세상은 착한 사람과 나쁜 사람이 아닌, 겁쟁이와 용기 있는 사람들로 나뉘어야 한다.

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세상을 구하려면 도덕을 자랑질하지 말고 자신의 비즈니스를 시작하라.

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내가 강제수용소에서 깨달은 46 가지

 

Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag

By Varlam Shalamov June 12, 2018

 

 

For fifteen years the writer Varlam Shalamov was imprisoned in the Gulag for participating in “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities.” He endured six of those years enslaved in the gold mines of Kolyma, one of the coldest and most hostile places on earth. While he was awaiting sentencing, one of his short stories was published in a journal called Literary Contemporary. He was released in 1951, and from 1954 to 1973 he worked on Kolyma Stories, a masterpiece of Soviet dissident writing that has been newly translated into English and published by New York Review Books Classics this week. Shalamov claimed not to have learned anything in Kolyma, except how to wheel a loaded barrow. But one of his fragmentary writings, dated 1961, tells us more.

 

1. The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.

 

2. The main means for depraving the soul is the cold. Presumably in Central Asian camps people held out longer, for it was warmer there.

 

3. I realized that friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not at the pit face).

 

4. I realized that the feeling a man preserves longest is anger. There is only enough flesh on a hungry man for anger: everything else leaves him indifferent.

 

5. I realized that Stalin’s “victories” were due to his killing the innocent—an organization a tenth the size would have swept Stalin away in two days.

 

 

 

6. I realized that humans were human because they were physically stronger and clung to life more than any other animal: no horse can survive work in the Far North.

 

7. I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers, the sectarians (almost all of them), and most priests.

 

8. Party workers and the military are the first to fall apart and do so most easily.

 

9. I saw what a weighty argument for the intellectual is the most ordinary slap in the face.

 

10. Ordinary people distinguish their bosses by how hard their bosses hit them, how enthusiastically their bosses beat them.

 

11. Beatings are almost totally effective as an argument (method number three).

 

12. I discovered from experts the truth about how mysterious show trials are set up.

 

13. I understood why prisoners hear political news (arrests, et cetera) before the outside world does.

 

14. I found out that the prison (and camp) “grapevine” is never just a “grapevine.”

 

15. I realized that one can live on anger.

 

16. I realized that one can live on indifference.

 

17. I understood why people do not live on hope—there isn’t any hope. Nor can they survive by means of free will—what free will is there? They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal.

 

18. I am proud to have decided right at the beginning, in 1937, that I would never be a foreman if my freedom could lead to another man’s death, if my freedom had to serve the bosses by oppressing other people, prisoners like myself.

 

19. Both my physical and my spiritual strength turned out to be stronger than I thought in this great test, and I am proud that I never sold anyone, never sent anyone to their death or to another sentence, and never denounced anyone.

 

20. I am proud that I never wrote an official request until 1955.

 

21. I saw the so-called Beria amnesty where it took place, and it was a sight worth seeing.

 

22. I saw that women are more decent and self-sacrificing than men: in Kolyma there were no cases of a husband following his wife. But wives would come, many of them (Faina Rabinovich, Krivoshei’s wife).

 

23. I saw amazing northern families (free-contract workers and former prisoners) with letters “to legitimate husbands and wives,” et cetera.

 

24. I saw “the first Rockefellers,” the underworld millionaires. I heard their confessions.

 

25. I saw men doing penal servitude, as well as numerous people of “contingents” D, B, et cetera, “Berlag.”

 

26. I realized that you can achieve a great deal—time in the hospital, a transfer—but only by risking your life, taking beatings, enduring solitary confinement in ice.

 

27. I saw solitary confinement in ice, hacked out of a rock, and spent a night in it myself.

 

28. The passion for power, to be able to kill at will, is great—from top bosses to the rank-and-file guards (Seroshapka and similar men).

 

29. Russians’ uncontrollable urge to denounce and complain.

 

30. I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

 

31. I am convinced that the camps—all of them—are a negative school; you can’t even spend an hour in one without being depraved. The camps never gave, and never could give, anyone anything positive. The camps act by depraving everyone, prisoners and free-contract workers alike.

 

32. Every province had its own camps, at every construction site. Millions, tens of millions of prisoners.

 

33. Repressions affected not just the top layer but every layer of society—in any village, at any factory, in any family there were either relatives or friends who were repressed.

 

34. I consider the best period of my life the months I spent in a cell in Butyrki prison, where I managed to strengthen the spirit of the weak, and where everyone spoke freely.

 

35. I learned to “plan” my life one day ahead, no more.

 

36. I realized that the thieves were not human.

 

37. I realized that there were no criminals in the camps, that the people next to you (and who would be next to you tomorrow) were within the boundaries of the law and had not trespassed them.

 

38. I realized what a terrible thing is the self-esteem of a boy or a youth: it’s better to steal than to ask. That self-esteem and boastfulness are what make boys sink to the bottom.

 

39. In my life women have not played a major part: the camp is the reason.

 

40. Knowing people is useless, for I am unable to change my attitude toward any scoundrel.

 

41. The people whom everyone—guards, fellow prisoners—hates are the last in the ranks, those who lag behind, those who are sick, weak, those who can’t run when the temperature is below zero.

 

42. I understood what power is and what a man with a rifle is.

 

43. I understood that the scales had been displaced and that this displacement was what was most typical of the camps.

 

44. I understood that moving from the condition of a prisoner to the condition of a free man is very difficult, almost impossible without a long period of amortization.

 

45. I understood that a writer has to be a foreigner in the questions he is dealing with, and if he knows his material well, he will write in such a way that nobody will understand him.

 

 

From Kolyma Stories by Varlam Shalamov. Translation and introduction copyright © 2018 by Donald Rayfield. Courtesy of NYRB Classics

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탈레브 시스템의 중요성

 

The importance of Taleb’s system: from the Fourth Quadrant to the Skin in the Game

 
필자:  globalinequality

 

Several weeks ago on Twitter I wrote (in an obviously very short form) why I thought that Taleb was one of the most important thinkers today. Let me explain in greater detail. Taleb went from (a) technical observations about non-Gaussian distributions of some phenomena to (b) generalization of what this means for our perception of reality and the way we comprehend things (epistemology) to (c) methodology of knowledge and the role of inductive thinking to finally (d) a statement on ethics. To convey this he created a new type of writing. I will leave this last part undiscussed, but whoever has read Taleb knows that his writing style is absolutely original and like Borges’ can be imitated but never fully mastered.

 

 

Let me now explain each of the four points. My original acquaintance with Taleb’s writings (and this may be true for many other people) came from his Black Swan and the sudden celebrity status of somebody who has seen the Great Recession coming. But while this may or may not be true, I think that it is of quite secondary, or altogether minor, importance. What Taleb has done with his Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan is to have directed our attention to a class of phenomena that exhibit very skewed distributions to the right and fat tails. It is important to point out that there are two facts here: high-end values and their relatively great frequency (as compared to Gaussian distributions).

 

Following researchers like Benoit Mandelbrot (who worked a lot on Paretian distributions) Taleb argued that the number of phenomena with such asymmetric distributions is much greater than was commonly thought and that lots of our thinking errs by tacitly assuming normal distributors. Like Moliere’s Mr. Jourdain we have become Gaussian without thinking or knowing that we are. This can have nefarious consequences. Take an example that Taleb mentions. The distribution of personal weight is Gaussian; thus when we build elevators that carry people we can at most assume that there may be, at any given time, (say) eight persons weighting 250 pounds each in the elevator. Let us add another 1000 pounds for safety and we can be pretty confident that an elevator that can handle 3000 pounds will be safe. But then suppose we are constructing a flood dyke. Flood levels are not normally distributed. Moreover even the last highest flood value does not guarantee that the following flood cannot be worse. Building safeguard for floods is much harder: we can imagine that the worst future flood may be five times worse than any that we know, but it could turn out to be ten times worse: “the odds of rare events are simply not computable” (Antifragile, p. 7). The number of such phenomena like flood is huge: income and wealth distributions, size of cities (with all that it implies for urban planning), number of victims in wars etc.

 

These are the phenomena where the averages carry very little informational content, and even variances do not necessarily mean much (variance is often undefined in Pareto distributions). “Variance…is epistemologically, a measure of lack of knowledge about the average; hence the variance of variance is, epistemologically, a measure of lack of knowledge about the lack of knowledge of the mean” (Black Swan, p. 353). We are dealing here with what Taleb calls the “fourth quadrant”, the unknown unknowns.

 

 

From that series of observations that represent the core of Black Swan, Taleb moves to the question of how we comprehend things and learn about them. An empirically-based observational approach leads him to prefer inductive, “tinkering” approach to deductive one. Moreover, the tinkering approach was linked in Antifragile to not only robustness (that is, not being negatively affected by volatility) but to a newly defined characteristic of “anti-fragility”, that is of being positively affected (thriving) in conditions of volatility. His view is that only systems that have been created by a long process of tinkering (i.e., evolution) have sufficient resilience to withstand Black Swan events.

 

 

This has also led him to conservative political philosophy, similar to Edmund Burke’s (whom he does not mention): institutions should not be changed based on deductive reasoning; they should be left as they are not because they are rational and efficient in an ideal sense but because the very fact that they have survived a long time shows that they are resilient. Taleb’s approach there has a lot in common not only with Burke but also with Tocqueville, Chateaubriand and Popper (whom he quotes quite a lot). One may notice how a technical/statistical point made by Taleb such as “my field is error avoidance” leads to agreeing with Hayek’s critique of the “conceit of reason”. (I do not agree with this approach but my point here is to explain how I see the logic of Taleb’s system developing).

 

 

And to round off his system, Taleb moves to ethics (Skin in the Game), a topic introduced already at the end of Antifragile. Here Taleb’s view is that to be credible one must show by his behavior that he believes in what he preaches. To put it in Rawlsian terms one must affirm in daily life the principles in which he claims to believe. This is also a controversial topic: should we reject Rousseau’s view on how to raise children because he abandoned his own? Should we believe in that (unnamed) economist’s findings that happiness does not increase after $50,000 despite the fact that he avidly pursues high-paying gigs? One might wish to separate scientist’s views from his private behavior, but there is no doubt that an alternative (Taleb’s) view can be also defended and that we tend to find the correspondence of one’s life with professed beliefs to be a strong reinforcement of correctness of such beliefs.

 

 

Taleb has succeeded, as I mentioned in the beginning, in creating a full system that goes from empirics to ethics, a thing which is exceedingly rare in modern world. Whether because we are tired of grand systems or because our knowledge has been parceled due to the way knowledge is created and disseminated in modern academia, but very few people are able to create systems of thought that go across multiple disciplines and display internal coherence. This the uniqueness and importance of Nassim Taleb.

 

나는 개인적으로 탈레브가 복잡계적 사고를 대변하는 철학자라고 생각한다. 나는 <서구의학은 파산했다>에서 현재 우리가 환원론적 패러다임에서 복잡계적인 패러다임으로 인식의 변화를 겪고 있고, 소위 토마스 쿤이 말한 패러다임이 변하는 과학 혁명의 과정에 있다고 주장했다. 이런 복잡계적인 패러다임의 시작은 하이에크에서 본격적으로 시작되었다고 나는 생각한다.

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대공황의 촉발에 기여를 한 8 단어, 우리는 고임금의 원칙을 믿는다.

These Eight Words Helped Cause the Great Depression

 

Hunter Lewis

 

 

Can the entire story of the worst economic disaster in American history really be told from just eight words in a political party’s platform? In this case, yes.

 

Here are the fateful words that introduced the second section of the Republican Party's 1932 platform, right after a waffling plank on prohibition: “We believe in the principle of high wages.”

 

This was Herbert Hoover speaking. His most cherished economic belief was that wages could not be allowed to fall, and after the Crash of 1929 he vigorously jawboned business leaders to keep wages up. It was not just a question of persuasion. He made it clear that if businesses did not do as he demanded, legislative wage controls would swiftly follow. Business leaders were afraid to defy this edict, and did their best to keep wages where they had been.

 

The results were utterly disastrous. Since the prices of products and services were in a deflationary downward spiral, the most effective way to avoid bankruptcy would have been to cut wages and other costs. This had been done in the Depression of 1921 with impressive results. That depression, chronicled in an excellent history by Jim Grant, The Forgotten Depression, was over in a year and a half. Nor did workers in aggregate suffer from lower wages. Their lower wages bought the same amount of goods and services at reduced prices.

 

Confronted with rapidly falling prices following the Crash along with frozen wages, business owners resorted to the only expedient left: massive layoffs. It was their last resort and the only possible way to try to save their businesses. As a direct result of Hoover’s twisted logic, millions of workers were fired and immediately faced penury and even starvation, while those still employed, especially union members and government workers, enjoyed a windfall. Frozen wages with falling prices in effect doubled their real wages.

 

Murray Rothbard explained all this in America's Great Depression, but you won’t find it in high school history textbooks. Nor will you read that Franklin Roosevelt just doubled down on Hoover’s tragic policy mistake by enacting wage and price controls. In a celebrated incident, a poor tailor was sent to jail for charging a few too many pennies for pressing a pair of pants.

 

This was almost a century ago, but the public and politicians still fall for the same twisted illogic. In his 2014 state of the union address, President Obama said that “ I ask America’s business leader to raise your employees’ wages.” In her 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton said the same thing: “It’s a pretty simple formula: higher wages lead to more demand, which leads to more jobs with higher wages….” Hillary did not explain why, given her premise, she was only asking for minor wage boosts. Why not mandate 100X higher wages? And while she was at it, why not also mandate 75% lower prices. The truth of course is that even modest wage and price controls hamper the free price system and sooner or later lead to unemployment and misery for those least able to protect themselves, the poor and the middle class.

 

The Democratic Party platform of 1932 also makes for interesting reading. It describes itself as a “covenant” and a “contract" with the American people, claims that voters can rely on its candidate to follow the promised policies, and includes among those policies an elimination of expanding and contracting credit “ for private profit,” a sound dollar, a cut of federal expenditure of no less than 25% together with a balanced budget, and elimination of government activities that could be handled by private enterprise and of subsidies to private interests. This “ contract” was of course immediately jettisoned by FDR.

 

 

Hunter Lewis is author of twelve books, including The Secular Saints: And Why Morals Are Not Just Subjective,

 

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