Policy in Words

[John Gelles <jjgelles@xxxxxxxx>]

        On Thu, 27 Apr 1995 Barkley Rosser wrote:

        "      3)  I still await a response as to how radical
        non-ergodicity avoids policy nihilism without
        contradiction."
	
	On Fri, 28 Apr 1995, John Gelles buts in:

	Although the world may change in unpredictable ways
	at any time, it also remains predictable in most
	things -- especially in the things on which policy
	is based and expected to work. The fact that a bomb
	destroyed people and their work in a relatively
	unpredictable setting does not change the effective-
	ness of systems that were distant from the bomb.

	The use of "non-ergodic" does not imply nihilism;
	it implies distinction between possibilities and
	probabilities, at the extreme end of the probability
	spectrum, such as the California Lottery: The computed
	chance of winning is 1 in 18 million. But in a
	"non-ergodic" world you could hold the winning
	ticket and get run over as the sixth winning number
	was drawn.

	A clever man from another state remarked your chance
	of winning when you buy a ticket is only slighly
	better than if you were never born.

	Now Paul Davis sees the distinction between the
	value of the estate of a man who was never born
	and of the man who holds a ticket on tomorrow's
	lottery as something to pin a theory on. He will
	be right once in 18 million times. The rest of the
	world is right 17,999,999 times.

	"Nihilism" passes the vocabulary test. There is
	a lot of it around. "Non-ergodic" is "unnecessary".
	It may describe the world we live in, but nobody
	knows its name:

		It is better to call the world ... slow
	to change, but changing nevertheless... hungry
	for news, for variety and innovation, but
	comfortable with the tried, true and familiar
	... moving from an animal like restricted set
	of economic reactions to the environment to a
	less restricted set of innovative understanding
	reactions based on science, practical policy
	and benign religious values exemplified in the
	prose of Thomas Jefferson.

	John Gelles