Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  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 its...

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...

  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 ...

 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.