Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  You may have heard Sam Altman on a news broadcast last weekend. Of course, you may not.  There was a lot else going on: two wars, with potentially important developments in each, as well as a guilty plea from the founder of Binance, launch of a spy satellite by the always-popular North Korean regime, and so forth and so on.  Amidst all of this, the board of directors of a company founded by Sam Altman to research artificial intelligence in a publicly transparent way, aptly called OpenAI, fired Altman. And they did so for no very clearly stated reason. Altman, though, went to Microsoft for assistance. Microsoft offered him a job heading its own AI push, and most of the employees of Altman's old company, OpenAI, threatened to quit if the board didn't persuade their old boss to come back. The implication was that they felt confident enough to quit because the new expanded MS operation headed by their old boss would happily take them on.    Altman may have the min...

song called "One Tin Soldier," performed by various artists and harmonically close kin to Pachelbel's Canon, was very big in North America in the early 1970s.  I remember thinking it was incredibly stupid, and making myself obnoxious on this subject to a couple of the song's admirers. [If you happen to read this -- sorry guys.] Upon reflection, I don't know why it struck me that way. But, for the record, it was the soundtrack version, from Billy Jack, that especially annoyed me.  Anyway, just for old time's sake and to make up for a hasty judgment of my callow youth, here is the refrain: Go ahead and hate your neighbor/ Go ahead and cheat a friend Do it in the name of heaven/You can justify it in the end There won't be any trumpets blowing/ Come the judgment day On the bloody morning after one/ tin soldier rides away. 

  God bless you" is a polite response to a sneeze in the American English vernacular.  May "God bless antihistamines," then, by the same token as he blesses sneezers. I would love to know a little of the history behind the biochemical marvel of antihistamines.  Yes, I went to the wikipedia article on the subject but don't understand it.  Thank you!

  "As I thought more about the giant volcano of crypto bullshit erupting at Crypto Bahamas, I realized that Tether was its molten core. Each scheme depended on exchanges like FTX to enable investors to buy and sell their tokens. And those exchanges in turn counted on Tether as a crucial connection to real US dollars. Without Tether, it was possible this entire economy would never have developed."   Zeke Faux, NUMBER GO UP, p. 135. Well, perhaps that is an overstatement.  Someone else would have come up with something similar had the founders of Tether -- Brock Pierce, Reeve Collins, and Craig Sellars -- all been busy on quite different paths. Somebody would have created coins that stayed close in value to the US dollar, while otherwise bearing the technological features of the cryptos, otherwise very volatile against the dollar.  Still: Faux's book is largely a tale of how the Tether coin was built on a lie -- that there was a one-to-one relationship between ev...

 CQS is a London based investment concern founded in 1999 by Michael Hintze. He is also known as Lord  Hintze, and as of this writing he remains CQS' chairman of the board.  Hintze --pictured here -- also runs a hedge fund, which has been something of a side gig for him. It is called the Directional Opportunities Fund.  As it happens, Toronto, Canada based giant Manulife Investment Management is buying out CQS, in a deal set to close early next year.  Lord Hintze seems poised, and happy, to go his own way. In a statement, he said:  “I’m delighted that CQS has found the right partner in Manulife Investment Management. It provides a long-term platform that will enable CQS to thrive as a leading alternative credit manager for years to come under Soraya’s exceptionally able leadership. I will now focus full-time on running the Directional Opportunities Fund, an opportunity that I am excited about. I wish Soraya and the CQS team every success as they embark on t...

I mentioned "effective altruism" in one of my posts about Michael Lewis. I'm going to circle back on that now.  What the heck is it?  In essence, it is a theory that has branched off of the strict utilitarianism, of Peter Singer, under the slogan (not Singer's) of "earn to give."   The idea: people with the skill to take very high earning jobs, (to run hedge funds) and who have utilitarian convictions, should take those jobs. They would waste their efforts and utilitarian convictions caring for the ill or digging water wells in parts of the underdeveloped world.  No: they should do the Wall Street wheeling and dealing, earn lots of money, and then use it altruistically. They can PAY people to dig water wells.     Further: effective altruism (EA) has tended to take a very long-term view of things. The utility of people who won't be born for another 500 years is as important as that of people alive today. This argument is key to the work of William ...

  As a fitting remembrance of the late Matthew Perry,  the fellow who brought Chandler Bing to life, allow me to reflect in academic form on a contradiction at the heart of the FRIENDS' theme song.  The first line of the first verse: No one ever told you life was gonna be this way seems in pretty direct conflict with the fifth line of the third verse: Your mother told you there'd be days like these.  The predicate of the two sentences is identical: "to tell."  The subject affirmed by the latter would seem pretty clearly to be included in the subject denied in the former. That is: Mom is somebody. And, considering the object case, life is a succession of days. Perhaps some philosopher could defend the song from the charge that there is a DIRECT contradiction in the lyrics by contending that the object case in the former sentence seems to refer to a more pervasive condition of "life" than simply that it contains "days like these."  But is it possible...

  Just a stray thought.  Of what company is "the scum" a CEO? Some of the following might get a bit complicated. Hold on for the ride.  I call Vivek Ramaswamy "the scum" because of his memorable exchange with Nikki Haley. He said she should keep her daughter off TikTok.  She said he should keep her daughter "out of your voice," sounding a bit like Will Smith to Chris Rock. He returned to his trollish ways and she muttered "you're just scum".  So he has a moniker for the ages. It looked like he was lucky she didn't ChrisRock his world.  Still, that exchange is not my stray thought for today.  I am wondering about the several times he said he would be a great President because he is a CEO.  The Republicans DID have a successful CEO as a candidate for President not long ago. His name was Mitt Romney. His party is rather on the outs with him now.  The scum was never the CEO of a Bain Capital.  He was the CEO of Roivant Sciences, a Bermuda in...

  One idea now making the rounds among some policy wonks is this: we can improve the social security system by changing the way adjustments to payments are made.  SS recipients now typically get a cost of living allowance (COLA) to keep their payments at a constant level of spending power. Something like that is a very appealing idea in a system where inflation is more a feature of the system than a bug in it.   But ... I'm sure I heard one of the contenders in the latest Republican Presidential debate saying. "We ought to link Social Security payments NOT to COLA, but to inflation.  That would save some money and help preserve the system."   In fact I think this was one of the relatively sane Republicans: Christie? Haley?  The proposition is NOT self-defeating in any obvious way.  COLA is not the only possible index of inflation, after all.  One could measure inflation literally, by the expansion of the money supply.  (Although the...

 Bryan Leiter discusses how and why academic philosophers should try to persuade their undergrad students -- in most cases -- against pursuing the field of philosophy into grad school. Turn back and seek the safety of the shore! Actually, in a recent posting Leiter simply reminded us of a discussion in the subject that appeared on his blog ten years ago. But I followed him back there.   Here is the 2023 reminder:  Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: Blast from the past: How to dissuade students from pursuing graduate work in philosophy (typepad.com) Here is the 2013 discussion:  Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: How to dissuade students from pursuing graduate work in philosophy? (typepad.com)

  No, "Wonder Woman" is NOT about to win a war with a magic lasso.  Fact Check: Has Gal Gadot Joined Israeli Army To Fight Hamas? (newsweek.com) . And, as Boomers know, the real Wonder Woman will always be ... Lynda Carter.  Maybe the IDF should try to recruit? 

 We've been hearing for years that the average age of much of the world -- essentially, the whole developed world -- is increasing.  The usual phrase is that the world is "graying."  A report from the US Census, after it had absorbed the 2020 census figures, made a century-by-century comparison of the amount of gray in the population. In 1920, only about 1 in 20 of the people in the US were 65 or older. In 2020, that figure had risen to one in six.  But one doesn't have to see the change in such a long time frame to see it clearly. The largest ever 10 year numeric gain in the 'senior' portion of the population defined by that age is the gain between 2010 and 2020. That category gains 15.5 million people that decade. One could make similar observations about much of the rest of the world.  There are various inferences one can draw from such facts. One, very much discussed, is that old-age pension systems are coming under stress. This has led to some heated deba...

I now take another look, perhaps our last look, at Michael Lewis' book about Sam Bankman-Fried. Once again, I will focus on a specific passage.  This time, that passage arises in the book's chapter six. In the ongoing story, it occurs when SBF is finally creating a crypto exchange, in Hong Kong in the go-go climate of early 2019.  [It didn't move much of its operation o the Bahamas until September 2020.] Lewis is talking about the difference between the crypto religionists on the one hand and the "suits" from traditional financial institutions, coming into crypto as colonizers, on the other.  The higher crypto prices rose, the greater the flood into crypto of sober-minded people in suits that people like Zane [a religionist] found insufferable. ... The Goldman guys and the venture capitalists and  the corporate lawyers turned crypto bros -- they were all part of this invasion of conventional people who wanted to make fast money without the kookiness that had made ...

Here is another fascinating passage from Lewis' book, GOING INFINITE. In this passage, chapter five, Lewis is telling his story through the eyes of Caroline Ellison. For those of you new to the subject: Ellison was Samuel Bankman-Fried's sort-of love interest, and at this point in our story she had joined his project to create a crypto oriented hedge fund.  (This project evolved into the FTX exchange and an affiliated hedge fund, but we aren't there yet.)  One more preliminary note: an "EA" is an "effective altruist," a member of a group of usually quite bright people committed to a very long-range sort of utilitarianism which produces some counter-intuitive results. We don't need to get further into it than that.   Anyway, the passage: " In late March [2018] she started the job. The situation inside Alameda Research wasn't anything like Sam had led her to expect. He'd recruited twenty or so EAs, most of them in their twenties, all but o...