Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

Humility, Hardwork, Honesty, Honour and Humour After reading in Jonathan Haidt's wonderful book, The Happiness Hypothesis , about Benjamin Franklin's daily self scoring regime to make himself better practised in behaving virtuously, I have been mulling over how an attention-span-challenged modern like myself might successfully implement a similar system, adapted for our times. Choosing which of the many possible virtues to measure oneself against is fraught with challenge and all the inherent perils of wanton list making , so my criteria, for the moment, has been reduced to ease of recall in a tight spot, hence a resort to onomatopoeia . I can just remember 5 things, sometimes, so here is my new ready reckoner to arm myself with as I prepare for my daily engagements with my fellow humans. Remind yourself, the 5 aiches : " humility, hardwork , honesty, honour & humour " As a boy I was subjected, through a school cadet corps, to the gross stupidities of mass ...

I've just rediscovered an apt word for this blog's current preoccupations: " heuristics ". It is prompted by an appealing post on Econlog that resonated here mightily. The basic proposition posited there is: " 1. If you don't have clear and convincing evidence that doing something is better than doing nothing, do nothing. 2. If you know that doing nothing is bad, but don't have clear and convincing evidence that one action is better than another, do the simplest, standard thing . " If only these principles were applied by the perpetuators of the current zeitgeist on global warming, then we would probably be dealing with much saner and more plausible policy options on "climate policy" than those they are foisting on us at present. And this also has the merit of seeming to be an iteration of the " Occam's Razor " principle. I also reckon that we can shoehorn these heuristics into the rule of thumb model being propounded he...