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Man, if you have one tie, which you’ve been wearing every working day for five years, you definitely qualify as scruffy.

Honest, matt and lindsey, I know I’m scruffy, and regard myself as the second best bit of evidence that one can be scruffy while wearing a tie (my dad is the best bit). I was kidding.

Tom S—Here’s the story. I was a guest at a large “Question Time” – type event in London with Tooley and a couple of people connected with the government. Whitty was the moderator. Tooley dresses impeccably, and when I walked into the blue room he said, with genuine disappointment, “Oh, Harry, you could at least have worn a tie”. SO, a few months later when I letf, Whitty gave me a U of London tie as a parting gift (and a sort of joke). When I got back to Madison I started wearing it to work, my wife thinking the habit would last about 3 weeks. But I still do it 5 years later, and feel wierd without it now. But, scruffy I remain.

But what the complaint about the finite undecideability of G really reveals is a deeper fact at issue:
people who have a sense of style don’t need algorithms, and people who need algorithms are never going to get a clue.

What we’re dealing with here is something entirely non-algorithmic in nature: it’s closer to a secondary quality in things.

Imagine a color-blind person trying to come up with an algorithm for “green”—it would be hard to do, of course, but more to the point, it would be completely unrelated to how color-sighted people keep track of greenness.

That’s why, if you ask someone (your girlfriend, e.g.) for a complete and exhaust set of rules for what counts as “clashing”, she will say “it’s not a bunch of rules, you moron, you just look at it, and you can see it clashes!”. And then you realize that you were born fashion-blind, and there’s not much you can do. Someone can try to tell you phenylthiocarbamide tastes like, but if you cannot taste it, no algorithm can function as a substitute.

So the very fact of looking for an algorithm shows you that the person looking for it does not yet realize how deeply clueless they are.

[G]reat confusion ensued, and every one was compelled to drink large quantities of wine. Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others went away-he himself fell asleep, and as the nights were long took a good rest: he was awakened towards daybreak by a crowing of cocks, and when he awoke, the others were either asleep, or had gone away; there remained only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were drinking out of a large goblet which they passed round, and Socrates was discoursing to them. Aristodemus was only half awake, and he did not hear the beginning of the discourse; the chief thing which he remembered was Socrates compelling the other two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also. To this they were constrained to assent, being drowsy, and not quite following the argument. And first of all Aristophanes dropped off, then, when the day was already dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to sleep, rose to depart; Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At the Lyceum he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. In the evening he retired to rest at his own home.—Plato, Symposium

But regarding the continentals as PIBs (People In Black): a revolt is forming, led by Rosi Braidotti. Pastels have been seen!

http://virtualstoa.net/2002/08/27/80771552/

… but you have to hand it to US academics: they sure know how to organize a conference that feels like a serious business convention. There were actually men and women there in suits, especially those silver-sheeny ones in a mottled semi-reflective material that looks as if they descend from a job-lot of curtain lengths delivered by UFO somewhere over Colorado circa 1955… By dressing below this level, it was possible to regard oneself as a marginally dangerous intellectual presence, or at any rate a marginal one. (In the UK, by contrast, it is physically impossible to dress so low as to be the worst-dressed person present at the Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association).

Alan Carling, “Rational Choice Marxism and Postmodern Feminism: Towards a More Meaningful Incomprehension” in Rational Choice Marxism, ed. Terrell Carver and Paul Thomas, Pennsylvania University Press, 1995, p.301.