My failure or his?

"The wind blew autumn leaves into intercalated lines and arcs of force so regular you could photograph them for a textbook on Cramer's Rule and the cross-products of curves in 3-space." - David Foster Wallace

Trying too hard or not trying hard enough? I tend to read too much into potentially trivial info. Life is short and I'm in a hurry (blog notwithstanding), and this is probably enough for me to never read David Foster Wallace. Mistake? (tough call, I know).

New Game: Good blogs gone bad

A recent blogosphere flurry as to whether Ann Althouse’s blog has a lot of anti-semitic posters. Some enjoyably awful arguments. One that interests me is this:

“The give-away that ‘Jdeeripper’ probably is Jewish is this line: "There were two women in the article, Eve Fairbanks and Lisa Lerer. Two male goyim Mike Allen, Ben Smith and one other Jewish male who is not a conservative Michael Goldfarb." The term ‘goyim’ is a term used by Jews to refer to non-Jews. Now that isn't proof of the writer's religion since the term is widely known, but it does suggest to me that this is not an anti-Semitic post, but an attempt to point out the hypocrisy of the left-wing establishment which holds up one diversity standard for the rest of the world, while not honoring the standard themselves.” – Legal Insurrection

Persecuted minorities often appropriate terms of abuse. You can probably think of many many examples. More interestingly, groups that only imagine they are persecuted minorities also appropriate terms of abuse as they imagine them. Thus, in fact, self-reference to “goyim” is quite common among anti-semites (who imagine that Jews secretly control and persecute them). I offer no examples (you may hunt in the internet slums yourself), but I think you’ll find it plausible. Whether the poster is Jewish or not is not even of much interest, but the weakness of the argument is worth pointing out in what is, in fact, a very simple matter.

As to the underlying complaint (which I haven't more than skimmed in the source blogs): Althouse has a huge comment section and it’d be a shocker if there weren’t lunatics of various stripes. Even were her blog disproportionately attractive to lunatics it could just as easily speak to an opposition to a more-than-usual sanity. Comments sections on the discussion almost guaranteed to include conspiratorial references to Jews, from which I draw no implications. However, it’s nice to try to think clearly on clear matters and so: -1 to all involved, in my head.

Family sentences

"The last time I went home before she died, I picked up 89/93: An Anthology by Uncle Tupelo. I love “Still Be Around,” but I can’t hear it without remembering driving around Houston mere weeks later, listening to Uncle Tupelo, and wondering how the fuck I was gonna live the rest of my life without my mom." -Kyle Ryan

"The people of Rome seem to have entertained for Pompey from his childhood, the same affection that Prometheus in the tragedy of Aeschylus expresses for Hercules, speaking of him as the author of his deliverance, in these words,

Ah cruel Sire! how dear thy son to me! The generous offspring of my enemy!" -Plutarch

No hidden meaning. I just like to collect sentences that seem to express a particular thought with great clarity. The first is along the lines of Pope's "what oft was thought", and the latter I like for its combination of allegory, allusion, analogy, personification and foreshadowing (and more, really). I often occupy my time trying to pay attention to little things. Not quite a game, but even presentations you don't enjoy can be made interesting this way. If you're searching only for a good sentence (or a good point), it almost becomes exciting as the time goes by and a no-hitter is being played to self-defeat.

In which I prove that even I am not interested in what I have to say

A fairly common piece of advice in academia is to try to be your own worst critic. Or perhaps it’s only common around me, which would be disturbing. It can be a Catch-22. If you believe you’re your own worst critic, surely you aren’t being critical enough of your critical faculties. And then believing you aren’t your own worst critic can be a boast (even if only to yourself) that you are so critical of your ability to be critical that you won’t even consider yourself that crticical. And so on. I tend to converge in this series around the point that makes saying “I am highly self-critical” a boast and likely a contradiction. Probably my reaction to the sentence is meaningless, since even when meant as a self-insult I dislike it. To say “I criticize myself too much” is to express a highly uncritical belief regarding oneself. I recognize, though, conventions vary regarding which “I” we mean, when we say “I am too self-critical”. Where I might say, “the background noise in my brain is insecure”, someone else might say “I am too self-critical”. Unlike Tiffany Aching, I generally stop at second thoughts for myself, I think.

That’s just an incoherent (but characteristic, and I suspect empathy inducing to some of you) preamble to a game I like to play. The game is to design a better enemy. The trick is to make the new enemy truer to himself and not just more reasonable in your eyes, and to the extent we define ourselves in contrast to others, it’s a self-definition game too. So, I am not a conservative. Conservatism seems to be running through a rough patch of late. Let’s try to design a better conservative. Most writers I would like would tend to redesign conservatism as libertarianism, or at least, more libertarian leaning (my own sympathies). I think another error is to see conservatism as backwards-looking. It is not the same to shout “STOP” as it is to say “GO BACK” and I think the former more accurately characterizes conservative appeal. Many of the moral games people play suggest people have an anti-consequentialist stance against altering the status quo. Looking to the past does that too, if not as much as seeking a specific future.

So, this means conservatism can change, since it’s defined by what is in the present. To look for a good conservatism, then, we should look to what is conservative and popular (the status quo). There are lots of arguments in favour of conservatism that explicitly enumerate its virtues, but those arguments are often perceived as not conservative arguments themselves (in being consequentialist – I don’t think that dichotomy is reasonable myself, but one does hear it about). The most popular conservative book I’ve read in the last few years was Pollan’s “In Defense of Food”. I appreciate it’s not usually framed that way, but I think the point is so clear as to not be worth belabouring. I suppose I mean by that, that this blog is written primarily for myself and that one sentence seems sufficient to me to reconstruct the point even if I’ve entirely forgotten it. Now, the Environmental movement is generally not conservative in its approach to problem solving, but I think the popularity of Pollan’s book (or its arguments) went well outside that circle. That’s not very helpful if it can’t be generalized, but happily, Pollan summarized his book’s rules:

1. DON'T EAT ANYTHING YOUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER WOULDN'T RECOGNIZE AS FOOD.

-I knew the first one was explicitly backwards looking (seemingly, anyway), which undercuts my argument. I’m fine with that. I choose to read that more as a limitation on new stuff, and thus more along the lines of “STOP” than “GO BACK” (that is, the advice is not telling you to only eat what your great-grandmother ate). What would the social generalization of this be? Perhaps: Don’t form relationships your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as relationships? I think this probably make gay marriage iffy from a conservative standpoint (one could argue it either way), which seems about right (not right for gay marriage, but right about where conservatism might be on the issue). I’d say social networking sites would be the clearer prohibition.

2. AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS CONTAINING INGREDIENTS THAT ARE A) UNFAMILIAR, B) UNPRONOUNCABLE, C) MORE THAN FIVE IN NUMBER, OR THAT INCLUDE D) HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP

- Hmm. Maybe a business model? Don’t support any program (government or investment, etc) that can not be explained in basic terms? That seems overly restrictive to me, but I’m not conservative (in this sense), so that may be appropriate.

3. AVOID PRODUCTS THAT MAKE HEALTH CLAIMS.

- I think that stands except it can be “societal health claims”. I think one needn’t necessarily avoid the products, so much as the arguments. So, for example, one should not vote for a President because he will do the best job, but because he is the best person (in some weird abstract sense!) and then believe that the doing of the best job will follow. Again, this strikes me as a conservative style argument (that frequently makes me uneasy) – that McCain, say, somehow deserved to win independent of whether he would do a better job or not. Likewise, this is consistent, to some degree with usual arguments in favour of the death penalty – it may not help with deterrence, expense, etc, but that’s not the point (that is: not a societal health claim).

4. SHOP THE PERIPHERIES OF THE SUPERMARKET AND STAY OUT OF THE MIDDLE.

-Um. Trust the heartland?

5. GET OUT OF THE SUPERMARKET WHENEVER POSSIBLE.

-The “real people” fetish. (getting bored hammering this square peg into the round hole, but enjoyed it for the while).

I’ll try to post a bit more in the next while – all at about this level of idiocy, so I hope no one reading this has any expectations (especially you, my future self). I’m also not sure how this got to any length at all since I said nothing. . . Last caveat: this is about the sorta junk I'll be writing about (I realize, a bit late perhaps, that I'm likely to save the science for where it's more helpful (to me, at least))

Ripples in the pond

One problem with the idea of memes is usually making them specific enough to be heritable. I’m being pedantic in pointing this out since fans of memes (they still exist) will have considered this problem addressed. Indeed, it’s funny this idea comes up with memes, since it also comes up with genes to a lesser degree. But a game I like to play is to cast an idea out into my circle of acquaintance and see if it takes hold. The idea has to then be specific enough to be readily observable as a variation in behaviour. If one is really lucky, one might see not only descent, but descent with modification. It’s most fun to play this game without stating it explicitly, but as an example, this once, I’ll give an explicit one:

Almost everyone makes a certain grammatical error in speech (and almost as certainly in non-professional writing) – the possessive gerund. This is a well recognized issue, which means one can google for better descriptions than I will provide (a general problem with blogging). Nonetheless, a quick example:

I hate you smoking.
I hate your smoking.

The first is wrong. The second is right. Without being too specific, the ad hoc way you can think of it is in your (!) saying this to someone you like. You would not want to say “I hate you”. You don’t hate the person. You hate the smoking. Whose smoking? Yours (your smoking)!

Me saying this is pedantic.
My saying this is pedantic.

Hopefully it's a bit more intuitive in this example. I am not a pedant, perhaps, since I am prepared to call this pedantic. So, I should not say Me pedantic (Me also like fire). It’s the saying that is pedantic. Whose saying? Mine (My saying).

I’m a great fan of English’s dynamism, so perhaps this rule will go by the wayside soon, but for the moment, it still makes sense. Just browsing the few presumed readers of this blog (forum, etc), one sees this error a great deal. So I cast out this rule into your consciousness and I’ll be able to see very clearly any ripples it makes.

I note that typos are quite likely in this blog, so this post a potential source of embarrassment. I'm guilty of many things here, but to do this at all, one must feel it lightly, I suspect.

The finish line is death

Starting any science(ish) blog even in the month of Darwin’s 200th Birthday is a little like having a first date on Valentine’s day (30 Rock). Like Liz Lemon, I’m ignoring it for the moment, or at least till November 24th. Instead: A game.

It’s easy to imagine finding Hebbian learning unnerving. If one abstracted it too much, one would think that once a threshold was reached, it would be impossible to reverse oneself. That is, if every pattern becomes easer to reproduce every time it is followed, how can you ever quit smoking? This isn’t such a mangling of the idea as you might think, if Hebbian learning were the only form of synaptic plasticity, so fortunate that it is not (and meta-plasticity getting more play in the last year or so). Nonetheless, Hebb’s insight does suggest a game which I frequently play. By your actions and decisions, you train your brain. Imagine that every choice you make really does make it easier to make that choice again later. This places a great deal of weight on otherwise idle choices. Giving in and having that bit of ice cream feels less like a welcome occasional treat if you imagine such decisions continuing ever onward and outward. In a way, this is not too dissimilar from the way one might apply the categorical imperative, except when asking “what if others behaved in this way?”, the others are your future selves, tomorrow’s boy and his descendants.

The game I specifically play is to imagine I am in training, mentally, physically, economically, psychologically, and in every which way, for my old age. You are going to be old for longer than you think, probably, and with any luck, even longer still. As you get older, it gets a little harder to alter one’s behaviour, possibly. Or, at least, there will be occasions when you will want to have good behaviour at the ready, without effort and without thought. Think of your current efforts as being banked. Exercise is building up strength for old age, not for its effects in the near term. Exerting yourself away from some undesired indolence is not an ongoing struggle, but a reservoir of effort which can be called upon at need. For example, I exert some effort considering various disasters. I might prepare for them physically or financially, but I also bank psychological effort, so that when I am faced with a fire, I don’t need to think about it. We are all approaching a very long disaster – senescence – and I consider myself in training for it. I also think this is a nice method for maintaining a long term perspective and an integrated personality (e.g., not enjoying procrastination quite as much)

If I had a hammer

I like to overlay games onto my daily experience. One game I play is what I think of as the “random obsession” game. I pick something, semi-randomly, and try to organize my thoughts around it. So, for example, one might pick “parasites”. Then, wherever possible, one can try to assume the importance of parasitism in explaining a phenomenon. Having parasites as an obsession could be quite productive, as Dawkins notes of W D Hamilton. Likewise, reading Newton on refraction, it is hard not to see a mind that tried to organize ideas around gravity more generally – sometimes productively, sometimes not. There are a number of advantages to choosing, temporarily, interesting (read: weird) central principles to organize your thoughts around:

1) If you’re buying a lottery ticket, it’s best to pick a random seeming number, so at least you won’t have to share the prize. Likewise, people are constantly exploring ideas, so what seems productive to you, seems productive to everybody. Thus, finding a strange niche may be more *uniquely* productive – an important consideration in a universe chockfull of interesting things.

2) It shakes you out of your own rut. Basically, cross-training for the mind as an extension of the idea that we should not get stuck too easily in local maxima of intellectual frameworks.

3) It leaves you less responsive to manipulation. A line of reasoning might be carefully designed to be compelling when thought about in the typical way. If your natural reactions are a bit skewed you may not be so easily fooled.

4) It’s fun and provides a natural focus to material that might otherwise just be a slosh of stuff to you. Whiles away the hours and content may also be easier to remember .

Variations on the theme that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail – so try out having a screwdriver, pliers, etc, once in a while, and it builds up your general inventory. Now, all of this depends on finding a good principle that’s generally applicable. Or you can choose a couple and focus on different arenas. As an example, I’m thinking that my random obsession for this blog, just for a little while and starting with this post, will be games.