Low wages, low productivity of labour

Italy and Britain, as different as they can be, have something in common: low productivity of labour. This is perhpas the main reason for the laggard growth of Italy and is a big problem in UK too. There is not an established theory about the causes of labour productivity, but it is suggesttive that both countries are characterized by very low wages compared to the other European countries, and precarity of work.

Sciatto

Non c'è parola più sciatta di "sciatto".

La bellezza salverà il mondo

Fabio fazio ha (re) introdotto il ritornello che la bellezza salverà il mondo. Che non va letto come "l'arte salveà il mondo", macome una linea aziendale per le aziende italiane. Del resto, l'arte non si occupa della bellezza (se non quella modesta), ma della verità.

Dio

Il sogno segreto degli informatici è di creare l'intelligenza divina. Non vedo perché, avendo la fortuna 8a occhio e croce) che essa non esista, si debba farla in silicio.

L'invenzione del cristianesimo

Carino questo testo - e tra l'altro è grosso modo quello che è successo -  però l'autore probabilmente è poco familiare con i giochi di potere e i complotti reali - che si fanno prendendo un gruppettino insignificante e facendolo gonfiare in modo che si contrapponga alle forze veramente rivoluzionarie - spesso però poi il gruppettino fa da solo - Hamas era un gruppetto finanziato da Israele ed è divenatto poi il suo maggior nemico.

Il finale (nietzchiano) direi che ne è la riprova. Uguaglianza e libertà sono idee decisamente ebraiche - l'antico testamento ne è inzuppato - lontanissime dalla mentalità greco-romana (pernso alla democrazia ateniese, in cui il concetto di uguaglianza non esisteva proprio, esisteva il concetto di molti, come dice tucidide), ed era il pensiero anche degli zeloti, quelli che facevano veramente paura ai romani e contro i quali i romani finanziarono i primi cristiani, dopo averli infiltrati (da personaggi come Paolo che però credo facesse il doppio gioco). In fondo la storia di Pilato che cerca di salvare cristo e degli ebrei (in realtà degli zeloti) che scelgono Barabba dice proprio questo, e credo che anche il tradimento di Giuda abbia a che fare con questa storia

Crise of liberalism ancient philosophers

I have read the recension of  book of Patrick Deneen on the cirse of liberalism. Deneen says that this crise is due to the fact that liberalism replaced the old ide of the phylosophers of self-mastery with the universal pursuit of personal desires. Apart that the term is improper (he says liberalism but he means modernity), apart that this is the cnformistic, boring criticism of the right and apart from the fact that the true proble is the conentration of wealth in a ridiculously restricted number of hands, the book has a point. People of the modernity are unhappy. Freud and Durkheim thought that this was the inevitable drawback of civilisation (the unease of civilisation), but I think that it has to do exactly with the abandonemenet of the idea of self-mastery pointed out by Deneem Where the book fails, however, is in confusing self-mastery with coerction, an idea that was totally foreign to the ancient philosophers and that arose only with the rise to power of Christianism (it was equally foreign to the first Christian communities). Socrates could sleep with the handsome Alcibiades and avoid to have sex with him because he was master of his desires, not because law or necessity prevented him from doing that (as conservatives would like).

Misery of ecological thought

A friend of mine published an interesting papers stating that in conservation we are builiding a generation of idots-savants (Battisti 2017 How to make (ineffective conservation projects..  Animal Conservation). I dare say the same occurs with studies of biodiversity. For instance a paper of the holy McGill )2012) states that he was surpising to find an inverse relationships between growth rate and abundace in trees of North America. But this is exactly was is expected from a logisti growth model which is a the base og ALL ecological theory of today  and I am surprised that renowned scientist cannot even interpret the formula of logistic growth dN/dr = rN,(1-N/K). Mc Gill thought thta the grotwh rate is r, while frowth rate is obviously dN/dt and it decreases after reachintg a maximu in logistic growth. In other words, the great ecologists "discovered" densituy-dependence (decrease in growth erate with denisty).

This is the growth rate-density relationship; it is found in every standard manual of ecology (if you care to read them(; this is taken from here  8a site of physicists, alas!). Mc Gill "discovered" the right half of the graph. Also Thuiller et al 2016 (see below) discoevred the right half of the graph since ihey fitted a linear and anot a quadratic model to their data (and of course they also were suprised)

Ah, palying with computers instead of studying ecology is very dangerous for thinking. And I am angry that I need to be so polemic. Thuiller, et al  2014. Does probability of occurrence relate to population dynamics? Ecography 1155-1166 say the same but with less anger.

Ecology evolutionary biology physics chemistry

Ecology is not evolutionary biology, it is ecology. Chemistry is not physics, it is a different field. Although the atoms obey the laws of quantum dynamics, the behavious of reactions is substantailly unpredictable from the laws of thermodynamics.

Berlusconi Trump II

A propositdo di Berlusconi e Trump, va aggiunto una seconda massima: "!o so benissimo che sono tutte cazzate, però mi piacciono quindi lo voto". Mi riesce difficile capire la psicologia di uno che pensa che ciò che piace a lui è così importante, ma tantì'è.

Berlusconi, Trump, asinus cum asino fricat

"E' cretino come me quindi è un genio / bravissimo". Il segreto del successo di Berlusconi e Trump è tutto qui. Che poi credo poco ci siano e molto ci facciano,

Medicina

Molte medicine non tradizionali insistono su una "forza vitale" che spiegherebbe la malattia. Quello che non tutti sanno è che e ci credono anche i medici "scientifici" alla forza vitale (la chiamano capacitò di autoguarigione) solo che si guardano bene dal dirlo ai pazienti perché l'autorevolezza è una componente fondamentale della capacità terapeutica, Io personalmente penso che semplicemente non capiamo quasi nulla della fisiologia dell'organismo (per ora), ma non abbiamo l'umiltà di ammetterlo. Le malattie infettive le curiamo molto bene, ma su diabete cardiopatie tumori malattie autoimmuni e potrei proseguire due ore, andiamo essenzialmente a tentoni. Gli astronomi non hanno paura di dire che non sanno assolutamente cosa sia la materia oscura (che è certo che esista, che rappresenta il 70% della materia e che sicuramente non è nulla di metafisico), perché l'astronomia è una scienza (non come la medicina).

Ecology, thinking

Ecology is dangerous, it puts in your mind strange ideas like "the limits of growth" (1972). The problem needed a radical solution, and McGill (was he?) invented R so that those that are doing ecology stopped thinking altogether.

Of course statistics is dramatically useful, but that was not the main reason for overemphasise on "quantitative! skills (many methods derive from psychometry). Luckili, I think that in very short time AI will break into ecology and we will through all this rwiddling.

Evolution of Indo European languages

It is often said that ProtoIndoEuropean was reconstructed by comparing the existing language. This is not completely true. Reconstruction of the PIE is based on the hypothesis that PIE contained all the phonemes present in the many branches of the language family (with minor variation) and that each nrabch arose by losing part of the phonemes, which is possible but ithat is difficult to distinguish from the alternative hypothesi that the original set of phonemes was reduced and that the different branches arose by consistent shift in phonemes. This is particularly important sicen the PIE was reconstructed long before the discovery of Hittite, which is quite unlike  in grammar and phonology from reconstructe PIE. If you look at a table of words in different Indo European languages you see that Hittite is consistently more similar to Sanskrit and secondarily to Greek  For instance PIE *dʰugH₂-tér Greek tʰugátēr Hittite túwatara. IThis is consistent with the grammar off Hittite, which is very similar to the more archaic forms of greek. For instance the conjucationof verb closely matches the athematic conjugation of Greek and Sanskrit, which is more archaic; reconstructe PIE grammar instead is based on the more recent thematic conjugation.

This has profounf implications, since it does not mean that PIE did not exist, but that instead of representing the protolanguage it represented an intermediate form between the oldest languages (Hreek Hittite and Sanskirt) and the more recent ones. The study of PIE leads to the conclusion that it was spoken in Ukraine, if instead Greek Sanskrit and Hyitte are the oldest languages the most probable location is somewhere near Kurdistan, where an archaic form of Indo-Arian language is spoken. One of the main arguments fro the Ukarine location is the presence of the word for horse among PIE roots, but such word is not present inHittite.

Of course it is equally possible that the XIX century ideas about PIE are true, that it arose in Ukraine, and that Hittite is somehow a branch of Indo-Arian language with a large number of loans from semitic languages of Anatolia, but I am unconvinced.

Creole, innatedness of language, complexity

In the previous post I exposed the ide of Chomsky that part of the language is inante and that the inante part is the capability to merge two units into a new one. A few linguists think that many more rules of syntax are innate, basing on the study of creoles. Creoles are languages born in colonial areas where peopel from different countries meet together. The children of these people "inventend" new languages which are a a mix of many languages and have a simplified but perfectly functional grammar. Creoles arose many times in various places where the colonizers brought workers from different colonized countries (The antilles, New Guinea etc.), and a remarkable feature of these languages is that they share essentially the sme grammar. For instance the order of words is usually subject verb object, whereas among all languages other forms (for instance subject object verb like in latin) are very common. This led a few linguists to believe thatre is a basic grammar ahrd-wirde in the brain and that the infinite variation existing among languages is a cultural developemnt.

I was watching a video from the Economist in which a British said that he did not like American since it is pretty basic. American is in many ways more expressive than British English (it is almost impossible to speak of philosphy in British english whereas it is not so difficult with the syntax of American englisth, which I therefore use), but it is true that it looks much simpler than British English. Linguist assume that all languages have more or less the same complexity, but many languages are simpler to master. It is largerly a matter of affinity with his own mother tongue (French is easy for an Italian but difficult for an english speaker), but it is quite obvious that some languages are "easier": Malese is quite simple to learn, and many find greek (an extremely complex language) much esasier than latin. Since creoles are among the "easieast" languages, and assuming that the gramamr of creoles is actually the basic grammar of human language, that means that easiness is not relateed to the complexity of the language, but to the distance from this basic grammar. As a matter of fact British English is an infinte series of idioms, which arose thorugh use, whereas American enlighs is probably actually more basic, as stated by the mildly racist British of the viedo.

Chomsky

The theories of Noam Chomsly are usually summarized in the following terms: the deep structure of language is fundamentally innate. The problem with this formulation, aas was pointed out by a linguist. is how much structure of the language is innate: dog certainly is not, since in closely related languages it is spelled differently, whereas the distinction bwteeen noun and verb is universal so it is a good candidate for being hard-wired. recently Chomsky clarified his ideas by saying that a mutation, maybe a punctiform mutation, which he calls "merge" allowed to merge two concepts into one. The structure of syntax which Chomsky discovered, and which are his scientific triumph, are very complex, largely unconscious, and difficult to understand, but the main idea is that language can merge units to form a new unit. This property - articulation - is unique to natural language, since it lacks for instance in the complex language of bees and even in the language of mathematics, and by the way allows the language to speak of himself (which mathematics can not). it is not unreasonable to believe that this merging propriety is genetically determined and that arose suddenly. Art arose suddenly and in very sophisticated form about 40.000 years ago, and it is usually thought to be a sign of the birth of language.