Ever since I learned to read, there’s been nothing better than to find a new author with a shelf full of books that I haven’t read[1]. Inevitably, though the day arrives when she (or he) becomes an old favourite with a shelf full of books I have read. The first I can remember was Rosemary Sutcliff; the most recent has been Patrick O’Brian. I’ve just reached the end of the Aubrey-Maturin series, though there are still a couple I’ve missed. I’ve always found finishing a series an ambiguous experience, and the following exchange from my blog has finally clarified the mixture of feelings.
From the monthly archives:
July 2004
It’s been a great pleasure having Ross Silverman of The Bloviator as a guest poster this week. Ross is a genuine expert, and The Bloviator is an excellent addition to anyone’s blog diet. Many thanks to Ross.
This is sort of a follow up to “Brian Leiter’s post”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/archives/001665.html on philosophy blogs in Newsweek. And equally belated.
Last week the Sydney Morning Herald ran an article by Paul Davies about “the possibility that our universe is a simulation”:http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/21/1090089219062.html. What was interesting, to me at least, was that the article cited Nick Bostrom’s argument to this effect in _The Philosophical Quarterly_. (An online version of Bostrom’s paper is “here”:http://www.simulation-argument.com/.) It isn’t every day you see a philosophy journal cited in the morning newspaper. Sadly Davies didn’t cite, or even talk about, my “refutation of Bostrom’s argument”:http://brian.weatherson.net/sims.pdf also in _The Philosophical Quarterly_. So I thought I may as well take the chance to revisit that debate and say what I thought was most important about it. Anyone who wants to write to the SMH making either of the points below is much more than welcome!
(Blog history note: I first found out about Bostrom’s paper through a chain of links starting with “Instapundit”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/003465.php, which probably makes my paper the first philosophy paper to be the result of a blog entry.)
I half-assume that most of you listen to BBC7 all the time, but that can’t be right. In its infancy The Economist very kindly referred to it as middle-brow, but I know that’s not true because my tastes are firmly lower-middle-brow, and it could have been programmed just for me. So for those of you who missed it, I have to belatedly alert you to a collection of the funniest sketches of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (sroll down the page), both, alas, no longer with us. Americans, in particular, who might be forgiven for believing that Dudley Moore was a talentless moron, will find conclusive evidence to the contrary. The rest of us can just wonder what on earth happened.
On Friday, George Lakoff of the Rockridge Instutute appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers to discuss the need for Progressives to improve their ability to get their message out to the American people. Specifically, he says they must develop the ability to counter Conservatives’ ruthless efficiency and almost fanatical devotion to Staying On Message. In spite of the fact that the message may use terms which define something completely contrary to what they propose to do, Conservatives’ ability to claim the language in which the debate will take place both puts Progressives on the defensive and diminishes how the left’s position looks in the eyes of the public. Lakoff, who has written about this issue in The American Prospect, calls this “framing,”
I thought I’d indulge my fantasy of joining the hard-core techie kids (like Kieran) by installing Linux on my home PC at the weekend. Bravely ignoring the concerns of my family — who feared for their own future access to the computer — I downloaded a disk image for Suse 9.1 (Personal edition) and rebooted from the CD-ROM. I even managed successfully to repartition my hard disk (and Windows still works). But under Linux I have no mouse (mine’s a Logitech Optical USB creature) and no network (despite faithfully copying down and reproducing details of DNS servers, gateways etc.). Much googling and initialization of modules later, I’m no further forward. The problem isn’t Linux as such, since Knoppix works fine direct from the CD, recognizing the rodent, happily working with other USB devices, and auto-configuring the network. But I’d like a “proper” version, nicely installed on my new partition, so that I can escape the “told you sos” and “what did you expects” of partner and children. All advice gratefully received.
This short film by zefrank seemed to make it to some corners of the blogosphere in March, but I don’t think it got the type of exposure it deserves. Go behind-the-scenes to learn about the making of the yellow-orange-red alert system (Tinky Winky reference and all!:). Warning, only visit the rest of the site if you have plenty of time to spare!
I finished Andrew Crumey’s “Mr Mee”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312268033/junius-20 last night, and, to adopt the “Chris Brooke evaluative vocabulary”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_04_01_archive.html#108221387921088431 , it is truly splendid and I’m going to read his other books as soon as I can. Crumey weaves together three interlocking stories: the unworldly octogenarian Mr Mee, and his discovery of the internet, porn and sex; the reflections of a terminally ill professor of French literature on his life, work on Rousseau, Proust, and (most pressingly) his plan to seduce his favourite student; and the adventures of Ferrand and Minard, two characters from Rousseau’s _Confessions_. I’ll avoid posting spoilers, but along with the “Monty Hall problem”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002227.html , we’re also treated to versions of Searle’s Chinese Room and Ned Block’s entire population of China, and one of the protagonists, seduced by an 18th century anticipation of the functionalist theory of mind, tries to construct a computer from string and paper. Anyone who has ever taught or been taught elementary logic will laugh aloud.
I was playing Scattegories with some friends last night and ran into an interesting scenario. The game is about coming up with names of things/people/places/etc that begin with a particular letter. The goal is to get as many points as possible and you get a point if yours is a unique answer for the particular category. Apparently, one of the rules is that you cannot use the same response for more than one category. Initially this did not seem like a big deal. After all, what are the chances that a capital and a menu item or an insect name and a crime would be the same? But it turns out, it happens more often than one might think. I suspect this may be because you are so focused on the letter and the words you have already come up with that if one of them fits another category, you’ll make the connection relatively quickly. You have three minutes to find a dozen matches, that’s a lot of cognitive switching in a short span of time. I ended up with the same response to the following two categories: President and Product Name (which we interpreted as brand name). What was my answer? There are probably several matches depending on the letter, mine happened using the letter H. I got the product name first and then realized there had been a U.S. president by the same name. Knowing the outcome, it would make sense to figure out the match here the other way around, of course.;) Remember, no Web searches available during the game and you have about fifteen seconds to come up with a response. (Of course, from the point-of-view of the game this is a silly exercise since the goal is to avoid such overlaps, but we’re not playing that game.:)
Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok recently presented a graph showing a positive correlation between UN measures of gender development and the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index. Of course, Alex presented the usual caveats about causation and correlation, but he concluded “at a minimum the graph indicates that capitalism and gender development are compatible contrary to many radicals”
This prompted me to check out how the Economic Freedom index was calculated. The relevant data is all in a spreadsheet, and shows that the index is computed from about 20 components, all rated as scores out of 10, the first of which is general government consumption spending as a percentage of total consumption. Since the Fraser Institute assumes that government consumption is bad for economic freedom, the score out of 10 is negatively correlated with the raw data.
Looking back at Alex’s post, I thought it likely that high levels of government expenditure would be positively rather than negatively correlated with gender development, which raised the obvious question of the correlation between government consumption expenditure and economic freedom (as defined by the Fraser Institute index). Computing correlations, I found that, although it enters the index negatively, government consumption expenditure has a strong positive correlation (0.42) with economic freedom as estimated by the Fraser Institute. Conversely, the GCE component of the index is negatively correlated (0.43) with the index as a whole. By contrast, items like the absence of labour market controls were weakly correlated with the aggregate index.
In the light of some recent discussions at “Butter”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=491 “flies”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=492 “and”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=493 “Wheels”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=494, “Daily”:http://marcmulholland.tripod.com/histor/index.blog?entry_id=377372 “Moiders”:http://marcmulholland.tripod.com/histor/index.blog?entry_id=380130 , “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/07/22/islamophobia.php, “Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/butterflies_and.html , and even here, I thought I’d post a link to “this OpenDemocracy interview with Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-5-57-2006.jsp , which I found of interest.[1] I also see that “Norm has just posted”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/andre_glucksman.html some lines from Andre Glucksmann on anti-semitism in France which are sort-of relevant, since a polemic against Glucksmann (among others) raised accusations of anti-semitism against Ramadan, a charge Ramadan rejects in the O-D interview.
fn1. Since these are sensitive times, and readers sometimes think that linking suggests endorsement, let me insist, self-defensively and for the record, that I’m not endorsing, just linking to something interesting.
The Financial Times has “a profile of Jane Jacobs”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373901880&p=1012571727085 , author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067974195X/junius-20 (which I think of as a very great book indeed). Jacobs’s other works haven’t achieved as much and some of them have been pretty crazy, but she’s still at it, now aged 88. Worth a look.
Experimental psychologists are fond of pointing to examples of economic irrationality in every day life – for example, people respond in very different ways if an article is priced at $9.99 and if it’s priced at $10. Through detailed examination of my own and my wife’s behaviour, I think I’ve identified another such example – the “Netflix fallacy.” “Netflix”:http://www.netflix.com/, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, is a subscription service where you pay a set amount each month to rent movies. You can have three DVDs out at any one time – when you are finished with one, you send it back, and receive a new DVD from your list of picks by return post. In theory, it’s an ideal way to make sure that you have the movies you want, when you want, and an excellent deal if you rent more than 3-4 DVDs a month.
In practice, it’s different – at least in my experience. Movies that we’ve rented sometimes sit there for two or three months before we watch them, or eventually, reluctantly, decide to send them back without seeing them. To my shame, this happens most often with the interesting, difficult films with sub-titles. I suspect that this is because we’re accustomed to thinking of DVDs as “stocks rather than flows”:http://hadm.sph.sc.edu/Courses/Econ/Classes/Stocksandflows/Stocksandflows.html. Because we have physical possession of the DVD, we’re disinclined to give it back until we’ve actually watched it. Of course, this means that we face substantial costs – we may very easily end up paying more money to rent the damn movie than we would have to pay to buy it and keep it forever. Meanwhile, Netflix is laughing all the way to the bank. It’s much smarter to think of the rental service as a flow – you’re likely to be happier if you keep the movies coming along in a steady stream, even if you don’t watch them (the latter may be useful information about your actual preferences, as opposed to the preferences that you would like to have). I suspect that virtually any reasonable decision rule along the lines of ‘send the movie back if you haven’t watched it within two weeks’ is likely to produce better results than our current policy of watching the movies whenever we get around to it. Or, more typically, don’t get around to it.
Some threads of the “ongoing”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002232.html “discussion”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002230.html about the Efficient Markets Hypothesis have begun to address the contrast between markets and planning, with the state as the prospective planner. As is often the case in such discussions, the implicit contrast is between a Hayekian information-processing ideal and, say, North Korea. To break down this assumption a bit, it’s worth drawing a link to a related debate in the economics and sociology of organizations about the existence of the firm. A long time ago, “Ronald Coase”:http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1991/coase-autobio.html asked why, if markets are so great, are there so many firms? Below the fold is an “old post of mine”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000064.html where I examine “Brink Lindsey’s”:http://www.brinklindsey.com/ efforts to defend the virtues of free markets in the light of Coase’s ideas. It might be of interest as a sidelight to the EMH debate.
After a year of leave in Australia (well, _someone_ has to act as a counterweight to all those Aussie backpackers), I just arrived back in the U.S. Three observations:
* It should not surprise you that making a c.1 year-old boy watch the in-flight TV system for six hours of a Sydney-to-Los Angeles flight would lead to emotional problems (viz, crying, screaming, kicking) for the following six hours. It seemed to surprise the parents of the c.1 year-old boy sitting next to us, however.
* A clear-eyed assessment of Los Angeles International Airport (e.g., by Martians) would conclude that it is a machine designed to produce unhappy, stressed-out people by means of multiple queues, unnecessary bottlenecks, pointless dumping of international transfer passengers out onto the sidewalk, and other more sophisticated methods.
* What the hell is “Hooters”:http://www.hooters.com/ doing with an “airline”:http://www.hootersair.com/? When I saw the jet trundle by on the runway I thought I was hallucinating.
After spending the next few days recovering from jetlag, I’m going to drive from South Carolina to Arizona, probably along I-40. (I have to do this, for various reasons.) Any advice? Apart from “Book a flight instead”, I mean.