It's not exactly predestination, man. Predestination is usually regarded as a religious concept associated with John Calvin. Although both Calvin and Hayek dismissed the idea of free will, Calvin's predestination held that our ultimate course in life and in salvation is laid out before us with unwavering certainty by God:

When men do come into the way of righteousness, or return into it, by means of holy correction or rebuke, who is it that works salvation in their hearts but He who 'giveth the increase,' whoever soweth, or whoever watereth? No free will of man can resist Him that willeth to save. Wherefore, we are to rest assured that no human wills can resist the will of God, who doeth according to His will all things in heaven and in earth, and who has already done by His will the things that shall be done. No will of men, we repeat, can resist the will of God, so as to prevent Him from doing what He willeth, seeing that He doeth what He will with the wills themselves of all mankind. And when it is His will to bring men by any certain way that He may please, does He bind their bodies, I pray you, with chains? O, no! He works within; He takes hold of their hearts within; He moves their hearts within; and draws them by those, now, new wills of their own which He has Himself wrought in them [John Calvin, "A Treatise of the Eternal Predestination of God Etc., Etc."].

Hayek, on the other hand, had a much more complex and anarchic type of determinism in mind:

[I]t should not be difficult now to recognize that although Hayek rejects the idea of free will, he accepts the idea of a subjective will; that is, a willfulness unique to each individual. It should also not be difficult to recognize the predictive limitations applying to explanations of such a will. In fact, Hayek rejects the possibility of "specific prediction" in the case of the individual will and finds that such a goal is "completely unjustified" [. . .] In other words, even though we may know the general principle by which the complex adaptive system we call the mind is causally determined by evolutionary processes, this does not mean that a particular human action can ever be introspectively recognized as the necessary result of a particular set of facts. Indeed, Hayek maintains that we are in no better position to predict the specific future motions of our mind than we are "able to predict the shape and movement of [a] wave that will form on the [surface of the] ocean at a particular place and moment in time" [Gary T. Dempsey, "Hayek's Evolutionary Epistemology, Artificial Intelligence, and the Question of Free Will"].

In order to make any kind of certain prediction about individual action, if Hayek's theories were true, you'd have to understand not only how the brain chemistry of the individual in question operates, but you'd have to know how the brain chemistry of every other living creature in the world works, and how every natural phenomenon in the universe will play out, with absolute detailed certainty. That's the only way you could know both how an individual would respond to a given set of circumstances — and to know exactly the sets of circumstances that the given individual would encounter.

So, according to Hayek's theories of evolutionary epistemology, in order to predict a single person's actions with certainty, you'd have to know everything about everything. In other words, you'd have to be God. Maybe it's not so different from Calvin's predestination after all . . .

Here I am at Justin's house, about to go see a movie — and Justin and Tiffany are preoccupied with floor plans for houses in St. Louis . . . You go where the money is, I guess, but it still sucks.

Yes, changing lanes on the freeway or changing lines at the supermarket is a bad idea — that is, unless you think you understand something about the traffic patterns that other drivers and shoppers don't.

David Friedman addresses this in his Price Theory textbook:

When you are driving on a crowded highway, it always seems that some other lane is going faster than yours; the obvious strategy is to switch to the faster lane. If you actually try to follow such a strategy, however, you discover to your amazement that a few minutes after you switch lanes, the battered blue pickup that was behind you in the lane you left is now in front of you.

To understand why it is so difficult to follow a successful strategy of lane changing, consider that by moving into a lane you slow it down. If there is a faster lane then people will move into it, equalizing its speed with that of the other lanes, just as people moving into a short line lengthen it. So a lane remains fast only as long as drivers do not realize it is.

Here again, a more sophisticated analysis would allow for the costs (in frayed nerves and dented fenders) of continual lane changes. On average, if everyone is rational, there must be a small gain in speed from changing lanes--if there were not, nobody would do it and the mechanism described above would not work. The payoff must equal the cost for the marginal lane changer--the least well qualified of those following the lane-changing strategy. If the payoff were less than that, he would not be a lane changer; if it were more, someone else would. In principle, if you knew how much a strategy of lane changing cost each driver (in dents and nerves--less for those with strong nerves and old cars) and how many lane changers it took to reduce the benefit from lane changing by any given amount, you could figure out who would be the marginal lane changer and how much the gain from lane changing would be. By the end of the course, you should see how to do this. If you see it now, you are already an economist--whether or not you have studied economics.

It's all a sophisticated way of examining comparative advantage — if you understand the lay of the land, the rules of the game, more than the other people around you, you have an advantage. It's this kind of advantage that allows some people to make a killing in commodities trading, say, or allows other people to drive to Justin's house in less than 30 minutes in medium traffic . . .

Even though I stayed home today because of the snow, I spent all day finishing USTL's April newsletter, helping to get the new Initiative & Referendum Institute web site up and running smoothly, and making numerous updates to the Tranquil Space web site. I did, however, manage to take time out of my busy schedule to watch the new episode of Ed (although I was on the phone during much of the show, helping USTL's executive director install Acrobat on her laptop so she could check out the newsletter I had finished . . .).

Tonight was also my first time ordering pizza online.

Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines, and a server crash at work. Headache, backache, kneeache. So a little break from the gradual move tonight in deference to minimal recuperation and new episodes of Buffy, Gilmore Girls and Smallville. Bass pounding again from the stereo next door. I'm glad to be leaving soon.

On the plus side, I'll be seeing They Might Be Giants on Saturday, King Crimson on Monday and Tuesday, and Project Object a week from Saturday. Music is the best.

Justin's complaints about the score in Gods and Generals remind me of a quote from an excellent Frank Zappa interview, which can be found poorly transcribed online. Of condescending, leading film scores, Zappa sez:

The thing that always amazes me the most about scoring for films is where they don't use music. That's what's important. To me, films that are heavily laden with score material are almost like sitcoms with too much laugh track. When there's too much [sings beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony] DAH-DAH DAH DAH. When the cellos come in, you know, the guy's saying, "Dramatic now. Appreciate this dramatic moment. Alert! Alert! Drama coming up. Major 7th chord — they're in love! Look out, here comes the love!" It's offensive to me. I find the films where you can really. . . . If the sound effects are well recorded, and the natural sound of what's going on is interspersed with just a little bit of music, to me it works a lot better.

So, what kind of a stupid name is Shrubbloggers, anyway? Discerning readers can at least tell from the logo that it's a crude adaptation of Shrubwalkers, but does that really make much more sense?

A guy I've worked with wondered if Shrubwalkers might be a reference to George W. Bush — you know, since his middle name is Walker and people called him "Shrub" a lot during the 2000 election. I had to pause a moment to shake off the gut-level revulsion when he told me this. After all, I hadn't heard anyone make this association before, so I hadn't had time to inure myself against the surprisingly unsettling effect of an invocation of the president's name in association with a personal endeavor . . .

So for any of you who are similarly misguided, let me state for the record that Shrubwalkers is indeed older than the baby Bush presidency, older even than the 2000 election. In fact, it's a literal name — it comes from back in the day when Justin and I used to walk on people's shrubs.

Yup.

Now, by shrubs I don't mean those chest-high bushes you find by people's windows and fences or single plants freestanding in yards (for the most part, anyway) — I'm talking about those low evergreen juniper shrubs that were all over the place in Portland, taking the place of grass on many parking strips. So, although walking on these things was pretty impolite, we probably didn't inflict any lasting damage. Although once we tried walking on top of a large (four feet high, maybe) freestanding shrub in Justin's front yard — until we heard a loud crack as one of the main branches gave way a little (OK, more than a little). I wonder if his parents ever noticed that the plant looked suddenly and inexplicably lopsided.

Why in the hell did we start walking on people's shrubs? I'm pretty sure I started it. It's just something I liked to do as a kid. Why walk on a boring old sidewalk when there was a much more interesting tactile landscape just a step or two away? Parking strips filled with large rocks were my favorite. And, years later, once Justin and I had trampled a couple of shrubs, it just became a tradition of sorts. Ahh, the crazy wackiness of young hippie poseurs . . .

We were so taken by the idea of walking on shrubs that it became a theme, then the title, of a poem (soon appropriated as lyrics for a song) we started writing at Skipper's one afternoon in mid-1991. We didn't finish it until sometime later, and I don't think we ever finished writing the music — although the music we did write is pretty damn catchy, if I do say so myself. The poem itself is reprinted below:

Shrubwalkers

What are they doing? They're peeking through the windows
Something's wrong and it's all your fault
you wrote them all letters
hung their rational minds by a thread
and I think you actually looked good
when I saw you last time
We held hands in the rain
while we walked on the shrubs
and the way you coughed made me cry
what lies live in your words today?
They're all watching me now
with their prehistoric eyes
their pity burns into the back of my neck
your haunting words echo through my mind, rolling
washing away the face I once loved
do you still go downtown on your own
to walk past our landscapes and
ride the bus for hours just to pretend
you've been everywhere?
You could never know when I followed.
I long for the days when we would walk
with the stars as our guide
now all they can do is say
"My, the shrubs are looking much better."

Justin M. Stoddard, Eric D. Dixon, Delores Tanner & Travers Gauntt
Summer, 1991

Delores and Travers are credited because they contributed key lines. Delores, our former manager when we both worked at Skippers, gave us the first line. As we sat there trying to come up with a good opening for a new poem, she noticed some people in front of the restaurant, well, peeking through the windows. "What are they doing? They're peeking in the windows," she said (I note that she said "in" and we later changed it to "through" because the people peeking through the windows in the poem were looking angrily at the protagonists — a fictional guy and a sadly-fictional girlfriend — as they walked on top of the window-peekers' shrubs; they weren't checking out the state of affairs inside a greasy fish joint). Travers, one of my best friends since I was two or three years old, gave us the great, paranoid, "They're all watching me now."

There you have it. We walked on shrubs, so we were Shrubwalkers. We named our imaginary band The Shrubwalkers. We named our web site The Shrubwalkers, even though it had nothing to do with walking on shrubs (other than including a reprint of the poem). And we named this site Shrubbloggers as a bastardized appropriation of a familiar self-identification. Bastardized because although this site has everything to do with blogging, it has nothing to do with shrubs — so this site's title is a Frankenstein conglomeration of an honorary (formerly literal) descriptor that loses meaning without its second half, and a currently-literal descriptor that loses meaning when joined with a severed half of the honorary. After all, we're not blogging about shrubs.

Then again, maybe that's not such a bad idea!