Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Yesterday, we spoke of a former cryptocurrency honcho, now hoping for an international prisoner exchange that night free him. Tomorrow we will speak of old-fashioned government-fiat money and the role it plays within Keynesian economics.  Today, I offer a quotation from an ancient philosopher. A Stoic, Epictetus, said this about money. He imagines that a friend has asked him to go earn some quick money and then share it. He replies to this hypothetical friend.  "If I can get it while maintaining my self-respect, trustworthiness, and high-mindedness, show me the way and I'll et some. But if you're asking me to lose my good qualities so that you can get things that aren't even good, you can see how unfair and unfeeling you're being. What would you rather have, money or a trustworthy and self-respecting friend?"  

  Welcome to money week. Today, tomorrow, and Thursday I will look from three different points of view at the whole idea of a universal medium of exchange, i.e. the idea of money. Today: who is Alexander Vinnik and why might you want to care? Vinnik is the fellow portrayed above with his arms behind his back. He was formerly the head of a bitcoin exchange, known as BTC-e. This was the Russian counterpart to FTX.  This is germane to our theme-for-the-week because as you all probably know, Bitcoin in particular and cryptocurrencies more generally are talked up as the new money, the medium of exchange that will in time replace the government fiat media to which we have become accustomed.  You all also most likely know what has happened of late to FTX and its founder.  Well ... BTC-e ended up at much the same place.  At any rate, in today's environment between Russia and the United States, the fact that there is a once-prominent Russian in custody in the U.S. is itself an asset of a so

I wrote here recently about the old issue of the two tables. There is the commonly-perceived solid wood object, on the one hand, and the sciency object of empty space with some whizzing electrical charges, on the other. As I said then, there are three ways of reconciling the two tables. One of them is the pragmatic way. The perceived table is a real thing, part of the world in which we live. The sciency table is a pragmatically useful model. BUT ... let us make the situation more complicated. What about the two skies? In the manifest world there is a dome-like presence above me. I clearly see it as having that shape. And I assign it predicates, "The sky is blue." Even the ubiquitous sentence "it is raining," which never has an antecedent for its pronoun, can be taken to refer to this sky.  What is the sciency equivalent? What do we say when we say the sky is blue? We say, perhaps, that our eyes, looking upward, come into contact with light waves of the blue part of

  The Trump appointed head of the World Bank, David Malpass, has resigned.  For those who need a refresher: the head of the WB, a Bretton Woods institution, is appointed by the President of the United States because of a deal made at that 1944 conference. The head of its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, is under the same deal always a European (chosen by the IMF's own executive board.)  Anyway: Malpass is leaving -- the reasons why are not obvious -- and his departure means that President Biden has an appointment opportunity he had not expected.  On Malpass' way out the door, I want to make one point about his earlier career as a business executive and economist. Malpass was the Chief Economist at Bear Stearns for six years. Those happened also to be the last six years of the existence of Bear Stearns as an independent entity. The post of Chief Economist disappeared when Bear was purchased by JPMorgan Chase in March 2008, as the Subprime Crisis of 2007 was t

  Pence doesn't want to talk to the Justice Department about reasons why it might want to prosecute Donald Trump in connection with the Capitol Hill riot on Jan. 6, 2021 that nearly killed Pence. Let us not discuss, just for now, WHY he doesn't want to talk. Let us simply take it as a given that he doesn't want to talk about this under oath. That way we can move on to this point: We have evidence now that his lawyers are pretty good.  Consider: Donald Trump's lawyers keep invoking "executive privilege" in situations like this.  They keep invoking it and they keep losing. Courts have acknowledged that executive privilege exists (one finds such an acknowledgement in the US v. Nixon opinion, for example). But the actual decisions rather than the dicta consistently go against it.  Perhaps this consistent losing record has some relationship to a fact about the text of the US constitution. That text does not say anything that, in a simple and direct reading, bestow

There are at least three views of the relationship between the manifest world and the scientific world.  The manifest table makes itself available to me when I sit at the chair. It is brown, firm, solid, makes a certain noise when tapped by one's fingers, and so forth. The scientific table, though, consists of some number of electrical charges whizzing about through otherwise empty space. Expand each image of the table to an image of the world. So: what is the relationship between the two worlds/tables? As I began -- there are at least three theories extant. 1. Scientific realism. The scientific world-view is the right one. The manifest view is mere appearance, a derivative from perceptual abilities that themselves are derivatives from the competition to survive.  2. Scientific pragmatism. The manifest view is the real one. We live, in a non-negotiable way, in its world. Science posits various theoretical agencies, like those tiny charged particles, because it is useful to do so. 

 The above is a simple and brilliant mathematical construction, Pascal's triangle, down to the 6th row.  Before you count the rows yourself and tell me I'm wrong, there are 7, let me make explicit what the small type on the left hand side suggests. The top "row" consisting of just one call, is the 0th row, not the first. The 1st row has two cells.  Now let us look at the structure of the pyramid. Every outside cell is "1." Every inside cell derives its number from looking over its shoulder, at two of the contiguous cells, and by summing them. For example, the middle cell in the 2d row says "2." That number is the sum of each of the two cells above it, both of which are contiguous with it and above.    The middle cell of the 4th row says "6." This is the sum of the "3" over each of its shoulders.  Knowing this, we can figure out how to continue the pyramid to the next, 7th, row if we want. That row would be,                     

A few words from a wise man. I did have good reasons for choosing as I did, which I'm willing to stand by and take responsibility for. If these reasons were not sufficient or conclusive reasons, that's because, like the heroine of the novel, I was not a fully formed person before I chose (and still am not, for that matter). Like the author of the novel, I am in the process of writing an unfinished story and forming an unfinished character who, in my case, is myself.

 There has been a fair amount of talk recently about David Sabatini, an MIT scientist, whose mug is shown here. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is now financing his research.  According to the local paper of MIT, the Boston Globe , Sabatini is "a biologist who once generated Nobel Prize buzz." Before going any further into the reason for the recent talk: what was the reason for the Nobel Prize buzz that preceded it "once"? It involved the study of rapamycin, a natural antibiotic found in the soil of Easter Island. In 2009, Sabatini received the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research for the study of rapamycin's anti-tumor effects.  The more recent development? Two years ago the University investigated charges of sexual harrassment by Sabatini and he was placed on leave. The investigators concluded that Sabatini had violated its policies and it recommended his tenure be revoked. He said in essence "you can't fire me, I quit."  Now (so says the Boston G

  I wrote last week about the history of journalism, and its technologies, prior to the introduction of the World Wide Web.   In this connection I have come across a fascinating quote from Ben Bagdikian, who was following precisely this subject in real time. In a 1973 article for the Columbia Journalism Review, Bagdikian wrote about the new doohickies on which reporters were writing their stories in the most advanced city rooms. His breathless prose is amusing from this distance.  I call them "dookickies" because the names were in flux. The phrase "word processor" would eventually stick for machines dedicated to textual purposes such as reporters and editors would employ. Further on, of course, it became the name of a class of computer software, but that was distant yet. Again, the following passage comes from 1973.  As he types, the letters appear on the screen. If he wishes to delete or add to a line he has typed, he uses a set of command keys to move a cursor -

The first of the five dramatic 2023 trials I highlighted for you, dear reader, as this year began is now well underway: Alex Murdaugh is on trial for a double murder and related crimes. As as true of many criminal trials, this one began with testimony from the police crime-scene investigators: the types whose jobs are glamorized in the CSI shows. The real-world ones make it seem less than glamorous. Indeed, the word used in wire services dispatches for the testimony of agent Melinda Worley, of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, has been "tedious."    At one point while testifying, Worley removed the sneakers of one of the victims, Paul Murdaugh, from a box and showed them to the jury. They were unremarkable New Balance shoes. This is all a matter of making a case -- I presume that eventually someone will testify that tread marks at the scene were distinctively New Balance.  But it is presumably not necessary to rely on sneakers to show that Paul Murdaugh was at the

  The Supreme Court's first opinion Monday of this session, a week and a half ago now, was disappointing. Much awaited, but more of a whimper than a bang.  One of the two cases decided is intriguing, but the SCOTUS decision entirely evaded the reason for the intrigue.  The case turned on the extent of the attorney-client evidentiary immunity. If an attorney and a client have a discussion about some completely non-legal matter (say, the client's recent travels), the fact that they happen to be attorney and client is not germane. The conversation may be pertinent if the client latter claims an alibi defense to some criminal charge and the conversation throws light upon it, the conversation is NOT privileged. But suppose an attorney and client have a conversation that touches upon both legal and non-legal matters. Courts will not try to de-scramble the egg and protect the purely legal parts. Either the conversation is as a whole non-legal enough to lose the privilege or it isn'