Monthly Archive for November, 2012

Looney Tunes

So there’s this man-eating creature named Jozin who lives in a bog, and is vulnerable only to crop-dusting powder. The mayor promises his daughter in marriage to whoever can defeat the creature. A stranger comes to town, borrows a crop-duster, captures Jozin, and wins the daughter. The end.

This, I think, is as good an example as any of why a gripping story requires more than just a good beginning and a happy ending. But sometimes, a hefty dose of looniness can fully compensate for the complete absence of dramatic tension. Et voila:

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Unreasonable

Brad DeLong appears to argue here that because pure reason once led him, Brad Delong, to an incorrect conclusion about which direction he was facing, it follows that pure reason can never be a source of knowledge.

(If that’s not his point, then the only alternative reading I can find is that Thomas Nagel is guilty of choosing a poor example to illustrate a point that DeLong would rather ridicule than refute.)

It would be too too easy to make a snarky comment about how we’ve known all along about Brad DeLong’s tenuous relationship with reason. Instead, here, for the record is a list of ten facts, of which I am willing to bet that DeLong is aware of at least 7 — none of them, as far as I can see, accessible to humans via anything but pure reason:

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Breakfast in Singapore

(Source here. Hat tip to our sometime commenter Val.)

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How High Should Taxes Be?

How high should taxes be? High enough to cover expected outlays going forward — but no higher.

That’s because any additional revenue would be used to pay down the federal debt, which is a bad idea. It was almost surely a mistake to run up this much debt in the first place, but now that we’ve got it, the best thing to do is to keep it forever.

Here’s why:

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Accounting for Numbers

Over at Less Wrong, the estimable Eliezer Yudkowsky attempts to account for the meaning of statements in arithmetic and the ontological status of numbers. I started to post a comment, but it got long enough that I’ve turned my comment into a blog post. I’ve tried to summarize my understanding of Yudkowsky’s position along the way, but of course it’s possible I’ve gotten something wrong.

It’s worth noting that every single point below is something I’ve blogged about before. At the moment I’m too lazy to insert links to all those earlier blog posts, but I might come back and put the links in later. In any event, I think this post stands alone. Because it got long, I’ve inserted section numbers for the convenience of commenters who might want to refer to particular passages.

1. Yudkowsky poses, in essence, the following question:

Main Question, My Version: In what sense is the sentence “two plus two equals four” meaningful and/or true?

Yudkowsky phrases the question a little differently. What he actually asks is:

Main Question, Original Version: In what sense is the sentence “2 + 2 = 4″ meaningful and/or true?”

This, I think, threatens to confuse the issue. It’s important to distinguish between the numeral “2”, which is a formal symbol designed to be manipulated according to formal rules, and the noun “two”, which appears to name something, namely a particular number. Because Yudkowsky is asking about meaning and truth, I presume it is the noun, and not the symbol, that he intends to mention. So I’ll stick with my version, and translate his remarks accordingly.

2. Yudkowsky provisionally offers the following answer:

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Good News and Bad News

Good news and bad news: Romney lost; Obama won.

What’s most depressing about the Obama victory is that it seems to have come largely as a reward for two things: the execrable auto bailout and a despicable campaign of character assassination.

What’s most refreshing about the Romney loss is that it seems to have come largely as a punishment for his cruelly evil immigration rhetoric. (Remember “self-deportation”?) This is tempered somewhat by the fact that Obama seems to have escaped punishment for his cruelly evil immigration policies. (Under Obama, deportations have reached an all-time high.)

Obama, I believe somewhat more than Romney, pitched his rhetoric at an audience presumed to be incapable of critical thinking. It’s a little depressing to be reminded how large that audience must be.

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Can A Million Puppets All Be Wrong?

The million-puppet march on Washington is advertised as a demonstration in favor of public broadcasting, but of course that’s not exactly what it is.

What it is, exactly, is a demonstration in favor of the current level of funding for public broadcasting.

Now: Just how many of those puppets — or how many of their human fellow marchers — do you imagine would be able to tell you what the current level of funding for public broadcasting is?

And insofar as these humans are out there marching and chanting without pausing to inquire into what they’re marching and supporting — well, I guess that explains their affinity for puppets.

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Your President Hopes You’re Stupid

Joe Biden says that Mitt Romney has lied about Jeep and outsourcing; Romney intimates that President Obama has lied about Libya. I presume there’s been substantial truth-stretching on both sides and about many issues. Truth-stretching (or lying) relies on the ignorance of voters. There’s plenty of ignorance to go around, which is why truth-stretching works.

Treating voters as ignorant is one thing; treating them as stupid is quite another. You rely on ignorance when you cite “facts” that are hard for people to check — as, for example, when the President presents himself as sympathetic to immigrants and hopes you don’t know about the record number of deportations on his watch. You rely on stupidity when you blithely contradict yourself, hoping nobody will notice. The latter seems far more cynical.

I’m sure both candidates have been guilty of treating voters as both ignorant and stupid, and I called attention to several instances (on both sides) in my commentary on Debates One, Two and Three. But it does seem to me that it’s the President who is banking most heavily on voter stupidity.

A few examples:

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