For fans of the original Star Trek . Let us remember for a fleeting moment an episode in which Captain Kirk, with some help, defeats a robot that had been holding him prisoner. In part at least this victory is won by telling the robot "I am a liar." The paradox is too much, the robot blows its fuses, and Kirk gets back to his ship. This is of course a tight version of the old Cretan paradox. The original version was just "All Cretans are liars" spoken by a Cretan. Not much of a paradox at all, actually. And St. Paul makes a brief reference to it without mentioning its paradoxical nature. There are lots and lots of Cretans. For any one Cretan to say "we're such a lying bunch" is not paradoxical. It may seem like to speaker is giving himself too much credit as a supposed exception to that generalization: still, no paradox. A Cretan might even say " all Cretans are liars" and be considered to have spoken hyperbolically. Perhaps a commun...
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There is a new anthology out, a collection of essays by philosophers addressing in their various ways the "Liar Paradox." I'll discuss the paradox myself today, and then say something about the new book in tomorrow's post. Most people, surely most people likely to be reading this blog, are familiar with most of the following material. I trust you will read on regardless. We begin, as is conventional, with the semi-legendary Cretan seer Epimenides, who is supposed to have said "all Cretans are liars." This is a rather fuzzy non-paradoxical comment, actually. Our tendency is simply to say that even liars don't generally lie all the time. A "liar" is someone who lies out of habit, pathological need, or to take advantage of other people. There is no logical inference that every sentence from the mouth of a "liar" in the ordinary language sense be a lie. So Epimenides may well have been telling the truth. Over the next couple o...
One of science fiction's greats passed away late last month. I refer of course to Harlan Ellison, the author of Web of the City (1958), Spider Kiss (1961), and A Boy and His Dog (1969). But Ellison worked best in forms that were not book length. Among his many published collections of short stories, Stalking the Nightmare (1982), Angry Candy (1988) and Mind Fields (1994). No, that isn't a photo of Ellison I've attached here. I'll tell you who the b-and-w photo is of in due course. Ellison was probably best known, though, for having written the screenplay for the greatest episode of the original Star Trek, "City on the Edge of Forever." Or, rather, he wrote the first draft of the screenplay. My understanding is that Roddenberry re-wrote it quite radically, in ways to which Ellison was never reconciled. Well, that's show biz. The basic plot involves a time machine that sends Captain Kirk back to the year 1930, a soup kitchen in Depression-stri...
You will be assimilated into the Borg! Regular readers probably know that I believe that the infrastructure of contemporary capital markets is broken. The broken character of it is sometimes (misleadingly) attributed to the speed at which trading is done, or (not quite so misleadingly) to the automatic, Borg-like, algorithmic character of such trading. The initials HFT (high frequency trading) have come to serve as short hand for a range of issues that have made markets overly easy for some players to rig at the expense of other players: and at the expense of issuers, the going-public process, even the over-all economy. Mary Jo White, the chair of the SEC, is setting up a panel to advise her and the whole of the Commission on such issues. Unfortunately, it appears that the panel is rigged in favor of assimilated into the Borg. Bloomberg is reporting that economist Joseph Stiglitz (a Nobel Prize winner) has been excluded from the body precisely because he has express...
I see from a recent "Heard on the Street" column that the investment bank Goldman Sachs has an operational unit that it calls "the Federation." As explained in the column, the Federation combines range of back office activities that do not generate revenue themselves but are nonetheless of great significance: accounting, legal, compliance, risk management etc. Goldman Sach's management committee is apparently divided three ways: representatives from sales and trading, reps from investment banking, and those from the Federation. The HOTS column cannot help but make Star Wars references here (a powerful organization known simply as the Trade Federation is manipulated by Sith Lords, an important plot point in the three prequel movies.). Personally, I would have made Star Trek references instead. The Federation of Planets, after all, constitute the good guys of that universe, not puppets of the bad guys. Still, to each his own. Anyway, the news conten...