inflation protected, 80-90%), and maximal risk securities (10-20%); never in medium risk.

Read trashy gossip magazines and classics or sophisticated works; never the New York Times (or something even more aberrant, Newsweek).

Talk to graduate students or the highest caliber scholars; never, never, never medium academics.

Lose all your money, never half of it.

Respect those who make a living lying down or standing up, never those who do so sitting down.

Separate the holy and the profane.

Do crazy things (break furniture once in a while), like the Greeks and stay "rational" in larger decisions.

If you dislike someone, leave him alone or eliminate him; don't attack him verbally.

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Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.

(in Gibbon's Decline & Fall)

Because of its genuine character, erudition is usually absent from academia where you would think you would find it --and has been so for a long time (nothing new, since the Renaissance was not an academic production but one by dilettantes). Of history's great erudites, perhaps the most remarkable is Joseph Juste Scaliger --I had thought that the most cultured of all was Pierre Daniel Huet, but Huet who thought Montaigne was ignorant and ungroomed in the classics held Scaliger in greatest respect. Scalinger had such a hunger for texts he read Hebrew & Arabic. Of course there are many identifiable others: Pierre Bayle, and, earlier, the commonly known pre-renaissance scholars Nicholas d'Autrecourt, Gerardo of Cremona, Michael Scotus, Rodolphe Agricola, etc. And there are many we are missing because they left nothing of interest behind; or nothing they left has reached us.

Note that Gibbon, though luminous, is not in the same league --one of the finest English prose writers, but not exceedingly broad in his knowledge since he was just classically trained, and not deeply at that --his sources are concentrated (mostly Diodorus Siculus, Ammianus Marcellinus, Procopius I think).

I am only impressed by a man's two attributes: courage & erudition. I disrespect those who lack the former, & crave the company of those endowed with the latter. Erudition is wealth, robust knowledge, being alive; it is organic diversification & signals open mindedness.

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But you can't expect economists to perturbate their models, or inject rigor in their arguments. They are the very same idiots after all who got us here.

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لهَوَى النّفُوسِ سَرِيرَةٌ لا تُعْلَمُ

Also it hit me that the ubiquitous word "khair", or "kheir" خيرin Arabic comes from the Greek χάρις ("grace", also "gift", the root of charm, charisma, etc.)

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After a half a lifetime of reading commentary on Plato, I've embarked on my own re-reading of the complete works, and have been quite shocked at what I saw, in relation to my specialty of probability & randomness: topics brought up in the mouth of Socrates that were rarely discussed in the commentaries, or, at best, treated marginally. Now, granted much of the commentary comes from classical writers; still it remains that the commentators are not looking at Plato with our eyes & concerns.

1) PHAEDRUS Fooled by Randomness; the cognitive distortions of mistaking the subset for the superset (modern research by Kahneman & Tversky showing how people after a vivid description think Linda is more likely to be a feminist bankteller than a bankteller; or how people can be manipulated to overpay for terrorist insurance, more than general insurance that includes terrorist coverage). In Phaedrus, Socrates warns against the sophists Tisias & Gorgias who who make the probable more likely than truth, and make small things appear large & large things appear small. Τεισίαν δὲ Γοργίαν τε ἐάσομεν εὕδειν, οἳ πρὸ τῶν ἀληθῶν [the true] τὰ εἰκότα εἶδον ["see what resembles", εἰκών, a copy, shares roots with the probable, εἰκάζω ("I guess") and ἔοικε ("it looks like", εἰκότα is neutral plural for εἰκώς used as "the probable" in Plato] ὡς τιμητέα μᾶλλον [value more], τά τε αὖ σμικρὰ μεγάλα καὶ τὰ μεγάλα σμικρὰ φαίνεσθαι ποιοῦσιν διὰ ῥώμην λόγου...

2) PROTAGORAS The hindsight bias (one aspect). Socrates explains how he "prefers Prometheus to Epimetheus" --Prometh = forward; Epimeth = backward. There was the myth of the two brothers, retold by Hesiod, but presented in Plato to warn about thinking in the past & not projecting properly into the future.

3) PROTAGORAS Use of conditionals is SOPHISTRY I was once discussing with Richard Thaler, a behavioral finance researcher his work on a psychological explanation of the equity premium puzzle. My point is that his interpretation might be true, but it lacks in empirical rigor, as we first needed to ascertain whether there was such a thing as the equity premium puzzle --to me, Black Swan events were not accounted for by the story, so we could not ascertain under "fat tails" what the risk was to make such statement; indeed whatever equity premium there was has evaporated in recent years. The behavioral economist agreed with me, but continued: "IF there was an equity premium puzzle, then...". I was highly irritated by the matter and could not see any sincerity in work that is so CONDITIONAL (the practice in economics has exploited some unrigorous paper on positivism by Milton Friedman; in Medicine nobody says "if man were mice, then this..."; in physics nobody says "if the Moon had water..."). I had been worried ...until I read Socrates' view that one cannot conduct a dialectic unless one SINCERELY agrees to every step of the argument. SOCRATES, refuting the sophist Protagoras who assented for the sake of argument with one of his statement: "I do not think an argument's validity can be tested unless these "ifs" are removed from it".

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Just as chess skills only help you in chess (we know that those who can play chess games from memory don't have strong memory for other matters), classroom math only helps in classrooms, weight training in gyms almost only helps you in gyms, a specific sport almost only helps you in that specific sport, and walking on smooth Euclidian surfaces causes injuries somewhere deep inside your soul.

When you run and jump on rocks, your entire brain and body are at work; you stretch your back better than with yoga; every muscle in your body is involved; no two movements will be identical (unlike running in gyms); you become yourself.

Absence of effort: So I can get the benefits of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with less than 20% changes in my day --as I can manage a 5-course dinner at Le Bernardin, drink good wine, dress with some elegance, yet have the benefits of the caveman... To me it is mostly about absence of effort in my life, outside of intense moments, freedom, work without constraints, unpredictability in my day, lounging whenever I feel like it, minimal contact with businessmen & other half-men, etc. I spent 7 years in total as an employee. When I look back, it was half way between being dead & alive.

Also I just realized that, in the same vein, broad erudition, when supported by a good mathematical culture, is vastly more robust than any specialization. The wisdom of the ancients was domain-independent.

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What I take is that intelligence in the sense of IQ tests and SAT scores is not as natural & ancestrally fit as wit, l'ésprit fin.

By not natural I mean not Black-Swan robust, skills we call intelligence because of a certain construction, but that are not needed ecologically. Mate selection has the right heuristics & intuitions --though in the right domain, & in the right domain only (the modern world we've constructed is quite different). So, Is "intelligence" without wit & verbal briliance really intelligence?

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Utility Theory /Prospect Theory: Segnius homines bona quam mala sentiunt in Livy's Annals (XXX, 21) (Men feel the good less intensely than the bad).

Negative advice: Nimium boni est, cui hinil est mali Ennius , via Cicero-

Madness of Crowds: Nietzche: Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, it is the rule (this counts as ancient wisdom since Nietzsche was a classicist; I've seen many such references in Plato) -

Hormesis: Cicero (Disp Tusc,II, 22) When our souls are mollified, a bee can sting -

The Paradox of Progress/Choice (Lucretius): there is a familiar story of a NY banker vacationing in Greece, talking to a fisherman &, scrutinizing the fisherman's business, comes up for a scheme to help the fisherman make it a big business. The fisherman asked him what the benefits were; the banker answered that he could make a pile of money in NY and come back vacation in Greece; something that seemed ludicrous to the fisherman who was already there doing the kind of things bankers do when they go on vacation in Greece. The story was very well known in antiquity, under a more elegant form, as retold by Montaigne I, 42: (my transl.) when King Pyrrhus tried to cross into Italy, Cynéas, his wise adviser, tried to make him feel the vanity of such action. "To what end are you going into such enterprise?", he asked. Pyrrhus answered:" to make myself the master of Italy". Cynéas: " and so?". Pyrrhus: "to get to Gaul, then Spain". Cynéas: "Then?" Pyrrhus: " To conquer Africa, then ... come rest at ease". Cynéas:" but you are already there; why take more risks"? Montaigne then cites the well known Lucretius (V, 1431) on how human nature knows no upper bound, as if to punish itself.

Loss Aversion: Nearly all the letters of Seneca -

121- A few Aphorisms

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

The opposite of success isn't failure, it's name dropping.

Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance.

In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

I wonder if a lion (or a cannibal) would pay a high premium for free-range humans.

Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.  




You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.

Some reticent people use silence to conceal their intelligence; but most do so to hide the lack of it.

Usually, what we call "good listener" is someone with skillfully polished indifference.

The differences between Goldman Sachs & the mafia: GS has a better legal-regulatory expertise; but the mafia understands public opinion.

Writers are (always) remembered by their best books, politicians are (mostly) remembered by their worst mistakes, businessmen are never remembered for anything

If you want people to read a book, tell them it is overrated.

In nature we never repeat the same motion. In captivity (office, gym, commute, sports), life is just repetitive stress injury. No randomness.

Common minds find similarities in stories (& situations), finer minds detect differences [Essay on the Universal & the Particular] 
  

The 20th C was the bankruptcy of the social utopia. The 21st will be that of the technological one. [From one Procrustean bed to another.]


I trust those who earn their living lying on their back more than those who do so sitting on a chair (hint: I read in bed...)

Don't trust a man on dependent income-except if it is minimum wage. Those on bondage & βάναυσοι would do anything to "feed a family".

Dubai borrowed to put vanity buildings on postcards; America and W. Europe need to borrow to just survive.


We unwittingly amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, & contrasts with enemies.


The mark of a mediocre mind is the subdued and passive reaction in front of the truly exceptional

Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around. 


[ The biggest error since Socrates has been to believe that lack of clarity is the SOURCE of all our ills, not the result. ]

What they call play (gym, travel) looks like work;what I call work (effortless daydreaming) looks like play.They lose freedom trying harder.  


I wish to say some day about someone "Voilà un homme!" as Napoleon said upon meeting Goethe: mixture of passion & intellect (& elegance too)

Übermen tolerate others' small inconsistencies though not the large ones;losers tolerate others' large inconsistencies though not small ones




Their sabbatical is to work six days and rest for one; my sabbatical is to work for (part of) a day and rest for six.




City-states organize by tinkering; nation-states produce bureaucracies, empty suits, Bernankes, deficits, and the toobigtofail. Too obvious.





Atheism/materialism means treating the dead as if they were unborn. I won't. By respecting the sacred you reinvent religion. answ:[ If you can't detect (w/out understanding) the difference betw sacred & profane you'll never know what religion means. Same with art ]

What they call philosophy, I call literature;what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip & what they call gossip I call voyeurism.




How superb to become wise without being boring; how sad to be boring without being wise [like that Bernanke].




The role of the media is best seen in the journey from Cato the elder to Sarah Palin. Do some extrapolation if you want to be scared.




Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession. Rarer and rarer since middle ages. [Ethics, Cognitive Dissonnance & Diffusion of Responsibility, Chap, why we need to worry about econ, "risk experts", & other charlatans]




Most people write so they can remember things; I write so I can forget.




Corollary to Moore's laws: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.




I wonder whether a bitter enemy would be jealous if he discovered that I hated someone else.



It is much harder to be a Stoic when wealthy, powerful, and respected than when destitute, miserable, and lonely.




Academics are only useful when they try to be useless, and dangerous when they try to be useful.




Success is to be in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood. The rest comes from loss of control.




A good foe is far more loyal, far more predictable, and, to the clever, far more useful than any admirer.




You will get the most attention from those who hate yrou. No friend, no admirer, and no partner will flatter you with equal curiosity.




Mediterraneans scorn instructions but bow to authority; Anglo-Saxons bow to instructions but scorn authority.




Most modern technologies are deferred punishment.




"Evolution does not teach by convincing, but by destroying." [Fat Tony on why Robert Merton, univ tenures in econ, and bailouts are dangers]




The Stoic sage should withdraw from public efforts when unheeded & state is corrupt beyond repair.[Seneca] Wiser to wait for selfdestruction.




There is nothing deemed harmful (in general) that cannot be beneficial in some particular instances. Universals are weaker under complexity.




 "Don't cross a river because it is on average 4 f deep". The average of expectations is typically > than the expectation of averages.




Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a more complicated system he thinks he understands.




Giving businessreaders my book: like giving vintage Bordeaux to drinkers of Diet Coke and listening to their comments about it .




They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status --but rarely for your wisdom




The idea is to NEVER answer critics, just aim to stay in print --make sure people will be reading me long after these critics are dead.




Modernity: We created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.




"It is much easier to scam people for billions than for just millions". [on Madoff & US gov-1st Lesson in the Epistemology of Fat Tony]




Charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.




We are better at (involuntarily) DOING out of the box than (voluntarily) THINKING out of the box. Thinking is just ornamental; for show-off.




I read nothing from the past 300 years; I drink nothing from the past 3000 years; but I talk to no ordinary (nonheroic) man over 40.



Edmund Phelps got the "Nobel" for writings no one reads, theories no one uses, and lectures no one understands. [Panel in Moscow]




Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but makes the fool vastly more dangerous.




We ask "why is he rich (or poor)?" not "why isn't he richer (poorer)?";"why is the crisis so deep?" not "why isn't it deeper?".

The tragedy of virtue is that the more boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb/tweet, the harder it is to implement.

To see if you like where you live: check if you are as happy returning as you were leaving. Also applies to work/relationships...

My problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds. [OPACITY]

Mathematics is to knowledge what an artificial hand is to the real one. Some amputate then replace.

Pomponius Atticus, severely ill, tried, the Stoic way, to take his own life. Having chosen starvation, he was cured of his illness.

Pure generosity is when you help the ingrate. Every other form is self-serving [Cont:genrosity/Kantian ethics]

For the ancients, forecasting historical events was an insult to the God(s); for me it is an insult to science.

A maxim/tweet allows me to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

I'd rather be a janitor in a philosophy department than Chaired Prof at Harvard Business School; or flaneur in NY than a hotshot at Davos.




I now take a hot bath after reading emails from businessmen or journalists; I then feel purified from the profane until the next email.




We worry about "too big", but the biggest error-prone centralized top-down institution in the world is the US Gov. It is getting bigger.




You cannot express the holy in terms made for the profane; but you can discuss the profane in terms made for the holy.



CNBC journalists are imbeciles. "You need skills to get a BMW, skills + luck to become a Buffet" -> into "Buffet has no skills".

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Huet despised Montaigne --whom he called Montagne. 

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Let us call it the error of rationalism. In Fat Tony’s language, it would be what makes us the suckers of all suckers. Consider two types of knowledge. The first type is not exactly “knowledge”; its ambiguous character prevents us from calling it exactly knowledge. It a way of doing thing that we cannot really express in clear language, but that we do nevertheless, and do well. The second type is more like what we call “knowledge”; it is what you acquire in school, can get grades for, can codify, what can be explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, provable, etc.

To make things simple, just look at the second type of knowledge as something so stripped of ambiguity that an autistic person (a high functioning autistic person, that is) can easily understand it.

The error of rationalism is, simply, overestimating the role and necessity of the second type, the academic knowledge, in human affairs. It is a severe error because not only much of our knowledge is not explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, etc., but, further, that such knowledge plays such a minor life that it is not even funny.

We are very likely to believe that skills and ideas that we actually acquired by doing, or that came naturally to us (as we already knew by our innate biological instinct) came from books, ideas, and reasoning. We get blinded by it; there may even be something in our brains that makes us suckers for the point. Let us see how.

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103- The translational gap

How long can something be held as wrong before its practice is discontinued? A long, very long time, much longer than we think. We've know that "modern finance" and economics represented a danger to society [since 1961, with close to 400 blowup episodes including the crash of 1987] to no avail --and this blowup of the banking system will not bring any relief. Even the fact that I may have made the point in what may turn out to be the ALL TIME bestseller in economics and philosophy of science [ and the mother of all empirical evidence] might not help displace the charlatans. Some ideas from the history of Medicine (Medicina, soror philosophiae!).

Noga Arikha "Just Life in a Nutshell: Humours as common sense", in The Philosophical Forum Quarterly, XXXIX, 3:

When William Harvey demonstrated the mechanism of blood circulation in the 1620s, humoral theory and its related practices should have disappeared, because the anatomy and physiology on which it relied was incompatible with this picture of the organism. In fact, people continued to refer to spirits and humors, and doctors continued to prescribe phlebotomies, enemas, and cataplasms, for centuries more --even when it was established in the mid-1800, most notably by Louis Pasteur, that germs were the cause of disease.

See also Arikha's book (it was swallowed by my uncatalogued library so I am ...reordering it).

The most complete compendium is in Wooton Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates.

p 184 [...] why doctors for centuries imagined that their theories worked when they didn't; why there was a delay of more than two hundred years between the first experiments designed to disprove spontaneous generation and the final triumph of the alternative, the theory that living creatures always come from other living creatures; why there was a delay of two hundred years between the discovery of germs and the triumph of the germ theory of disease; why there was a delay of thirty years between the germ theory of putrefaction and the development of antisepsis; why there was a delay of sixty years between antisepsis and drug therapy. [he explains elsewhere that there was no money in microscopy, which delayed implementation...]

Elsewhere Wooton shows how surgeons resisted anesthesia (because it was considered cheating), how doctors in France were still bleeding patients at the end of the 19th century, yet: In 1851 [...] Dietl showed that bloodletting tripled the death rate in a pneumonia.

p 240- Pasteur had a sensible distrust of doctors. p 14 I took it for granted that in an open argument, good ideas would always defeat bad ideas. [...] Peer group pressure often halt progress in its track.[...] Despite the brilliant work of philosophers and historians of science, no one has really worked out how to write a history that takes account of this. p 293 Shapin tells us that "The Harvard biochemist L.J. Henderson [1878-1942] was supposed to have remarked "that it was only sometime between 1910 and 1912 ...that a random patient, with a random disease, consulting a doctor chosen at random, had, for the first time in the history of mankind, a better than 50-50 chance of profiting from the encounter."'

Also, something that explains why I am going nuts.

By 1861 [Semmelweiss] was denouncing those who had not adopted his views as murderers.

James Le Fanu: The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (1999) talks of "collective deception".

I call this the translational problem because of a great paper by Ioannides (my hero) et al. Life Cycle of Translational Research for Medical Interventions in Science (Sept 5, 2008) --they show how long it takes from initial scientific paper to implementation --and how the cycle is lengthening. But my problem is that the gap knowledge/practice is not curable --the arrow goes from practice to knowledge.

New books on medical history: Gloria Origgi have me a book on Semmelweiss by ... Louis Ferdinand Celine! (merci mille fois). Also Francois Lebrun Se soigner autrefois Médecins, saints et sorciers aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles, Georges Vigarello Histoire des pratiques de santé, Jackie Pigeaud La maladie de l'ame, Collectif (Centre Jean Palerne): Rational et irrationel dans la médecine ancienne et médiévale. I also got a long paper by Gerd Gigerenzer on medical practice and conditional probability (I guess it is the misunderstanding of Type 2 error that is costing us so much).

Also I consider the work of Gary Taubes (and soon the book by Art DeVany) as documents in the history of medical errors.

***

Canguilhem wonders why it took so long to figure out iatrogenesis: "Quant a l'iatrogenese medicale, comment peut-on penser que les médecins aient attendu la deuxieme moitié du XXe siecle pour observer les effets secondaires" [Etudes d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences, Vrin, 1968, 1994].

Scribonius Largus: who accompanied Claudius, was interested in pharmacology but not interested in hidden causes.

Comme indices plaidant en faveur de cette orientation empirique chez Scribonius, on peut noter la place de choix acordée a la pharmacologie, le respect scrupuleux des auctores, de meme que l'absence d'interet pour la connaissance des choses cachées. [Joelle Jouanna-Bouchet, Scribonius Largus et Marcellus: entre rationnel et irrationnel, in Collectif, Rationnel et Irrationnel dans la médecine ancienne et médiévale, Publications de l'Université de Saint-Étienne, 2003].

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Telling people NOT to smoke seems to be the greatest medical contribution of the last 60 years. Druin Burch, in the recently published Taking the Medicine

The harmful effect of smoking are roughly equivalent to the combined good ones of EVERY medical intervention developed since the war. (...) Getting rid of smoking provides more benefit than being able to cure people of every possible type of cancer" [emph. mine]

Life expectancy: Another problem. I keep hearing the fiction that medical practitioners doubled our life expectancy. Life expectancy increased because of 1) sanitation, 2) penicillin, 3) drop in crime. From the papers I see that medical practice may have contributed to 2-3 years of the increase, but again, depends where (cancer doctors might provide a positive contribution, family doctors a negative one) . Another fooled-by-randomness style mistake is to think that because life expectancy at birth was 30, that people lived 30 years: the distribution was massively skewed: the bulk of the deaths came from birth & childhood mortality. Conditional life expectancy was high --I do not know of many measurements (it should not be too hard) --just consider that Paleo men had no cancer, no tooth decay, almost no epidemics, no economists, and died of trauma. Perhaps legal enforcement contributed more than doctors to the increase in life .

60  Religion Protects You From Bad Science  --Medicine, Expert Problems, and the Rationality of Temples

I-Medicine

Nobody seems to notice that over the millennia religions (all religions) have saved people from death –because it protected them from doctors and “science”. Because of the illusion of control, we feel like “doing something” when facing a problem –“seeing an expert”, etc. If religion is at least neutral then it is a great way to stay out of harms’ way: science, faux-experts, quacks, etc.

Martial in his epigrams gives us an idea of the perceived expert problem in medicine in his time (i.e., the doctor causing more harm than expected, but exploiting his expert status):

Nuper erat medicus, nunc est uispillo Diaulus: 
   quod uispillo facit, fecerat et medicus I thought that Diaulus was a doctor not a caretaker –but for him it appears to be the same job.

Non habui febrem, Symmache, nunc habeo. I did not feel ill, Symmache; now I do (after your  ministrations).

Montaigne goes deeper. He reports on the attribution problem seen by the ancients –not too different from current stockbrokers & economists. Doctors claimed responsibility for success and blame failure on mother nature.

On demandoit à un Lacedemonien qui l'avoit fait vivre sain si long temps: L'ignorance de la medecine, respondit il. Et Adrian l'Empereur crioit sans cesse, en mourant, que la presse des medecins l'avoit tué. A Lacedaemonian was asked what had made him live so long; he answered “ignoring medecine". The Emperor Adrian continually exclaimed as he was dying that it was his doctors that had killed him.

Mais ils ont cet heur, selon Nicocles, que le soleil esclaire leur succez, et la terre cache leur faute; et, outre-cela, ils ont une façon bien avantageuse de se servir de toutes sortes d'evenemens, car ce que la fortune, ce que la nature, ou quelque autre cause estrangere (desquelles le nombre est infini) produit en nous de bon et de salutaire, c'est le privilege de la medecine de se l'attribuer. Tous les heureux succez qui arrivent au patient qui est soubs son regime, c'est d'elle qu'il les tient. Les occasions qui m'ont guery, moy, et qui guerissent mille autres qui n'appellent point les medecins à leurs secours, ils les usurpent en leurs subjects; et, quant aux mauvais accidents, ou ils les desavouent tout à fait, en attribuant la coulpe au patient par des raisons si vaines qu'ils n'ont garde de faillir d'en trouver tousjours assez bon nombre de telles... [Attribution Problem]

Effectively you hear accounts of people erecting fountains of even temples to their favorite gods after these succeeded where doctors fail (see Vivian Nutton’s Ancient Medicine, an interesting book for a start, though near-silent about my heroes the empiricists, and not too detailed about ancient practices outside of a few standard treatises).

I truly believe that it was rational to resort to prayers in place of doctors: consider the track record. The risk of death effectively increased after a visit to the doctor. Sadly, this continued well into our era: the break-even did not come until early in the 20^th Century. Which effectively means that going to the priest, to Lourdes, Fatima, or (in Syria), Saydnaya, aside from the mental benefits, provided a protection against the risks of exposure to the expert problem. Religion was at least neutral –and it could only be beneficial if it got you away from the doctor.

Montaigne on why the last thing a doctor needs is for you to be healthy [Agency Problem].

Nul medecin ne prent plaisir à la santé de ses amis mesmes, dit l'ancien Comique Grec, ny soldat à la paix de sa ville: ainsi du reste.

The easy part is to show that religion was superior to science. It is hard to accept it: religion protects you from bad science. Now my conjecture, which I am trying to substantiate, is that the empiricists (Agrippa, Philinus, Menodotus, etc.) and to some extent the medical methodists, did not have the expert problem. The empiricists insisted on the “I did not know” while facing situations not exactly seen in the past, for which an exact treatment did not repeatedly yield a cure. The methodists did not have the same strictures against analogy, but were still careful.

II- Agrippa (no relation)

Which brings me to a strange, and strangely overlooked writer –or perhaps a literary mystery as we could be dealing with two writers. Or a joke. Or a madman –a victim of acute schizophrenia. Montaigne’s sources on medicine come from the recycling of the very erudite Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum atque artium declamatio invectiva (“De vanitate”), published c.1530. It is a strange skeptical attack on the negative aspect of science and knowledge by a 16^th century man who is mostly known for a treatise on magic that he wrote before that, & for his practice of magic & alchemy. And it was not a change of heart: Agrippa continued to practice magic & alchemy after writing the De vanitate (which attacked alchemy and magic!). De vanitate is a Pyrrhonian treatise though, seemingly, Agrippa was not aware of the works of Sextus Empiricus (which had not been available in Latin). He covers literally everything: mathematics, medicine, EVEN FINANCE, in way that is suspiciously similar to (but more extensive than) Adversus mathematikos. I just got a photocopy of the text that Montaigne read (in Medieval Latin, almost impossible to read owing to the characters & even harder to understand), & the only readable document a photocopy of a Medieval French translation by Louis Turquet de Mayerne. The only bound volume I managed to locate was selling for $4000 on Abebooks (photocopying such text is legal; photocopied but bound volumes make for a much better reading quality than originals).

Agrippa might be the only Pyrrhonian skeptic who was imprisoned for his writings (I guess if you do not take my brief jail episode in Lebanon into account).

Agrippa's Dilemma: Hermetic" Rebirth" and the Ambivalences of De vanitate and De occulta philosophia Renaissance quarterly [0034-4338] Keefer yr:1988 vol:41 iss:4 pg:61

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Ierodiakonou & Vanderbroucke [1993]. More fundamentally, the Greeks wondered what gave rise to the stochastic nature of medicine. Here, their ways split. In the second century AD Alexander of Aphrodisias held it to be an inherent property of medicine. Medicine does not proceed by syllogisms to the effect that something necessarily and invariably is the case. Rather, medical propositions are concluded in terms such as "for the most part", or "in only a rare case". These expressions hold true generally, but not necessarily for the individual. Others such as Galen in the same century, believed that medical science in itself was as impeccable as any other but that its practical application was fallible because of variation in the individual patient. [Medicine as a stochastic art. Ierodiakonou, Katerine,Vandenbroucke, Jan P., Lancet; 2/27/93, Vol. 341 Issue 8844, p542, 2].  I looked for Ierodiakonou’s research (she is a classicist, V. is a medical researcher) on the vanishing Aenasidemians.

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There was a period during which "medicine derived its explanatory models from the physical sciences" [Andrew Wear, in Conrad et al., 1995].

Giovanni Borelli, in De Motu Animalium, compared the body to a machine consisting of animal levers. "He wrote that God applied geometry when making animal organs, and that since the movements of animals are the proper subject of mathematics they can be understood in terms of levers, pulleys, winding-drums, and spirals, etc. Borelli ordered his book into propositions as in geometry, first demonstrating, for instance, the forces involved ..."

Cicero and Probability: Cicéron de Clara Auvray-Assayas. "... probabile" n'est pas une traduction du Grec mais un concept forgé par Cicéron; son usage ne se limite pas a la theorie de la connaissance, mais permet d'articuler la rhetorique et la philosophie ... une critique rationnelle de toutes les doctrines systématiques."

Apres avoir montré qu'il n'existe pas de representation telle qu'elle differe d'une fausse, l'academicien propose de se fier a ce qui est "persuasif", pithanon en grec, et que Ciceron rend par probabile. A premiere vue il s'agit donc de la traduction de l'adjectif grec "pithanon"... Reste la question du sens: non seulement le latin fait disparaitre l'element semantique essentiel, la persuatsion, au profit des valeurs de la preuve et de l'approbation contenues dans le verbe ˆprobare , mais le sens actif du grec pithanon (qui persuade) est occulté dans l'emploi de l'adjectif probabile dont tous les emplois attestes sont passifs ("qui peut etre prouvé/approuvé). [...] le sujet ne recoit plus passivement ce qui le persuade, c'est lui qui juge si une chose mérite son approbation.

[Cicero translated Plato's Timaeus λογος εικος [believable rationalization/explanation] & εικος μυθος [believable story] by probabilia, something we can give approval to.]

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Another major error (again voiced by two economists, among whom was (angry) Lord Eatwell): you cannot observe without some theory. Even Galen used it as his lame argument “Logos is needed for observation … observation is impossible without logos”. It misses the point entirely. Empiricism is not about not having beliefs: it is about avoiding to be a sucker, a decided and preset bias on where you want your error to be –where the default is.  An empiricist defaults to suspension of belief (hence the link with the skeptical Pyrrhonian tradition), while others prefer to default to a characterization or a theory. Mostly, avoid the confirmation bias ! (we empiricists prefer the disconfirmation/falsification bias).

Tension between “rationalism” and empiricism: The distinction appears to be expressed in modern terms (Claude Bernard -l' empirisme compris dans son sens le plus large et le plus général est l' opposé du rationalisme ;l' empirisme est alors l' exclusion de tout raisonnement de l' observation et de l' expérimentation.(emph. his)) The medical empirical tradition supposedly died out c. 200 AD. (to be revived later first by Paracelsus, then by a collection of surgeons, but waxed and waned. I suppose that it was stamped out by the Arabs). Within Hippocrates’ corpus some writings are said to be in the rationalist tradition, while others (the oldest) are in the empirical tradition.  & Al-Razi on the difference:

فالرازي مثلاً يقدم النظري على العملي، ويعطيه الأسبقية إذ يقول : "من قرأ كتب أبقراط ولم يخدم، خير ممن خدم ولم يقرأ كتب أبقراط"، ويقول أيضاً : "إن قليل المشاهدة (أي الخبرة) المطلع على الكتب خير ممن لم يعرف الكتب"

Note that Al-Razi, nevertheless, stood up to Galen, something that did not take place again for 5 centuries. He wrote a book called: "الشكوك على جالينوس".

Primary (or close to): Galen (almost all there is to know in found subf. empirica), Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes Laertius, Photius, Celsus (De Medicina), Caelius Aurelianus, Arabic texts (?): Ibn Sina, Al-Razi, Comments on “Jalinos” by Averroes,

Secondary: Charles Daremberg (cours du Collège de France), Lorenzo Perilli (Menodoto di Nicomedia & papers), Victor Brochard, Albert Favier (unreliable), Zeller, Ludwig Edelstein (Ancient Medicine –collected papers), Deichgraeber (not translated: I cannot read German), Harris Coulter (a linear combination of his predecessors, mainly Deichgraeber), Vivian Nutton (not very good), Roger French (Medicine before Science), Don Bates (Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions)…

Literature on Pyrrhonian skepticism: Unlike the literature on empiricism, you can fill up a wall of books and file cabinets of contemporary, post-contemporary, and secondary sources.

OLDER SEQUENCE

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I leave aside the confusion absence of evidence/evidence of absence--and the misunderstanding of the very notion of "empiricism". It is a fact that in the real world of our daily decision-making 1) we do not have much evidence of most relevant things, yet we need to take action; 2) in most situations, "true/false" is never symmetric (one side is more harmful than the other), so the burden of evidence is one-sided. Which is why once these fakes "doing science" lose their tenures after the endowments (and charity) run out of funds, they will be barely fit to do anything in the real-life ecology. I wonder what you can do with an unemployed, say, academic orthodox economist. You could do better with non-post-academic cab drivers. Clearly those the most fit at dealing with "just evidence" will be idiot savants outside their evidence domain.

And I can expect that with the SP500 about 20% lower than here, you will see tenures unexpectedly evaporating. The silver-lining of the crisis, perhaps, with the de-academification of society.

When I was warning about the risks of the financial system, I encountered nasty resistance from these types --recall that I blame the academic establishment for this idiotic risk taking."Where is the evidence?", they kept saying, missing the subtlety of the a-delon & evidence of fat tails. Two unpleasant situation, worth naming names because these two individuals are exceedingly harmful to society. 1) The most unpleasant situation was the psychologist Dan Gilbert from Harvard who broke the Brockman dinner party etiquette by shouting insults within earshot, c. Feb 2007, (and with Harvard's endowment at > twice its current value), and kept ranting in my back that "he offers no evidence!" . 2) The second one was in London, in 2006, when one Herr Doktor Prof. Armin Falk University of Bonn, who did some bullshit experiments on bounded rationality, not knowing that I was a trader, shouted in a strong German accent: "I do science ; you just do philosophy". Science it was.

So let me take this into more interesting territory, and express my anti-social-planner views. Even more that in Hayek's days, the ecology of the real world is becoming too complex for Aristotelian logic: very, very little of what we do can be safely formalized, meaning asymmetries matter more than ever. Which puts the Western World today at the most dangerous point in its history: unless we get the Bernanke-Summers crowd out of there, it will eventually be destroyed by the machinery of arrogant, formal-thinking civil servants, and Ivy-league semi-retards.

Finally, beyond the current mess, I see no way out of this ecological problem, except through that tacit, unexplainable, seasoned, thoughtful, and aged thing crystalized by traditions & religions --we can't live without charts and we need to rely on the ones we've used for millennia. Le 21e siecle sera religieux, ou ne sera pas!

PS- I went on a European radio to express my ideas. When asked: what should we do, I replied: just listen to John Gray. He is the greatest living thinker. It was a great surprise when a few hours later, I opened my mail and saw John Gray's book with a handwritten note from him.

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Some people think they attend the opera for the story.

It is the same with language. Language is largely made to show-off, gossip, confuse people, delude them, charm them, seduce them, scare them, exploit them, etc. And, as a side effect, convey information. Just a side effect, you fools.

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Is it true? How about the reverse: you do not become free by acting intransigent; those who are free have the obligation to be intransigent. Fat Tony to Nero: "Being self owned is a state of mind".

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The only bad news came at the end of the session, when a VIP central banker, former IMF hotshot, co-author of a macroeconomics textbook classic (with Blanchard), came to me to critique my point about feedback loops. I had said that unemployment in NY caused by Wall Street losses, percolating and generating unemployment in, say, China, then percolating back into unemployment in New York, because of these feedback loops, were not analyzable analytically, owing to the monstrous estimation errors with such effects. The hotshot disagreed, explaining that we had input-output matrices that were good at calculating such feedbacks, citing a "Nobel" (Leontieff, I presume) --I looked at him with the look "he is arrogant, but does not know enough to understand that he is not even wrong" (needless to say that he was one of those who did not see the crisis coming). The problem is one of convexity, described in The Black Swan with the story of the billiard balls, as unpredictability compounds when we add additional bounces. It was hard to get the message that even if econometric methods could track the effects in normal times (natural, since errors are small), such models said nothing about large deviations, for which the errors would be monstrous.

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