Anna Hazare's availability cascade

At one time, the only way to cure syphilis was to infect the patient with malaria. Elevated body temperature, during malarial fever, killed off the more dangerous pathogen.
Mass politics, in India, has always been about the many-headed rabble clamoring to be infected with syphilis so as to cure an endemic malaria. The result is that public life remain an open sewer swarming with mosquitoes, through which the heedless throng headlong wade to embrace the most loathsome of political prostitutes who, by reason of their witless senility, general insalubrurity  and shrilly sententious absence of charm, can plausibly claim to be the providential virgins whose deflowering, folk wisdom has it, might cure the Public's Venereal disease.

The rationale of Hazare's antics is as follows- Elections cost money to win. So elected politicians have to be corrupt while in office so as to have enough money to get re-elected. BUT  an all-powerful  Lok Pal will throw  corrupt politicians in jail. Hence only non-corrupt politicians, not spending money to win will be elected. Parliament will then have no incentive to keep laws and institutions which give rise to corruption. Everything in the garden will be lovely.

Why won't this work? The laws and institutions which give rise to corruption ARE NOT the product of the thirst for bribes but, instead, arise from 'availability cascades'- stupid ideas which give rise to defective 'mechanism design'.
So long as you have bad mechanism design, corruption will exist. True, if you shoot people for being corrupt then that same underlying drive will change its color- it will become an insurgency. They will shoot you before you shoot them.
When the Govt says you can't do something you really want or need to, it doesn't mean you stop doing it. Either you pay a bribe to do it legally or you do it through a criminal network. If the Govt. tries to destroy the criminal network, you will get a cross-over into insurgency. Sooner or later, some accommodation will have to be made. Why? Because the Govt. needs to raise revenue to pay soldiers to shoot people. Where will that money come from? If the Govt. is telling people they can't do something which earns them money then they may do it anyway and use part of the extra money they get to shoot the soldiers the Govt. sends.
Violence is fungible. Bad fiscal policies breed violence. That violence gets masked as corruption- what Dadhabhai Naorojee called 'shakkar ki churi' - the knife of sugar- everything is sweet but it is the knife all the same' . India has bad, stupid, fiscal policies. That's why it's fucked. Just substitute Govt. funding for political parties for the current regime and Anna Hazare's logic falls to pieces. Corruption will still exist even with clean politicians- suppose Kaushik Biswas a successor for Manmohan, for example- because of its 'transformation potential'.

Why? The people are stupid. They believe stupid things. They have created a system that perpetuates poverty. Corruption and Emigration are the only two reliable routes of escape. Another exists. It is based on  honesty and intelligence. It is based on admitting that Indian mass politics is a story of stupidity, arrogance and fraud on a colossal  scale.
A people foolish enough to believe that Mahatma Gandhi got rid of the British or that (till recently) India, with its present constitution, will ever rival China- deserve nothing but Anna Hazare's availability cascade.

In Economics, an availability cascade is a specious, but simple to understand, solution to a real problem which everybody buys into by reason of its ubiquity and low cognitive cost of acquisition.

Examples are
1) the drain theory. India is actually very rich. But the British broke into the houses of the people at night, when they were fast asleep, and robbed them of their wealth. Get rid of the British, or the Banias or the Bazaar or the Bourgeoisie or Big Business' Managing Agencies etc, etc and suddenly India will become very rich. Baba Ramdev's version of anti-corruption is- 'Get back the Black Money from Switzerland and buy everybody an Air Conditioner'.
2) redistribution cures poverty- India is poor because of low productivity. Everybody knows how to boost productivity. Just imitate high productivity countries. Oh? Capital is too costly? Urm... but India's big. It has lots of coal and iron. There are economies of scale in capital goods production. Of course, if in your redistributive zeal, you featherbed workers in the capital goods sector then per-unit-labor costs don't fall- instead you just get crap capital goods with negative value added. The Indian labor aristocracy had abysmal absenteeism. They were reverse Stakhanovites.
What about the peasants? There were islands of rising productivity and integrated Agri-business in British India . There were plenty of sociologists- Ambedkar for example- who understood what needed to be done or at least the proper direction in which to proceed. But, an availability cascade- the dogma that land redistribution boosts productivity- had superior appeal especially if it involved cutting off the heads of landlords (Naxalbari) even if, generally, they weren't actually landlords but kulaks or, well truth be told, not kulaks at all but some random guy who  looks kinda Trotskyite... Even more stupid was the Vinobha Bhave &  J.P. Narayan's 'bhoodhan' which was about changing the hearts of the landlords- except, generally, they weren't actually land-lords with clear title. What was the upshot? The one thing the British had invested in- viz. establishing title and rules for transfer of realty- evaporated. The more contestable title became, the greater the anarchy a Province was plunged into- Bihar was so thoroughly fucked over by Bhave- the entire State was 'Bihardaan' gifted away- that the fuckwit could finally go back to home patting himself on the back for a job well done.
The availability cascade that land reform boosts productivity just wouldn't die. This was accomplished with a little Statistical sleight of hand which Econometricians well knew to be false but, for fear of the CPM's intellectual goons in Bengal, still thought it politic to peddle.
3) Impossibility of Agency Capture- though India's history has been nothing else since it acquired the name India.
4) No heteromorphism of preferences- okay, this is a bit technical but essentially Indian democracy & claim to territorial integrity as an optimal currency area depend on this. The reason Govt. fucks up Life chances is so as to enforce preference homomorphism.  Kurukshetra was about kin selective moral heteromorphism as constitutive of a Universal, metic friendly, Ethos founded upon a once and for all Blood Sacrifice. Without it there was no Bharata.  Since our India is founded upon blowing Sepoys out of canons- nothing Moran kin selective here!- India is a heteronomous Bharata for denying the efficacy of its own foundational Kurukshetra.

But, enough in this splenetic vein. There is already a big literature in Econ, including proven templates, re. Corruption and Development for the road forward to be clear and consensus based. But, Anna Hazare and his shrill bunch of losers ignore all that simply because this represents their last chance to gain a public status equal to that which their over-weening ego prescribes for themselves..
They are determined to gain personal glory by taking the tried and tested Gandhian road of being as stupid as humanly possible.

Pratyekas supervene on Boddhisatvas?

A Pratyeka Buddha is a 'hidden' Buddha who, however, does not start up a proper Sangha, or monastic community,  for which salvation consists of waxing fat on a lazy doctrine while putting the squeeze on the laity for donations and forcing dalits to do the dirty work under conditions of more wretched yet social opprobium.

A Bodhisattva is not less than a Pratyeka Buddha- he has attained the prize- which is a phenomenal state- but he has a different intentional state- viz. he wishes to save other sentient beings by getting them to understand that the Jains and the Ajivikas and all other Sraman denominations- not to mention the Carvaka materialists- are totally fucked in the head and could everybody kindly be very very shitty to 'low caste' people- coz they don't got 'right livelihood-' and like immediately become a monk or hand us monks loads of money already?

Clearly, Pratyeka Buddhahood supervenes on Boddhisatvahood- in the sense that every Boddhisatva is indistinguishable from the stand-point of any Pratyeka specific measure- but the reverse is not the case. Two instances of Pratyeka Buddhahood can always be distinguished from the Boddhisatva perspective as approaching closer or standing in some relation to itself. (Either that, or Pratyekas are 'zombie' Buddhas and can't have 'real' intentionality.)  But, why should this be?

One answer is that the Times weren't right for the Prayeka to set up a Sangha. In this case, there is some phenomenal state that supervenes- is multiply realizable across both Pratyekas and Boddhisatvas- but some 'cetana' or intentional state which does not similarly supervene. Why? Is it because sentient beings capable of Entanglement, as in the Avatamsaka or Vimalakirti 'Buddha field', do not exist? If so, something is added to the concept of Intentionality and something taken away from the scope of Phenomenology.

But Phenomenology does not disappear. The intention to be a Boddhisatva does not make you a Boddhisatva. You have to first instantiate in your phenomenal series that supervenient Pratyekadom otherwise you're just a wannabe.
Since, the Bodhhisatva 'cetana' or intentional state has supervenience- i.e. is multiply realizable- only if the ground for an entangled Buddhafield is ready at hand, an Occassionalist doctrine suggests itself as an (non) explanation for why the Pratyeka phenomenal state does not reduce to Bodhisattvadom.

In other words, Phenomenology and its dual Occassionalism re-appear in Buddhism as the two sides of the coin of 'Nothingness' which it cashes out as. Indeed, only the name of the coin changes, nothing sensible ever gets uttered, in this as in every other variety of peripatetic fraud or soteriological chicanery whose pious cultivation ensures we will always have more monks than reason.

mutiliated numbers

Take the decimal expansion of a pair of  irrational numbers which have been mutilated at certain unknown points. You are asked to construct a choice sequence between them subject to some arbitrary constraint. Is the task meaningful? Is it mathematics or nonsense?
Suppose there is a class of cellular automata whose behavior, when observed by some Turing tested entity, reliably and uniquely produces the comment 'you know, I rather think these wee beasties are trying to construct a choice sequence between such and such mutilated numbers! Why on earth would they want to?' And, 'oh look, that little fellow there seems the smartest of the bunch- but hang on, maybe he's hit a wall and now there's that other fellow who seems to be going great guns.'

In a sense, if the above thought experiment isn't utterly incoherent in some way I've failed to spot, what happens to the claim that Mathematics is synthetic in any sense or degree? What happens to intuition?

Oughtn't we to chuck both words in the bin?

Indeed, if cellular automata were the paradigm of Maths or Logical thinking taught to us from Primary School onwards, would we not dismiss as arrant nonsense otherwise common-sense seeming notions like  'the principle of displayability' (from Husserlian phenomenology) meaning that every term or concept used has to be defined by a phenomenon (something observable) determined by it- the like of which, as a methodological principle, every discipline displays to some degree or other?