Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I noted yesterday, that in writing his work on collective choice Sen had apparently read not only the work of John Rawls (which was inevitable), but responses to Rawls about the humans-only nature of the deliberations Rawls imagines behind the veil of ignorance. We are supposed to imagine ourselves as ignorant of our social class, race, and native intelligence, but presumably cognizant of the fact that, when the veil is lifted, we will turn out to be humans.  The responses wondered why the species barrier is that strong. What piques my interest is that Sen refers to these critiques (he does not source them specifically -- admittedly it is a bit of a digression from the main line of his thought) as half in jest and half serious.  Hmmmm.  Has Peter Singer written in response to Rawls? If he has, (and I'm too lazy to look into it right now) then I can easily imagine Singer making the point Sen emphasizes in dead earnest, utterly without jesting.  What Sen sees...

  Amartya Sen, an economist/philosopher, was born in November 1933 and he is still with us. He may be the single most important philosopher alive.  One of his works is COLLECTIVE CHOICE AND SOCIAL WELFARE. Or, perhaps, you might count this as two of his works.  The first book of that title was published in 1970, then a much expanded and re-written version appeared in 2017. I'd like today to quote a bit from the 2017 edition, in which Sen is with some sympathy discussing the work of John Rawls.  He says (this is a footnote): A half-jocular, half-serious objection to the criteria of fairness of Rawls and others often runs like this: Why confine placing oneself in the position of other human beings only, why not other animals also? Is the biological line so sharply drawn? What this line of attack misses is the fact that Rawls is crystallizing a rule of fairness that our value system does seem to have, rather than constructing a rule of fairness in vacuum based on notion...

  An alien recently landed his UFO in Vatican City. Pope Leo went out to meet him personally.  Leo, "I just want to know one thing.  Does your world know Jesus Christ as Savior?"  Alien, "Oh, yes.  He visits us about once every seven years.  We throw a big party when he arrives, then he preaches and heals amongst us. When Jesus has decided it is time to leave, our leaders declare a national holiday and there is a big send-off parade. We tell him we look forward to the next visit" Leo, "Really?  He only visited this planet once, more than two thousand years ago."  Alien, "Hmmm.  Did you give him a nice send-off?" 

I haven't seen either of the recent WICKED pics.  I don't plan to see them. Years ago I had some interest in the OZ fantasy world.  Back when it meant the Frank Baum books on the one hand and the 1939 movie on the other.  The Baum books were written as an allegorical take on the monetary debates of Baum's day. The word "Oz" itself suggests ounces, the standard measurement for gold. The notion of a "yellow brick road" suggests gold bricks, and perhaps that an insistence on a gold standard was leading the farmers of the US, the Kansans, toward danger. And so forth.  Of course the Garland movie didn't do much with the allegory -- It could have, since the '39 movie came out between FDR's abandonment of the gold standard (1933) and his partial reinvention of it by way of Bretton Woods (1944) -- but it didn't.  Personally, I have never asked myself prequel-producing questions like "how did the monkeys learn to fly" or "why does ...

  . Mid-2020, the firm (ticker symbol still GOOG) performed a stock split. In July 2021, Alphabet announced Intrinsic, a new robotics software company.  In November 2021, the formation of a new company, Isomorphic Labss, to promite the use of artificial intelligence in the pharmaceutical world.  August 2024, a US district court found Google guilty of violating antitrust law by using unlawful tie-ins to maintain its dominance in what remains its signature product, the search engine. No drastic remedy will be attempted, because the courts notices that the market has been taken over by AI/LLMs of late, and Google has no dominance there.  April 2025, another US district court finds Google guilty of illegally monopolizing parts of what is called the adtech stack, I.e. online advertising technology.  November 2025, the parties to the adtech case made their final arguments to the court in the eastern district of Virginia as to the proper remedies it should order. ...

Without getting fancy, here are some key dates: 1996: Larry Page and Sergey Brin experiment with a new type of search engine.  In those ancient days search engines simply ranked results by how often a searched-for term appears on a web page.  But Page and Brin are after something a bit more sophisticated, a range of metrics that cumulatively determine how important the searched items are on a particular page. They literally used a friend's garage as an office while working on this idea. A cliche is born, the garage-born web business.  1998: The new business is formally created when Page and Brin persuade a co-founder of Sun Microsystems to pony up $100,000 so they can incorporate, set up shop in Menlo Park and hire their first employee.  2002: Yahoo offers to buy out Google for $3 billion.  Google holds to a valuation of $5 billion, and the talks end without result. Also this year, in a display of the mainstreaming of the verb form of their name, an episode of t...