Occupy Thanksgiving

Calvinism as a Nominalist Project

Great discussion over on Jesus Creed about Calvinism, Arminianism, double predestination, and the character of God. 

I especially appreciated comment#2:

The closer I get to this debate the more I am convinced that underneath it is the ongoing issue of realism vs. nominalism. Luther was a nominalist, a strong and growing movement of his time. Nominalists believe that attributes like love, goodness, beauty, etc. are not real existences. They are only names we give those attributes, hence nominalism. When applied to God categories like the good, the true and the beautiful are not real in and of themselves, as if for God to be those things he has to meet a standard outside of himself. This would seem to make God less than God since he is subject to a measure and it would seem to make God less free since he is constrained by that measure. Luther’s response? He glories in the God who simply is apart from categories that do not arise from his own being. What this can lead to is an arbitrary God, who no matter what he does is always glorious. Therefore, God can be exalted for what on the face of it would normally be considered horrendous evil – i.e., damning people you could save. So we can end up with the strange configuration of being willing to go to hell for the glory of God as a sign of true salvation. To which I respond, huh? In fact, the more arbitrary God seems to be, the more glorious he is. And in some of the Reformed circles I have been exposed to, moral categories for God can seem unstable. And in such a case arguing as Olson does seems to diminish God’s glory. This is always the Reformed response. Olson is simply pleading for the existence of real moral categories. If these are thrown out, there is nothing left to discuss anymore and moral debate becomes senseless. So, to sum it up, I am not so sure that the debate is primarily about free will in man. It might be more about free will in God. I think pursuing the debate along these lines would be more fruitful. I am hoping that Olson presses this trajectory a bit more.

Comment by don bryant — November 9, 2011 @ 2:48 am

The Objectivist Tree

Shostakovich before bed

A slice of heaven for a cold November night...






Dmitri Shostakovich's son, Maxim Shostakovich conducts Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major which is performed by Maxim's son, Dmitri Shostakovich Jr. and accompanied by the I Musici de Montreal

Intellectus: one of the keys to Steve Jobs' Success

The lie of the Enlightenment was that "ratio" was the only component in intelligence. Walter Isaacson points to "intellectus" as an additional necessary part.

Was Steve Jobs Smart? Scientists on the Keys to Success

COLUMN by LEE DYE
Nov. 2, 2011

You don't have to be the brightest kid in the class to become the best scholar. Researchers are finding new clues about what it takes to succeed in school, and probably throughout life.

For centuries thinkers have argued about what intelligence is, and how much it takes to make a genius, whatever that means, and how important intelligence is in guaranteeing success. Today, most would agree that intelligence is the cornerstone of academic success.

But there's more to success than that, and there's plenty of examples, including Steve Jobs, the legendary innovator who changed the world.

No one would suggest that Jobs wasn't very, very smart. But he probably didn't have to walk far across the Apple campus to find a bunch of employees who were just as smart as he was, and maybe much smarter.

Biographer Walter Isaacson argued in the New York Times that Jobs was not overly smart in a traditional sense, in that he did not try to solve problems by rigorous analytical pursuit, common marks of intelligence, but relied more on "imaginative leaps" that "were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical."

Jobs made his mark in the business world, not academia, and his success was due to many things, including personal charisma, and he was the kind of salesman who could peddle ice cream to Eskimos in the middle of the winter.

Bright, yes, but much more than that.

But what about us commoners, who shuffle through life without the gifts that enabled a man like Jobs to do so much? What does it take for us to succeed?

Although Jobs dropped out of college to launch his career, nearly all of us need a first rate education to compete in what has become a highly competitive world. And even in the realm of academics it takes more than intelligence to succeed, although only a fool would argue that intelligence is unimportant. It establishes the basic foundation.

Beyond that, however, educators agree on a second component – effort. No matter how bright you are, you've got to work.

And now, researchers have added a third component. You need intellectual curiosity, or as they put it, a "hungry mind."

In a huge study, scientists in England and Switzerland gathered data from 200 studies involving about 50,000 students to see what it took for them to excel in school. They published their findings in the current issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Curiosity turned out to be a major player.

"Curiosity is basically a hunger for exploration," coauthor Sophie von Stumm of the University of Edinburgh said in releasing the study.

In brief, the study concludes that effort and curiosity together were as important as intelligence in achieving academic success.

"Our results highlight that 'a hungry mind' is a core determinant of individual differences in academic achievement," the study concludes. Curiosity, which they call the "third pillar of academic performance," has been largely overlooked by educators, according to the study

And that, they argue, is a huge failure in schools today.

"Schools and universities must early on encourage intellectual hunger and not exclusively reward the acquiescent application of intelligence and effort," the study says, adding this:

Academic success is likely to be achieved by "not only the diligent class winner who writes an excellent term paper but also the one who asks annoyingly challenging questions during the seminar, a habit that is, unfortunately, not appreciated by all teachers."

In other words, the kid who has all the answers deserves no more encouragement than the one who asks curious questions, clear evidence of a "hungry mind."

The study doesn't attempt to explain how to create that hunger. Encouraging those annoying questions may help, but it probably sends us back to that old debate over nature vs. nurture. Some kids are probably born with it, others learn it in a home that encourages curiosity.

Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis, who has spent decades studying what it takes to be a genius, argues in a new book that it takes more than good genes. It also takes good surroundings.

Other factors also contribute, like good health, financial support, and a little luck.

Any genius needs that. Theirs is not an easy road to follow.

Stanford University researchers, for example, found a link between genius and mental illness, including manic depression. Most highly creative achievers, they concluded, are a little disturbed, which in turn gives them a broad emotional range that possibly contributes to their creative efforts.

And, by the way, over the years I've interviewed many brilliant scientists who easily rank as geniuses. They aren't all nuts.

The only person to receive two Nobel prizes in physics, John Bardeen of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was described in a biography by historian Lillian Hoddeson as "a humble, calm, soft-spoken Midwestener who had plenty of friends and who liked to play golf and have picnics with his family."

He was also very bright, worked very hard, and had a "hungry mind."

That leaves us with this question. How many Bardeens are there out there who will never get that spark that ignites their intellectual curiosity?

Four Reforms that Don't Require Bureaucracies to Implement

 

The following  article appeared in the NYT. I'm especially fond of suggestion #4.

Did You Hear the One About the Bankers?

CITIGROUP is lucky that Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed when he was. The Libyan leader’s death diverted attention from a lethal article involving Citigroup that deserved more attention because it helps to explain why many average Americans have expressed support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The news was that Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.

It doesn’t get any more immoral than this. As the Securities and Exchange Commission civil complaint noted, in 2007, Citigroup exercised “significant influence” over choosing $500 million of the $1 billion worth of assets in the deal, and the global bank deliberately chose collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, built from mortgage loans almost sure to fail. According to The Wall Street Journal, the S.E.C. complaint quoted one unnamed C.D.O. trader outside Citigroup as describing the portfolio as resembling something your dog leaves on your neighbor’s lawn. “The deal became largely worthless within months of its creation,” The Journal added. “As a result, about 15 hedge funds, investment managers and other firms that invested in the deal lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while Citigroup made $160 million in fees and trading profits.”

Citigroup, which is under new and better management now, settled the case without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. James Stewart, a business columnist for The Times, noted that Citigroup’s flimflam made “Goldman Sachs mortgage traders look like Boy Scouts. In settling its fraud charges for $550 million last year, Goldman was accused by the S.E.C. of being the middleman in a similar deal, allowing the hedge fund manager John Paulson to help choose the mortgages and then bet against them without disclosing this to the other parties. Citigroup dispensed with a Paulson figure altogether, grabbing those lucrative roles for itself.” (Last Thursday, the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case demanded that the S.E.C. explain how such serious securities fraud could end with the defendant neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.)

This gets to the core of why all the anti-Wall Street groups around the globe are resonating. I was in Tahrir Square in Cairo for the fall of Hosni Mubarak, and one of the most striking things to me about that demonstration was how apolitical it was. When I talked to Egyptians, it was clear that what animated their protest, first and foremost, was not a quest for democracy — although that was surely a huge factor. It was a quest for “justice.” Many Egyptians were convinced that they lived in a deeply unjust society where the game had been rigged by the Mubarak family and its crony capitalists. Egypt shows what happens when a country adopts free-market capitalism without developing real rule of law and institutions.

But, then, what happened to us? Our financial industry has grown so large and rich it has corrupted our real institutions through political donations. As Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, bluntly said in a 2009 radio interview, despite having caused this crisis, these same financial firms “are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they, frankly, own the place.”

Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. One consumer group using information from Opensecrets.org calculates that the financial services industry, including real estate, spent $2.3 billion on federal campaign contributions from 1990 to 2010, which was more than the health care, energy, defense, agriculture and transportation industries combined. Why are there 61 members on the House Committee on Financial Services? So many congressmen want to be in a position to sell votes to Wall Street.

We can’t afford this any longer. We need to focus on four reforms that don’t require new bureaucracies to implement. 1) If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big and needs to be broken up. We can’t risk another trillion-dollar bailout. 2) If your bank’s deposits are federally insured by U.S. taxpayers, you can’t do any proprietary trading with those deposits — period. 3) Derivatives have to be traded on transparent exchanges where we can see if another A.I.G. is building up enormous risk. 4) Finally, an idea from the blogosphere: U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from. The public needs to know.

Capitalism and free markets are the best engines for generating growth and relieving poverty — provided they are balanced with meaningful transparency, regulation and oversight. We lost that balance in the last decade. If we don’t get it back — and there is now a tidal wave of money resisting that — we will have another crisis. And, if that happens, the cry for justice could turn ugly. Free advice to the financial services industry: Stick to being bulls. Stop being pigs.