Knowledge Problem

Lynne Kiesling

Six straight weeks of either conference or houseguests … and this weekend involved both! I came home Friday from a very cool conference on ethics and changing energy markets to my visiting in-laws. It’s a nice autumnal weekend here in Chicago, so we are having fun; today will be carving the jack-o-lantern for the trick-or-treat activities, and also taking our kayaks out and storing them for the season. That’s always a bit depressing, but at least this year we have a garage in which to store them and don’t have to impose on the generosity and kindness of our friends!

So the rest of the fall and early winter are not going to be quite so insane, I hope … and I know Mike’s been busy too. I’ve also been a little self-censoring because I’ve been chewing on some deep conceptual issues having to do with regulation of network industries, incumbency, status quo bias, etc. … I’m beginning to think that they are ready for the light of day, so will try to frame them and put them out here for general discussion and refinement over the next couple of weeks.

This should mean more fresh content here, soon. Gotta deal with kayaks and pumpkins today, though!

Lynne Kiesling

Six straight weeks of either conference or houseguests … and this weekend involved both! I came home Friday from a very cool conference on ethics and changing energy markets to my visiting in-laws. It’s a nice autumnal weekend here in Chicago, so we are having fun; today will be carving the jack-o-lantern for the trick-or-treat activities, and also taking our kayaks out and storing them for the season. That’s always a bit depressing, but at least this year we have a garage in which to store them and don’t have to impose on the generosity and kindness of our friends!

So the rest of the fall and early winter are not going to be quite so insane, I hope … and I know Mike’s been busy too. I’ve also been a little self-censoring because I’ve been chewing on some deep conceptual issues having to do with regulation of network industries, incumbency, status quo bias, etc. … I’m beginning to think that they are ready for the light of day, so will try to frame them and put them out here for general discussion and refinement over the next couple of weeks.

This should mean more fresh content here, soon. Gotta deal with kayaks and pumpkins today, though!

Michael Giberson

On the PFF blog, Tom Lenard comments on Larry Lessig’s article, “Coase’s First Question,” [PDF] in the current issue of Regulation. Lenard summarizes Lessig’s distinction between “Proper-Coaseans” and “Property-Coaseans” in this way:

Lessig argues that “proper-Coaseans” first ask the question of whether the resource in question should be the subject of property at all, before asking where the property right should reside. This is in contrast to “property-Coaseans,” who go straight to the second question.

Lessig argues against creating property rights in internet protocols and says a proper reading of Coase supports this view; Lenard says Lessig’s argument is based on quoting Coase out of context. Good stuff.

Lynne Kiesling

Over at Two Blowhards, Michael has a really nice and informative post on the Scottish Enlightenment, and its contrast with the French Enlightenment:

My hunch about why we feel the post-Enlightenment pinch as acutely as we do is that the Enlightenment most of us know is the French Enlightenment. And those French, forever pushing things to absurd extremes. A Frenchman is apparently incapable of saying, “Hey, cool: Reason!” and then adding it to his repertory. No, he has to believe in it, make a substitute religion of it, live it out to its logical conclusions … And what does Reason lead to when it’s pushed fanatically out as far as it can go? Barrenness, cafe existentialism, suicide, bizarre buildings, Catherine Breillat movies. (Little joke, given that I love many of her movies.)

But there was another Enlightenment altogether, one that had its feet well-planted on the ground — the Scottish Englightenment. In 50ish years, from circa 1700 to the mid-1700s, Edinburgh transformed itself from a religion-oppressed backwater into one of the happening-ist cities in Europe. Giants walked Edinburgh’s streets: Thomas Reid, Frances Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, many others.

The post is full of good thoughts and incredibly useful links. His inspiration was this David Denby article from the New Yorker, which was itself largely inspired by a reading of James Buchan’s Crowded With Genius. I can’t do the Denby article justice by excerpting it; it’s very good and thought-provoking, and worth a full read.

I plan to go read all of these sources, to bolster my understanding of the two different Enlightenment experiences. My simple-minded notion of them is that they had very different conceptions of reason and rationality: the French notion was very Cartesian and constructivist, the Scottish notion more organic and evolutionary. Perhaps that’s why, as Michael at Two Blowhards says,

Reading Adam Smith himself, I was struck by what a respectful, trenchant, and complex thinker he was — anything but the simple-minded apostle for corporatism and greed that he’s sometimes taken to be today. Passages in his works anticipate Hayek and chaos theory; other passages anticipate Marx in their vision of how deadening division-of-labor-style labor can be.

Michael Giberson

Ever since I saw a note about it on Transterrestrial Musings a week ago, I’ve been meaning to write about the Prisoners’ Dilemma tournament organized at the University of Nottingham. For some 20 years, the simple tit-for-tat strategy has reigned as champion over all comers in iterated prisoners’ dilemma games. As Wired describes it, however, a new champion may have emerged.

Or maybe not. Glen Whitman at Agoraphilia suggests that tit-for-tat isn’t dead yet, with a discussion that is better than anything I would have come up with.

Marginal Revolution has also commented on the tournament. The Wikipedia provides a good overview of PD games. Nottingham will host another tournament in 2005, for additional information see www.prisoners-dilemma.com.

Lynne Kiesling

Kevin Brancato is actually the one who has enhanced my productivity by posting on Google’s new tool for searching your hard disk. For people like me who are constantly on the knife’s edge of organization, this is the bee’s knees!