Sometimes ordinary-language words embed deep and important truths. I believe this is the case with the word "realty" for example, which English speaking people use for a certain species of property. Realty looks suspiciously like "reality" and the fact may get us to thinking metaphysically about the fecundity of land, the relative permanence of land versus chattels, fixedness, etc. and how these are all earmarks not just of realty but of reality as well. But I suspect I've said all that before here. Today I'm thinking about another fraught word: evanescence. Or in the adjectival form, evanescent. Indeed, one important feature of this word is that we're much more accustomed to it as an adjective than as a noun: one encounters "an evanescent X" much more often than one encounters "evanescence." Further, the connotation is almost always positive. We think of valuable things as fleeting. (Which makes this an odd word to couple wit...
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For no very compelling reason I'm thinking today of a particular episode of South Park. The episode I have in mind is one in which a Mormon family moves to the neighborhood. Its son (Gary) starts attending school with Kyle, Stan, etc. The central story line involves Stan and more broadly the Marsh family, the disruption of its habits by the new family in town, and eventually the resumption of normal by the Marsh's as Stan persuades his father that the Mormon story of how their church got its start is nonsensical. It is possible that the recent unexpected re-appearance of Mitt Romney in our national politics had something to do with turning my thoughts thus. But the story gives Gary the last word. Or, almost the last word. Actually, it's Cartman who gets the very last word. After Gary directs an angry monologue at Stan and walks away, Cartman says, "Man, that kid is cool, huh?" What Gary was saying was that Stan had rejected his friendship because Stan ...
[Richard B.] Spencer graduated from UVA in 2001, then proceeded to the University of Chicago for a master’s degree in humanities. He said he studied there with the philosopher Robert Pippin, who “influenced me a great deal.” “It was there I started questioning the fundamental nature of democracy,” Spencer said. (Pippin doesn’t remember him. “I regard his rhetoric and activities as loathsome and despicable,” Pippin wrote to me. “I revere the founding principles of liberal democracy, and want no association with the man.”) At a party during his year at Chicago, he confessed his political leanings to the Marxist philosopher Gopal Balakrishnan, then a professor at the school. Spencer recalls that Balakrishnan gave a professional diagnosis on the spot: “You’re a fascist.” The above italicized material is from an article in The Atlantic by Graeme Wood. Here's a link: June Issue . It inspired me to look into this other fellow, Robert Pippin, somewhat further. Pippin is...
I have written before in this blog about the 'Bayesian' interpretation of probability. I have even discussed a construction of quantum mechanics that draws on Bayesianism. What I'd like to add today is a little bit of history. Bayesianism doesn't come from the Reverend Thomas Bayes. No more than Christianity comes from Jesus. No one seems to have thought Bayes' 18th century contributions to probability theory (real though they were) had a lot of philosophical weight until the early 20th century. It was Frank Ramsey who made that leap, who served as the Apostle Paul of our analogy. In the mid 1920s and through the early 1930s, Ramsey worked to axiomize a Bayesian/subjectivist approach to probability. [Ramsey is a relevant figure in the history of epistemology as well: he pioneered the minimalist account of truth.] H wrote, "[w]e have the authority both of ordinary language and of many great thinkers for discussing under the heading of probability what ap...
Recently, (November 22, 2017) the international criminal tribunal at the Hague sentenced Ratko Mladic to life imprisonment for genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws or customs of war. The charges arose in connection with events in the former Yugoslavia through the first half of the 1990s. For example, in July 1995 troops under Mladic command overran UN established safe areas in Srebrenica and Zepa. More than 8,000 Moslem Bosniaks who had sought sanctuary there were murdered on his orders. Not long ago I discussed in this blog the "error" theory of meta-ethics, the view that ethical statements try to assert some moral realities, but they inevitably fail because there are no such realities. One argument sometimes advanced for the error theory is an argument from dissension about morality. T he underlying idea is this: when a subject is important to a lot of human beings for a long time, and thus comes under intense study, we would expect di...
I wrote something here not long ago about the practice of tipping a barber -- at least, my barber. I didn't mean much by it except as a filler anecdote for a day when nothing very profound occurred to me. But the wonderful blog Marginal Revolution has got me thinking that there IS something important to consider about the practice of tipping people in service businesses with low barriers to entry. Consider, with MR, the Uber driver who typically has a tip jar. Through the app you are paying Uber, which is paying him, and through the tip jar you can pay him directly. Now: does the practice of the tip jar affect his income? In the traditional model, assuming perfect competition, etc., the answer is clearly "no." After all, assume it did. Assume, then, that the drivers started making more money per trip by making tip jars available. Word would get out, the business of becoming an Uber driver would be more appealing, and more people would do it. That would mean more ...
The fellow pictured at the top of yesterday's blog post was Taleb: the half-smiling fellow pictured here is Cernovich. They seem to be friends. The fact has lately come under a great deal of discussion, and Taleb has responded, on twitter. "When I have drinks with someone on the left ... nobody on the right bothers me. When I have drinks with someone on the right, the left goes wild. F*** them." The asterisks are in the original. Asked whether Cernovich was a racist, Taleb replied, "#SkinintheGame. He has a Persian Muslim wife (& a half Persian daughter) . Ignore talk (by ppl & abt ppl), observe what ppl do." The phrase "skin in the game" is in essence a "term of art" in Taleb's writings. Never trust anyone who tells you to buy Mattel stock who doesn't own Mattel stock, etc. More broadly, much of academia has isolated itself from the off-campus world, allowing its denizens to be "Intellectuals Yet Idiots,...