You Don’t Abandon Your Spouse Even if You Find a Better Match Elsewhere
Or, in the sequence of your beliefs, ideas, investment, thoughts, the first one always dominates
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
Nicholas Coccoma is a Boston-based political writer who recently made an excellent argument that true democracy can only happen once elections have been replaced with a lottery system that hands political power to a random selection of citizens.
Interestingly, the notion of politics by lottery is as old as democracy itself. The ancient Athenians deemed the citizen lottery model an integral part of the democratic system and saw major shortcomings in solely relying on elected representatives.
One key problem with representative democracies is that elected officials never represent the actual, diverse make-up of society. For example, the Members of Parliament in India are mostly Hindu, male, and goons with criminal records — not an accurate representative of an average citizen.
“We can make all the tweaks we want, but as long as we employ voting to choose representatives, we will continue to wind up with a political economy controlled by wealthy elites. Modern liberal governments are not democracies; they are oligarchies in disguise,” Coccoma writes.
When it comes to wealth, the numbers are even more dispiriting. Almost 90 percent of them are millionaires. 99 percent of Indians aren’t. And while over 228.9 million people in India live in poverty, you won’t find a single one of them in the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha.
When many feel a sense of despair about the crumbling of democratic values around the world, citizen assemblies with members selected via a lottery system offer a glimmer of hope: a more equitable, truly people-powered and therefore more genuine version of democracy. “The question is not whether democracy will die, but whether it will be instituted for the first time.”
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Q: Why is it so hard to be self-critical?
Around 155 BCE, the Greek philosopher Carneades of Cyrene came to Rome as one of the three Athenian ambassadors who represented the Academy, the same argumentative open-air institution where three centuries before, Socrates drove his interlocutors to murder him just to get a break from his questions. It was now called the New Academy, was no less argumentative, and had the reputation of being the hotbed of scepticism in the ancient world.
On the much anticipated day of his oration, Carneades stood up and delivered a brilliantly argued lengthy and aggressive speech in praise of justice and how it should always be at the top of our motives.
The Roman audience was spellbound. It was not just his charisma, the audience was swayed by the strength of his arguments, the eloquence of his thought, the purity of his language, and the energy of Carneades.
But that was not the point Carneades wanted to drill.
The next day, Carneades came back, stood up, and established the doctrine of uncertainty of knowledge in the most possibly convincing way. He proceeded to contradict and refute with no less swaying arguments what he had established so convincingly the day before.
Carneades managed to persuade the very same audience and in the same spot that justice should be way down on the list of motivations for human undertakings.
Today, let’s talk about scepticism. More precisely, let’s try to understand why it’s so damn hard to remain self-critical in the long run — not merely due to our own individual limitations, but also because of certain dogma and instinct that is prevalent in the human species.
There are reasons to believe that, for evolutionary purposes, we may be programmed to build a loyalty to ideas in which we have invested time.
Think about the consequences of deciding every morning at 8 am whether to keep the spouse or part with them for a better emotional investment elsewhere. Or, think of a politician who is so rational that, during a campaign, they change their mind on a given matter because of fresh evidence and abruptly switches political parties.
You don’t abandon your spouse even if you find a much much better match elsewhere. Even if you do, you do it after serious consideration, only under special circumstances. I think we all can agree that you don’t do it every now and then. And we all know that changing opinions as a politician is career suicide.
The world wants you to stay true to your initial investments. In the sequence of your beliefs, ideas, investment, thoughts, in most of the cases, the first one always dominates. This is called the path dependence of beliefs.
We support our children in whom we have a heavy investment of food and time until they are able to propagate our genes. We do the same with ideas. An academic who became famous for espousing an opinion is not going to voice anything that can possibly devalue their own past work and kill years of investment. People who switch parties become traitors, renegades, or, worst of all, apostates. There was a time when those who abandoned their religion were punishable by death.
Researchers found that purely rational behaviour on the part of humans can come from a defect in the amygdala that blocks the emotions of attachment, meaning that the subject is, literally, a psychopath.
But it doesn’t mean that you are either true to your initial ideas or you are a psychopath.
The ancient sceptics Carneades et al’s main teaching was that nothing could be accepted with certainty. According to them, only conclusions of various degrees of probability could be formed, and these supplied a guide to conduct.
Carneades was not merely a sceptic. He was a dialectician, someone who never committed himself to any of the premises from which he argued, or to any of the conclusions he drew from them. He stood all his life against arrogant dogma and belief in one sole truth.
Another thinker from antiquity who preferred to be guided by probability than allege with certainty was the garrulous Cicero. Many say this was very handy for it allowed him to contradict himself. Cicero was not of the habit of attaching himself too stubbornly to an opinion for the mere fact that he had voiced it in the past.
If we step further back in time, before Carneades, and reach sixth-century BCE Greek Sicily, we can see the notion of probability was used in a legal framework by the very first rhetoricians who, when arguing a case, needed to show the existence of a doubt concerning the certainty of the accusation.
The first known rhetorician was a Syracusean named Korax, who engaged in teaching people how to argue from probability. At the core of his method was the notion of the most probable.
For example, the ownership of a piece of land, in the absence of further information and physical evidence, should go to the person after whose name it is best known. One of his indirect students, Gorgias, took this method of argumentation to Athens, where it flourished.
In modern times, Karl Popper is among the forerunners who have brought scientific rigour to the most probable with his idea of falsifiability: a statement, an idea, a hypothesis, a law, a theory only remains true as long as it is not proven false through observation and experimentation. This concept is central to the scientific method and is used to distinguish scientific theories from non-scientific ones.
Having said that, outside the domain of science, self-contradiction is thought to be so shameful that this “virtue” is often ridiculed, both in thought and in prose.
For instance, Marcel Proust’s most famous 20th century novel In Search of Time Lost features a semiretired diplomat, Marquis de Norpois, who, like all diplomats, was a socialite who spent considerable time in salons. The narrator of the novel sees Monsieur de Norpois openly contradicting himself on some issue.
When reminded of his previous position, Monsieur de Norpois did not seem to recall it. Proust reviles him:
Monsieur de Norpois was not lying. He had just forgotten. One forgets rather quickly what one has not thought about with depth, what has been dictated to you by imitation, by the passions surrounding you. These change, and with them so do your memories. Even more than diplomats, politicians do not remember opinions they had at some point in their lives and their fibbings are more attributable to an excess of ambition than a lack of memory.
Monsieur de Norpois is made to be ashamed of the fact that he expressed a different opinion. Proust did not consider that the diplomat might have changed his mind. We are supposed to be faithful to our opinions. One becomes a traitor otherwise.
If you think about it, self-contradiction has been culturally made to be so shameful that, if practised in the same spirit, can prove disastrous in science.
This is one of the reasons a scientist is often forced to act like a cheap defence lawyer rather than a pure seeker of the truth. For example, a doctoral thesis is “defended” by the applicant. It would be a rare situation to see the student change their mind upon being supplied with a convincing argument.
One would think that when scientists make a mistake, they develop a new science that incorporates what has been learned from it. But people confuse science and scientists.
Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous. They are human, and like most humans, they are marred by the biases humans have. Most scientists are hard-headed, otherwise they would not derive the patience and energy to perform the Herculean tasks asked of them.
If they didn’t attribute their failures to some rare event (indicative of the thought that they were right but that luck played against them) it would kill their self-esteem and not give them enough strength to keep them going against adversity.
Luckily, science is better than scientists. After an existing understanding of the world collapses (for example, the world is made up of fields and particles), a new thought emerges, which integrates the existing knowledge into itself (there are no longer particles which move in space with the passage of time, but quantum fields whose elementary events happen in spacetime). This new idea might be resisted, but not for long, as the proponents of the old idea will be much closer to their funeral date than the new one’s.
Science evolves from funeral to funeral.
Today I Learned
Typhoid and typhus have similar names and symptoms but are different diseases. Both are bacterial in origin and marked by sharp abdominal pain, listlessness, and a tendency to grow confused.
Typhus is caused by a rickettsia bacillus; typhoid is caused by a type of salmonella bacillus and is the more serious of the two. A small proportion of people infected with typhoid — between 2 and 5 percent — are infectious but have no symptoms of illness, making them highly effective, if nearly always unwitting, vectors.
The most famous such carrier was a shadowy cook and housekeeper named Mary Mallon who became notorious in the early years of the twentieth century as Typhoid Mary.
Almost nothing is known of her beginnings. She was variously reported in her own day as being from Ireland, England, or the United States. All that can be said for certain is that from young adulthood Mary worked in a number of well-to-do households, mostly in the New York City area, and wherever she went, two things always happened: people came down with typhoid, and Mary abruptly disappeared.
In 1907, after a particularly bad outbreak, she was tracked down and tested and in the process became the first person to be confirmed as an asymptomatic carrier — that is, was infectious but had no symptoms herself. So fearsome did this make her that she was held in protective custody, very much against her will, for three years.
She was released when she promised never again to take a job handling food. Mary, alas, was not the most trustworthy of souls. Almost immediately she began working in kitchens again, spreading typhoid to a number of new locations.
She managed to elude capture until 1915, when twenty-five people developed typhoid at the Sloane Hospital for Women in Manhattan, where Mary had been working under an assumed name as a cook. Two of the victims died.
Mary fled but was recaptured and spent the remaining twenty-three years of her life under house arrest on North Brother Island in the East River until her death in 1938.
She was personally responsible for at least fifty-three cases of typhoid and three confirmed deaths, but possibly many more. The particular tragedy of it is that she could have spared her unfortunate victims if she had just washed her hands before handling food.
Timeless Insight
Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do, it’s a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out.
That’s never the way.
What I’m Reading
We are all in the depths of a cave, chained by our ignorance, by our prejudices, and our weak senses reveal to us only shadows. If we try to see further, we are confused; we are unaccustomed. But we try. This is science.
— Carlo Rovelli, Reality is Not What it Seems
Tiny Thought
We spend way more time on irrelevant problems, such as contemplating the existence of god, and way less time on real world problems that actually affect us, such as assessing the quality of an investment decision.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋