Outstanding video explains modern music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo
By
Micah Mattix
Thursday, June 27, 2024
Saturday, June 01, 2024
The Devil’s Best Trick
Review in WSJ of the book The Devil’s Best Trick
Letter to the editor about the review:
While an actual disappearance of the devil would be one of the most glorious events in human history, the disappearance of which Randall Sullivan speaks has not been an even remotely positive development (“In Search of the Unseen Evil,” Micah Mattix reviewing Mr. Sullivan’s “The Devil’s Best Trick,” Bookshelf, May 28).
According to the old adage, “Capitalism without failure is like Christianity without hell.” Our increasingly socialist and agnostic society seems to have dispensed with both failure and hell. The consequences haven’t been at all favorable, except, perhaps, for the actual, and real, devil.
Mark M. Quinn
Naperville, Ill.
An engraving by Gustave Dore from ‘Milton’s Paradise Lost’ by Robert Vaughan, 1885 PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
‘The Devil’s Best Trick’ Review: In Search of the Unseen Evil
Satan has faded from view over the last few centuries. But ‘systems and situations’ still can’t explain the depth of human sin.
Does the Devil exist, or is he a figment of our imagination? This is the first question Randall Sullivan tries to answer in “The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared.” The second: If he is real, who or what are “we describing when we refer to ‘the Devil’?”
Mr. Sullivan seriously entertains both questions. A longtime contributing editor to Rolling Stone, he wrote previously about supernatural events in his 2004 book, “The Miracle Detective,” in which he investigated the appearance of the Virgin Mary to six young people in the early 1980s in Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“The Devil’s Best Trick” is something of a companion volume. It also begins in Medjugorje, in this case in the summer of 1995, when Mr. Sullivan witnessed an exorcism. The experience shook him. “I’ve attempted to deconstruct that experience many times in the years since,” he writes, “mainly in the hope that I would be able to put it out of mind.” He couldn’t. “I became utterly convinced,” he continues, “that something was leaving” the exorcism’s subject and that what he had witnessed “was not emotional or psychological or imaginary but real, whatever that meant.” This sends Mr. Sullivan on a journalistic and intellectual quest to “find” the Devil.
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Atlantic Monthly Press
352 pages
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Mr. Sullivan revisits the deaths of Tate Rowland and Terrie Trosper in the small Texas town of Childress. The two were siblings. Rowland hanged himself at age 17, and three years later Trosper died at 27 from suffocating on her own vomit. Rowland seems not to have had an initial autopsy, and Trosper’s was later discovered to contain significant errors and omissions. Stories of “a satanic cult being involved in Tate’s death,” he writes, had long circulated through the town. Why does Mr. Sullivan investigate these two deaths, which took place during the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s and early ’90s? Because he knows someone who had a childhood friend who seemed to confess to participating in Rowland’s murder. “I don’t believe in God,” the friend had said. “I believe in the Devil.”
Mr. Sullivan also travels to Mexico to participate in a Satanic ritual. The ritual doesn’t require a human sacrifice, but Mr. Sullivan describes Mexico’s cult of Santa Muerte—Saint Death—in detail, tracing its origins back to the religious practices of the Aztecs. He should be lauded for frankly describing the Aztecs’ practice of sacrificing and eating human victims by the thousands.
In between these two accounts of contemporary Satan worship, Mr. Sullivan traces the idea of a devil from the ancient world to the present. There was no figure of evil in ancient Greece, Mr. Sullivan notes. The gods themselves “did the dirty work,” and good and evil were understood to be tendencies that were present in all people. But there is a figure of evil in Judaism called Satan, which comes from the verb meaning “to obstruct.” Satan is an obscure figure in the Old Testament, only appearing a handful of times. He precipitates man’s fall (taking the traditional interpretation that the serpent is Satan), and in the Book of Zechariah, he is “described as ‘the adversary’ of mankind.” In the Book of Job, he is allowed by God to take Job’s family, wealth and health to see if Job will curse God.
Only in Christianity, Mr. Sullivan argues, “has the Devil been absolutely essential from the very beginning.” Jesus was tempted by Satan, cast out demons and warned his disciples about the Devil. “John’s Gospel,” Mr. Sullivan writes, “is in its entirety the story of a cosmic conflict between God’s light and the darkness of the Devil.” The authors of the books of the New Testament “repeat again and again the idea that Jesus came to break the hold of Satan.”
Mr. Sullivan traces the early Christian controversies over how God could be the creator of all things and not the author of evil and describes how subsequent writers understood evil. Thomas Aquinas argued that Lucifer perverted his own nature by foolishly attempting to reject God’s sovereign rule. Martin Luther “insisted,” Mr. Sullivan writes, “on a Devil who was at once God’s servant and his enemy.” He sometimes oversimplifies. His portrait of Augustine, whom he accuses of “fatalism,” is a caricature. Percy Bysshe Shelley may have been a zealous atheist, but Lord Byron was not, and Mr. Sullivan clumsily lumps them together. He also oddly ignores 18th-century Gothic writers and 19th-century Russian novelists, who were obsessed with devils and the problem of evil.
Mr. Sullivan’s account of how belief in the Devil gradually disappeared in the West is plausible, if conventional. Witch hunts in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries reached a climax in England in the 17th, when a professional “witchfinder” named Matthew Hopkins managed to execute some 300 women over a two-year period in the 1640s. The abuse of these trials, combined with anticlericalism in 18th-century France and changing attitudes toward the supernatural, led to increasing skepticism regarding the reality of a literal Devil.
We often think of evil today as “something created by systems and situations,” Mr. Sullivan notes, but he doesn’t find this convincing. “What ‘situation,’ ” he asks, “could produce the likes of Lawrence Bittaker,” who raped, tortured and murdered five teenage girls in 1979. If evil is simply the result of man-made “systems,” how did it enter our world in the first place, and why does it flourish in some people but not others in roughly the same situation?
Mr. Sullivan is a gifted storyteller, even if the shifts between recent events and intellectual history can be jarring. Not everyone will find his concluding equivocation satisfying. There “is a Devil,” he writes, by which he means “a force of evil that human beings can best comprehend by personifying it.” To acknowledge this, he says, is to throw open the door the Devil “hides behind.” Maybe. But I’m not sure it opens the door all that wide.
Mr. Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University.
Thursday, April 11, 2024
Solar system viewed from Earth
The epicyclic model was used in ancient and medieval astronomy to explain the apparent motions of celestial bodies. In this model, the planets move in a small circle, called an epicycle, which itself moves along a larger circle, called a deferent. When these motions are combined, they can produce complex patterns that resemble mandalas.
The epicyclic model was used in the geocentric (Earth-centered) systems of astronomy, such as those proposed by Ptolemy and other ancient astronomers. In these systems, the Earth was considered to be stationary at the center of the universe, and the Sun, Moon, and planets were believed to revolve around it in complex circular paths. The epicyclic model allowed astronomers to make accurate predictions of the positions of celestial bodies, despite the fact that the underlying assumptions about the structure of the universe were incorrect.
In the modern, heliocentric (Sun-centered) model of the solar system, the planets orbit the Sun in elliptical orbits, and the apparent motions of the planets as seen from Earth are explained by the relative positions and motions of the Earth and the planets in their orbits.
Solar system from Earth's perspective (video)
When the motion of the planets are charted as their so called epicyclic geocentric paths, or the shapes their orbits have as seen from Earth, you find these interesting mandala-like structures
Friday, March 29, 2024
Danny Kahneman's work
Kahneman's book Thinking: Fast and Slow is well worth reading and digesting. I've discussed it in presentations and books.
This article by his editor is a wonderful summary.
Excerpts:
...
Before the pioneering work done by Kahneman and his research partner, Amos Tversky, who died in 1996, economists had assumed that people were “rational,” meaning we are self-interested, use all available information to make unbiased decisions, and our preferences are consistent.
Kahneman and Tversky showed that’s nonsense. Their findings, directly or indirectly, inspired change across the business world, including the redesign of organ-donation programs and improvements in planning for multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects.
Kahneman was a pioneer of what became known as behavioral economics, although he always saw himself as a psychologist. Investors who take Kahneman and Tversky’s lessons to heart can minimize fees, losses and regrets. Kahneman may well have had more influence on investing than anyone else who wasn’t a professional investor.
...
For years, as an investing journalist, I had wondered: Why are smart people so stupid about money?
About five minutes into Danny’s presentation, I realized he had the answers—not only to that question, but to nearly every mystery of financial behavior.
Why do we sell our winners too soon and hang onto our losers too long? Why don’t we realize that most hot streaks are just luck? Why do we say we have a high tolerance for risk and then suffer the torments of the damned when the market falls? Why do we ignore the odds when we know they’re stacked against us?
Danny paced softly back and forth at the front of the room, his blue-green eyes sparkling with amusement as he documented these behaviors and demolished conventional economic theory.
For decades, he and Tversky had conducted experiments, almost childlike in their simplicity, to see how people really think and behave.
No, Danny said, money lost isn’t the same as money gained. Losses feel at least twice as painful as gains feel pleasant. He asked the conference attendees: If you’d lose $100 on a coin toss if it came up tails, how much would you have to win on heads before you’d take the bet? Most of us said $200 or more.
No, people don’t incorporate all available information.
...
Ask people if they want to take a risk with an 80% chance of success, and most say yes. Ask instead if they’d incur the same risk with a 20% chance of failure, and many say no.
Noting that the stocks people sell outperform the ones they buy, Danny joked that “the cost of having an idea is 4%.
...
“The most important question to ask before making a decision,” he told me, “is ‘What is the base rate?’”
He meant you should begin every major decision by figuring out the objective odds of success, given the historical range of outcomes in similar situations.
If you’re thinking of starting a new business, your gut might tell you there’s no way you can fail. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, however, half of new businesses die within the first five years. That base rate comes from millions of startups, each of which also expected to succeed. You, on the other hand, are a sample of one.
Knowing that the base rate is 50/50 shouldn’t deter you from trying, but it should prevent you from being unrealistically optimistic.
...
In the beginning, I wrote the first drafts of chapters that never saw the light of day. Gradually, Danny took over the writing, agonizing over every sentence, as I rewrote and edited.
Late in 2007, as we were polishing the chapter called “The Illusion of Validity,” I woke up one night in an icy sweat, pulse racing, gasping for air. My wife rushed me to the emergency room. It turned out I hadn’t had a heart attack; I’d had a panic attack, the only one in my life before or since.
Danny was even more alarmed than I was.
In 2008 I moved on, joining The Wall Street Journal. Neither of us would ever publicly discuss our book divorce; Danny finished the final third of the book without me.
“Collaborations don’t always end well,” he’d warned me on our first day of work together, “so I want to make sure you will always think of me as a mensch,” a good person.
And so I do—the most complicated mensch I’ve ever known.
...
Working on the book exposed me to three of Danny’s qualities I hadn’t previously encountered in their full intensity. Only years later did I realize that I’ve internalized them as a journalist and an investor. Or so I hope.
First, Danny saw everything through a child’s eyes or, as some people call it, “beginner’s mind.” No one else I’ve ever known has so often asked: Why? Instead of assuming the status quo is valid, Danny always started by wondering whether it made any sense.
He was also relentlessly self-critical. I once showed him a letter I’d gotten from a reader telling me—correctly but rudely—that I was wrong about something. “Do you have any idea how lucky you are to have thousands of people who can tell you you’re wrong?” Danny said.
Finally, Danny could rework what we had already done as if it had never existed. Most people hate changing their mind; he liked nothing better, when the evidence justified it. “I have no sunk costs,” he would say.
One of his favorite words, while working on the book, was “miserable.” He used it to describe whatever we had just written; the process of writing a book; and, above all, himself.
Danny’s misery was largely rooted in the decades he and Amos had spent exploring the failings of the human mind by picking apart their own errors of thought and judgment.
Taking the outside view on everything else had given Danny the outside view on himself. He embodied the ultimate form of self-knowledge: to distrust yourself above all.
...
Born in 1934 in what today is Tel Aviv, Israel, while his mother was visiting there, Danny was raised in France. He spent much of his childhood hiding from the Nazis in barns and chicken coops in the French countryside.
He insisted that didn’t explain much about him; after all, not every survivor of the Holocaust had become a self-critical psychologist fascinated by financial behavior.
Instead, he credited his success to hard work—but even more to luck, especially meeting Tversky.
Danny also insisted that studying the pitfalls and paradoxes of the human mind didn’t make him any better at problem-solving than anybody else: “I’m just better at recognizing my mistakes after I make them.”
For all his knowledge of how foolish investors can be, Danny didn’t try to outsmart the market. “I don’t try to be clever at all,” he told me. Most of his money was in index funds. “The idea that I could see what no one else can is an illusion,” he said.
“All of us would be better investors,” he often said, “if we just made fewer decisions.”
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