Employing evidence to make policy is an unnatural act

--- Robert Shea, in conversation with Bob Hahn on the Two Think Minimum podcast, "Robert Shea on Evidenced Based Policy’s Impact and Potential," June 29, 2020,

From the transcript:

Hahn: So how does that differ from how things work in Washington or other places around the world today? I mean, don’t politicians and civil servants use evidence? What’s the big deal here?

Shea: Yeah, you must’ve gotten this a lot too when you told people you worked on the commission on evidence-based policymaking, oh my god, we need a commission for that? That’s not what we do every day? No, employing evidence to make policy is an unnatural act. Today, politics, emotion, anecdote are more likely to drive policy than evidence. This whole movement, the evidence movement is all about trying to more and more get policymakers to look at data and evidence, and use it in their policy making.

[Labels] are ways for us to categorize and simplify our lives in ways we shouldn't actually simplify our lives

--- Víkingur Ólafsson, in an interview for Deutsche Grammophon, on the launch of his  Debussy-Rameau albmu, 3 June, 2020

Excerpt from timecode 3:28:

I don't think about labels at all, I mean like musical labels. I'm not talking about Deutsche Grammophon. I'm talking about Neoclassical or Classical or even Baroque or Impressionism or Jazz or Rock or Pop or whatever – it doesn't mean anything to me - all those stamps. They are completely outside of the music. They are ways for us to categorize and simplify our lives in ways we shouldn't actually simplify our lives because music is much more complex than that.

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul

Khalil Gibran, from "On Reason and Passion"

Excerpts

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.

If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.

For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

...

Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields, and meadows—then let your heart say in silence, “God rests in reason.”

And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky,—then let your heart say in awe, “God moves in passion.”

How we teach is what we teach

--- John H McArthur, quoted by Michael Roberto in Lecture 1, The Art of Critical Decision Making, The Great Courses, timecode 32:13

... that urgency is accompanied by a sort-of diminished authority because there is no one consensually agreed version of what just happened

--- Jonathan Shainin, in conversation with David Runciman and Helen Thomas, Talking Politics podcast #248, 4 June 2020, "Facts vs Opinions"

Excerpt, with approximate <time code> in angle brackets

<37:17> We have a settled model, a kind of classical model, so to speak, of how the facts, the news, and the demos interact with one another. And I think that settled model is now very antiquated, and I’m not sure we have a new model that adequately conveys the kind of chaos and instability in the relationship between those three elements. And so I think journalism feels more urgent to many people than it ever has before, in terms of, you’ve got it on your phone, you’ve got it on social media, people are talking about it all the time, people are talking about the news. And yet, that urgency is accompanied by a sort-of diminished authority because there is no one consensually agreed version of what just happened, in the way that an earlier iteration, journalists had a kind of functional monopoly on describing the world to their audience. […] <38:47> You had kind of a consensus about a stable way of representing the world, and I don’t think it exists anymore. And I think it's a real challenge, because I think this constant skepticism, or doubts, or even cynicism, about the extent to which we can produce a representation of what's happening out there in the world. And I think what you see, particularly when you look at questions of race in America, for instance, you get into another for of thinking about representation, which is, who are the journalists who are telling this story.

And here's Helen, following up at <39:32> 

I think that the - what's happening in America at the moment - does run into the limits of the analytical mode [of opinion writing]. Sometimes I think that's been true about Trump since the beginning. There's something about his presidency, where the analytical mode just seems inadequate to try to get to grips in any moral sense with what has been happening, and that is particularly true now. I think in terms of what's been going on for over the last week, and partly the analytical mode is sort-of near exhausted, because there's something almost I think religious about what is happening and that that means that trying to sort-of use conventional political language to try to say something about it doesn't really work. It can risk coming over as simple indifference, and that's simply not what's required in this situation. 

Words are to a lawyer what mathematics is to a physicist

--- Owain Blackwell, in "Words are Chameleons: The Languages of Law," Oxford Reference, 20 March 2019

Excerpts:

Words are to a lawyer what mathematics is to a physicist. That being the case, if an observer watched the goings on of, say, the Court of King’s Bench in the 15th century, they might wonder how the legal system could work at all, for they would be hearing words in three languages.

...

So can we contrive a system in which all words are defined and all nuances banished? It is but a pipe dream. For, as Justice Holmes observed: ‘A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.’ Furthermore, it would be a grim day for lawyers if such a dream could be realized. One is reminded of the toast first given at Sergeants Inn in 1756 by Mr Wilbraham, and since then much repeated: ‘Gentleman, to the glorious uncertainty of the law.’ For it is that very uncertainty—uncertainty, usually, over the meaning of words— by which lawyers earn their keep.

Everybody has the same size box

--- Michael Hsu, quoted in Business Travel Won’t Be Taking Off Soon Amid Coronavirus, Wall Street Journal, 15 June 2020

From the article

Michael Hsu, chief executive of Kimberly-Clark Corp., the maker of Cottonelle toilet paper, said he has found Zoom calls more effective than some in-person meetings with his executive team. In face-to-face executive roundtables, people fidget and look at their phones, he said, but on Zoom people are forced to be attentive. Mr. Hsu said he also finds such meetings to be more “egalitarian” because no one is at the head of the table, so executives speak up more often and more candidly.

“Everybody has the same size box,” he said.

Rome added political genius to Greek artistic genius

--- Paul Veyne, in an interview with François Busnel in L'Express, 12 January 2005

In context:

F. B. Le poète Horace avait-il raison d'affirmer que «la Grèce conquise a conquis son sauvage vainqueur puisqu'elle apporte chez lui les arts»?

P.V. Oui, certainement. Mais Rome a ajouté au génie artistique grec le génie politique: l'autorité et le sens de la règle du jeu en politique sont romains. Et cette règle du jeu s'est perpétuée jusqu'à nous. Son principe est très simple: une grande collectivité obéit certes aux clans et aux pouvoirs sociaux mais il faut aussi suivre un certain nombre de règles de droit public. 

Every gift comes with sacrifice. There is always something demanded.

--- Joy Harjo, in a CSMonitor Q&A, April, 2020

In context:

Q: How would you describe the gift of poetry?

Every gift comes with sacrifice. There is always something demanded. To take care of the gift of poetry demands listening, even when it seems as if there is nothing or no one there. It remembers listening to history and beyond history. It means walking a road of language alone, until you teach someone how to hear you. My mission is to take care of the gifts that I carry, to develop and feed them, and then to share them. We must all take care of our respective gifts, because with them we will find the answers to our problems. With poetry, we can sometimes sing the answers. 

I've always wanted to be exempt from meaning, the way one is exempt from military service

--- Roland Barthes, quoted by Michael Wood around timecode 17:24 in an LRB conversation with Adam Shatz (May 2020)

From the transcript:

Adam Shatz: ... something that is central to Barthes’s thinking, which is this discomfort with meaning. He described meaning at some point, I think, as sticky. Heavy, sticky. He didn’t like it. What was that about?

Michael Wood:  He says at one point – it’s a phrase I’ve always liked – I’ve always wanted to be exempt from meaning the way one is exempt from military service. It’s required – you can’t actually get out of military service if that’s the law of your country. You could be some kind of protester, you could be a conscientious objector, but he doesn’t want to be a conscientious objector. He wants a certain kind of exemption from meaning, or at least a rest from meaning. I think that is, in a way, a kind of French illness or a French worry. It’s a natural thing to say, I think if you’re French, that meaning is rather regimented, it’s official, there’s a standard version of it. I’m not sure that any English speaker ever quite feels that about meaning.

I think this is from "Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes," judging by the only other reference a quick search turned up: a 1977 review by Frank Kermode in the New York Times. Here's the excertp:

Barthes is an extraordinary virtuoso though people who read him in English—a language, incidentally, in which he takes very little interest—may be skeptical about this remark. It remains true. Highly original, extremely fertile and inventive, he really does represent, in a peculiarly qualified way, a new kind of writing, and he continually discovers new ways of writing about writing. He is not a philosopher, not a linguist not a poet, not a novelist and even not an essayist. His ideal “text” is not controlled by an author at all. He “dreams of a world which would be exempt from meaning (as one is from military service),” and the ideal text would also be without meaning and without style. Yet he is, and knows he is, a conscious stylist and heavy with meanings.

According to the biography in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard, Barthes was indeed exempted from military service in 1937 (aged 22). I couldn't confirm the quote using the Amazon "Look inside" function, but the phrase "dreams of a world which would be exempt from meaning" apparently occurs on page 87 of the 2010 paperback edition.

When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around

--- Milton Friedman (2009) Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, p.14, University of Chicago Press 

Quote according to AZquotes:

Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.