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Description: A graduate student in mathematics and a philosophy major take on politics and culture with the following aspirational motto: ‘Deregulate your mind.’
Last Update: 11:42:33 03/02/2006
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First Fetched: 00:18:18 01/31/2004
Last Updated: 11:42:33 03/02/2006
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For any of you that may be reading this via RSS, the change from Movable Type to WordPress means that the RSS feed for selling waves is now located at http://www.sellingwaves.com/feed/ If you’re interested, that is.
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Over at Catallarchy, Micha Ghertner discusses “How To Tell You’ve Won An Argument;” namely, when your opponent concedes that his position is less coherent than your own, you’ve won. Now, I don’t want to dispute his point, but rather to question how relevant it is. I’ve touched on this before, but I’m a bit dubious of the notion that the “correct” position is the one that wins arguments between advocates of two different positions. Obviously, in the first place, there’s nothing to prevent both arguers from being wrong; the relative lack of coherence of one of their positions means, at best, that the other’s position is “less” wrong (assuming that even makes sense and assuming that coherence is a measure of correctness).1 But this is somewhat superficial (and besides, already mentioned and acknowledged in the comments to Ghertner’s post); more importantly, I want to cast doubts upon the parenthetical assumption I made above, that coherence is some sort of infallible metric for ...
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I just got an email from my hosting company…apparently the old Movable Type comment script is causing some sort of server malfunction, so they’ve disabled all comments on this site. Since I refuse to pay for the new version of MT, I may end up doing what I’ve been thinking about for a while: namely, switching to WordPress or some other alternative. Which seems to be the thing to do these days, anyway. Fortunately, spring break is coming up next week, so I may actually have some free time to wrestle with it. In the meantime, feel free to email any comments you may have.
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It’s almost comforting that such invidious fluffy-minded sludge as this is floating around, as it seems, like religion, to keep the middle-brows hypnotized by “beautiful sentiments” which are so vague as to keep them from actually getting together and doing anything. It’s sort of weird to hear this weakly Marxist social-democratic pap which used to be shouted from the rooftops now being whispered in a low monotonous whine. The author avows his fealty to Jeremy Bentham, not Marx, and calls it utilitarianism not Marxism, but there are many illegitimate fathers along this line of thought. The root of the idea is that, now that neuroscience has supposedly made it possible to actually identify what makes us happy, the idea of happiness has become quantifiable, and hence a program of providing the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people has become objectively possible. However, the author does not make the slightest effort to apply these wonders of modern science to actually ...
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RIP, H.S.T. (See also “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Regrettably necessary,” and “Don’t Vote!”)
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“Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.” —John von Neumann1 This, in a sense, is at the heart of why mathematics is so hard. Math is all about abstraction, about generalizing the stuff you can get a sense of to apply to crazy situations about which you otherwise have no insight whatsoever. Take, for example, one way of understanding the manifold structure on SO(3), the special orthogonal group on 3-space. In order to explain what I’m talking about, I’ll have to give several definitions and explanations and each, to a greater or lesser extent, illustrates both my point about abstraction and von Neumann’s point about getting used to things. First off, SO(3) has a purely algebraic definition as the set of all real (that is to say, the entries are real numbers) 3 × 3 matrices A with the property ATA = I and the determinant of A is 1. That is, if you take A and flip rows and columns, you get the transpose of A, denoted AT; if you then multiply ...
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"Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them." This is good advice, especially for democracies, which tend (as even Plato and Thucydides noted) to have short-term attention spans. But we shouldn't forget an equally important lesson, articulated most forcefully by Nietzsche: The health of a person and a people also depends vitally on the capacity to forget. Forgetting is necessary to free ourselves from imperfectly understood "lessons of history," so that we can see the challenges ahead clearly, without preconceptions or prejudice. Forgetting is also the better part of forgiving, and there are whole domains of political controversy -- indeed, whole regions of the world -- where a little less history could be of service in this respect. --Eliot Noyes, Getting Past the Past
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At the conjunction of this critique of reductionism in physics and this interview with Benoit Mandelbrot I think one sees the same basic dynamic at work: a devaluation of simplicity and generalization in math and science, what I suppose Mandelbrot might call “smoothness,” and a preference for the complex and the multifarious. To some extent this seems to cut against the basic scientific impulse to simplify, to generalize, which is what a law or an equation generally does. In Laughlin I think there is even a certain disillusionment with realism perhaps not totally dissimilar from that in the analysis of language by dear friend Wittgenstein. Although, by encouraging investigation of the specifics and intricacies of phenomena which seem to be superficially covered by the most general and basic laws and to give up idle speculation about the far nether regions of the universe in space and time which cannot in any way be corroborated, he seems to be trying to bring physics back into the ...
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Note to Curt: Just because the state claims the authority to apprehend and punish rapists doesn’t mean that apprehending and punishing rapists is a form of state coercion. Nor is the notion that rape is bad an example of state coercion. Depending on your perspective, this is either a moral truth derived from God/reason/whatever or a widely-accepted social convention. Similarly, the notion that one can own property is (again, depending on your perspective) either morally necessary or a widely-accepted social convention that seems to work pretty well (here I’m dispensing with Communists and other fools who have nothing intelligent to say on the matter). Either way, the fact that the state claims ultimate authority to adjudicate property disputes does not make private property a form of state coercion. (Further reading)
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“Perhaps you’re familiar with “the tragedy of the commons,” a social dilemma outlined by the late biologist Garrett Hardin in a famous 1968 essay of the same name. The dilemma is that when individuals pursue personal gain, the net result for society as a whole may be impoverishment. (Pollution is the most familiar example.) Such thinking has fallen out of fashion amid President Bush’s talk of an “ownership society,” but its logic is unassailable.” That response seems like a pretty damn obtuse interpretation of the essay, simply because the essay is nothing if not a plea for the creation of property rights. Furthermore, while it is true that Hardin claims that pursuing individual gain leads to group catastrophe, the word “when” in the paragraph above implies that there are times when the individual doesn’t, whereas Hardin claims that individuals basically always pursue their own interest, which is the problem in high-density situations where some amout of coordination is necessary. ...
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Just some cheerful words to chew on while our politicians wear their enamels off congratulating themselves about the Iraqi election: “The collapse of the rival giant [the Soviet Union] has exaggerated Americas apparent strength because it has so much more economic muscle than any single rival. But for many decades Americas share of the worlds economic output has been in decline. Think of a see-saw. America at one end is now easily outweighed by any substantial grouping at the other, and most of those powers are on friendly terms with each other. Americas modesty in 1945 understated its muscle, just as Bushite vanity overstates it today. He has over-reached. His country is overstretched, losing economic momentum, losing world leadership, and losing the philosophical plot. America is running into the sand.” Maybe I’ve been hanging out in France, where declinism (both French and American) never goes out of fashion, for too long, but that assessment seems more convincing than this ...
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I might deduce one final consequence of a skepticism in regards to temporality and causality. If our only experience of the world is of an existent reality, such that something uncreated or destroyed is literally unimaginable, the superfluity of religion becomes very evident. Since it is on the basis of a parallel between finite objects, which are presumed to be necessarily created, and the universe in its totality, which in turn therefore needs its Creator, that modern religions ultimately justify themselves, if creation, rather than lack of creation, is taken to be the phenomenon unjustified by experience then the concept of God is unwarranted.
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I may have bored everyone to death about this topic, but I have my last exam tomorrow, so here is my final thought about what distinguishes science. Most of the descriptions of science that I know of don’t really explain how science progresses without falling into a quaint mythology about approaching some metaphysical truth. Kuhn doesn’t, Popper doesn’t, Pierre Duhem doesn’t, and I myself have neglected to account for it to some extent. I think the key is that science, at least experimental science, is essentially concerned with predicting the future. Every hypothesis, in essence, is a prediction about the future. What distinguishes science from other forms of prediction is the emphasis on verification, the insistence on framing predictions in such a way that when they are tested they can be decisively answered positively or negatively. In other, the goal is not to not be wrong but to achieve a definitive positive answer. Even a definite negative answer is preferable to none at ...
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About a month ago I wrote this entry which was, I think, somewhat misunderstood, at least by the one confirmed reader of it. In it I tried to argue that there are some fundamental problems involved in conceptualizing time which, in my mind, appear intractable, and hence its existence as a concept contradictory, impossible. To which it was replied that of course time has an existence, as a social convention, a mental framework. Of that I have no doubt-it would be impossible for me to refute even if I wanted to. My point was about metaphysics, not sociology, and in that regard I don’t think it was that much different from that expressed by St. Augustine regarding time: “if no one asks me what it is I know what it is, but if someone asks me I don’t know.” Or, even more notably, Kant, who regarded time, in addition to space, not as an entity, process, or property of the physical world, but as a filter of percpetion, the mental framework which orders our experience of the world. Which ...
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As promised, quotations from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations are now available. Again, both German and English versions of each are reproduced, though the task was made considerably easier than in other cases by the fact that the edition I used was a dual-language edition. I (like, I suspect, many others) find Wittgenstein simultaneously fascinating and annoying. On the one hand, he makes interesting and insightful observations on all sorts of phenomena; on the other, he never really synthesizes those observations into a single, coherent argument. For example, when he says that “Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination” (I§6) or that “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language” (I§109) or that “The fluctuation of scientific definitions: what to-day counts as an observed concomitant of a phenomenon will to-morrow be used to define it” (I§79) I find myself saying “Right on!”; but I also ...
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I’ve just returned from the beach (okay, I actually got back yesterday), which, at least partially, explains why there have been no updates in the last week. Anyway, as anyone who knows me at all well would expect, I spent far more time at the beach reading than doing anything else (though I did do a few other things). And let’s just say my choice of reading material didn’t exactly fit the stereotype of what one is supposed to read at the beach. Instead, I finally decided that it was time for me to read Proust’s Swann’s Way and Goethe’s Faust. For those that haven’t read them, I highly recommend both (though I have to admit that Proust is a little hard to get into). To encourage those that, like myself up to last week, have been putting these books off, I’ve compiled a couple of lists of my favorite quotations. In deference to those who actually speak French and/or German, I’ve also managed to track down the original, untranslated version of each (and yes, this took a really ...
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Once upon a time, reading The Chronicle’s rip on Wal-Mart would have made my blood boil, but now the only reaction it seems to cause is a slow, sad shaking of the head at its spurious reasoning. The article’s author, Liza Featherstone, wants to portray Wal-Mart, yet again, as the bad guy, causer of poverty and wrecker of lives.1 Now, it goes without saying that the argument is light on facts and heavy on anecdotes; as it happens, the only hard demographics in the whole article are the following: Only 6 percent of Wal-Mart shoppers have annual family incomes of more than $100,000. A 2003 study found that 23 percent of Wal-Mart Supercenter customers live on incomes of less than $25,000 a year. More than 20 percent of Wal-Mart shoppers have no bank account, long considered a sign of dire poverty. And while almost half of Wal-Mart Supercenter customers are blue-collar workers and their families, 20 percent are unemployed or elderly. Based on these facts, Featherstone jumps in line to ...
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A little picture I took a few weeks ago; click the below image for the full view:
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This article about Gödel and Einstein is really, genuinely fascinating, and shocking as well, even if exaggerated for dramatic purposes (as it might well be). It goes to show that, while I honestly don’t think the average scientist is consciously close-minded to revolutionary theories, as Kuhn might lead us to believe, the scientific institution possesses a uniquely hierarchic structure that does tend to impose orthodoxy to a much greater degree than might be readily believed. On the other hand, I would think that the basic impossibility of time as commonly conceived would be intuitively obvious. Both the “present” and “future” are inconceivable, since all perceptions are basically reactive, and hence we perceive only what is already past. Well, actually I should revise that slightly: the idea of the present moment is both theoretically and practically impossible; that is not the case with the future, at least symbolically speaking, but since it’s unperceivable there’s also no ...
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I took an exam today, so here are two final cool-down tirades: I could add to my critique of Kuhn that even a non-“revolutionary” has a natural incentive to refine or re-shape the paradigm governing his activity—fame and glory, certainly, if it’s a big breakthrough, but also just solving his problems, be they great or small. So in one sense you could say that the work of the individual scientist resembles more Popper’s conception of science as a whole, i.e. conjecture followed by refutation, as long as that is qualified by noting that refutation is actually where problem-solving begins, not where it ends. I think that Popper was wrong to think in terms of universal, objective, direct-experiment-produced refutations, and I think Kuhn was right to criticize it, but if it is not right to imagine an objective standard governing refutation of ideas, it still seems clear that on an individual basis scientists (and people at large, for that matter) have personal criteria for continuing to ...
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Well, I still don’t have much time, but I can’t resist adding just one or two qualifications to my other remarks, with numbers corresponding to my last post: It should be obvious that the equivalence of “science” and “natural science” is more than just a semantic issue or an abbreviation. The debates in the social sciences such as anthropology, psychology, etc. regarding whether they are sciences or not is somewhat misleading. Most of the people involved in these debates seem to think it is a purely methodological issue, but, as I have already indicated, the methodology of science arises from the materialist philosophy underlying it, so unless these other disciplines are similarly willing to accept that ideological baggage, they cannot integrate into the sciences. Case in point: psychology is now finally starting to be regarded as a true science almost purely via its association with and increasing dominance by neuroscience. I think Kuhn’s paradigm model is good for explaining the ...
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Just two quick thoughts about science. I would expand on them more if I had the time, but I don’t: It annoys me when people, in my philosophy of science class and elsewhere, talk about science as a method rather than as a set of beliefs. Of course there is a method to science, but that’s not what makes it distinct from other areas of knowledge. It is especially galling when someone asserts that science is uniquely given to skepticism, to methodical investigation, to revision of its foundational beliefs, etc., in other words that it is the only truly “progressive” body of knowledge. But all of that only seems to be the case because, as Kuhn might say, we’re inside the scientific paradigm. When you really get down to it, science boils down to some materialistic beliefs that are essentially taken as datum, such as that everything is essentially physical, inanimate, material, and in motion. These have stayed more or less constant since the emergence of these beliefs, i.e. the ...
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Mark Edmundson, who’s admonishing people to read more, apparently has never heard of Friedrich Hayek: [BRIAN] LAMB: Here’s an older book spoken about by Milton Friedman, on the other side. EDMUNDSON: OK. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MILTON FRIEDMAN, AUTHOR AND ECONOMIST: It’s a book well worth reading by anybody, because it’s a very subtle analysis of why, how it is that well-meaning people who intend only to improve the lot of their fellows, tend to favor courses of action which have exactly the opposite effect. I think in my, from my point of view, the most interesting chapter in that book is one labeled, why the worst rise to the top. (END VIDEO CLIP) LAMB: He’s talking about “Road to Serfdom” - Hayek - a bible for people on the conservative political side. EDMUNDSON: I’m glad to know about it. Until this moment, I’ve heard nothing about it. But I will write it down and give it a look. I’d say Billy Beck has a point: How on earth do Americans get to that man’s point in life without ...
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This is a time for resuscitating some strange literary ghosts. Take this little paeon to e.e. cummings. Cummings doesn’t really hold any particular interest for me in his own right; his little word-games are amusing enough, maybe, but they give me about the same feeling as playing vintage original-Nintendo games. It’s barely entertainment, through a pretty heavily nostalgic filter. And yet the reviewer, maybe the author as well, I don’t know, seems to be trying to set him up as some kind of martyr for uncompromising, imperishable art. To me, the value of being uncompromising in art is not a lot higher than it is in, say, marriage. And in any case, cummings’ little doodles just don’t really even evoke the pathos even of the selfish isolated aesthetic mind like, say, the works of Ambrose Bierce. Whether comic or tragic, they were in any case written for the amusement and digestion of just a few, which these critics seem to consider all for the best, but, somewhat inconsistently, the ...
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I’ve only met one real hippie in Paris. Some of the American students I know here would have been surprised by that upon first arriving here. One in particularly, a friend of one of my friends back at school, much attached to wearing plaid sport jackets with corduroys and basketball shoes, a champion of the harmonica as a respectable instrument and, of course, still trying to act as a latter-day John the Baptist for Bob Dylan, I think expected more. I imagine he thought that the absence of large numbers of fundamentalist Christians and Republicans, combined with the usual French attitude towards our most obvious sacred cows meant that France would be a paradise of free love, joint-smoking on the sidewalks and philosophy mixed with jam sessions: in other words, the American college experience without disapproval from the elders. Well, the girls are out of range, the philosophy comes rapidly but angrily and smoking a splif (no real joints here) in public will practically get you sent ...
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As most of you have no doubt noticed, I tend to buy a lot of books. Aside from the fact that I’m something of a compulsive reader, I’m really enamored of the whole ritual of owning a book, from the initial purchase to the freedom to dog-ear and underline to the imposing solidity of a well-stocked bookcase. That’s all completely irrelevant to my point, other than to establish that I buy a lot of books. And, increasingly, the books that I buy, especially books published in the last decade or so and aspiring to literary merit, are adopting a sort of rough matte finish as a necessary part of good cover design. Apparently there’s something about matte finish that graphic designers think screams this book has literary merit. Now, admittedly, there’s something more compelling about the matte-finish-and-chiaroscuro-graphics school of cover design than the glossy-cover-and-embossed-letters school that reigned supreme in the ‘80’s and still dominates in the thriller/romance sector of the ...
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| 15:11:40 November 24, 2004, Wednesday (PST) |
Source: selling waves |
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A t-shirt I just saw: Guns don’t kill peoplePhysics kills people Needless to say, worn by a physics grad student.
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In the end, however, Europeans have not sought to counter U.S. hegemony in the usual, power-oriented fashion, because they do not find U.S. hegemony threatening in the traditional power-oriented way. Not all global hegemons are equally frightening. U.S. power, as Europeans well know, does not imperil Europe 's security or even its autonomy. Europeans do not fear that the United States will seek to control them; they fear that they have lost control over the United States and, by extension, over the direction of world affairs. If the United States is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, then, it is in large part because Europe wants to regain some measure of control over Washington 's behavior. The vast majority of Europeans objected to the U.S. invasion of Iraq not simply because they opposed the war. They objected also because U.S. willingness to go to war without the Security Council's approval -- that is, without Europe's approval -- challenged both Europe's world view and its ...
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Realized I haven’t commented on the election since it happens. Basically, I have nothing to say about the whole thing. Primarily, I was rooting for an electoral tie, just because it would have been delightfully ludicrous. Barring that I was hoping for Kerry to win the electoral vote but lose the popular vote, because (a) it would have been wonderfully ironic and (b) because legislative gridlock is always desirable and there wasn’t a chance in hell the Democrats were going to control either house of Congress. Okay, neither of those things actually happened and, to be honest, it all played out pretty much how I expected. I mean, I hate to say “I told you so”, but, well, I told you so: Bush is going to win this election. For better or for worse, his arguments are essentially positive: I will do X because I believe it is the right thing to do. Whether or not he believes his own arguments, and whether or not what he does exemplifies whatever beliefs he may actually have (and I’m ...
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First, choose a problem that nobody’s ever solved before. Be careful, though: the most common beginner’s mistake is to choose a problem that’s much too difficult. Fermat’s Last Theorem was an old favorite, but since Andrew Wiles proved that a while back, the new favorites are the Riemann Hypothesis and the Poincaré Conjecture. Rather, as a beginner, you want to pick something that’s within your grasp. I suggest picking two random 200-digit numbers (no need to make them up on your own; get your computer to do that) and adding them together. With probability 1, nobody in the history of the world has ever added these two numbers together before. Next, plug it into Mathematica or Maple. No red-blooded, God-fearing mathematician would ever dream of trying to solve a problem without plugging it into a computer and seeing what the answer is first. Sure, the numerical solution will probably be so vague as to be worthless, but this is how things are done. Now it’s time to get down to ...
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