Quotulatiousness

August 21, 2026

This is something we genuinely need today

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Plus, as Kate at Small Dead Animals often points out “Mischief is important“:

In one of the only three management books anyone should bother to read — and everyone should read the three — Robert Townsend says that a CEO should, while on the road, try phoning his own company. Try the helpline and see how far he gets. Try calling his own office. Sure, you should end up with the Executive Secretary who then directs it to the right person but sometimes that correct person is going to be you. Say, Warren Buffett calling to make you rich by buying the company and thus crystallising all your stock options and RSUs.

This is a lesson that has been forgotten. From a Guardian list of things government should pass laws to make happen:

    Force companies to put a phone number on their homepage

    You’ve got a problem with a company and you want to get it sorted – and then you realise you cannot find a number for it anywhere. There are communications companies that have no “contact us” link anywhere to be seen, and energy companies that send you all round the houses looking for a way to get in touch.

    One of the recurring themes of Guardian Money readers’ problems is the struggle to find someone to help when something goes wrong. Clearly, once you have published a phone number, you need staff at the other end answering the phone and offering some joined-up thinking, so this is only the start of the solution – but at least customers would not feel like companies were trying to hide from them.

This does not work as there is no guarantee that anyone will answer the call.

We’ve also that basic point that Burke and his Little Platoons can — and often do — solve problems better than government. So, here’s the pitch for that private sector service.

We set up a database of the home and work and mobile phone numbers — emails too — of the management of companies. Most importantly, the board of directors. If the company is owned by private equity — say — then the General Partners of the PE company.

Obviously, if a company has a helpline, which people answer, then all of that information stays private to us. If a company does not then we publish it as a page saying these are the contact numbers for that company. Say, Evri, the delivery people. The board members get their numbers and email publicly revealed. As I recall it they’re PE as well so some number of GPs over in the US also start getting aggrieved calls from Lesser Wallop about non-delivery. Not that any Septic would be able to understand Ms. Aggrieved of Lesser Wallop but it’s the instance of the call that matters. Evri is used as an example for a bit of looking around a few months back seemed to reveal that they had no UK phone number at all. Thus the directors it will be.

The top management of companies that do not provide a helpline — nor answer the one they claim to have — will have the customer complaints calls directed toward them. This will, of course, rapidly mean the opening of a useful customer complaint line that people actually answer. Those making that £250k a year as the board member of whatever do not want to be talking to Ms. Aggrieved of Lesser Wallop. Therefore phone calls from Ms. Aggrieved will lead to the creation of a useful customer services department.

At which point, of course, we take the board members’ phone numbers down and job done. But, clearly, we keep monitoring to ensure that those service times don’t then decline.

Make the bastards who make the decisions suffer the consequences of those decisions. Works this does, really, it works.

Now, there will be some who say that government can do that. Why use the Little Platoons when a law can simply be passed?

Which is to miss a basic philosophic point, which is that we should only use government when we, ourselves, cannot do it. Government is for when the Little Platoons cannot achieve it. Letters of Marque are lovely things but biffing the Frenchies is better done with a Royal Navy. Assuming we still had one of course. RNLI, on the other hand, works better without government than it would with.

But much more than that. For who are the worst at providing a contact number that works? Why, that would be government, wouldn’t it? Anyone ever tried to ‘phone HMRC? Quite.

“For the female of the species is more deadly than the male”

Filed under: History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A few weeks back, John C. Wright contemplated how he initially understood what Rudyard Kipling was saying in his poem “The Female of the Species” and how he realized he’d been mistaken:

    So it comes that Man, the coward,
    when he gathers to confer
    With his fellow-braves in council,
    dare not leave a place for her
    Where, at war with Life and Conscience,
    he uplifts his erring hands
    To some God of Abstract Justice –
    which no woman understands.

    And Man knows it! Knows, moreover,
    that the Woman that God gave him
    Must command but may not govern –
    shall enthrall but not enslave him.
    And She knows, because She warns him,
    and Her instincts never fail,
    That the Female of Her Species is more
    deadly than the Male.

The argument runs that woman’s nature, by its nature, requires her to be uncompromising and ferocious to defend her children. Hence the political logic of compromise, half-measures and horse-trading (universally required for masculine teamwork with friends or détente with enemies) ought to be and is alien to the female instinct.

The poet here, with tongue in cheek, calls these masculine traits of professionalism toward allies and military courtesy toward enemies as prompted by folly or fear. The woman is described as if she were a battleship “armed and engined” and launched for one sole purpose.

The poet then cautions that this maternal instinct, so right and necessary for the survival of the race (“lest the generations fail”), becomes fanatical and destructive when used to support political policies, which become, in effect, to her, her children.

In law school, I was told that a prisoner on death row, after all other souls on earth were convinced he was a murderer, would still have his mother writing letters to the governor petitioning for a pardon. The maternal instinct never parlays, never ceases, never surrenders, never listens to reason.

Hence, or so Kipling warns, the female of the species must be kept away from the seats of power, that is, the ballot box and public office (“when he gathers to confer with his fellow-braves in council”) and he ends by warning that she herself knows this and warns of it.

One jest in particular that flew over my head was the line about femme and baron. In law, man and mate are treated as one person by coverture, and in heraldry her coat of arms and his are two halves of one: here, the poet is implying that she is usurping his rights without surrendering any of her own (As when a female can vote for war but is immune from the draft.)

Yesterday, I linked to a Lorenzo Warby essay that considered some of the same aspects in a non-poetic context.

Update: I’m told it’s helpful to include the URL to the original post.

Ted Gioia’s objections to Effective Altruism

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I’ve only encountered discussions of Effective Altruism in the comments at Scott Alexander’s blog, so I don’t have strong opinions one way or the other. On Substack Notes, Ted Gioia explains his why he’s not a fan:

After my article on the Phoebe Gates scandal yesterday, some readers have asked for more analytical detail of my objections to Effective Altruism. I provide that below — but, be forewarned, this is more philosophy than journalism. If you’re not interested in analytic philosophy, you should just skip this. Even so, some of you will find this interesting, so I share it here.

TED ON EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM

    Effective Altruism is a consequentialist ethical system, unlike deontological approaches which are primarily rule-driven. You may assume that judging a moral action by its consequences is obviously the right thing to do, but the reality is that no religion, government, or community has ever made ethical decisions in this way.

    If you commit murder, the judge pronounces sentence on your violation of the law, but the judge NEVER says: “Let’s wait ten years and determine the consequences of the murder you committed — maybe it was okay”. This never happens and never will, and for a very good reason. Chaos would ensue if actions could be justified by long-term consequences.

    But that is precisely the kind of chaos that Effective Altruism allows, and willingly embraces. Its practitioners are extreme in this way — they focus on the most long-term and geographically distant consequences. This is dangerous, much like driving without looking at the road in front of you, but instead imagining what’s happening on the road a mile ahead.

    This inevitably results in crashes. That’s why I can accurately predict that Effective Altruists will be recognized by the chaotic short-term impact of their efforts. And this is precisely what happened with Sam Bankman-Fried, Catherine Ellison, Leopold Aschenbrenner, and now Phoebe Gates. None of this is coincidence. The chaos is hard-baked into their philosophical assumptions.

    So I can safely predict that the same thing will happen again in the future. Effective Altrusim, if it continues to retain its influence, will lead to more fiascos, meltdowns, and criminal actions. That’s why I describe it as a moral philosophy for Bond villains.

    And even if we did attempt to justify actions by consequences, how can you begin to implement such a methodology? Do we need to wait a year to measure consequences? Or ten years? Or a lifetime? Or several generations? And how can you even begin to separate the impact of other factors or counterfactuals? If you kill a baby because you know it will grow up to be Hitler, how can you ever prove that fact? The only certainty is that you just killed a baby.

    So this adds a second problem to Effective Altruism — not only does it embrace chaos, but it operates in a perpetual mist of vagueness. This, too, is exactly what we see in the public statements of Sam Bankman-Fried and others. Here, too, the connection between their philosophy and their malfeasance is evident at every step. Just look and see the many grand (but ambiguous) pronouncements that come out of their lips. It’s almost a trademark of the cult.

    The next problem of consequentialist ethics is that the bad things its practioners do are REALITIES — happening immediately — while any positive consequences of their actions are merely POSSIBILITIES. So from a chronological perspective, the chaos precedes benefits. From an ontological perspective, the negatives have total existence while the positives merely possess possible existence. And because chronology can’t be reversed, the perpetrators can’t undo actions if the positive consequences never ensue. These are significant problems with Effective Altruism.

    I won’t even go into the psychological make-up of people who act this way — who tend to display a narcissistic savior complex that runs counter to everything we know about the character of ethical people. I’m dealing here with philosophy, not psychology. But you could write an entire book on the psychological profile of Effective Altruism — and it would be a devastating takedown of the cult.

    So you can cite names like Peter Singer, but that doesn’t change any of this. At best, Singer can say that he is so super smart he can understand consequences better than any of us. But that’s exactly what Sam Bankman-Fried thought, and Leopold Aschenbrenner, and all the others. (By the way, Stalin, Mao and other mass killers would inevitably make this same kind of Effective Altruist argument to justify their murders — because crimes on that magnitude inevitably demand consequentialist justifications. They were super-smart people too.)

    After you consider this, you start to understand why the most powerful ethical systems are built on something stronger than possible longterm consequences. Take your pick — Kant’s categorical imperative, Thomistic natural law, Aristotelian virtue ethics, the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, the Code of Hammurabi, Rawlsian justice, or whatever. They are all superior to Effective Altruism, and it’s not even close.

Batman as a modern Sisyphus

Filed under: Books, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t normally post much about comic book characters, because my interest in comic books lasted from about 1965 to 1975 … a very different era than most of the comic books of today (I’m sure it’s considered tantamount to a hate crime to refer to them as “comic books” by a significant number of long-time fans). Here, Devon Eriksen explains why the Batman character is a modern rendition of the Greek hero Sisyphus and his eternal punishment in the underworld:

Batman, the fictional character, does not embrace the Batman Fallacy because he is written as stupid. He’s obviously intended to be very intelligent.

But the many, many authors of this character have always agreed that he must have this one critical blind spot.

Why?

So the story can continue.

See, if Batman kills the Joker, or turns him over for execution, the story, or at least a popular villain, is over. No more Joker stories.

So the character of Batman must be created in the image of Sisyphus… always struggling against the manifestation of the problem, but never able to address the root cause.

All of Batman’s victories must be against the Joker’s latest scheme, not the Joker himself. He must forever be playing defense, making heroic efforts merely to maintain things as they are, like the Red Queen running as fast as she can just to stand still.

This is how the Joker, a man of no special resources or talents, whose sole advantage is utter disregard for law, empathy, or human life, can be a challenging foe for a billionaire genius superathlete with an endless array of technologies and skills.

He can simply generate schemes forever. He doesn’t have to win always, or even often. Because every one of his victories is real and has permanent consequences, and every one of his defeats is temporary, pending a rematch.

Batman, by his very nature, can never stop the Joker, only slow him down.

If Batman were a different character, if he were willing to, say, throw the Joker out of a helicopter over a vast body of water, then the story would eventually end, because pretty soon the setting would no longer need Batman.

And no doubt on that day, there would be a great deal of whinging over whether throwing the Joker out of a helicopter was a “human rights abuse”, as if the Joker himself were not a walking, talking human rights abuse to begin with.

But Batman can never win, and never stop fighting, because he refuses to go on the offensive and remove his enemies from play.

This post is not about Batman.

Nikola Tesla’s Weird Eating Habits

Filed under: Food, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 24 Feb 2026

Roast duck, sadly without a crispy skin, with creamy celery sauce

City/Region: New York
Time Period: 1896

Nikola Tesla was a scientific genius and a very eccentric man in many aspects of his life, especially in his eating habits. He only ate at a few restaurants where he had reserved tables, and he required two dozen napkins with which he’d wipe down each piece of silverware before dropping the napkins on the floor.

He would sometimes supervise the cooking of his meals, including this duck roasted under a smothering of celery, a recipe which journalist and author of Prodigal genius; the life of Nikola Tesla, John J. O’Neill, said “was of his own devising”. With the lack of detail about this dish, it’s impossible to say if this method is what was intended, but I found that roasting with the celery didn’t impart much flavor.

The celery sauce, which has a bit of nutmeg, does pair nicely with the duck, but I prefer duck with a nice crispy skin and a sweet sauce.

    Roast Ducks
    Truss the birds … rub a little butter over them and dredge with flour, salt and pepper, and roast in a hot oven for twenty or thirty minutes. If preferred stuffed, peel, core and quarter some apples and fill the body with them, removing them when the bird is done, as they are not fit to eat, the flavor being too strong …

    Celery Sauce for Boiled Fowls
    Wash thoroughly and trim a head of celery. Put it into boiling water, with one tablespoonful of salt, and boil it until it is tender. Then drain it through a colander, and cut into pieces one-half inch in length. Blend a large tablespoonful of flour with one-fourth pint of the broth in which the fowls are boiling. Mix till it is quite smooth, add one ounce of butter, a small piece of grated nutmeg, and salt to taste, and mix it with one-fourth pint of milk. Place it over the fire in a saucepan, and stir it till it boils. Let it boil for ten minutes and then throw in the pieces of celery; when it is quite hot again, pour it into a sauce-tureen, and serve.
    — The Cook Book by “Oscar” of the Waldorf by Oscar Tschirky, 1896

(more…)

QotD: The Amish

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Amish have their historical roots in the Swiss Anabaptists, a Radical Reformation movement who believed in adult baptism, pacifism, and total separation of church and state. (Unsurprisingly, the Anabaptists were bloodily persecuted by both Catholic and Protestant rulers for their refusal to accept conscription, swear oaths, or pay taxes.) And then in 1693 the Anabaptists had a schism, as Protestant sects are wont to do, over the question of how to deal with excommunicated members: one side of the argument, led by Jakob Ammann, advocated not just for exclusion from communion but for total shunning in everyday life. When he lost, he and his followers split off, and their branch was known after him as the Amish. Many of these early Amish joined the broader wave of German immigration to the United States, with five hundred settling in Pennsylvania in the 1700s and a larger group arriving in the early 1800s. Those who remained in Europe were eventually absorbed into other Anabaptist and Protestant denominations, but on the American frontier the Amish maintained their cultural identity: alone among the German immigrant groups, they still speak Pennsilfaanisch-Deitsch, or “Pennsylvania Dutch”, a dialect derived from Palatine German. (They mostly also speak English, and their church services are conducted in standard High German.)

The basic organizational unit of Amish society — after the extended family, which is vital and often includes three generations under one roof — is the “church district”, a community of twenty-five to forty families who live within a short buggy-ride of one another. The leaders of the district are chosen by lot from among the married men, and each is governed by an Ordnung, an unwritten set of rules laying down expectations for behavior. It’s this Ordnung that contains the restrictions on technology and lifestyle that we typically associate with the Amish, covering everything from what color you can paint your barn (one group insists on red because white would be too worldly) to whether you can use mechanical milking machines. The church revisits their Ordnung every six months or so to see if it needs updating — one group had originally approved walkie-talkies for communication while hunting, but then discovered boys were using them to flirt with girls and decided to ban them. Church districts with similar Ordnungs are “in fellowship”, and a cluster of districts in full fellowship with one another are an “affiliation”. (A “settlement”, like the Holmes County Settlement, is a cluster of geographically contiguous districts regardless of affiliation.)

Importantly, few of these restrictions are based on the idea that the banned technology or behavior is wrong in and of itself: for instance, every Ordnung forbids a baptized Amish adult to own a car, but boys from some Amish families have cars for a while in their teens and all but the most conservative affiliations will pay someone else to drive them if they need to go farther than their buggy can take them. Or to put it another way, nobody thinks the English are bad people for driving cars — they just think we’re not Amish.

So if an Ordnung mostly isn’t meant to keep you from doing intrinsically evil things, like murder and adultery and blasphemy, what is it for? How do you decide what to allow? What are you optimizing for when you design it?

Two things, mainly, though they’re not neatly separated. The first and most important role of the Ordnung is engendering the virtue the Amish call Gelassenheit. There’s not a perfect English translation for the German,1 but Hurst and McConnell describe it as a spirit of “selflessness, humility, or meekness”, a subordination of self to community. Amish scholar2 Donald Kraybill wrote that Gelassenheit is meant to develop a “yielded self” that “stands in contrast to the bold, aggressive individualism of modern [English] culture”. Thinking too highly of yourself, or trying to outdo others, are failures of Gelassenheit, but they’re hard to avoid when you have to market your personal #brand or compete in the marketplace. Unmechanized agriculture, on the other hand, was very good at nurturing Gelassenheit: a farmer is necessarily aware of his dependence on natural forces beyond his control, which keeps him humble. Nowadays the Amish worry that shifts way from their traditional lifestyle will “foster the notion that the worker controls his or her work and life”, which might “breed an attitude of self-sufficiency, even arrogance” that is antithetical to their values.

The concern for Gelassenheit shows up particularly in Amish approaches to childrearing. Where English society values self-expression, intellectual curiosity, and individual accomplishment, Amish parents rank obedience and self-control as the most desirable qualities in children. (More than half of the parents the authors surveyed put “being interested in how and why things happen” at the bottom of their list.) They also report that teachers at Amish schools tend to be “preoccupied (to our eyes) with minor aspects of misbehavior that signaled nonparticipation in the group or lack of obedience to authority”. All of this carries through into the workplace, too: the Amish generally think white collar workers are “out to make the big bucks” and that their jobs are be difficult or impossible to undertake with a “meek spirit”. So if you can’t farm (and increasingly you can’t), the Amish think your work should be something near home that uses your hands, allows your family to participate, and contributes directly to your community. No arguments here that building dashboards to give executives deeper insight into critical business functions leads to the more efficient allocation of global capital and lifts all boats; they want you to make food or furniture or something.

The Ordnung‘s second goal is to separate believers from the broader world. This is partly a legacy of the Anabaptist experience of persecution, partly a response to Biblical passages like Romans 12:2’s warning not to “be conformed to this world”, and partly a protective measure against a world that isn’t interested in Gelassenheit, but the dualism between Amish and “English” is a vital part of what it means to be Amish. Of course, it’s impossible to clearly differentiate between things that promote a particular mindset/virtue and things that mark you out as different: the distinctive Amish “plain dress“, for instance, both limits opportunities for vanity and marks out the wearer as, well, kind of a weirdo. (There’s sometimes also a sub-goal of separation from other Amish affiliations — one Amish man is quoted saying, “The only reason the Old Order doesn’t have rubber wheels [on their buggies] is because the New Order did it first”.)

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: An Amish Paradox, by Charles E. Hurst and David L. McConnell”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-12-15.

  1. And they mean something different by it than Heidegger does!
  2. Okay, this one is a Mennonite scholar of the Amish.

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