Under The Sun

Radical

2004-06-07T14:05:00.000-04:00

"The end-to-end principle is one of a very few ideas in human history that are permanently radical--ideas that always provide leverage in the fight of the interesting versus the dull. Competitive markets are permanently radical, literacy is permanently radical, the First Amendment is permanently radical, and now we can add end-to-end to that list."
--Clay Shirky

The teachings of Jesus are permanently radical, too.
(--Richard Rohr)

The Internet Was Broken

2004-05-24T14:54:00.000-04:00

The thunderstorms here de-powered our ISP, so I've been 'Net-less for three days. Now I'm digging out from under the pile. Blogging will resume (to its usual level of intermittance) shortly.

A good idea

2004-05-21T11:07:00.000-04:00

(link).

Write your Congresscritters.

Easily Amused

2004-05-18T17:37:00.000-04:00

"For the record, I do have a sense of humor, and one thing that amuses me is to answer misguided emotional outbursts with arid rationalism. The opportunity to compose this aridly rationalistic comment contributed significantly to my enjoyment of this afternoon. Thank you. :-)."
--Me

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

2004-05-18T13:50:00.000-04:00

Look.

Ask the next question

2004-05-17T17:23:00.000-04:00

"Two former weapons inspectors--Hans Blix and David Kay--said the shell was likely a stray weapon that had been scavenged by militants and did not signify that Iraq had large stockpiles of such weapons."

Where did they scavenge it from?

Indeed

2004-05-16T22:10:00.000-04:00

This is far too sensible. Call the secret police.

Modern Medicine

2004-05-16T17:25:00.000-04:00

"So turning her back on traditional medicine, Milton-Jones was relying on the Austrian physician, Dr. Mohammad Khalifa, and his "knee tissue manipulation," which is believed to stimulate re-growth of the tissue in a non-invasive procedure. Khalifa told Milton-Jones his hands are so sensitive that he can feel the nerve endings in the body, and by rubbing his thumbs in a circular motion on the front of Milton-Jones' knee, Khalifa believes he stimulates those nerve endings to help encourage the body's natural healing process.

"Milton-Jones, who has started for the Los Angeles Sparks for the past five seasons, wanted desperately to believe. The WNBA season was just around the corner, and the Olympics were a mere six months away. Surgery would surely put both in jeopardy, so Khalifa and the two 90-minute sessions a week he required were certainly worth taking a chance on.

"If only those thumbs would stop digging. And then, they did.

""Stand up," Khalifa said.

"Milton-Jones grabbed for her crutches, but Khalifa shook his head. Then he asked the unthinkable: "Jog in place."

"So Milton-Jones took a tentative step. Quickly, she realized the knee felt stable, almost normal. And pretty soon, Khalifa had her jumping off the injured knee as if going for a layup, then doing defensive slides -- completely pain-free.

""How does it feel?" he asked. The knee felt good, but Khalifa wasn't satisfied.

""We do not want 'good,' " he said. "We want perfect."

"Khalifa then went to work rubbing the back of Milton-Jones' knee. And when he was done and had her go through the same drills, the knee, in fact, felt perfect. She had good range of motion, and the swelling was minimal.

""It was a miracle," Milton-Jones said recently when recounting the experience during a phone interview.

"How else can you describe her recovery? Although two MRIs -- one by USA Basketball shortly after the initial injury and a second test five weeks later by the L.A. Sparks -- indicated a complete tear of the ACL in her right knee, Milton-Jones' latest MRI shows scar tissue but no tear."

Emphasis in the original.

Something happened here, and we have no idea what. (We'd have a slightly better idea if the writer, Nancy Lieberman, were a competent journalist rather than a former basketball star--"two 90-minute sessions a week" is not instantaneous healing.) Perhaps--probably--even Dr. Khalifa doesn't correctly understand how or why his treatment really works. Perhaps it doesn't work at all. But we have more than hearsay evidence that an ACL was torn and isn't anymore. If I were a research physician, I would set up an MRI machine in Dr. Khalifa's clinic and take daily MRIs of as many of his patients as possible. This is not a miracle; it's medicine. We can, and must, understand why and how it works.

God Is In

2004-05-16T14:37:00.000-04:00

Josh Chafetz, like my entire family, doesn't understand evangelical Christianity.

> the idea that religion has to be hip to be relevant

It's not about "hip"; it's about "engaged". God, too, lives in the real, present world. That world includes skateboards and body piercings. God is all things to all people (he is large, he contains multitudes). To me he's a philosopher. To a sk8er boi he may be a sk8er boi. Neither diminishes him.

> in the long term, I think most of us want transcendence

God is *both* transcendent and immanent. The God of the suburban megachurch and the old red hymnal isn't transcendent, he's just absent.

>, and bringing religion down to the level of

This may be "down", but it's the down of heaven -> earth, not the down of high -> low. The whole point of Christianity is that God descended, and descends, to our level, because he loves us. He doesn't need or even want us to leave our lives and go to some idealized fairyland in order to worship him. He meets us where we are.

[Now playing: "God Is In" by Billy Jonas.]

2004-05-15T18:12:00.000-04:00

ROTFL!

Great Writing

2004-05-14T23:27:00.000-04:00

Lynn Sislo has a question: why is one of these paragraphs "better" writing?

"I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren... The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battle fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation."

"I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies... The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

The former is William Seward's first draft, and the latter is Abraham Lincoln's revision, from the close of Lincoln's first Inaugural Address. Lincoln was right, and he was right because of St.-Exupery's Principle: the perfection of design is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Or (as one of Lynn's commenters mentioned) Strunk and White's Rule #17: Omit Needless Words.

"I close. (We are not) we must not be (aliens or) enemies but (fellow countrymen and) brethren... The mystic chords (which proceeding) from so many battle fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and (all the) hearths in this broad continent (of ours) will yet again harmonize (in their ancient music) when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation."

Everything in parentheses can be omitted--and indeed, that's fairly close to what Lincoln did. He also substituted simpler words for pretentious ones.

"I [am loth to][1] close. [We are not][2] enemies, but _friends_. We must not be enemies[3]... The mystic chords [of memory][4], stretching[5] from every battlefield[,][6] and patriot grave, to [every living][7] heart and [hearthstone][8], all over this broad _land_, will yet [swell the chorus][9] [of the Union][10], when again touched[11], [as surely they will be][12], by the [better angels of our nature][13]."

[1]: "I close" was deemed too brusque. Judgment call. Lincoln's version is more human, which is rarely a bad thing.
[2]: I thought this could be omitted. Lincoln disagreed. After some thought, I agree with him.
[3]: The separate, short sentence is more emphatic.
[4]: As Mike said: What chords?
[5]: Much more active than "proceeding".
[6]: I don't understand what that comma is doing.
[7]: "living" is an upbeat, vibrant word.
[8]: As Harvey noted, "hearthstone" is easier to say out loud.
[9]: Vibrant!
[10]: Union!
[11]: "breathed upon" is distant; "touched" is intimate.
[12]: Hope!
[13]: This speech is about us, not about some angel.

All of these changes--plus the two word choices I underscored--improve on Seward's draft. That's the difference between good writing and great writing.

2004-05-13T00:38:00.000-04:00

Also just noticed that my attempt to set Comments open didn't work. I'll see what I can do about that, but in the meantime, feel free to email blumsha (at) juno (dot) com.

2004-05-13T00:18:00.000-04:00

About this, on the other hand, Fred is 100% correct.

(UPDATE: clued in to the web-server's cluelessness. It's the essay titled "Crimes", on top as of this writing.)

And this: "If memory serves, God (Leviticus, I think) did say we should stone homosexuals to death. While I am not antireligious, God and I are going to differ on this one. Call it jury nullification."(--"Gay Marriage")

2004-05-12T23:52:00.000-04:00

I am not an evolutionary biologist. But one doesn't have to be an expert to solve most, if not all, of these problems. (Link via Donald Sensing.)

>> 1) A fair number of people are deathly allergic to bee stings, going into anaphylactic shock and dying. In any but a protected urban setting, children are virtually certain to be stung many times before reaching puberty. Assured death before reproduction would seem a robust variety of selective pressure.

An allergy is an overreaction by the immune system. Having a strong (=reactive) immune system is good. Dying of pnemonia or infection is just as bad as dying of a bee sting. And I'm not convinced that bee stings are quite that common, especially among people who actually have to pay attention to the world around them in order to survive.

>> The same reasoning applies to a long list of genetic diseases that kill children before they reach adulthood. (Yes, I too can imagine plausible explanations. Plausibility isn’t evidence.)

By itself, no. But there's very strong evidence that the theory of evolution in general is true, so it's reasonable for scientists to conjecture about how it applies to cases on which evidence is lacking.

(I do not, by the way, believe that the theory of evolution is proven beyond any shadow of a doubt. But I do think it's good science, and my religion--Reformed Christianity, to which I converted as an adult--tells me that I should believe good science unless it directly contradicts divine revelation (e.g. Scripture), which evolution doesn't.)

>> Homosexuality in males works strongly against reproduction. Why have the genetic traits predisposing to homosexuality not been eliminated long ago?

(1) There is evidence that homosexuality becomes significantly more common when overpopulation is more likely than extinction. This has been observed in swans, iirc. (2) Genes for homosexual preference are passed on when gays are forced by society to suppress or repress their preferences and therefore often marry and have children. The significant number of "ex"-gays, who are rightly seen as a triumph of will over instinct, are the current incarnation of this. The only way out of this trap is to consign gay men to a celibate priesthood....

(Which may tend to explain why homosexuality has become more common since the Reformation. If it has; I have no data.)

>> Pain serves to warn an animal that it is being injured, or to make it favor, say, a wounded leg so that it can heal. Fair enough. But then why did we evolve the nerves that produce the agony of kidney stones--about which an animal can do absolutely nothing?

Most persons who suffer from kidney stones are past prime reproductive age.

>> the genes exist for the brains of a Gauss or Newton, the phenomenal vision of Ted Williams, the physical prowess of Cassius Clay. Presumably (a tricky word) in a pre-civilized world, strong and intelligent people with superbly acute (for humans) senses would be more likely to survive and spread their genes, leading to a race of supermen. Is this what we observe?

Compared to Cro-Magnons? Absolutely.

>> Here we come to an interesting question: Do the superior pass along their genes more reliably than the inferior? In primitive tribal societies do we observe that the brighter have more children than the not so bright?

It's not clear how much of an advantage above-average intelligence is in primitive tribal societies.

>> evolutionists [] make intellectual pretzels trying to prove that the attractive and the fit are one and the same. Well, they aren’t.

Not anymore. But standards of attractiveness change much more quickly than genes evolve, so that doesn't prove much.

>> If intelligence promotes survival, why did it appear so late?

Because it's very complicated, so it took a long time to develop, and very sophisticated, so it isn't very useful until quite late in the game.

>> People have a wretched sense of smell and mediocre hearing.

Atrophy.

>> People are weak. [] Were we already packing heat when we swung down from the trees?

(1) It is quite possible that we were already throwing rocks and sticks. Predators are lazy; two or three rocks is usually plenty. (2) That's why we developed intelligence and tigers didn't. (3) Does anything prey on monkeys?

>> So much of evolution contradicts other parts. Sparrows evolved drab and brown so that predators won’t see them. Cockatoos and guacamayas are gaudy as casinos in Las Vegas so they can find each other and mate.

What eats sparrows? Sparrow-hawks, and other such raptors. Are there any raptors in rain forests? No, because it's impossible to hunt from the air in a rain forest. So it's safe to be eye-catching.

2004-05-12T19:20:00.000-04:00

In response to Marc Moffett:

>> The puzzle of Escher sentences is that we don't notice their semantic infelicity.

I don't see why this is a puzzle at all; it's a fact about human psychology, not a fact about semantics. We can understand incorrect sentences the same way we can understand misspelled English.

Relatedly, the question how a given speech act should be interpreted is quite independent of the question what the sentence formally means; interpretation, moreover, depends crucially on context, so I don't think it's correct to say that "[i]t's actually clear in broad terms what [is] intended". I agree that one particular interpretation of this particular sentence recommends itself as most likely, but that certainly doesn't make the sentence "mean" that interpretation.

Formally, it seems to me, "More people have thought about Escher sentences than I have." is a statement whose truth depends on the number of people I "have"; there are certainly contexts in which one may be said to have people, e.g. when making a dinner reservation. But that's irrelevant to the sentence's Escherness, which doesn't even require that the sentence have a meaning at all. Escherness is merely a psychological phenomenon, not really a language puzzle at all.

2004-05-12T13:14:00.000-04:00

OxBlog notes a proposal to cut the US Navy's submarine force by up to a third. This would cost a bunch of jobs in Massachusetts, but those can be readily replaced by standard defense-budget pork. The serious question is whether cutting the submarine force is a good idea, and I suspect it is: submarines are a classical weapon--an advanced one, of course, but based on strategic and tactical needs that are now obsolete. What good are submarines against terrorists? So it seems to me that buying fewer two-billion-dollar submarines is a reasonable way to trim spending.

2004-05-12T13:12:00.000-04:00

Administrative Notice: the Bundy223.org server is down while its owner is moving into his new house, so I've returned to Blogspot until the DSL installers get their act together. Sorry for the inconvenience.

2004-02-14T13:58:00.000-05:00

I've moved! Thanks to the world's most wonderful webmaster, I now have a spiffy new Movable Type blog. It's not pretty yet, but it works. http://www.bundy223.net/~andyb/blog/. Enjoy!

(PS to anyone following Derek Lowe's link from Corante: the post he linked to is reproduced at the new site, with a functional permalink and comments enabled.)

2004-02-13T20:41:00.000-05:00

Chortle.

2004-02-13T20:33:00.000-05:00

<<
Anti-Semitism is so prevalent in some of the housing projects that ring Paris and other major French cities that "it's become infused into the language," according to Barbara Lefebvre, a history teacher at a French public school.

"Just about every week I see students in my class - where there are no Jews - insulting each other by saying, 'Stop it, you Jew.' Or 'No, you can't borrow my pen, it's not yours, Jew.' Or if their pen is broken they'll say: 'What's wrong with my pen? It's a Jew.'

"When you point it out, they say, 'This is just a way of speaking.'"
>>

Actually, I agree that this by itself is not evidence of virulent anti-Semitism: sometimes a cigar is just a smoke. But--ahem--where there's smoke....

(Via Pejman Yousefzadeh.)

2004-02-13T19:45:00.000-05:00

Read this.

I've been on anti-depressants for over two years now, so I feel qualified to offer some additional comments.

1. I am absolutely certain of this: Traci Johnson was told, several times, that if she experienced any wild mood swings at any time during the trial--and especially if she ever began to think about killing herself--she should report to the physicians immediately. She didn't, and that's on her.

[No, that doesn't mean that her suicide was "her fault". It means that she was one of the many, many people who contributed to it.]

2. "apparently non-suicidal". Yes, many people who commit suicide talk beforehand about doing so. Many don't. I've known both kinds. (Hell, I've been both kinds.)

3. "apparently non-suicidal 19-year-old". All 19-year-olds are at risk of depression and suicide. Period.

Furthermore, this particular 19-year-old had to drop out of school for financial reasons. Nope, no stress there.

4. It's quite possible that coming off the drug caused a mood swing. That means it works.

It is not news that anti-depressants are dangerous. Even most admitted depressives don't want to take them, for good reason. So why was Lilly giving its drug--at a higher-than-normal dose, even--to someone who wasn't depressed? Because "the FDA had requested that Lilly conduct the safety tests, which typically examine side effects." (--The Indianapolis Star.) Struck match, got burned.

I'll tell you why Traci Johnson died. She died because a group of good doctors trying to do a good thing according to a good policy gave her a drug that did what it was supposed to do, and as a side effect it made her feel really depressed, and her parents didn't notice because they weren't in the same state, and her friends didn't notice because she wasn't in school that term, and her neighbors didn't notice because they were strangers who just happened to be sharing a dorm for a few months, and when Traci decided to kill herself there was no one close enough to stop her. And that's a goddamn tragedy and it happens hundreds or thousands of times every year, with no help at all from experimental drugs. And we're not going to help the problem by abandoning an anti-depressant any time anyone taking it kills herself. If you need something to make Traci Johnson's death more meaningful than it already is, then call her a martyr for a good cause. And don't kill the cause because it killed her.

2004-02-11T23:56:00.000-05:00

Um...

"True RE [reverse engineering] is like when godless heathen communist Pole-rapers get their hands on three of your sweet B-29's in Vladivostok in 1944 and then flaunt the bastard clone Tupolev Tu-4 at the 1947 Moscow Aviation Day parade.

"Now we can drop the atoms bombs on you too, pigs, as soon as Ethelina and Julianovich and Klausovich delivers the plans! And then we gets Moose and Squirrel!"

2004-02-11T15:46:00.000-05:00

John Calvin was right:

"The researchers wrote they expected the ethical Christians would score higher on the Social Interest Survey, motivated primarily by Christ's ethical teachings. It was not so. "The born again group scored higher in social interest in both age groups studied, even though they are primarily committed to the person of Christ and secondarily committed to the ethics. These results support the notion that born again commitment fosters greater internalization of Christian ethics."

2004-02-11T14:34:00.000-05:00

On seeing a stop sign:

"An Orthodox Jew does one of two things: A) Take another route to work that doesn't have a stop sign so that he doesn't run the risk of disobeying the halachah, or B) Stop at the stop sign, say "Blessed art thou, 0 Lord our God, king of the universe, who hast given us thy commandment to stop," wait 3 seconds according to his watch, and then proceed. Incidentally, the Talmud has the following comments on this passage: R[abbi] Meir says: He who doesn't stop shall not live long. R. Hillel says: Cursed is he who does not count to three before proceeding. R. Simon ben Yudah says: Why three? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, gave us the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. R. ben Isaac says: Because of the three patriarchs. R. Yehuda says: Why bless the Lord at a stop sign? Because it says: "Be still, and know that I am God." R.Hezekiel says: When Jephthah returned from defeating the Ammonites, the Holy One, blessed be He, knew that a donkey would run out of the house and overtake his daughter; but Jephthah did not stop at the stop sign, and the donkey did not have time to come out. For this reason he saw his daughter first and lost her. Thus he was judged for his transgression at the stop sign. R. Gamaliel says: R. Hillel, when he was a baby, never spoke a word, though his parents tried to teach him by speaking and showing him the words on a scroll. One day his father was driving through town and did not stop at the sign. Young Hillel called out: "Stop, father!" In this way, he began reading and speaking at the same time. Thus it is written: "Out of the mouth of babes." R. ben Jacob says: Where did the stop sign come from? Out of the sky, for it is written: "Forever, 0 Lord, your word is fixed in the heavens." R. ben Nathan says: When were stop signs created? On the fourth day, for it is written: "let them serve as signs." But R. Yehoshua says: ... (continues for three more pages ... )"

(Via Naomi Chana.)

2004-02-10T18:19:00.000-05:00

"Jesus was no sissy. If he played football, you'd be slow getting up after he tackled you."
--Rev. Jerry Falwell

(Quoted here.)

2004-02-10T18:01:00.000-05:00

"Tailgate parties are one of the great inventions of modern society... It's the story of Ruth: you arrange to meet a bunch of people at the stadium, and it turns out that they have prepared a feast for you, and that these people are your people, and where you go, they will go, and their gods and heroes will be your gods and heroes, and their food your food."
--Anne LaMotte, The Psychic Hat

(Via Will Baude.)

2004-02-10T17:57:00.000-05:00

Permit me to quote myself :-). I commented thusly on this post by Michael Blowhard:

1.
<<
"Doesn't it seem that, as digital technology moves into a field, that the field always becomes more ... down to earth, more brusque and less special? Writing becomes less about qualities and tone and more about information and attitude."

This is tangential, of course, but: writing in the digital media remains very much about qualities and tone. This can be non-obvious because Google finds bad writing as well as good, but in any community that makes use of the accolade of respect--the blogosphere, most mailing lists, almost any group of serious computer experts (hackers, not crackers)--respect correlates strongly, though not exclusively, with the ability to use language well. One criterion of good language is indeed efficiency, but that's a return to the Classic Style, not a degradation. Another criterion of good language, to which hackers especially are attuned, is the ability to convey multiple levels of meaning, i.e. to write between the lines. An example is the mailing-list post that treats its interlocutor courteously while nonetheless conveying to those in the know the author's less-than-respectful personal opinion. This is one digital-media analogue of snobbery, which, as always, goes hand in hard with art. If you're inclined, spend some time browsing the Jargon File ( http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/ ), and reading the introductory remarks. I suppose it's possible that non-hackers don't perceive the aesthetic that's in play here, but if so that's a failing of non-hackers; there is definitely an aesthetic, and it is definitely in "play".
>>

2.
<<
About young gals. I'm a 20something male, and the gi^H^H women I'm interested in are exactly the ones who have depth. There are a lot of them out there; they're under the pop-culture radar, so to speak, but that's just because the radar is calibrated wrong. The people who are actually taken in by the pop-cultural illusions are indeed going to be (in general) miserable when they grow up, but people without depth have always been miserable, and always will be; the looming crisis of the demographic under discussion is in that respect no different from the mid-life crisis of the Boomer who finally realizes that his corporate job and 2.3 kids have left him without a real sense of self. So the problem of identity you're seeing is indeed different than it used to be, but in the grand scheme of things it's normal, not aberrant.

About poetry and the sacred. Those are not and never have been younglings' concepts. Adolescent poetry is almost universally bad--mine sure was. It may be that for many younglings these days adolescence lasts longer than it used to, but that's just the continuation of the historical trend: when Romeo and Juliet were my age they'd been dead for ten years (to borrow Tom Lehrer). We still, eventually, grow up, and we will as long as the problem of scarcity ensures that we can't all have everything we want. And when we grow up, we will write poetry and embrace sacredness. Mere generations can't change the nature of life.
>>

2004-02-10T15:06:00.000-05:00

Punctuation matters.

(That's a declarative sentence, not a headline.)

Here's why it matters. The second "or" does delineate the intent, as Mike explains. But if that "or" were preceded by a semicolon instead of a comma, the meaning would be unmistakable--even without clause-identifiers.

There are two differences between adequate writing and excellent writing. The one more commonly noted is the use of vocabulary to furnish nuance. The one less commonly noted is the use of punctuation (including filler words and the arrangement of clauses) to furnish flow. A well-punctuated sentence flows with a single, unmistakable current: it can be read in only one way.

That is why, as Mark Twain said, the test of good writing is "the reading aloud". (And not, in general, by the author, who already knows what it says.) A sentence that impels a reader to hesitate, to backtrack, to think twice, almost certainly should be revised. Sometimes such complexity is inevitable, but far more often it is merely incompetent.

2004-02-10T14:34:00.000-05:00

"I believe in God--Bach's God."
--Glenn Gould

(Via Terry Teachout, via Pejman Yousefzadeh.)

2004-02-10T14:25:00.000-05:00

ROTFL!

2004-02-08T14:46:00.000-05:00

"Human beings have been most magnificently productive and reached their highest cultural peaks in the times and places where humans have thought most deeply about their place in the universe and been most convinced they have one."
--Charles Murray

(Quoted here: read the whole thing. Via Two Blowhards.)

2004-02-08T14:25:00.000-05:00

"It is easy to lie with statistics, but it’s a lot easier to lie without them."
--Richard J. Herrnstein

2004-02-08T12:53:00.000-05:00

"It's supposed to be a mother and child."
"Well, why isn't it?"
--Anthony Browne, The Shape Game

2004-02-06T17:20:00.000-05:00

(I'm not sure whether to write 'clueful' or 'cluefull'. Neither is in the dictionary, but at least one (probably both) should be. I prefer the former, by equivalence-class with 'wonderful', but I might be swayed by a good argument.)

2004-02-06T17:17:00.000-05:00

USS Clueful

Discussing his thinking and writing processes, Steven Den Beste notes: "Some people use prayer to gain wisdom and help them in deciding what they should do. They will compose themselves, and then explain their problem to God. Then they will "put it in God's hands", and wait, and eventually God will speak to them and tell them what they should do. It long ago occurred to me that if you remove the theology and look at the process, these people are doing exactly the same thing I am, and from my own mechanist viewpoint, the answer is coming from another part of their brain rather than from God."

Further cluefulness occurs here. What Den Beste is doing is applying the scientific method to philosophy. In the short term the results may be ugly, but in the long term the process works, really, really well.

2004-02-06T10:44:00.000-05:00

Nature's Way

<<
I wonder whether it is true, as the Rothmans claim, that "there is no holding back the enterprise." It is just possible--now for the first time in the history of modern science--that the moment has finally come when society might reconsider whether the curiosity and enthusiasm of scientists alone should determine the direction of research into certain technologies.
[...]
To accomplish the feats of genetic improvement predicted with such assurance by Gregory Stock and William Haseltine is to forget the admonition of Francis Bacon, who was, after all, the father of the scientific method: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." Two centuries earlier, Michel de Montaigne had warned of the dangers of doing otherwise when he pointed out that we should not get in nature's way, because "she knows her business better than we do." Long before the Rothmans, such philosophers were putting us on notice.
>>
--Sherwin B. Nuland, "Getting In Nature's Way"

"whether the curiosity and enthusiasm of scientists alone should determine the direction of research into certain technologies". But they don't. Science does not proceed in the orderly, pick-and-choose, what-shall-we-research-next-sir? manner of Civilization (yes, I mean the computer game). It proceeds rather in the manner of Civ's more sophisticated successor, Alpha Centauri: we can set a goal, but what we actually discover, and whether it actually has anything to do with our goal, is significantly random (or at least chaotic). This is true--in the real world--for two reasons: first, because reality is complex and interdependent, not to be accurately mapped by any geometry we can fathom; second, more importantly, because what we discover about the world is in the end determined by how the world actually is. If something is true, then sooner or later it will be discovered, by someone, somehow. We can, perhaps, make an effort to avoid looking in the more likely directions, but that's just another form of head-in-the-sand, and it won't work.

Which is to say that the progressives, as well as the conservatives, can quote Bacon and Montaigne. Scientific progress is part of Nature's business: indeed she knows it better than we do, and indeed we can command it only by obeying it. Science must first fulfill its obligation to truth, to reality; only later can we mold it to our own ends. If bio-engineering leads, or can lead, to a more successful society, that too is a fact, and will be discovered, and will be used. Any particular group may have the will and power to ignore it, but in the long run such groups will lose. It can be argued that losing would be an acceptable price for moral rectitude. But Mother Nature would not agree.

2004-02-06T09:28:00.000-05:00

"Do you believe in an infallible power?"
"You mean like Google?"
--Get Fuzzy

2004-02-06T08:20:00.000-05:00

Chortle.

(Via Eugene Volokh.)

2004-02-05T17:29:00.000-05:00

Brilliant invention in search of marketing: Smog-eating paint.

(Link via OxBlog.)

2004-02-05T17:09:00.000-05:00

Must ... control ... Fisk of Death ...

<<
"Is shared planning time an efficient way to produce challenging lessons? It may be, but an ethic of care stipulates that rigorous intellectual exchange among trusting colleagues enables them to examine their own practices. Will student disruptions diminish if kids have a few individual moments with teachers each day? Possibly, but an ethic of care finds advisory programs warranted when they help teacher and student know one another more fully. When school practices are guided by an ethic of care, individuals and whole schools emphasize growth, empathy, response, and community."
--Becoming Good American Schools[*]
>>

[*: I'm pretty sure it's this book, but my source (personal correspondence) quoted without proper citation, so I'm not sure. The Fisk of Death doesn't care.]

Actually, I really do have to control the Fisk of Death, because upon further review, this passage isn't fisk-worthy; it's merely wrong.

I initially thought it was fisk-worthy because I thought it was taking pot-shots at potential allies by seeming to dismiss their concerns: "we don't care about improving lesson-planning or improving classroom discipline", instead of "we hope our methods improve lesson-planning and classroom discipline but even if they don't...". Such a faux pas, needlessly alienating even the most forward-thinking educational conservatives (like me), would indeed be fisk-worthy. But after further review, I think that interpretation misses the authors' point.

In fact, I think, the authors really do mean that schools are not (as we educational conservatives hold) institutions for sharing ideas; they are institutions for growing human beings. Lessons (well-planned or otherwise) and discipline really are beside the point; the point is growing good human beings by imparting self-esteem and sociability.

This is wrong, obviously: growing good human beings is the point of life, including schools, yes, but also families, friends, churches, summer camps, and even total strangers. (Learning how to deal with strangers is a vastly underrated component of growing up.) But schools have a particular role in that process, which is to, yes, share ideas: a certain subset of ideas, the "basic" ideas that our society deems to be of universal value. Schools may, and indeed should, do more than that: religious schools on one hand, or high-school art programs and shop classes on another, broaden the curriculum to, hopefully, good effect. But the basic purpose of a school is to teach the universals; if they fail in that then they fail, period.

To argue, then, as Becoming Good American Schools does, that the point is not to share ideas but to "care", is to miss the point. Schools care by doing their job. If the application of an "ethic of care" on the micro level is a way to do the job better--if caring about teachers will make them better teachers and caring about students will make them better students; which, of course, it will--then we forward-thinking conservatives are all for it. So the authors might in fact stand a good chance of getting what they want if they were willing to play a little politics. But if their square one is to thoroughly reconceptualize the role of public education in society, then they can't win and don't deserve to--and wouldn't even if their reconceptualization weren't itself wrong.

2004-02-05T16:01:00.000-05:00

"You can take any theory of reference that you'd like and the results all come out the same for "Atrios" and "Sullivan"."--Matt Yglesias

This is dead wrong, and even the most naive theory of reference shows why. Sir Walter Scott is the author Waverly. Therefore the proposition "Sir Walter Scott is the author of Waverly" is true. Now substitute the fact into the first clause, replacing 'Sir Walter Scott' with 'The author of Waverly'. Result: "The author of Waverly is the author of Waverly." But that's a tautology. Therefore the original, equivalent phrase, "Sir Walter Scott is the author of Waverly", is also a tautology. But of course it's not; it's merely a contingent truth.

The point of this exercise (which was conducted by Bertrand Russell in 1904, so Yglesias really ought to be familiar with it) is that references are not interchangable, even when they refer to the same object. Why does this matter? Well, suppose I google "Nick Kristof", and I find that someone called him "human scum". That's part of Nick Kristof's reputation, and it affects everything he does under the name 'Nick Kristof'. Which is--because 'Nick Kristof' is his real name--everything. Whereas if Kristof were to call Atrios "human scum", that would pertain to Atrios, but it would not pertain to whoever Atrios is in real life. No one will know--except in this abstract sense--that the person who is Atrios indulges his penchant for namecalling by hiding behind masks. The same insult affects Kristof more than it does Atrios, because Kristof is a person and Atrios is merely a persona.

So I wouldn't say that Atrios is "immune" from personal attacks, but he's certainly much less vulnerable.

2004-02-04T19:45:00.000-05:00

Jane Galt sez:

"But whether or not spanking is good for children, I find it very hard indeed to imagine that this is a matter with which the federal government of a modern industrial state needs to involve itself."

I thoroughly disagree. If children have a right to be free from physical abuse--and they do--then if spanking constitutes physical abuse, the government should prohibit it. The claim that it's none of the government's business begs the question.

Furthermore, given the options, a full prohibition is vastly better than either a full permission or a line anywhere in the middle. A line in the middle would require the government to care about not merely the principles of parenting, but the details, and that would be very bad. A full permission would condone (some) child abuse, and that would be very bad. A full prohibition merely interferes with the right of some parents to use one particular parenting technique, and that's bad, but it's not very bad.

The only argument I can think of against a prohibition is that it's unenforceable, because enforcing it would require a spy-camera in every crib. But the same argument applies to laws against child abuse in general, and in that case it is deemed to lose: very little prevention of child abuse outweighs a lot of disrespect for the law. A law against spanking creates more disrespect for the law (because it's a more unpopular law) and prevents less child abuse (because spanking is usually only mildly abusive), so there's room for debate about which way the pacman munches ('<' , '>'). But I personally still don't think it's a close call; and in any case, debate about balancing rights is precisely the business of government.

So even if the law against spanking isn't a good idea--which I think it is--it's certainly an appropriate question for legislation.

2004-02-04T17:11:00.000-05:00

Random Weblink of the Day: The Quotebook of Solomon Short.

2004-02-04T16:50:00.000-05:00

Still tinkering with my blogroll. I'm always torn between restricting it to the blogs I'm actually following or including all the blogs I read occasionally. Guess which way I'm swinging this week?

2004-02-04T14:45:00.000-05:00

"Over the centuries we have allowed no animal to be onstage without performing in the play."
--Michael Sims, Darwin's Orchestra

2004-02-04T13:53:00.000-05:00

D'oh! Sorry!

2004-02-03T16:29:00.000-05:00

Updated my blogroll. (See previous post, item #3.)

2004-02-03T16:22:00.000-05:00

Terry Teachout is clueful about blogs.

(Via Lynn Sislo.)

UPDATE: Edited.

2004-01-31T18:30:00.000-05:00

"I regard mystification as a form of instruction."
--Brian W. Aldiss

2004-01-31T17:31:00.000-05:00

Exactly.

2004-01-31T17:04:00.000-05:00

Slavoj Zizek is, as always, clueful.

2004-01-30T15:46:00.000-05:00

Science-Fiction Not-Spoiler

Read This Alien Shore, by C.S. Friedman. It's one of those books which manages to be great without necessarily being good: its plot is full of large holes and its characters are more or less archetypical. But its pacing is perfect, so I didn't notice the holes or the flatness until well after I'd whizzed through its did-I-really-just-read-564-pages?; and its setting is brilliant, and its metaphor of human nature is provocative and deep. I spent two weeks trying to write a thorough review that would do it justice; I couldn't. Just read the book.

2004-01-30T15:17:00.000-05:00

Science-Fiction Spoilers

Some stories are not quite good enough that I feel the need to archive them[*], but are good definitely enough that I feel the need to share them. This most often happens when the story's execution, however beautiful, is less important than its concept. Such as:

*"Willie", by Madeleine E. Robins: in which a scientist creates life ... and then has to raise it to adulthood.

*"Coffins", by Robert Reed: in which a perfect life-support system, and its inhabitant biomass, colonize a distant galaxy.

*"The Resurrection of Alonso Quijana", by Marcos Donnelly: in which Cervantes conjures Don Quijote to teach a G.I. to kill Iraqis.

Both "Willie" and "The Resurrection..." deserve to be taught in English classes as commentaries on their respective sources.

All three stories, along with many others that are also worth reading, can be found in The Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: A 45th-Anniversary Anthology.

2004-01-27T15:11:00.000-05:00

"The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."
--William Faulkner

2004-01-26T21:52:00.000-05:00

I am a Breakout Bat.

I am an abstract sort of creature, who dislikes any sort of restraint. If you try to pigeonhole me, I'll break the box, and come back for more. I don't have any particular ambitions, I just drift, but I am adept at keeping life going along. What Video Game Character Are You?

2004-01-23T19:07:00.000-05:00

A definition

Rational conservatism: the belief that history is a wisdom tradition.

2004-01-22T13:36:00.000-05:00

Another deep insight from Jim Kalb:

"Every society is based on some understanding of things that's too overarching and fundamental to be altogether articulate. That understanding lies behind all social institutions, including government. In a complex society that understanding has to take a definite and institutional form. If it doesn't then it won't be able to assert itself, and particular activities and institutions will lose their relationship to the underlying common understandings needed to maintain coherence and public acceptability. They'll go off in specialized directions and become generally incomprehensible, or they'll become a battleground for warring ideologues and get captured by someone with an ax to grind. Therefore the need for organized public religion.
"Liberals of course reject all that. They think that everything can be made perfectly rational so we don't have to worry about unstated common understandings except as prejudices to be done away with. The result is that liberal dogma, which can't be proved either and has problems of its own, becomes the religion. You can't say "Merry Christmas," but every college has to have all sorts of observances around Martin Luther King day."

Kalb personally pines for the era when "organized public religion" meant the Roman Catholic Church, which I think is stupid. (Sorry, Jim.) But his basic point is fully valid regardless: we must be able to publicly express our societal commonalities. Not "we should be able"--though we should--but "we must". He is exactly right that the impulse that is forbidden in the form of religion will always assume other forms. Multiculturalism is a religion for many liberals; so is environmentalism (I hope you all read Michael Crichton's speech on that topic, to which I linked a while back). Both of those concepts are worthwhile, but as religions go, they went. Same with religions on the conservative side: Christianity itself, for one--I posted recently about how the suppression of religion makes it more virulent, not less--and patriotism. Idiot patriotism and idiot multiculturalism are mirror images, two symptoms of the same illness. And the illness is that we are forbidden to publicly deal with the fundamental political question: what is a just society? A just society is a free society--but if you suggest that homosexuals should be free, you'll get shouted down. Not--this is crucial--just by idiot religion, but by intelligent religion as well, because intelligent religion has been forced to choose sides. And on the other hand, a just society is a moral society--but if you suggest that homosexuality is immoral, you'll get shouted down. No one, on either side, is actually asking whether homosexuality or something related to it is actually a bad thing. No one is asking anything; people are just shouting. Different groups shout at different things in different places, obviously; and it's possible that one is right and the other is wrong. But there's no way to find out, let alone build a political compromise, because there's so much shouting, on and by both sides, that no dialogue is possible. The essence of political society has broken down. And it's broken down for exactly the reason Kalb says: because modern liberalism has ruled too much of the population out of court. In fact, it has alienated so many people that there is a real danger that they will soon hold enough power to fix that very Court.

Last night at dinner I was snickering at the way the Democrats are shooting themselves in the feet, and my parents asked me if, how, I could really support President Dubya. The answer is that I don't support him; I don't support politics at all, which is why I don't vote. But I'm rooting for Dubya, the same way I root for the Braves. I'm rooting for him because I'm sick of liberalism doing exactly what Jim Kalb says it does: trying to tell other people what they want. If a majority of the American people want to re-elect Dubya, then I want that majority to win[*]. They have just as much right as my parents to vote for the United States they want to live in, and if the consequence of that is 30 years of a reactionary Supreme Court, well, that's how the Constitution says our republic works, and if you don't like it you can move to Canada[**]. But if you do, be well aware that you brought that fate upon yourselves.

([*]: No, I haven't forgotten Florida 2000. But if a President noted for his divisiveness actually gains election share after four years in office, then the people noting the divisiveness are barking up the wrong tree.

([**]: No offense intended; I'm quite fond of Canada, and I'd be happy to live there if I weren't living here.)

2004-01-22T12:17:00.000-05:00

Conservatism, Libertarianism, Liberalism

I don't agree with everything Tyler Cowen says here, let alone everything Jim Kalb says. But they're participating in the important conversation, which is more than can be said for many of the liberals of my acquaintance.

Because, fundamentally, Kalb is right about this: "Rational political arrangements always rest on pre-rational and pre-political connections. That's why the modernist idea that it's possible to construct a society doesn't work." Society cannot be constructed; it must evolve. I'm a libertarian because I believe that the best way to facilitate evolution is to get out of the way as much as possible. That may be wrong, but at least it makes sense. (Kalb's) conservatism, on the other hand, is nonsensical, because it endorses what has evolved but denies that evolution continues. And (classical) liberalism is even more nonsensical, because it denies evolution entirely in favor of top-down control, i.e. totalitarianism. There's at least one version of liberalism--market socialism--that successfully repudiates the totalitarian impulse, but my current best guess is that market socialism reduces to libertarianism on empirical grounds: libertarian theory, when fully worked out, will be market socialism, and market socialism, when fully thought through, will be libertarianism. If this hypothesis is true, then political theory is a solved problem. I expect to see empirical demonstration, one way or the other, in my lifetime.

(Why are we so close? Because there are, fundamentally, only two positions still in the game: market (the US), and socialism (the EU). Everything else has failed. And obviously the solution lies somewhere in the middle. I believe--as I posted a few weeks ago--that European socialism will be dead within 20 years, possibly 10; other people believe that American capitalism will explode within the same period. "My lifetime" includes plenty of lag time beyond that. There will be a decision. It's a great time to be alive! ;-) .)

2004-01-20T14:02:00.000-05:00

"In fact, I should be back from the Marvelous Monthly Minyan in plenty of time to catch the Carolina-Connecticut game -- I don't often watch TV on Shabbat, but if I am to follow the customs of my fathers there's no denying that ACC games are holy."
--Naomi Chana

2004-01-18T23:38:00.000-05:00

"Like Saul on the bike path to Damascus, Howard Dean found God, and so God decided to take another look at Wes Clark. Then Clark announced that he has studied "Catholicism, Protestantism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, [and] Kabbalism," and God, Who, after all those parted waters and halted suns and multiplied loaves, expects people to recognize that Catholicism and Protestantism are forms of Christianity and that Kabbalism is a form of Judaism, and Who does not take kindly to having the secret knowledge of the true divinity represented in the sub-lunar sphere by a Clark-supporting culturally obsolete pop star with a fetish for red string, thought to shine His countenance upon Joe Lieberman. It was the right thing to do; the senator had earned the endorsement. But He understood, in His wisdom, that this would be too predictable and too Jewish, and so He directed His spirit toward Virginia Beach, where He revealed the outcome of the election to Pat Robertson, thereby demonstrating to a country captiously obsessed with the imperfections of its notables that the Almighty sometimes has a purpose for broken vessels."
--Leon Wieseltier

2004-01-15T23:17:00.000-05:00

"There's been talk around the blogs about systematically tracking reporters, assigning a blogger to analyze the reporting of a specific professional journalist. I don't think this is a very good idea. [...] What you'll find out when you track reporters is that they aren't doing their job. This has very limited value."
--Dave Winer, who then does propose a more constructive alternative

2004-01-15T17:20:00.000-05:00

Lileks gets it exactly right: it's "the sort of news that transcends today". And that's worth more than those who are trapped in current events can understand.

Jerry Oltion won a Nebula Award in 1997 for "Abandon In Place", a novella in which (to give away nothing) ghost Saturn Vs start launching from Canaveral once a week until a veteran astronaut realizes, intuits, that it's the long-lost spirit of the space program clamoring to return to the Moon. So they do. It's totally hokey; Oltion knew it and all the award voters knew it. It won a Nebula anyway because the members of the SFWA believe in that vision, the vision of humanity transcending itself, not over time but merely by action, even though it is merely human. So despite the bad timing, despite the uncertain budget, despite the bad planning, this announcement is important. We must venture outward, and there is never a bad time to remind ourselves that we can and we will.

2004-01-14T11:41:00.000-05:00

Conservatism and libertarianism.

From the linked article by Julia Magnet: "What Stillman notices in Barcelona is that irresponsible politics and irresponsible sexual behavior spring from the same ideology." Irresponsible morality, too. Conservatives are not wrong to see a link between social/political radicalism and moral radicalism. The question is where, not whether, the battle line is to be drawn.

The answer is: at morality ("you should not"), not at politics ("you may not") or society ("you must not"). The latter battles can't be won. "Freedom creates civil society. Political compulsion destroys it." That's why libertarianism is the only path to a healthy society, no matter what one's personal definition of social health may be.

2004-01-14T11:04:00.000-05:00

"We must give, and have given, this policy with our allies and with the United Nations every opportunity to work. It is evident, however, that the cost in human lives in allowing this policy to continue is too great. In addition, and perhaps more importantly for the United States, we are now in a position of ignoring, as many did in the 1940s, one of the worst crimes committed in history. If we ignore these behaviors, no matter where they occur, our moral fiber as a people becomes weakened. As the Catholic Church and others lost credibility during the Holocaust for not speaking out, so will the United States lose credibility and our people lose confidence in themselves as moral beings if the United States does not take action.
"Since it is clearly no longer possible to take action in conjunction with NATO and the United Nations, I have reluctantly concluded that we must take unilateral action."
--Howard Dean, 1995

2004-01-12T22:14:00.000-05:00

"Why is it teenagers are always so f---ing smug?"
"Because they share a great secret," Martin said mildly, and took another bite of sprouts.
"Oh yeah? What's that?"
"Their parents are all assholes."
--Elizabeth Hand, "Last Summer at Moon Hill"

2004-01-12T21:35:00.000-05:00

"One is encouraged to remount as soon as possible, but not by the horse."
--Gene Wolfe

2004-01-09T15:22:00.000-05:00

"There is something of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde about Richard Rorty. Who is who is relative to the philosophical angle from which you consider the strange case."
--NDPR

2004-01-09T13:54:00.000-05:00

The importance of community.

2004-01-08T23:46:00.000-05:00

"Democratic politics have to find a way of accomodating communal feelings, and Nehru's lofty disdain for all faiths, except "scientific socialism", helped to provoke the kind of religious extremism that is now causing so much damage. A man who saw religion as nothing more than "senseless and criminal bigotry" was not best placed to understand the concerns of Muslims who feared the domination of Hindus in the struggle for independence. His advice to a Muslim friend that he should read more Bertrand Russell was typical of his own background and taste, but perhaps not the most useful counsel he could have given. And the aggressive secularism of Nehru's Congress Party, though intellectually appealing, was unable to contain the religious chauvinism of a rising Hindu middle class."
--Ian Buruma, reviewing Shashi Tharoor's Nehru: The Invention of India in the NY Times Book Review

I noticed this because it's case in point for the argument I was trying to make to my family over dinner, about how liberal humanism in the US ended up producing Dubya. My family doesn't understand the Christian mindset, and therefore can't see why the policies they advocate alienate Christians. And then they wonder why the US is experiecing a conservative religious revival, and electing its President to fit. This is why.

2004-01-08T17:49:00.000-05:00

"Once character is put at the center of moral theory, its study must issue from reliable methods of inquiry. Those methods are largely empirical, and they must address two key issues: the natural process that gives us our natures and the actual results of that process. Aristotle was wrong about the process whereby we get our natures, and Darwin was right. We get our natures (our genotypic and phenotypic psychological traits) from the processes of evolution. Some traits have adaptive explanations; some do not. But all come from the vicissitudes of evolution. There is nothing about that process that guarantees that we will have a set of psychological traits that properly nurtured will be unconflicted. The process whereby we get our natures has a very limited interest in our happiness or our psychological flourishing. If reproduction is best achieved by psychopathic character traits, then the process whereby we get our natures is as open to that possibility as one that will make us contented cows. Any moral psychology associated with virtue ethics must recognize this fact and cannot rely on any articles of faith or postulates of practical reason about the ultimate reconciliation of morality and flourishing. To do so is to abandon the commitment to reliable methods of inquiry about what virtue ethics puts at the center of moral theory. But to suggest that naturalism only constrains what morality requires of us is to suggest that morality has some foundation outside our nature the demands of which must accommodate our frailties."
--NDPR

2004-01-08T09:18:00.000-05:00

"A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they not be inhabited, what a waste of space."
--Thomas Carlyle, stargazing

2004-01-05T16:58:00.000-05:00

What You Can't Say.

2004-01-04T08:04:00.000-05:00

"[...] a term so heavily laden with associations as to be an embarrassment whether we translate it or not."
--Henri Frankfort, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man

He was speaking of 'logos', but the remark is true in general.

2004-01-01T13:15:00.000-05:00

The transhuman singularity.

In response I wrote the following:

If, in fact, we can't predict anything beyond the singularity, we're faced with a dilemma: should we allow research into transhuman intelligence? It's possible that TI will be benevolent, so we should strive to create it; but it's also possible that TI will think as little of us as we think of mosquitos, and would feel no qualms about extinguishing us. That wouldn't be bad for the universe, of course, but it would probably be unethical. And if we can't even try to guess, can't even hope to assess the likelihoods involved, on what grounds should we make this crucial decision?

(SF hat-tip: Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division.)

But--fortunately--there are some reasons to believe that there will be no other qualitative leap than the one which separates us from the other primates. That leap--arguably--is language: not a limited language (chimps have that; probably even housecats have that), but an infinite language: one in which everything that can be said can be said. Any complete language can, in theory, be translated into any other complete language. And it seems likely, for Godelian reasons, that human language is complete. If not, we're back to singularity; but if so, then the difference between human thinking and transhuman thinking must remain merely quantitative: TIs will think like we do, only better.

Anf if there is only one kind of thinking, then there is also only one kind of ethics--that is, only one true ethics. We may expect TI to have a better grasp of that truth than we do. It is certain that respect for persons is part of that truth. And therefore it would not be a severe risk for us to place our welfare under their advice or control.

(SF hat-tip: John C. Wright, The Golden Age.)

If this is the case, then we can predict the future, and the validity of our predictions will tend to correlate with the correctness of our understanding of ethics. Not physics; ethics. Because predicting transhuman technology is easy: anything is possible. So the important question is not what TI will be able to do, but what they will choose to do.

This is, I think, exactly the kind of problem science-fiction is good at. Imagine utopias and try to break them. (SF hat-tip: Martha Soukup, "A Defense of the Social Contracts".) Will any of our guesses be correct?--presumably not. But some of them will probably be on the right track, and we may be able to see which, and why. So singularity is not the only possibility for a transhuman future. And the question may well reduce to a straightforward, though not simple, question about language.

PS. Ken MacLeod is awesome; everyone should all read everything he writes. The Golden Age is terrible. "A Defense of the Social Contracts" doesn't involve TI, but it won a Nebula Award in 1994 and I read it two days ago so it's fresh in my mind.

2003-12-18T13:43:00.000-05:00

"So far, bad philosophy has killed a lot more people than biotechnology. Perhaps we should regulate it...."
--Glenn Reynolds

2003-12-18T13:40:00.000-05:00

"[...] the large can of whupass which was opened up by Judah the Hammer. The fable about the oil was just for the kids."
--someone in the comment thread

2003-12-18T12:34:00.000-05:00

"France is in bad shape. Strange as this sounds, it reminded me in a way of some of my visits to the Soviet Union in the late eighties. [...] France is not really a democracy but a bureaucratic state in which, instead of voting for change, interest groups take to the streets to make themselves heard on various issues."
--Roger Simon

"Get a grip."
--someone in the comment thread

But I think Simon is on to something. France is a state that not only doesn't work the way it wants to work--that's normal, the US is the same way--but can't work the way it wants to work. It isn't productive enough to support its policies, and its policies don't permit any major changes to its productivity. That makes revolution--perhaps invisible, perhaps violent--inevitable. The French socialist state, like the Russian "communist" state, is doomed. Its demise may not be prompt or catastrophic, so perhaps it's nothing to worry about. But you know what the fastest-growing minority in France is, don't you?

2003-12-14T20:18:00.000-05:00

"Dead 2200 years, but still producing first-rate scholarship!"
--Josh Chafetz

2003-12-14T16:09:00.000-05:00

"After [their festival was over], two thousand Spartans set off for Athens. They were so anxious not to be late that they were in Attica on the third day after leaving Sparta. They had, of course, missed the battle, but such was their passion to see the Persians, that they went to Marathon to have a look at the bodies. That done, they praised the Athenians on their good work, and returned home."
--Herodotus, Histories, VI.120

2003-12-14T08:40:00.000-05:00

Don't believe me, believe this famous guy! Michael Crichton on environmentalism.

2003-12-12T17:52:00.000-05:00

"Rousseau has said in his Emile (book iv.): "Even though philosophers should be in a position to discover the truth, which of them would take any interest in it? Each one knows well that his system is not better founded than the others, but he supports it because it is his. There is not a single one of them who, if he came to know the truth and the false, would not prefer the falsehood that he had found to the truth discovered by another. Where is the philosopher who would not willingly deceive mankind for his own glory? Where is he who in the secret of his heart does not propose to himself any other object than to distinguish himself? Provided that he lifts himself above the vulgar, provided that he outshines the brilliance of his competitors, what does he demand more? The essential thing is to think differently from others. With believers he is an atheist; with atheists he would be a believer." How much substantial truth there is in these gloomy confessions of this man of paintful sincerity!"
--Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense Of Life (p.53)

2003-12-09T22:38:00.000-05:00

"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."
--Douglas Adams

2003-12-08T13:32:00.000-05:00

"There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts."
--Vladimir Nabokov

2003-12-05T21:17:00.000-05:00

"Consciousness is an ontology."
--Jaron Lanier, summarizing George Berkeley and the quantum mystics

2003-12-05T12:39:00.000-05:00

"As much as we're all supposed to please God in any way we can, we should not be
seeking to earn greatness or prestige in the eyes of God or others. Jesus Himself pre-empted such a conclusion by saying that one who wants to be great must become the servant of all.
"Fanaticism happens (and I'm only saying this is one of many possible routes to fanaticism) when people start thinking that the world owes them something for their visible obedience to God, that they should be regarded as great people, that they are owed such regard, and, because they are so close to God, are justified in correcting people who do not show the proper respect to them. The arrangement is that we glorify God for all eternity; God is under no obligation to glorify us in the here and now. He will raise up and put down whomever He chooses. No-one who gets a head full of his/her own present or future importance is going to be of much use."
--Geoffrey Ream

2003-12-05T11:49:00.000-05:00

"The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at the creation of the world."
--Emerson

2003-12-05T11:48:00.000-05:00

"Mayflies, in contrast, have useless vestigial mouths. Flies suck."
--Michael Sims, Darwin's Orchestra

2003-12-03T14:12:00.000-05:00

"The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err, and err, and err again
but less and less and less."
--Piet Hein

2003-12-03T11:40:00.000-05:00

Conservative of what? I am emphatically not "Republican not conservative"; in fact, I would suggest that under Popshot's terms, the Republican Party is conservative not Republican. It has a Republican wing, of course, but such people tend toward independent, just as democratic Democrats (as opposed to the liberal elitists who prefer to do other people's thinking for them) tend toward independent. (Political parties are no exception to this rule: every ideological movement eventually falls prey to reification of the platform--the stance forgetting the reasons for the stance--which drives out anyone who can actually think.) And both groups of independents believe basically the same things: there's no difference in principle between libertarians and market socialists, just some differences in judgment. Calling such people Republicans is just as absurd as calling them Democrats.

But the real difference between the libertarians and the market socialists is precisely the difference between conservatives and liberals: the question their judgments diverge on is, Is our present society good enough? Liberals say no, we need change; conservatives say yes, stay the course. Those judgments--those definitions--don't change. What changes over historical time is "the course" we seek to hold or change.

Virginia Postrel said it best: the course the new conservatives seek to hold is that of dynamism, of change itself. We see a society that is able to adapt, and we want it to keep that ability. The present society we want to conserve is not "the United States circa 2003"; it's constitutional capitalism as a whole, where it may lead. Not that there are no possible bad outcomes; clearly things could go wrong. But we believe--we judge, on the basis of all the evidence available to us--that the best way to avoid future wrongness is the way we're using now. We believe that our current system, broadly construed, is and will remain an effective way to adapt to the future by weighing and balancing our diverse concerns.

"But--but--" sputter the liberals. There are so many things wrong with our current society! Yes--but we're working on them. And the current rate of progress is reasonably close to optimal, reasonably close to the proper balance between moral need and practical feasibility. Why do we think that?--because we think that constitutional capitalism is exactly the kind of process that is best equipped to find such a balance. By combining the economic and moral facts of life, constitutional capitalism is as close as we can come to a realistic model of how society actually works. Is it perfect?--of course not. But one of the ways in which it successfully models reality is that it has the ability to modify itself if the need is clear enough. The more insightful among us may correctly identify a need before it becomes "clear enough", but the Constitution is quite clear, and quite correct, about the proper reward for such insight: one vote plus the right to speak freely in order to persuade. That standard, that procedure, is not perfect. But it is better than any other ever devised, and we conservatives believe that it's good enough.

Postscript. One of the sub-headings of Jonah Goldberg's essay (linked from the Popshot piece) is "Maybe The Left Jumped The Shark?" That's exactly right. There was a time when liberalism, relative to its then-present, was the correct way to go: before government was constitutional, before markets were free. Then, radical changes were required for society to evolve: the Magna Carta, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution. When that era of changes ended--when the foundation became firm--is an interesting historical question. (I would argue that it was when the Anglo-Dutch alliance thwarted the Spanish Armada, but a case could be made that it was the rise of labor unions in the 20th century.) But at some point the dynamistic balance was struck. And that was the point when liberalism as an overarcing philosophy (as opposed to liberalism as a position on specific political questions, like gay marriage) did indeed jump the shark.

2003-12-03T09:27:00.000-05:00

On May 11, 1935, at 4:44 AM (EDT), the song sparrow (Melospiza melodia) known as 4M began to sing. He sang until seven minutes after sunset, nearly 15 hours, repeating his call 2,305 times.

Margaret Nice counted, notebook in hand. Her children brought her breakfast and lunch out to the "wild neglected piece of flood plain" behind their house. It was by no means the only time Nice took meals outdoors. She was a mother and a homemaker, but she also had a master's degree in ornithology. The amateur birding club in Columbus, OH, refused to accept a female member, but the American Ornithological Union had better sense. Fluent in French and German, Nice reviewed foreign publications for American journals, and later edited the journal Bird-Banding. A French colleague called her work on song sparrows "perhaps the most important contribution yet published to our knowledge of the life of a species". And the Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz called Mrs. Margaret Nice the founder of ethology--the study of natural animal behavior.

(Hat tip: Darwin's Orchestra, by Michael Sims.)

2003-12-01T15:51:00.000-05:00

"The gospel of truth is joy, to those who receive from the Father the grace of knowing him."
--The gnostic Gospel of Truth, 1:1

2003-12-01T15:50:00.000-05:00

"Origen even suggests that the holy spirit inserted such contradictions into John's gospel in order to startle the reader into asking what they mean, and to show that these stories are not meant to be taken literally."
--Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief

Origen wrote in the 3rd century CE. As Pagels shows, the early Christians understood many things about their religion that the later church more or less intentionally forgot.

2003-11-19T19:17:00.000-05:00

"The cavalry hunted all these animals on various occasions. In the case of the wild asses, when anyone chased them, they ran ahead and then stopped still; for they ran much faster than the horses. When the horses again got near, they would do the same thing, and it was impossible to catch them except by stationing the horsemen at intervals from each other and hunting in relays. [...] No one succeeded in catching an ostrich."
--Xenophon, The Persian Expedition

2003-11-19T15:06:00.000-05:00

"Being wrong is the fate of lesser mortals. Great philosophers instead suffer the indignity of being constantly misunderstood."
--Hans-Johann Glock

2003-11-17T16:20:00.000-05:00

"Because meta-data describes a worldview, incompatibility is an
inevitable by-product of vigorous argument. It would be relatively
easy, for example, to encode a description of genes in XML, but it
would be impossible to get a universal standard for such a
description, because biologists are still arguing about what a gene
actually is. There are several competing standards for describing
genetic information, and the semantic divergence is an artifact of a
real conversation among biologists. You can't get a standard til you
have an agreement, and you can't force an agreement to exist where
none actually does."
--ibid.

2003-11-17T16:11:00.000-05:00

"The people working on the Semantic Web greatly overestimate the value
of deductive reasoning (a persistent theme in Artificial Intelligence
projects generally). The great popularizer of this error was Arthur
Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories have done more damage to
people's understanding of human intelligence than anyone other than
Rene Descartes. Doyle has convinced generations of readers that what
seriously smart people do when they think is to arrive at inevitable
conclusions by linking antecedent facts. As Holmes famously put it,
'when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however
improbable, must be the truth.'
"This sentiment is attractive precisely because it describes a world
simpler than our own."
--Clay Shirky

2003-11-10T18:16:00.000-05:00

"Men can embody truth but they cannot know it."
--Yeats

2003-11-07T15:23:00.000-05:00

"I took away something else from the Matrix trilogy: it is a product of deeply confused people. They want it all. They want individualism and community; they want secularism and transcendence; they want the purity of committed love and the licentious fun of an S&M club; they want peace and the thrill of violence; they want God, but they want to design him on their own screens with their own programs by their own terms for their own needs, and having defined the divine on their own terms, they bristle when anyone suggests they have simply built a room with a mirror and flattering lighting. All three Matrix movies, seen in total, ache for a God. But they can’t quite go all the way."
--Lileks

2003-11-05T15:41:00.000-05:00

"I don't think the humanities are in danger because their academic practitioners are getting lost in theory; I think the humanities are in danger because they're somehow getting taught so poorly that humans consider them irrelevant. Which scares me a lot more than the latest Dark Lord to come down the pike."
--Naomi Chana

2003-10-30T10:06:00.000-05:00

Many critics will tell you that their best allies are authors who write letters to the editor in response to a negative review, because such authors more often than not display exactly the attitudes and bad prose style that earned them the negative review. Here, with a slight twist, we have an instant classic of the genre:

"To the Editor:
"In Brooke Allen's review of a new biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Oct. 5), she inappropriately underestimates the ability of high school students to comprehend literary pieces like "The Scarlet Letter." Not only are Allen's comments irrelevant to the purpose of the review, but they also offer no evidence for her rude assertion. In fact, according to the National Adult Literacy Survey, 23 percent of the 191 million adults in America perform at the lowest reading proficiency level. On the other hand, we, as 16-year-old students at the Hockaday School, have mastered the works of Homer, Emily Bronte, Virginia Woolf, and Hawthorne. Thus, reading comprehension is dependent upon the quality of literary exposure, not upon age."

(There's lots to laugh at here, but my favorite is "mastered".)

For the record: when I was 16 I was an editor of my high school newspaper, and had learned to identify poorly-written opinion pieces. I'd also read The Scarlet Letter, and I knew even at the time that I hadn't really understood it at all. And finally, contra these students' lack of literary judgment, Allen's remark about high school was in fact germane, though not essential, to her review.