Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

If we want a date for the birth of the world wide web (www), considered as an available and useful tool for journalism, we are probably best off fixing on March 1989, the month when Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist working for the European research organization CERN, wrote up his proposal for Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http), something that would which allow not just the geniuses at CERN but … anybody … to use a browser and set up a web server, and get a website started. It took a while yet for a lot of institutions and then individuals around the world to catch on. When one thinks about the disruptive impact of Berners-Lee’s innovation upon mass media, there is a temptation to think of this as a one-time-only bomb. In the days of old there was the world we think of in connection with Clark and Lois in the newsroom of the Daily Planet as depicted in the black-and-white television show of yore: old-style manual typewriters, landline telephones, and coffee pots -- and in another b...

  Yesterday I wrote about the lottery paradox, the epistemological crux of some of my recent reading. I refer you back to yesterday's post if you come to this not knowing what the term means. I will proceed today presuming that you know.  Now, clearly, part of what makes the paradox ... paradoxical is the rule of conjunction. This is the idea that if A is known and B is known then it follows that A + B is known. Or, in a weaker alternative statement: if A is rationally believable and B is rationally believable then A + B is rationally believable.  After all, why can we not simply say that "it is true that my ticket is a loser and I can know that this is true by considering the laws of probability"? One reason I can't say that with a clean logical conscience is that if I can say it of my own ticket I can say it of any one of the thousand (or however many) others that were sold. And if I can do THAT, then by the principle of conjunction I can say that all the tickets ar...

 My recent reading has included a book on epistemology,  It is an anthology of essays on the "lottery paradox," edited by Igor Douven, a professor at the Sorbonne.  What is the lottery paradox? That takes some explaining. Consider two propositions: "I will be in Chicago next week" on the one hand and "this lottery ticket will lose" on the other.  Make some reasonable stipulations here in two sets First, I believe I will be in Chicago next week because I have made plans. I have both the airline ticket and hotel reservations.  I have a great deal of interest in an event that will take place there and I have enough money to make the trip and come back without difficulties.  In this case, we generally do say without hesitation, "I know that I will be in Chicago next week." We are not bothered by the possibility that, say, a fire in Chicago could destroy the hotel and cause the cancellation of the event. In that case, I will presumably not take the fl...

  ... we're talking about 6G already? Some of us still have our ears ringing from all the talk that accompanied the advent of 5G! Indeed, in some quarters 5G was blamed for the advent of Covid-19. That was nonsense, of course, but it reflected the shock of the new. Now we must be prepared for the shock of the newer, Sabine Hossenfelder, a prominent physicist, has spoken to this point recently, specifically speaking to the matter of frequency. SixG will give us much lower latency and capacity. No more frustrated waiting for something or other to finish buffering. (Isn't that something you do to a floor?) And it will be the higher frequencies that will allow this.   The problem with that high frequency is that such signals are easily blocked. Researchers think they've found a way around this, but the results of their experiments so far are not impressive.  Six G isn't supposed to be rolled out until 2030 anyway, so they have time to work out the kinks.    ...

To continue on the reviewer-ish roll from yesterday. I understand the word "contemporary" in the headline to exclude any books that are primarily concerned with any events prior to the contested presidential election of 2000.  And I will keep the chief focus here on U.S. politics, though I hasten to add that the concern is not insularity. At least three of them are focused on the contentious relationship of the United States to the rest of the globe.  Without further ado: 1) Woodword, STATE OF DENIAL (2006). Woodward writes a fair amount of dross, but this is one of his better efforts IMHO, looking at how the Bush administration managed to persuade itself that the cause of peace required a U.S. occupation of Iraq.  2) Isikoff & Corn, HUBRIS (2006). Much the same focus as the first book. But where Woodward is concerned with showing Bush's self-delusion, this book focuses on the efforts of the group around Bush to delude the rest of us. 3) Woolen, DONALD TRUMP (2009). N...

  Were I to list the five best business books of recent years, (let us say, of the new millennium) I might offer this, in chronological order, without any imputation of relative priority.  Robert Bryce, PIPE DREAMS (2002). There were a lot of books above the rise and fall of Enron published around the time this one was. But this one holds up better than others of the herd.  Michael Lewis, FLASH BOYS (2014). A fascinating look at exchange structure issues, such as how exchanges collaborate with high-speed traders to allow them an advantage from their trading velocity. Who benefits? Who loses? What are those who would otherwise be losing, doing about it?  Brian Arthur, COMPLEXITIES AND THE ECONOMY (2015). Chaos theory, its spin-off in complexity theory, and whether they help us understand the business world.  Gary Sernovitz, THE GREEN AND THE BLACK (2016). About the petroleum industry, fracking, and related matters.  Mervyn King, THE END OF ALCHEMY (2016)....

  For those of you who may not know: the image here is not me. It is just what you get if you search for a stock image of a man waving goodbye.  I am waving my own internal goodbye these days to the ideology of anarcho-capitalism, which for particularity I used to call Rothbardian anarcho-cap. It may come as news to some readers that there are varieties of anarcho-cap but, take it from me, yes there are. Rothbard's is different from, say, Molyneux's. I no longer care enough to try to explain why. But I wasn't exactly a Rothbardian either. I understand now that my anarcho-cap was unique. It embodied chiefly a sense that (1) the myth of sovereignty is the source of most of the evil in the world, (2) by debunking that myth we can help move humanity forward to a new and (in consequentialist terms) a better equilibrium -- better than anything that can be achieved on a globe shared among nation-states, and (3) that new equilibrium will look like a lot like a supercharged capita...

For those to whom the terminology is new: 1) Reg CF is an SEC rule on the creation and use of equity crowdfunding portals, the intersection of high finance and social networks.  2) The phrase "the wisdom of crowds" was the title of a 2004 book by James Surowieck, deliberately echoed in the phrase I'm using as a headline here, which in turn I take from the source I'm linking you to below.  So the question "how wise is the Reg CF crowd" means "can equity crowdfunding portals as they exist at present effectively aggregate disparate information in the way Surowieck had in mind?  Here is the source:  How Wise Is the Reg CF Crowd?  - Financial Poise This may lead some of you to ask: why did Faille start this brief post with that odd illustration? Simply because it is trivially true that not ALL crowds are wise. Bubble-creating speculative buying of an asset gets less wise the more people get in on it. Holland/tulips/windmills. In due course the holders can...

  Continuing our thoughts from yesterday. Today, we want to discuss two other big trials that are going to happen in 2023. One is the State of New York's civil action against the Trump business empire; the other is Dominion's defamation suit against Fox News. Both are politically momentous. I happen to believe that the US Justice Department will likely indict Donald Trump himself this year, but the trial on that one will have to be a 2024 spectacular. In the meantime, it has a surrogate: a civil lawsuit that New York's attorney general, Letitia James, is pressing. So, to resume our count ... FOURTH: the New York civil case.  This lawsuit seeks $250 million in damages from former President Trump, other members of his family, and/or the Trump Organization for having fraudulently misvalued assets in order to cheat banks and insurance companies.  The trial is set to begin this October.  It isn't a crime, nor is it a tort, for a man to overstate the extent of his wealth o...

 The year just begun should be a great one for fans of reality courtroom dramas.  Today and tomorrow I hope to discuss five possible judicial spectacles of 2023, arranged in (increasing) order of political salience.  FIRST: the Murdaugh murder trial. Alex Murdaugh is a prominent member of the tort plaintiffs' bar (and a defense-oriented tort law reform group has called South Carolina a "judicial hellhole for defendants") -- the Murdaugh family has powerfully benefitted from a permissive attitude toward forum shopping by the bench in that state.  In February 2019 one of Alex's sons, Paul Murdaugh, recklessly piloting a boat, caused the death of his friend Mallory Beach. The Beach family, in a civil lawsuit, claimed that Alex and Paul's older brother, Buster, were negligent and responsible for the death of their daughter in providing Paul with alcohol prior to the accident.  Fortunately for the Beach family, the state has lots of other tort lawyers. The litigation...

  The ending of 2022 brought us the news of the death of Barbara Walters. She had retired from broadcasting in 2014 after more than a half-century of it, because she was struggling with cardiac difficulties.  At a point one might fairly describe as her career peak she was both the co-anchor of a nightly news show with Harry Reasoner (1976 - 78) and the object of a Gilda Radner parody. The parody was of the gentler sort which may be considered a tribute, after all. [The photo above shows her interviewing the Fords as a couple, during their time in the White House.] At any rate, Walters' death comes soon after  Wealth of Geeks has compiled a list of the thirty wealthiest women news anchors. Please don't feel that you need to look it up. Here is the gist. The wealthiest of them all is Katie Couric, now said to have a net worth of $110 million.  Then Diane Sawyer at $80 million and, third, Megan Kelly with her $45 million. I am fascinated by how spread-out that is. Numbe...

 The newly elected Congresscritter for New York's 3d district to the US House of Representatives is George Santos.  As most of the literate world knows by now, George Santos is a liar. Bigly. Wherever his account of his life can be placed up against documentable facts, his account falls apart. His response to the disclosure of some of his lies is that, yes, he did tell untruths, create "embellishments" etc., but no he is not a fraud and did nothing criminal.  Okay: Santos' lies are what we have come to expect from politicians and are not the biggest story in recent history. It is not even the biggest story of this hour concerning the still-unorganized House of Representatives of the 118th Congress. But I do have to say a few words about Santos. Or, specifically, TWO words with a little embellishment. The two words are: Goldman Sachs ?  I am surprised that anyone would tell the lie that he told about having worked at Goldman Sachs. Republicans of "the base" h...

  I am looking at a paper presenting a psycho-historical view of Hitler and Nazism written by a woman of whom I know nothing at all -- by Amelia Clark, a student at the University of Mary Washington working on her Masters Degree.  This is well-trodden ground. I'll just pick one nugget in Clark's discussion that seems of interest. There is no evidence, she writes, "that he had any anti-Semitic feelings before he left Linz or even that he had any during his first years in Vienna."  Such references to Linz, an Austrian city straddling the Danube between Vienna and Salzburg. and the place where Hitler was a boy. Clark's phrase "before he left Linz" reminds me of Auden's poem, September 1, 1939. "Accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offense, from Luther until now, that has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, what huge imago made...."  Clark is saying (and Auden might well agree, if I understand his poem correctly) that nothin...