The Gita as Dutch book

We've all heard of Pascal's wager- one should bet that God exists, even if that seems very improbable because there's an infinite pay-out and anyway what have you got to lose?
The problem is that in life we are making not just one bet but a series of connected or coherent bets- like an accumulator- such that Pascal's wager involves one in smaller lower fungibility or uncertain arbitrage bets with different time horizons. The intuitive idea I'm trying to get at here is that betting on God might mean your daughter, the dentist in Ireland, dies because the doctors aren't allowed to conduct a procedure that aborts her unviable foetus.

But, even in the simplistic sorts of models Economists use, two related problems inevitably arise. One is that when you offer a fair bet you are assigning a probability to an outcome. If the  price of the bet is 'to believe x' then that price does not stay constant as new information becomes available. Bayes' Law shows how that price changes over time. I'm assuming that it is more costly to believe a more improbable thing but even if we drop this assumption there's another reason why this will be the case. That has to do with your ability to 'lay-off' risk or increase the reward for risk without increasing your 'downside' exposure by running a book.
I'm not up on the literature but it seems a reasonable guess that philosophically inclined gamblers in the ancient world- like Yudhishtra, in the Mahabharata, or Ghalib, our Ghazal King- spent a lot of time considering under what circumstances it would be profitable to run a book, that is offer a bunch of bets, consistent with Pascal's wager.
The Italian Probability theorist, de Finetti formalized this notion as follows-  A person who has set prices on an array of wagers in such a way that he or she will make a net gain regardless of the outcome, is said to have made a Dutch book
Fudging things a bit, the Dutch book theorem conveys the notion that coherent betting creates Dutch books whose 'fair odds' are probabilities as estimated by the agent.
This raises the question, what is the Dutch Book such that Pascal's wager, by itself, shows us a path to find the 'best' Scripture? This notion is interesting once we admit errancy in Scripture reception as itself a determinant of its content- i.e. the signal is designed to be rationally repairable. Now, Pascal was certainly smart enough to work out whether his Jansenist reading of the Bible was indeed a Dutch Book- let alone the best possible Dutch Book. The fact that he did not make that claim- nobody is taught Probability theory in the Bible- itself tells a stupid bloke like me that it's not a profitable avenue of inquiry.. 
But what about the Gita? I read it as the 'dual' of the Just King's education in Probability theory. So am I committed to the notion that the Gita is a Dutch book ? One reason why I might indeed be maintaining this position is my belief that the Mahabharata is a series of balanced games with homothetic preferences- i.e. everybody pretty much wants the same sorts of things, has the same information or ability to get that information if they want to, and the guy offering the wager has to give the other fellow first pick.  So if I say 5 to 1 we have a White Christmas, you and I have access to the same Weather forecasts and it's your choice as to which state of the world is going to pay-out for you.

Now, assuming that new information about the world- which changes 'the price' of the Pascalian wager- arrives from totally independent sources, let's say all the causal chains involved are totally separate and identically randomly distributed- then it appears common sense to say there is no profitable Dutch book, or such a book is empty. How can you offer a bunch of people as smart as yourself a series of bets and come out ahead regardless of the outcome? Bookmakers and Casinos and Stock brokers and so on make their money on 'the spread'- the margin between the price at which they buy and sell- or else they have 'insider information' or are better at complex maths or something of that sort.
However, this might not be the case because of something inherent in the subjective way we adjust our expectations and calculate probabilities. Of course, if we had some assurance that everything that is knowable is stuff we can know, this does not pose a problem. But what if there are latent variables outside our ken? Well, in practice we know that there are lots of things we can't directly observe or measure but perhaps there's always a good enough workaround so long as things aren't hopelessly entangled.
De Fenetti introduced a distinction between 'independent sequences' which are 'exchangeable' in the sense of being just as random as each other, and exchangeable sequences arising out of dependent sequences. In other words, subjectively there is wiggle room between things being random because all causal sequences are independent and their appearing interchangable though they are in fact not independent at all. It is the 'latent' variable which introduces this wiggle-room and makes me wonder whether I haven't been confusing independence for exchangeability in broader ways.

In other words, just when I was about to say with great confidence that the Gita aint a Dutch book- sure it's  great poetry, & good for instilling shradda piety, but no way, no how does it constrain me to embrace Occultation and Occassionalism for purely Rational reasons- I come a cropper because I can't deny latent variables exist nor that Evolution is Probabilistic nor that I'm a dumb fuck knows shit from poetry or piety- i.e. maybe my response to the Gita is Rational and it's only coz I got such low bandwith Rationality that I didn't realize that was the only signal I was getting.
What makes things worse is that 'Evidential decision theory' allows for the possibility of backward causation. In other words, the claim made by Ved Vyasa or Valmiki or Tulsi or whoever, that who ever listens to their work gains salvation without any further mental effort or even volition on their part, turns out to be apodictically true- at least for genuinely stupid people like me. Why? 
Well, to quote Prof. Huw Price, the possibility now exists that 'without inconsistency, we might claim to be able to bring about past events. Dummett shows that we can accommodate a belief in backward influence, so long as we are prepared to give up the assumption that before we decide how to act, it is possible for us to find out whether the past event in question has already occurred.'

How this is relevant, is because the random question 'is the Gita a Dutch Book?' has just revealed that  I don't know what I believed about the Gita- there's a backward influence of the Dummett kind because it is impossible for me to know whether some element of what made up my 'belief'- or De Finetti 'coherent' speculation- had or indeed has already come to pass. 

As I go on to say in this previous blog post- The fact is, it is never possible, on a sufficiently fine-grained phenomenology or theory of the world, to determine that any occurrence is truly 'Past'- which also means Gibbardian 'hyperstates' and judgments made by 'hyperagents' have no road to supervenience with respect to 'prosaic factual properties'; everything is always in a sort of 'mixed inference' or else a Frege-Geachian flux till Beenakker's boundary resolves Hempel's dilemma as the Cosmic cows come home. Thus any Agency and Intentionality-based 'inwardness' we can have knowledge off must be reverse mereological and Time arrow reversed as indeed is what we would expect if our minds evolved on a stochastic fitness landscape.

So, thank You Great Hindu God, yeah, thanks ever so much- why didn't you make me something sensible, like a Mormon or a Scientologist? What? You thought I was Gay? Look I've explained all that. Yes, as a horny 16 year old,  I did put an ad in Time Out- 'gay South Indian boy wants to meet gay non-Manglik  for gay times'- but I never thought P.Chidambaram would respond. Okay, it was with a cease and desist order, coz I used his wet veshti picture, still, you can't say he doesn't look a bit like Pippa Middleton from behind.

Li Po at Nalanda

There was a long tradition in China of attributing innovations in prosody to the influence of Sanskrit. Prof. Victor Mair has written some interesting papers on this topic.

The Chinese may have developed a theory about tonality and established rules for the alternation between heavy (guru) and light (laghu) syllables and so on through contact with some other foreign language but what is interesting is that the Chinese poetic genius did not shrivel up and die after coming into contact with Brahminical  literature.
Indeed, Prof Francois Martin goes a step further and even suggests that the Chinese genius for landscape appreciation itself may have been reinforced by Sanskrit literature-

What has all this to do with Li Po?
Let us hear from an Indian Professor of Chinese descent-

'...China had two great poets, Li Bai and Bai Juyi, both belonging to the Tang Dynasty, who styled themselves as “upasakas”. Li Bai (701-762), whose poetic gems are suffused with the aroma of Chinese whiskey, has left behind a poem “who am I?” which reads:

“Blue-Lotus Upasaka is my self-styled title,

An angel from Heaven I’m banished to this world,

My fame has been buried beneath the liquor of the pubs

And I have measured thirty springs with my wine cups.

Who am I ? Why on earth should anyone thus inquire?

I am Golden-Millet Maiterya’s next life.”

(See Tan Chung, Classical Chinese Poetry in the Classics of the East series, Calcutta: The M.P. Birla Foundation, P. 143, with translation modified.)

This “Golden-Millet Maiterya” was the legendary Indian Buddhist layman, Vimalakirti whose Chinese name reads “wei-mo-jie” (the transliteration of the Sanskrit). Another famous Chinese poet, Wang Wei (701?-761) had a second name in “Wang Mojie”, i.e. he tried to demonstrate in both his names that he was “Wang Vimalakirit” -- “Wang” being his surname. Here we see Li Bai and Wang Wei vying with each other to claim themselves as the reincarnation of Vimalakirti who was the Indian symbol for a man highly enlightened (even more enlightened than the Bodisattvas) but remained married in the mundane world. I dare say that all the Chinese intellectuals who had self-styled themselves “Jushi” had cast themselves in this Vimalakiriti mould.'

(Do read this whole, magnificent, book here. The distinguished author is the son of the Most Venerable Tan Yun Shan about whom I've blogged earlier)

Li Po (Li Bai) drank a lot- he drowned drunkenly trying to rescue the reflection of the moon- how is he an upasak? The answer is provided by Vimalkirti's 'Field theory' of Buddhahood- an update on the Avatamsaka Sutra's Occassionalist monadology- whereby a relationist dynamics is added to what is otherwise reflection simply. I think this is comparable to 'adi vigyan'- the original science of throwing off your own evils onto a reflection- evolving into Shantideva's 'paratama parivartana'- whereby swopping selves saves both parties. Meditators, he tells us, dive into Hell to rescue all beings. Thus, it appears, those who are born intoxicated have no fear of intoxicants. Those destined to rescue all Hell-dwellers are joyous simply. Shantideva, who lived around the same time as Bai Juyi , is sometimes depicted as having a transgressive life-style- drinking wine and shacking up with a washer-woman- but what is unquestionable is that he and Bai Juyi shared a bottomless compassion for the common people. There is a story that the latter's mother drowned in a well, while bending down to admire the beauty of some flowers, and this led to a charge of filial impiety being made against him by his enemies because he had written a poem titled 'the new well' and another on admiring flowers. 

Sadly, Shantideva's Nalanda- ably enough served by the existing Institute there- is now connected with Amartya Sen's projected International University. What we moderns term Scholarship, it seems, is not just too leaky a vessel to cross the Ocean of Samsara, it is not even sufficiently sea worthy for a simple booze cruise to rescue the Moon's reflection and thus cast up at the Tavern at the end of the river of stars.

Yet Sen was born in the Shantiniketan of Tan Yun Shan. There is a lesson here which, as Gandhi was wont to say, all who run may read.
Mind it kindly.

Ipseity, Alterity & the conjuration of the Subaltern.

Can Critical  Philosophy, post Godhra, still be considered a Baudelairian exorcism of ipseity, rather than a Baudrillardian ethic of alterity, when answers randomly canvassed, from the most ideologically diverse theorists of the Subaltern, to the question 'where is the toilet?' all so consistently cash out as 'my mouth'?
 Take Sumit Sarkar- outside and shoot him- no, I jest, I jest- that's the job of the Naxalites- but, seriously folks, he was right to point out that Subaltern Studies stopped being about really marginalized folk- tribals and manual scavengers and so on- and turned into Foucaldian whining about Eurocentrism- so his approach to answering the question 'where is the toilet?' begins with a recognition that the disposal of 'number two' is a subaltern form of WORK. Since Subaltern studies gobshiterry should be about genuine subalterns, like manual scavengers (bhangis), the mouth of a Subaltern Studies savant is indeed the nearest toilet.
Ranajit Guha's approach is more 'roundabout' (as the Austrian Economists would say) and Spivak's is more Literary Capital intensive but both reach the same conclusion because Guha lectures in Vienna and  the word toilet comes from the French toilette and Spivak can speak French, so basically, yes, the nearest toilet is her mouth.

No change there then.
Personally, I blame David Cameron.
That boy aint right.

Is Public Justification empty?

Perhaps a truly Private Language is impossible because, as Wittgenstein argued, we would have no way to check we were using a word properly. I suppose one way round the problem is to engage an auditor to maintain a Dictionary and a Grammar and so on for your Private Language and perhaps Relationships and Communities have evolved to provide that 'external audit' function.
What about Public discourse, or what is called 'Public Reason theory'? Is there a way to be sure it will always be meaningful? If so, then it is sensible to speak of a Rawlsian 'Public Justification Principle' - whereby everybody has 'sufficient reason' to back every Law- because absent a 'well-ordering' of Social States 'sufficient reason' faces a halting problem- i.e. Public Reason theory wouldn't be meaningful in any Public sense. Applying Binmore's 'folk theorem' -whereby there is always some game theoretic mechanism to replace the need for external coercion- we can get away from some of the problems in that literature and focus on the basic question of whether, under the most benign possible circumstances, Public signals and Private signifying exhibit a symmetry relationship such that something we can all agree to call 'Meaning' is minimally conserved.
One way to prove that this can be the case is to attempt a General Equilibrium Analysis of  'externally audited' Private language and its aggregation as Public signals.
A naive way of expressing Noether's theorem, for non dissipative systems, is to say that the existence of a conserved property or Law is evidence of a Symmetry or vice versa.
Thus, for Classical or Marxist Economics, 'Labor' and 'Capital' are meaningful terms and 'Laws'- like the Iron Law of Wages- can be derived or, at a higher level of complexity, the project of a Sraffian Economics, or a Hilary Putnam/Amartya Sen type normative Economics can be sustained.
This is of general interest, because, for Neo-Classical Economics, a scandal, in the shape of the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem, has arisen such that its notion of General Equilibrium becomes empty or 'anything goes'- i.e. we have a non-dissipative system, under standard assumptions of individual rationality, or even homothetic preferences, such that no testable hypotheses arise nor is there any way of telling if the Economy is behaving pathologically.
Of course, one way out is simply to say that one wants whatever outcome one is lumbered with. All states of the Universe are gross substitutes for each other. Perhaps, in some mystic or teleological sense this is actually the case for states of the World, but, surely, Discourse isn't exclusively or even mainly about states of the World?
Sir Alfred Sherman once said 'A Bishop who stops believing in God can go in for Socialism or Sodomy but an Economist who renounces faith in his profession is unemployable' Well, we know he was wrong about Economists, they can always toss coins for Big Finance or shill for Micro Finance or  grow fins for an ornamental Think Tank or bottom feed as part of a Credentialist Academic Ponzi scheme, but surely a champion of Public Discourse can't afford a similar agnosticism with respect to whether Language itself breaks public signalling/private signifying symmetries and simply throws away information?

Is there any way forward- perhaps work being done in some discipline I haven't heard of- such that Public Discourse doesn't cash out as pathological memetics which acts as enabler for all the mischievous Preference Falsification Avalability Cascades that have plagued us over the last 20 years?
I don't know- but I'd sure to love to find out.
I wish I could be optimistic about the answer, but given the invidious nature, for Economics, of problems of aggregation- e.g. the Capital controversy between the 2 Cambridges', or the well known problems of Social Choice- the greater likelihood seems to me to be that Public Discourse is doomed to either a Procrustean bed of ideology, such that polysemy is constrained, and symmetries are artificially enforced or else to an 'anything goes' emptiness unable to gauge its own morbidity or seek for its own cure.

The fourth PhD of Dr. Fu Manchu

They have a saying in China- “Science students look down on language students; language students look down on history students; history students look down on politics students; politics students look down on their teachers.”
What about Development Studies?
Wikipedia tells us- In the 1933 novel, The Bride of Fu Manchu, Fu Manchu claims to hold doctorates from four Western universities. In the 1959 novel, Emperor Fu Manchu, he reveals he attended Heidelberg, the Sorbonne, and Edinburgh.
'Yes, but isn't it true you also attended Cambridge?'  Sir Denis Naylor Smith asked clenching his teeth as succubi slithered all over him.
'What of it?' Dr. Fu replied, 'Good school, Cambridge, nothing wrong with it at all.'
'In Physics maybe,' Sir Denis replied, 'but, correct me if I'm wrong, your Doctorate was in Development Studies.'
'You lie, round-eyed swine!' Dr. Fu replied, his jade mask of Oriental inscrutability slipping from his slitty eyed face, 'I just got a MPhil is all. I never went all the way. I mean, I was just a mixed up kid trying to break into the Takeaway delivery business. It...it was a confusing time.  Anyway, lots of people have MPhils in Development Studies- doesn't mean they are all Gay.'
'Like Rahul Gandhi?'
'Damn you, Naylor Smith! You just had to throw that in my teeth didn't you? Why do you think I keep trying to blow up the World? Will you people never let me forget? I...I just wanted to be loved, to give something back, to make the world a better place. But you people got your hooks into me and forced me into Development Studies. Oh what's the use. Everything is spoiled. I just don't want to live anymore. Come, poisoned fingernail, lacerate the throat of the Master you have so faithfully served.'

Steve Landsburg on debt & taxes

Landsburg's latest post has put a cat amongst the loony right, Tea Party, pigeons.

How high should taxes be? High enough to cover expected outlays going forward — but no higher. That’s because any additional revenue would be used to pay down the federal debt, which is a bad idea...Because deadweight loss (i.e. the economic damage due to the disincentive effects of taxes) is roughly proportional to the square of the tax rate, it turns out that the latter — the policy of paying interest forever without ever making a principal payment — is (at least roughly) the policy that minimizes the present value of deadweight loss.

There are two types of errors in this argument

1) During a National Emergency or a Recession, Taxes shouldn't be 'high enough to cover expected outlay'. Governments should run a deficit. Not to do so is to risk making everyone radically worse off. Thus, not borrowing during a War runs the risk of defeat and conquest, and trying to balance the budget during a recession may cause mass unemployment and a 'liquidity trap' such that Investment remains depressed though interest rates are very low. However during Peace time and/or during a boom, tax revenues should be higher than spending and the Debt should be allowed to fall so as to put the breaks on Aggregate Demand and act as an 'automatic stabilizer'.

2) That deadweight losses of taxation are the only relevant efficiency cost.  The 'crowding out' effect of Govt. spending, or the burden of servicing Govt. debt, does not matter because of 'Ricardian Equivalence'- i.e. the notion that consumers save more if they anticipate higher taxes in the future.

The problem with this line of argument is that it begs the question. It assumes the very result it sets up its equations to solve for. It's a case of garbage in, garbage out.

If consumers were the perfectly rational creatures assumed by Ricardian Equivalence, there would be no lasting deadweight loss of taxation. Elasticities of Supply and Demand would be zero in the short run and infinity in the long run. There would also be no citizens left to pay Govt. debt. They'd all have emigrated or formed a new country. 

Why does this not happen in practice? The answer is that there is uncertainty in the Economy. A fully anticipated Budget Deficit or Surplus wouldn't matter. It would tell us nothing new. But an unanticipated level of Debt does tell us something new. It tells us that we as a nation aren't as wealthy as we thought we were. We have to scale back our consumption of both private and public goods and services. We expect to see the Govt. tightening its belt same as the rest of us. During a War, or during a Depression, we may see the necessity of the Govt. running large deficits and incurring high levels of debt- but we still won't be sympathetic to measures which we consider wasteful or ostentatious. Why? Well, we may not have perfect information or rationality, but we do have some information and some rationality. If the Govt. spends money in an unproductive way, we become fearful that the productive capacity of the Economy will suffer in the long run. Our country will have lower income and worse infrastructure. To compensate, we might save more or emigrate or simply scale back our own aspirations and levels of economic engagement and interaction, preferring to be self-sufficient as far as possible or else to adopt a feckless attitude to life- indulging in more alcohol or drugs or crime than we would otherwise have done.

The problem with 'deadweight loss' type arguments is that human beings have a lot of in-built behavioral plasticity. They can side-step markets  controlled by the 'stationary bandit' of the State and find unregulated or illegal markets or types of production and exchange which they may choose to see as hedonically rewarding precisely because it frustrates what they may perceive as an inequitable or irksome State policy or practice.

Witzel, Witzelsucht & the origins of Religion.

Prof. Michael Witzel's Casaubon like magnum opus- unifying all mythology by means of comically obsolescent scholarship- is due to drop in a couple of months. Meanwhile here is a link to a paper of some interest in itself, which provides a plausibly Scientific sounding- i.e. guaranteed to be obsolescent- justification for the exercise. Essentially, two different claims are made- one is that myths are fragile, ecologically sensitive, and have low fidelity transmission, second that myths have deep genealogy. There may have been some model of memetic epigenetic effects which made this not utter moonshine- but such models have ephemeral 'half lives' and in any case are not robust. Still, it is the very ludic obsolescence of the underlying model which will make Witzel's book worth reading but that is not the topic of this post.
Instead it is the medical phenomena known as Witzelsucht- about which Wikipedia has this to say-
Witzelsucht (from the German witzeln, meaning to joke or wisecrack, and sucht, meaning addiction or yearning) is a set of rare neurological symptoms characterized by a tendency to make puns, tell inappropriate jokes or pointless stories in socially inappropriate situations. Ironically, however, the person is insensitive to humor produced by themselves or others around them. They do not understand that their behavior is unnatural, therefore are nonresponsive to others’ reactions. This disorder is most commonly seen in patients with frontal lobe damage, particularly right frontal lobe tumors or trauma.

The causal connection between Religious ideation and frontal lobe epilepsy is both ancient and widely recognized today not least thanks to Karen Armstrong's candor on the subject. What makes Theology interesting is that it is part of what Witzel has called 'a highly correlated system' which, in a sense, seeks to impose a curb or discipline upon a type of mental activity not uncommon and which would be bound to shape the Evolutionary Stable memetic endowment of any given Society.  If a lot of privileged discourse is indeed a type of  ethological 'displacement activity'- and Witzelsucht, like philosophy, is clearly a displacement activity- then there are also going to be Tardean mimetic effects which alter dynamics.

Mythologies, as opposed to Visionary ideations, if arising from Witzelsucht, are less amenable to the discipline of intensive correlation. Indeed, the distinct feature of myths as opposed to totalizing narratives is that they point to the impairment of the very faculty to which they otherwise appeal. They are the Fermat's Last Theorem of the great wits and  comedians, the shaggy dog stories which true Lords of the Ludic exchange the way Mathematicians exchange conjectures that tremble upon the verge of being transgressive to received axioms.

How does this relate to the origins of Religion? It doesn't except in the sense that if there were no noise Evolution wouldn't be Information theoretic. But that, surely, isn't saying much.