Philosophers' Playground

Do We Pass the Funny Down to Our Kids?

2012-01-29T10:22:00.002-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

Some speculative comedist sociology this weekend. Are you more likely to be funny if you come from a funny family? Is the funny something biological that some folks have and others don't? Is it something we get from our environment? Whence comes the funny?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Why Was the Republican Field So Weak This Time?

2012-01-27T07:59:00.000-05:00

It has been interesting to see the Republican primary process work itself out. The party is clearly not satisfied with Mitt Romney, for whom they have been trying repeatedly to find a substitute. None of the other flavors of the month which came and went were terribly strong. Newt Gingrich, seemingly the last one standing, has generated panic among party powerful. There have been calls for a savior to enter the race since it started and they continue, albeit somewhat muted at this late point.

There are stronger candidates that could have stepped up and chose not to -- Jindal from Louisiana, Christie from New Jersey, Daniels from Indiana, even McCain with another run. During the process, there seemed to be a weakened incumbent, so why did the field that developed turn out to be so weak? Is the threat of an incumbent so powerful that even with a bad economy, it seems too high of a mountain to climb? Is there something amiss in the party recruitment apparatus? Has the tea party fractured the GOP in such a way that the usual recruitment mechanisms don't work? How did the Republicans come to have the field they did and not a stronger one, even in their own estimation?

I Don't Need a Pair, I'd Just Like to Buy One Jean Please

2012-01-26T09:33:00.002-05:00

When we look at the terms we use for closed crotch garments worn below the waist, we almost always use the plural -- pants, trousers, jeans, dungarees, Bermuda shorts, cut-offs, capris, leggings, tights, a pair of underwear, panties, bloomers, jockey shorts, boxer shorts, briefs,... Yet, when we examine the terms for clothing worn on the torso, the terms are always in the singular -- shirt, blouse, sweater, vest, jacket, coat, tank top, camisole, even brassiere (the one where it would make the most sense to use the plural). Open bottomed clothes that cover lower half -- skirt, kilt, dress, robe -- are singular. We generally have two arms, just like two legs, so why the syntactical difference? The only counterexample I can think of is the two piece bathing suit where the lower half is the bikini bottom (singular) or is it generally bottoms? For men, we use the singular bathing suit, but also the plural swim trunks. Explanations or further examples and counterexamples?

Anachronistic Literary Comparisons

2012-01-25T08:55:00.001-05:00

Last week a friend made the claim that Stephen King will be remembered as the 20th century's Charles Dickens. The trivial comparison, of course, would have been to say the 20th century's Poe, but when you think of commercial success and output as well as the ability to locate the deeply entrenched, but easily overlooked concerns of the times, the Dickens comparison is extremely apt.

It started me thinking about what other such comparisons could be made. Philip Roth as the 20th century H.L. Mencken? Norman Mailer as the 20th century Proust? Truman Capote as the 20th century Goethe? What apt anachronistic comparisons can you think of?

Humility as an American Virtue

2012-01-24T09:54:00.001-05:00

Thinking about George M. Cohan's patriotic song, "You're a Grand Old flag." The line that sticks out is:

Every heart beats true 'neath the red, white, and blue
where there's never a boast nor a brag

In a song extolling the virtues of the nation, humility is set out as key. Nationalism seems to be antithetical to humility, and nationalism is certainly not the same as patriotism although the two are often confused for each other. At the same time, humility seems not to be a virtue we currently celebrate.

So, when did humility cease to be an American virtue? Was it ever?

Year of the Dragon

2012-01-23T08:16:00.000-05:00

Today is the Chinese new year and the start of the year of the dragon. In the set of signs of the Chinese zodiac cycle, the dragon is the only mythical member. While imaginary, the dragon is to be found in stories from cultures across the globe. We find dragons in Greek, Western European, Chinese, Indian, and Mesoamerican mythology. Surely, there was some cultural cross-pollination, but it seems hard to believe that there was that much of an influence. Why then is the dragon so ubiquitous?

There seem to be three possible explanations. One line is that the dragon is a slight variation of animals that were observed and then made larger and scarier in legend -- say, crocodiles or snakes that get made into monsters. This seems plausible since we see this done with griffons and the like, but it is odd that with different animals in different ecosystems, the same fictional derivative would develop spontaneously in so many places.

A second is that the notion developed as an explanation for dinosaur fossils. If you have the ossified remains of animals larger than we see, but whose skeletons resemble observed reptiles, then it would only be reasonable to posit the existence of these larger reptilians whose details would be filled in by story. The problem here is that while fossils did turn up from time to time, it wasn't until we started mining for coal in the industrial age that we really started unearthing significant numbers of fossils. At the time of origin, dinosaur fossils would not be very widely known and therefore would not need explanation.

A third explanation for the commonality is evolutionary. If disparate cultures have the same concept, perhaps it goes back to a time before we were spread all over the globe. In coming down from the trees and living primarily on the ground, what would be the natural predation fear we as a species would develop? Snakes and other land-dwelling carnivores including land crocs. Since this fear is bred into all humans because of our common origin, it could be expressed cognitively in terms of fictional beings that instantiate our basic fear along the lines of a Joseph Campbell type monomyth. It is not clear what sort of evidence one could have for such a just so story, however.

Which of these is most likely correct or is there another option? Why are dragons cross-cultural?

Best Typo

2012-01-21T06:57:00.000-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

TheWife and I went to a newly open Chinese restaurant that came recommended. Looking at the take-out menu and turning to the veggie options we found "Genetal Cho's tofu." TheWife looks up and says, "and I thought it was supposed to be vegetarian." Great hilarity ensued.

One of my favorites from a take-home exam in which the student was quoting Einstein, “The slave is doomed to worship Tim and Fate and Death.” All hail the mighty Tim.

What is the best typo you've found?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Technology in the Classroom

2012-01-20T10:04:00.002-05:00

Whenever we hear discussions of improving education these days, someone inevitably brings up "technology in the classroom" as if it is unquestioningly something that leads to better learning. But is it? Sure, technology improved manufacturing -- more products produced, more uniform quality, cuts and stitches made exactly straight,.. Technology in medicine, again, better diagnostics, better records, better ability to bring teams onto the same page for care,... But how does it help in learning?

One example I've seen work is the use of clickers in science classes. The professor asks a question and like asking the audience on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, there is a quantifiable measure of who thinks what. It can be used to see if the class really understands the point you've been trying to make. It can be used to expose folk misunderstandings that science corrects. It is a useful technological pedagogical advance.

But beyond that, I don't understand why we are so fascinated with technologizing learning. Good teaching is good teaching and a good teacher doesn't need anything but a class. Is there something I'm missing here? Are there other examples of technology in the classroom that are helpful in ways a good teacher alone could not be?

The Necessity of Curse Words

2012-01-19T05:03:00.002-05:00

The shorter of the short people has become fascinated with curse words. The idea that there are culturally forbidden sounds makes these sounds interesting. As a reuslt, he's invented his own, nork (the sound made by the Siamese elephants in Tim Conway's famous bit). He loves that it is functionally equivalent to words he knows he cannot say, but because it is his word, he can say it. Do we need words that perform the rhetorical functions of swear words? Do they do what no other linguistic entities are capable of doing or are they just short cuts to utterances that could be expressed otherwise?

Is Being Smart a Disability?

2012-01-18T09:12:00.002-05:00

The courts have determined that it is perfectly o.k. to discriminate against people with high IQs. A man applying for a position with the New London police force was denied -- and his denial upheld -- on the grounds that he scored too highly on the entrance exam. Aristotle argues that moderation is the key for ethical virtues, but that with respect to intellectual virtues more is better. One can never be too smart, too wise, too knowledgeable, too good of a problem solver, too clever,... But is he or the New London police department right? Can you be too smart? Can being smart be a flaw? In general? for certain occupations?

Muhammed Ali and Tim Tebow

2012-01-17T09:47:00.001-05:00

Today is Muhammad Ali's 70th birthday. Ali was not only one of, possibly, the greatest to ever walk into a boxing ring, but was a major social figure who was outspoken on the issues of the day. He spoke out against the war in Vietnam and refused to go even when drafted.

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?

He was a prominent voice for peace and civil rights at a time when standing up was not the easy thing to do. He was stripped of his title and not allowed to fight for four years, before the Supreme Court upheld his case as a conscientious objector.

The question that springs to mind is whether we have contemporary athletes who seek to occupy a similar space in the present moral discourse. The name that seems unavoidable is Tim Tebow who is a champion of the other side of the political aisle. He is held up in the media, both sports and non-sports, as the archetype of a good person, of morality. His book is full of passages like:

People often seem to think that when you're following the Lord and trying to do His will, your path will always be clear, the decisions smooth and easy, and life will be lived happily ever after and all that. Sometimes that may be true, but I've found that more often, it's not. The muddled decisions still seem muddled, bad things still happen to believers, and great things can happen to nonbelievers. When it comes to making our decisions, the key that God is concerned with is that we are trusting and seeking Him. God's desire is for us to align our lives with His Word and His will.

We have a conflation of morality with strength of Christian belief here -- two completely different things -- and we have a diminishing of non-believers as them, but perhaps this is just nitpicking. Is there a difference other than political persuasion between Muhammad Ali and Tim Tebow as public figures?

Martin Luther King Day and St. Patrick's Day

2012-01-16T09:50:00.001-05:00

On Martin Luther King Day, here's a repeat of my St. Patrick's Day post:

With parades and parties, we take St. Patrick’s Day morelightly than other holidays. We treat it more as a celebration than a momentfor solemn reflection. This is a wonderful thing, not only for the joy itbrings, but because there is hope in the fact that we allow the deeper meaningof the day to pass unnoticed.

Ouryoungest national holiday is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, during which we notonly commemorate the life of a peaceful leader who stood for justice andmorality, but take time to contemplate the ways in which our culture and socialstructures still embody unfairness toward groups of Americans.

Though we seldom stop to think of it, St. Patrick’s Daystands for all that we wish for eight weeks earlier on Martin Luther King,Jr.’s birthday. The mass Irish migration to America occurred in the first halfof the 19th century and was met with fear, hatred and bigotry.

Overt job discrimination was rampant as every Irish workerknew of the “No Irish Need Apply” signs and the same sort of vitriolic rhetoricwas voiced toward them as we see now against Spanish-speaking immigrants. TheKnow Nothing Party was organized specifically to undermine the political powerof Irish Catholics. Kids today have no sense whatsoever how momentous it was in1960 to have John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, elected president of theUnited States.

But the fact that anti-Irish discrimination is no longer apart of our collective consciousness is precisely what makes St. Patrick’s Dayso wonderful. We do not use St. Patrick’s Day to celebrate Irish-Americanliberation and equality, we just use it to celebrate Irish culture.

Irish-Americans are now considered as American as anyoneelse, but this is not the result of complete assimilation. Irish-Americans werenot made to surrender their identities. A decade and a half after Frank McCourtwon the Pulitzer Prize for “Angela’s Ashes” and “Riverdance” sold out showafter show, we see the Irish as contributing positively to the larger cultureand on St. Patrick’s Day everyone partakes in the celebration of thatcontribution.

St. Patrick’s Day stands as a monument to cosmopolitanism,to the view that we are strongest not when we are homogenized, when ourdifferences are stripped away in favor of a single way of being, but ratherwhen we embrace differences and seek to understand how other ways ofexperiencing the world can be used to augment, to enrich our own limitedperspective.

Ferdinand Tonnies, a founding father of sociology, arguedthat there is a difference between communities — groups bound together by whatthey have in common — and societies — which are created of distinct groups. Itis human nature, he claimed, that communities would create societies, that nomatter how similar the members of the group, we inevitably find ways to divideourselves up, of creating us versus them situations.

As human beings, we naturally try to exclude, shut out andminimize others. St. Patrick’s Day gives us hope that it can be different. Thatwe can not only peaceably coexist, but that we can cherish and benefit from ourdiversity.

MartinLuther King, Jr. Day is an important holiday because it forces us to focus onthe places in our cultures where we erect boundaries, hurdles and brick wallsto keep those who are different from fully realizing themselves as citizens andcomplete human beings in our society.

There remain major impediments to the full equality of manyAmericans. But while the heaviness of such a task should make us pause, thelevity of St. Patrick’s Day should urge us forward, providing us with a successstory that it can be done.

We can bring people into the family without forcing them togive up what makes them special. This sort of inclusion enriches us all. Whenit is said that on St. Patrick’s Day “everyone has a little Irish in them,” itacknowledges the ways in which we are a better culture for having added anotherset of experiences.

This is why, despite the fact that I am not Irish, Icelebrate St. Patrick’s Day as one of the great American holidays and lift aglass of Guinness to toast the legacy of The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. inhope that someday we will have created a society so moral, fair and mindfulthat his birthday, too, can be celebrated in the same way.

Appropriate Locations

2012-01-15T10:16:00.002-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

This year's meeting of the International Society for Humor Studies is being held in Poland. (The first annual meeting was so small that it happened when three humor studies scholars walked into a bar...) The appropriateness of this spot leads to the question, what other conferences should be held where? Best answer receives a free year's subscription to The Philosophers' Playground.

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Smart Blondes

2012-01-13T05:14:00.000-05:00

The other day after school, the less short of the short people got in the car and reported that she had heard her first dumb blonde joke. She took great umbrage at it, despite being brunette, and decided that for the next time she heard such an offense, she would be prepared. She would have, ready to hand, a list of the world's smartest blondes. It was a question I thought would be great to kick around here.

First to my mind was Werner Heisenberg, the genius behind early quantum theory. So, who should make the list as the smartest blondes?

Thoughts about Time

2012-01-12T09:32:00.003-05:00

Two astrophysicists at Johns Hopkins, Richard Conn Henry (not to be confused with the other astrophysicist named Richard Henry at University of Oklahoma) and Steve Henke, designed a new calendar. With this calendar, June, March, September, and December have 31 days while all others have 30. In this way, every year, the same date falls on the same day of the week. Christmas and New Years would always fall on Sunday. The only wrinkle is that instead of a leap year giving us a day every four years, they add a week every five years. A nifty idea.

I studied general relativity with Henry during grad school. We started the semester by working through the special theory for a couple weeks with the generalized mathematics we would need for the general theory. While playing with the basics of the metric, he pointed out that the only difference between space and time in terms of calculations in the theory was a negative sign. He then mused that if we added a second negative sign, we would have the equations governing a universe with two perpendicular times. Just as we have three spatial dimensions that are independent of each other, why couldn't we have a universe with multiple times?

But what would it look like? What would it be like to live in a universe in which you could be late in one direction and early in another? Henry sent a letter to Richard Feynman and asked him what he thought it would be like to live in such a world. Feynman wrote back that he and his son had spent a weekend playing with the question, but had no good answer. So, let's see if we can do any better. What would it be like to live in such a world?

Does Micro Experience in Business Translate into Macro Competance in Economic Policy?

2012-01-11T10:19:00.000-05:00

On the heels of yesterday's primary in New Hampshire, I want to explore the central claim in Mitt Romney's rhetoric. His argument is "I had a career in the business world, therefore I am better suited to fix the economy than the President who has not built a business career." I am not interested in the particulars of Romney's career -- did Bain Capital build businesses and create jobs or did they raid companies and make their money laying off workers and selling off the pieces -- nor do I want to contrast the particular policy proposals. I am more interested in the argument by authority that Romney is putting forward -- I am an authority because of my experience. We heard similar arguments during Clinton's run in which he was attacked as incapable of being a competent commander-in-chief because he lacked military experience -- again, having never climbed a tree, he is not someone who can be trusted with questions about forest management.

Earl Weaver is a hall of fame manager, but was a lousy ballplayer. His star outfielder Frank Robinson is a hall of fame player, but did not enjoy comparable success as a manager. We cannot draw a straight line between success at the lower dirt-under-the fingernails level and then at the higher strategic level. But, at least Earl Weaver did play the game. On the other hand, there are businesses that are destroyed when they replace someone who came up through the ranks and understands how things run and replace him with a newly minted M.B.A. who has no experience or care with the core product of the company. In the case of macroeconomic policy, does experience in the trenches teach you anything that cannot be learned otherwise? How much of an advantage -- if any -- does one get in determining successful macroeconomic policy from being acquainted through experience with the workings of particular businesses?

Further, what counts as experience here? Why does being in the business count as experience, but being a consumer, not? Does our notion of being "in business" itself have a bias towards owners and away from the other stakeholders?

The Power and Danger of Anonymity

2012-01-10T08:31:00.002-05:00

The Leiter Reports is the central spot for inside baseball for the academic philosophical community. Brian Leiter has a strict policy there of not posting anonymous comments. If you have something to say to the community, put your name to it. Own it. It cuts down on certain sorts of comments, keeps things more civil and removes certain ethical worries. I've never had that sort of policy here. I know who some of regulars use pseudonyms are, others I don't. We've had very few instances of inappropriate comments, and I've always tried to make clear in a stern but not rude fashion when someone has crossed the civility line here -- and others on the Playground have also made clear to folks when a comment has been unacceptable. So, I don't think there is any need to change anything.

That being said, what is the point of a blog name that conceals your own? Does it make you more comfortable in commenting? Does it allow you to feel like you have a nickname when just hanging out with the gang? What is the lived experiential value of the pseudonym you use here and for those of you who do not -- Kerry, Jeff, Gwydion,... -- why did you choose not to?

Neo-eponyms

2012-01-09T09:23:00.002-05:00

Eponymy is when a word is made out of a name. Think of "champagne" which now refers to the drink more than the region from whence it comes. Science is full of eponyms from Newton's laws to Huntington's disease to units of measure like the joule or the watt to inventions like the diesel engine or Morse code. Many come from literature, for example, Achilles heel, or from properties of historical figures, consider the term sideburns. We are hearing the verb "to tebow" quite frequently in the media.

Are there new eponyms that should be added to the language? Properties or characteristics of contemporary figures that can be used to coin new terms? "Obamized" -- when you take a modern Republican position and get called a socialist for it? To "romney" -- betting on both sides of a game? Others?

The Feast of Saint Peter

2012-01-07T08:16:00.003-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

This weekend would have been Peter Cook's 75th birthday. One of the leaders of the new radical comedy of the 1950s and 60s in Britain. His first troupe was a four-man outfit that performed under the name "Beyond the Fringe" and included Dudley Moore who would become his comic partner for decades to come. Moore was an accomplished pianist in addition to a comedian, and so the two opened a club in which Moore's jazz trio would perform and Cook would bring in cutting edge comedy that was nowhere else to be found in early 60s England. The two started clean and absurdist, but through the late 60s they got edgier and edgier. From Beyond the Fringe.
Here they are in Bedazzled.
And a decade later:

Thank you, Peter Cook for all the laughs.

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Ownership and Access

2012-01-06T09:50:00.001-05:00

The notion of intellectual property has never been made fully consistent. It is an attempt to marry an Enlightenment era notion about possession of things and land to a changed notion of "the fruits of one's labor." I remember as an undergraduate puzzling over what was the referent of the phrase "Beethoven's 9th symphony." Was it the dots on the page? Was it the movements of the members of the orchestra? Was it the resulting sound waves in the air? Was it the internal experience of the listener? Was it the record (yes, we had records when I was in college)? What is the symphony itself? If it were someone's property, what was it they had rights to? What was it he or she possessed?

The question has been made philosophically even more interesting now that the media that contained the thing is going away. Now that we no longer need the record album, 8-track, or digital file on our computer to have unfettered access to a book, song, or graphic image, does the notion of ownership make sense anymore? Or is ownership in the case of intellectual property simply the ability to have access at will? If I pay a fee and can listen to Dark Side of the Moon anywhere, anytime, but do not have a CD to put in the cabinet, do I own it in the same way? Does ownership talk make sense anymore now that access requires no physical media?

How Long Does Adolescence Last?

2012-01-05T05:20:00.002-05:00

Sociologist Michael Kimmel came to campus last semester and an interesting point he made was that adolescence is a modern concept. Traditionally, you hit an age where you are capable of reproduction and, boom, you move from childhood into adulthood instantly. But since Freud's time, only the last century, we've had a different view in which there is a transitional period. It reminds me of that sentence from the opening of "The Gods Must Be Crazy," "...and their children are sentenced to twelve years of scholling just to learn how to survive in this strange world."

So, how long does adolescence last? Has it been expanding? Is it cultural? When is someone an independent adult? Is that a single concept or can you be an adult, that is, be post adolescent, and not be independent?

Presidential Age Limit

2012-01-04T09:38:00.000-05:00

On the heels of the Iowa caucus, let's ask about the requirements to be President of the United States. It is written into the second article of the Constitution that to be eligible for the position, one must be thirty five years old. Is this something we think ought to be maintained or is it groundless, anti-democratic age discrimination? If you are old enough to vote, shouldn't you be old enough to run? I'm not saying that there is a given twenty two year old I would vote for, but why limit that person's right to seek the office? Plato argued that we shouldn't even educate people until they reach forty, so offering such folks the most powerful position in the world may not be the best idea. Then again, the electorate would be able to decree with their ballots that the person was too green and not yet ready. Why shouldn't we have the option? Is the presidential age limit legitimate or illegitimate discrimination?

Bullshit or Not: Cicero Edition

2012-01-03T05:16:00.000-05:00

There's an old sketch film called Amazon Women on the Moon which contained a spoof of Leonard Nemoy's old program "In Search Of" that had the tagline, "Bullshit or not, you decide." We use it as a basis for an occasional series of posts where we assess a passage from a prominent writer. Since today is Marcus Tullius Cicero's 1906th birthday, let's take a quotation from "On Friendship" for today's installment.

"And great and numerous as are the blessings of friendship, this certainly is the sovereign one, that it gives us bright hopes for the future and forbids weakness and despair. In the face of a true friend a man sees as it were a second self. So that where his friend is he is; if his friend be rich, he is not poor; though he be weak, his friend's strength is his; and in his friend's life he enjoys a second life after his own is finished. This last is perhaps the most difficult to conceive. But such is the effect of the respect, the loving remembrance, and the regret of friends which follow us to the grave. While they take the sting out of death, they add a glory to the life of the survivors. Nay, if you eliminate from nature the tie of affection, there will be an end of house and city, nor will so much as the cultivation of the soil be left."

So, an overly romanticized account of friendship or touching account? Bullshit or not? you decide. As usual, feel free to leave anything from a single word to a dissertation in the comments.

New Year's Resolutions (for somebody else)

2012-01-01T10:49:00.002-05:00

Happy New Year! A happy and healthy 2012 to everyone!

With the fresh, clean year comes a chance to start anew, to make changes, to make those improvements that bring our actual selves more in line with our potential selves. And thus we make the new year's resolution. Let's put a twist on it, though. Rather than exposing our own shortcomings by making our own resolutions public, let us gently suggest resolutions for those who might need the nudge.

What resolutions should be made by whom?

Moral Barometer

2011-12-30T08:49:00.002-05:00

Every year around this time I ask what folks think are the most important moral issues of the day. It is interesting to see what gets added, what drops off, and remains on the list of concerns.

So, given the world as it is and looking forward into the coming year, what are the most pressing ethical concerns?

What Does "Peace on Earth" Mean?

2011-12-29T08:42:00.002-05:00

I drive past a lot of places this time of year that have banners or signs that say "Peace on Earth/Good will to men." A lot of them are not places I would generally think of as being pro-peace as I conceive of peace. So, it makes me wonder what they mean by "peace." Is it just the absence of war? Is it a completely different kind of peace, something like "everyone now converts to my religion/worldview"? Is it something else or does it mean nothing at all? Is it just something said without thought at all? What do they mean by "peace"?

Is Governance a Subfield of Ethics?

2011-12-28T10:29:00.002-05:00

Machiavelli's The Prince was a watershed work. Before it, discussions of governance were considered to be governed by the rules of ethics, that the way one should govern was completely determined by how one should act. Machiavelli made it a pragmatic matter. Here is how to do it successfully without moral consideration. Surely, it is wrong to think that governance is independent of ethics; one can govern immorally and be blameworthy for it, but is ethics sufficient to determine how to govern? Is governance rightly a subfield of ethics?

Autonomy, Individual Rights, and Chewing Tobacco

2011-12-27T08:38:00.002-05:00

The new collective bargaining agreement between professional baseball players and the league has taken a small step towards limiting the presence of chewing tobacco in baseball. Players can still chew and spit during games, but they cannot carry it in their uniforms. No more tins or pouches in the back pocket. A ban on its use during games was considered, but rejected.

Chewing tobacco has been part of baseball culture for over a century. It is something you see when you watch baseball. Of course, many of those watching baseball are children and those playing are their idols whom they then use as role models. As a result, a number of these children will start chewing because they see their heroes doing so. This will mean some of them will develop addictions leading to lip and mouth cancers that they otherwise wouldn't have and thereby a number of premature deaths that need not have occurred. This is simply a fact of the world.

The question is whether this fact means that players should have their right to use tobacco during the games stripped from them. A liberatarian outcry has emerged since the CBA was released, arguing that this is an infringement on the players rights. Baseball players do not lose autonomy because of their chosen line of work and if they want to carry and chew, they should be the ones to make the choice. They are adults as are the parents of the kids and this second set of adults should do the parenting, not Major League Baseball.

On the other hand, the league sure does like the tickets sales to families and all of the money from selling overpriced jerseys of the favorite players they get a cut of. When having players be heroes makes them cash, they're plenty happy, but does this also come with a moral responsibility to make sure that their idols present an image that is healthy? Given that ball players are role models, does this mean that they should be expected to surrender certain rights (not to ever chew, but only during the three hours of game time) for the good of the children they will be influencing?

Boxing Day: Will MMA Make Boxing and Professional Wrestling Obsolete?

2011-12-26T13:19:00.003-05:00

Reality television has taken the place of soap operas. We now get to see absurd plots and dysfunctional relationships in which real people suffer actual emotional damage. Are we seeing the same for our cultural blood lust as we are for its psychological counterpart? Will ultimate fighting and mixed martial arts competitions take the place of boxing and professional wrestling as the outlets for our desire to see humans cause physical pain to other humans?

Worst Gifts

2011-12-24T08:58:00.002-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

The first time LilBro and I had sufficiently significant others to have over for the holiday celebration, our folks played candid camera by getting the ugliest, most tacky things they could find as first presents for each of us just to see the reactions from those who would never expect it from their boyfriend's parents. As they held up the black and dayglow lacy mini-dresses and LilBro and I rolled and got the evil eye -- LilBro got smacked and was told sternly "It's very nice" which, of course, made all the funnier. Yes, I was raised in an orthodox Comedist household.

But not all bad gifts are intentional. What's the worst gift you ever received?

Live, laugh, and love,

Irreverend Steve

Happy Festivus

2011-12-23T06:01:00.000-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

Yes, it is that time of year again. Happy Festivus! Please use the comments for the airing of the grievances. Here is this year's feats of strength:

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Did Newt Gingrich's Wife Commit Adultery Too?

2011-12-22T10:47:00.003-05:00

I was listening to a discussion about Newt Gingrich's conversion to Catholicism this morning and it glossed over the fact that he was with his current wife before he was no longer with his previous wife. It is clear that he committed adultery, but did she? In taking his nuptial vows, he entered into a contract that he broke. Clearly, this is wrong. But the mistress who would later become his next wife, took no such vow. He entered into the contract with his previous wife, she has no relationship whatsoever with her. Does the fact that the man to which she feels a physical attraction is already married cast any moral obligation upon her when she never acted in a fashion that would give her additional moral obligations? If someone steals your spouse, you would be furious at both of them. You have clear moral grounds to be enraged at the cheating spouse. If the person who seduced your spouse away knew s/he was already married, do you then have moral grounds for your umbrage?

They Might Be Kantians: Legitimate Argument for Guilt by Association?

2011-12-21T09:33:00.000-05:00

This morning the short people and I were listening to "Flood" on the way into school. Still a great album. The ethical question in the song "Your Racist Friend" has always interested me. The song recounts the conundrum of someone at a friend's party and the host has a friend who is a racist and making ignorant racist comments. The narrator says of his host "I know politics bore you" and there is no sense that host himself harbors racist sentiments, but he "stands by his racist friend." The narrator says that he feels like a hypocrite remaining present at the party and so leaves on principle.

In refusing to condemn the friend's racism, do we have a legitimate case of guilt by association with respect to the host? Does the context matter? The host is apolitical and just trying to have a good time at his party, is he morally obliged to do more than sweep something he cares little about under the rug since it's not his fight? By not doing so, is the host entrenching and thereby indirectly supporting racism and thereby does he have a duty to do something about his friend?

Why Is Ron Paul Ignored by the Media?

2011-12-20T06:51:00.001-05:00

So, in the latest poll from Public Policy Polling, Ron Paul leads the Republican field in Iowa. This, after a string of other candidates, popularly deemed the anti-Romneys, rose and fell. But the way all of those candidates were treated is very different from he way Ron Paul has been, that is, the other candidates weren't completely ignored. Sure, some of Paul's views are well out of the mainstream, but then so are many of the views of Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, or Newt Gingrich. Ron Paul seems to occupy a different space in which he could never be seen as the anti-Romney. Is it because he is more libertarian and not mainline conservative? Is it a function of the GOP leadership dictating to the reporters whom they would have covered? Do the reporters just not like him personally? Is there another reason? Why is Ron Paul treated like he just doesn't exist?

Interview Advice

2011-12-19T10:38:00.002-05:00

Philosophy jobs searches at colleges across the country work on the same schedule. The annual eastern meeting of the American Philosophical Association has traditionally been the place where all first interviews take place. Skype has meant that some departments don't use the APA meetings, but even with them tis the season to interview.

So, for the candidates who will be interviewing -- and for job candidates, in general -- any advice?

My one piece of advice involves a question you are almost surely going to be asked, the dream class. If you could teach anything in the world, what would you want to teach? We who have been lucky enough to get jobs know that the function of graduate school is to induce mental illness. You will be convinced that your dissertation topic which is a small corner of a corner of a corner of a sub-issue of a technical concern is the most important and interesting question in the world and the continued survival of the human race depends upon its being successfully resolved. As you leave your grad student years behind, you will eventually be able to hold actual conversations with human beings who are not your dissertation director and have the other person actually care about what you are saying. The dream class question is really a test to see how far along that path you have already traveled. DO not answer the question by saying that you would love to teach an advanced seminar in the field of your dissertation or on the major figure in your dissertation. The question can be faithfully translated as "It is impressive that you have written a dissertation, but are you more than a one-trick pony?" By answering the dream class question in a way that brings up your dissertation topic, you are saying "Why yes, I am. I have a very narrow intellect and am not excited to branch out into all of the wonderfully fascinating directions your students will want to explore. I am a boring automaton who will repeat the name of a single philosopher over and over again for the next 30 years whenever you ask me how my weekend went or what I think about the weather. Can I have this job now?"

Other advice for job seekers, philosophical, academic, or real-worldly?

Grading Hell

2011-12-17T14:12:00.004-05:00

This is one of the two times of year profs call "grading hell." With large stacks of papers and short amounts of time, everyone is stressed, everyone is exhausted, and grades are due. Family is pushing for more time because things need to be done in preparation of the holidays and you've got more work to do than hours to do it in. And then we get approached and have exactly this conversation repeatedly: What's the worst excuse/plea you've ever gotten/heard of?

Sins of Old Age: Is Ethics Age-Dependent?

2011-12-16T09:32:00.002-05:00

On the way in this morning, the classical station played Rossini's "Sins of Old Age," a title that begs for consideration. There is surely a time before adulthood when one is not fully able to be a complete moral agent because of lack of knowledge, lack of maturity, and lack of experience. But generally, once one has reached a point of autonomy, we consider ethical duties to be ethical duties.

But are they? Are there acts that we do and should condemn in younger or middle-aged people that simply are not problematic once one reaches a certain age? Are there acts that we should expect from younger adults that elder folk should not engage in?
Professionally, for example, we expect senior people to be more involved in governance issues. There is a sense in which we have professional trajectories that seem to come with normative elements that change over time. Think of the Jimmy Buffett song "A Pirate Turns 40." There is something sad about a middle aged man acting like a 21 year old. At the same time, we sometimes see college students who are prematurely middle-aged, who are not taking full advantage of a time in life when they have the freedom to explore avenues and have life-shaping experiences that will not be open to them later on and it seems harmful to them, wrong in some sort of way.

Is ethics age-dependent in any interesting way? Are there sins that are particular to old age or indeed sins of youth?

Is It History Because It Is Old?

2011-12-15T09:19:00.002-05:00

A group is trying to get a particular strip mall in northern Virginia designated as a historic location to be placed under the protection of preservation laws. The argument is that history is not just about locations where important events happened or unique locations or notable architecture, but it is about keeping bits of everyday life as it was lived by people at that place at an other time. Post-war America saw a proliferation of shopping centers which became a staple of mid-20th century life. They may be aesthetically as utilitarian and unpleasing to the eye as anything ever built, but they are a part of the American story and we should seek to preserve it for posterity. The argument against is, "Really? A strip mall?"

No doubt part of the move is about zoning and development in the neighborhood, but the deeper question is an interesting one. Is the fact that something has been a regular part of the culture and is being phased out for whatever reason (good or bad) sufficient to consider typical examples as worth preserving? Does something have to be of particular interest to warrant historical status?

What's the Difference: Value, Price, Cost

2011-12-14T11:03:00.002-05:00

Since we're on a roll of economically related posts, what is the difference between value, price, and cost?

Is the Euro Necessary for a Peaceful Europe?

2011-12-13T09:25:00.003-05:00

One of the arguments you hear for the German willingness to extend itself to bail out Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland is that the Eurozone is not just a monetary union for the sake of financial advantage. The integration of Europe serves a much more important function, peace. By having Europeans see themselves as Europeans, something that arises from tighter and integrated relations, it makes the likelihood of war in Europe less likely. By considering their way of life to be enmeshed with each other, they see other European nations as variations on us instead of as an alien them that could be dehumanized, a major step towards war.

After the European wars of the 19th and especially 20th century, there is good reason to do whatever one can to make entire continents more likely to live together peaceably. But is there really a rational fear there? Is Europe now a different place? Is the threat of a war between major European powers something that is still in the realm of possibility? Is Europe more mature? Has globalization and the complete reinvention of the world economy made European continental war a concern of the past, or could old antagonisms arise again?

Alternating Pairs

2011-12-12T09:27:00.002-05:00

On the way into school this morning, the shorter of the short people proposed that we try to think of words that alternate pairs of consonants and vowels, for example, "sweeps." Of course, we then tried to find long ones. "Outlooks" is eight letters and "cleanliest" has ten. Can you beat ten?

Funniest Places on the Web

2011-12-10T10:08:00.002-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

It comes to my attention that these new-fangled intertubes can be used for the funny. What are the most humorous places on the web we should be reading? The Onion, The Borowitz Report, and Funny or Die certainly have highest profiles. Are there lesser known sites that we should be laughing at? Jesus' General has long been a favorite of mine. Others?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Everything Below This Post Is Kaput

2011-12-09T08:40:00.005-05:00

My oldest friend Gwydion asks,

"Do you ever get tired of blogging? If so, how do you reinvigorate yourself?"

I've had this Playground up and running now for almost six years with six posts a week. I am closing in my 2,000th post. I do not want to begin to calculate how much time I've spent on this project with no means of monetizing anything at all connected to it. It is a labor of love. I enjoy the fact that I can be a part of smart and playful conversations with friends from all parts of my life and with some familiar strangers who are a blast to hang out with.

That said, of course, there are times when you get tired. What do I do at those times? I ask for topics from you guys with an auto mechanics to quantum mechanics post... Seriously, though, what keeps me posting are two things. First is a sense of obligation. I've created this community and feel a sense of duty to keep it going, to keep it vibrant. It is an odd thing that a voluntary action on my part has created expectations in people I care about which then gives me a sense of obligation to continue acting. As such, I make sure to do something even when tired.

But, and this is the second part, I've also let go of a sense of ownership, that it is my job alone to keep this place hopping. I used to think of blog posts as little journal articles or op/ed pieces where I needed to construct arguments and defend a position as the basis for the conversation here. But I realized that it would be easier on me and coincidentally more fun for everyone else if I treated the blog more as a classroom where I ask a provocative question and let you folks bat it around instead of weighing in decisively and stepping on the conversation. There are interesting questions, both contextual and perennial, that are easily framed to generate conflicting intuitions. It is often fun to see the ways in which these open questions will take folks who generally disagree on things (say you and Kerry), and bring you together against others with whom you often agree. By moving to a question instead of answer based format, it has made my end less onerous. I keep a running list of those "ooh, that would make a good blog post" questions (right now, I've got 15 on the list ready to go during the several weeks).

It also helps to have some tried and true templates -- what's the difference, why do you know that, bullshit or not -- in my back pocket that I can pull out from time to time and have everyone know the game and how to play. It's funny how many e-mails I get from people who are Playground regulars that include off-topic mentions of this -- "I have a good question, should I hold it for the next time you do auto mechanics to quantum mechanics..."

So, there are strategies that help, but most of all I just keep going because this is a virtual community I care about and would feel bad letting it slip. Maybe it calls for therapy, but the blog is cheaper...

Neutrinos and Snow

2011-12-08T09:45:00.002-05:00

JB asks,

"What would be some of the real impacts (i.e. to the average human being) if neutrinos are really faster than light?"

Likely, very little. The standard misinterpretation of Bohr's principle of correspondence (which works well) is that each new theory has to have the theory it replaces as an approximation, that is, the new theory has to have results that reduce to the successful parts of the old theory it overthrows. If it turns out that neutrinos really do violate the theory of relativity, the theory of relativity will need to be replaced with something new that mathematically reduces back to the theory of relativity in all of the cases where it worked (that is, everywhere other than these bizarre never seen anywhere else effects). The theory of relativity similarly reduces to Newton's theory in virtually every single case we encounter on a day to day basis. So, practically, the effects would be nothing.

What about technologies? Unlikely. Neutrinos are strange little particles with no charge and virtually no mass. Neutrons in an atoms nucleus are a proton and an electron stuck together. but when you do that, certain properties don't quite work out, so physicists realized there had to be another component, and that's the (anti)neutrino. Just detecting their existence was worth a Nobel Prize. As such, it is unlikely that we'd be able to find ways to exploit this superluminal speed for computing or some other purpose.

That being said, it would likely mean a complete conceptual revolution in physics making LOTS of work for philosophers of physics. So, if you are married to such a person, you'd have to listen to discussions of the debates about this and how the people who disagree with this philosopher do not really understand the theory or what I said about it non-stop. So, for some people it could be a source of constant annoyance.

Kerry asks,

"Does it make scientific sense to say at this time of year, as many of us do, 'Man, if this was snow instead of rain we'd really be in for it!'? That is, is the difference between rainfall and snowfall merely a matter of temperature, or is the constellation of causes that produces rain actually quite different from the one that gives us snow, such that the buckets of rain coming down today wouldn't and couldn't be snow unless other factors besides temperature changed?"

The usual conversion factor is 10:1 for inches of rain to inches of snow. Does this calculation mean anything? When someone says, "this would have been four feet of snow had it been cold enough," what they are really saying is ""this would have been four feet of snow had it been cold enough...ALL ELSE BEING EQUAL." The problem as you point out, and the philosopher Nancy Cartwright has written extensively on this point, is that all else is never equal. The weather is the system we use as the prototypical chaotic system in which small changes to variables make large changes in effect. So, of course changing the temperature of the air would change how moist the air is, wind speeds, and any number of other factors that would have effects on how much snow is dropped.

Oil and Gas

2011-12-07T06:50:00.004-05:00

Jigamo asks,

"Where does the advice to change oil every 3,000 miles or 3 months come from? It doesn't make sense to me why people would still being changing oil so frequently when there are options out there that are rated for 25,000 miles (or 1 year)."

The number 3,000 is one that has been associated with oil changes for decades and decades, back when you could change your own oil and not have to worry about resetting some computer so it stops giving you a digital message.

Engines are made of metal which must move in a beautifully orchestrated fashion to work efficiently. Metal rubbing against metal causes friction which results in heat. Heat expands metal causing the pieces to not fit quite right and therefore not work quite right. Lubrication in engines -- like so many other parts of life -- is essential to the system remaining functional. Over time, the oil becomes contaminated with impurities it picks up and it breaks down chemically, making it less effective at eliminating friction, so it and its corresponding filter need to be changed. 3,000 miles was the generally accepted number for engines and oil as they were manufactured before modern innovation. Now, we have better lubricants that resist heat better. We have engines that are made tighter and are self-monitoring for some of the issues you were looking to avoid. As such, 3,000 miles is unnecessary.

Why is it still automotive gospel? First, once a belief is widespread, it is accepted and difficult to change even when change is rational. Second, the more often you change the oil, the more oil is sold. I know it is hard to believe that oil companies and car dealerships would be less than honest and open, but...

FBC asks,

"What is an objective assessment of the risk/reward of the fracking process as in North East PA?"

This is a hard fracking question. When we need information that is more technical than we ourselves can determine, we have to rely on authorities. a legitimate argument from authority has to satisfy three criteria: (1) the authority must have actual material existence in this universe (no "I read somewhere that..."), (2) the authority must be a person whom we have good reason to believe knows the answer (the person is an actual authority in the field), and (3) the person must not have a personal interest in getting me to believe one way or the other. The worries in the fracking case is with both (2) and (3).

Consider them in opposite order. There is A LOT of money at stake here and powerful corporate interests that want access to the shale. They know that environmental concerns are real and playing off of the tobacco and industrial chemical industries' experiences, they know how to buy scientists and infiltrate the literature to plant information they can use in court and in public relations efforts to sell the project. They've bought, for example, the geology department at Penn State which is now an arm of their marketing departments. An objective assessment would have to be one that is not paid for by the industry. It would have to be transparent in its assumptions and methodology and have its findings replicated by other independent sources. The problem is that those producing the studies want to keep that information hidden. Case in point,

A New York Post editorial advocated for New Yorkers to "frack, baby, frack!" citing a "new study out of Penn State" claiming ample economic rewards of natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. However, the editorial failed to note that the study was sponsored by a lobbying group representing gas companies.

Then we have the problems with (2). Who are the experts here? It is what we call an interdisciplinary problem. There is no one set of experts to turn to and working across intellectual boundaries in a way that allows a unified account is difficult.

But it is even trickier in this case because we are dealing with a process whose real effects are as of yet unknown. There have been an unusual number of earthquakes in regions of Arkansas and Virginia where fracking has been taking place. Are they related? Maybe. We don't know. The unintended unforeseen consequences of something like this cannot be predicted -- that's the unforeseen part -- so a cost/benefit analysis could be way off should there be huge unforeseen costs.

The answer then, is "heck if I know." Issues like this require rational decisions based on our best models of the costs and benefits and these models are always and necessarily based on incomplete information. But in this case, we seem to have some glaringly big question marks and we have to hope the frack that the worst case scenario doesn't come to be.

Income Inequality and Occupy Caesar's Palace

2011-12-06T09:45:00.005-05:00

JB asks,

"Can the Occupy movement ever gain traction with the larger (apathetic) portion of the 99% when stories keep coming out with headlines like 'Occupy protesters leave behind 30 tons of garbage in Los Angeles park?'"

I'm not sure what would satisfy the conditions for "gaining traction." We know that the media will be hostile to any movement that questions the status quo, especially if it is one in which it is not particular demands within the structure but the structure itself that is being questioned. We know also that this is part of a larger dynamic in which protesters are labeled "dirty hippies who don't want to get a job" and this ad hominem attack can be used to keep from asking the questions that need to be asked about both the moral fairness and economic sense of our current system.

That being said, the Occupy movement HAS changed the discourse. It is having an effect. It will not change the system. It will not be able to undermine the power that corporate interests have in Washington. But, it can shine some light on it and make it a live issue instead of allowing the country to be bankrupted in back-alley deals that serve only to shift all wealth upwards. It can slow the process and that may create a context in which larger changes become possible. What Occupy has done is to introduce frames into the current way of speaking and thinking about things that are healthier. I think that Occupy has the traction, if the goal is to allow us to start talking about issues we previously couldn't under the Republican frame. And if you doubt that, look at how nervous it is making Frank Luntz.

Philo asks,

"We've all seen the charts for wealth and income inequality, and it seems to be apparent that this has to be fixed by some redistribution mechanism. What is the right thing to do?"

Income is the amount you bring in and wealth is the amount you have. For those of us in the 99%, we spend most of what we make, putting it into the economy where it gets circulated again and again in what John Maynard Keynes called the multiplier effect. In this way, it is the poor, working, and middle class who are the real job creators. The wealthy make their money from investments, not wages -- that is they get more money just for being rich and then use most it to invest in ways that does not have a direct effect on the real economy, the wealth gets horded and does not raise all boats. The solution, therefore, begins by giving preferential treatment to money that was earned by actually working for it. The rate on capital gains -- free money for having money -- should be significantly higher than that for earned income which is taxed according to a fair and progressive set of rates.

Then, we need to increase the wealth, not just the income of the 99%. This has begun. One effect of the elimination of traditional pensions and the stock market bubble of the 90s is that a larger portion of the population now considers wealth management seriously. Stock and bond ownership is now significantly broader than it has been. Savings is not something we do well in this country and it can be encouraged in a number of ways from early financial education to increasing the limit on tax-deferred or tax-free contributions to IRAs or college savings accounts.

YKW asks,

"The Five-year results for the S&P 500 Index (going from December 6, 2006 thru yesterday) registers a drop of 152 points, or a cumulative loss of about 11 percent. While I know that keeping say, $100,000 in small bills under my mattress would have produced a better return during this period than buying a fund that replicated S&P, would I have also done better by playing casino craps with $20,000 of that money (consistently betting the pass line, double odds, and 2 numbers) over the same five year period?"

In five years, there's approximately 2,000 days. given your $20,000 bankroll, that means you'd play about $10 per day. The odds on a double odds pass bet favor the house by only .61% which means that on a $10 bet, the expectation value is $9.94, that is, you expect on average to lose about six cents a bet. Over the 2,000 days, then, you'd likely be down only $120 and have had a darn good time yelling and screaming with the other nuts at the craps table for the year which means that you would likely be better off. Not that I'm suggesting this as a long-term financial strategy...

Analytic/Continental Divide, Ps and Qs, and Scientific Disproof

2011-12-05T10:06:00.002-05:00

C. Ewing asks,

"Is the difference between analytical philosophy and continental philosophy one of history/tradition or methodology? both? neither?"

Both. The divide that defined 20th century philosophy derives from a split in how to proceed after Kant. Very roughly, Kant argued that doing metaphysics leads to contradictions, so you have to choose between logic and metaphysics -- analytics chose logic and Continentals chose metaphysics. The continental tradition traces its roots to Hegel who abandoned the traditional two-valued logic for his dialectic. This meant two things: (1) the traditional logic no longer applied, and (2) we need to look at the objects of philosophy through historical lenses. As Continental thought reacted against Hegel and developed into the 20th century, those notions remained as the signature. The term "deconstructed" which entered our lexicon from the postmodernist school in the Continental tradition means to unpack the effects of social and political power structure in explaining why people believe something. Reality and knowledge become functions of the social.

Analytic philosophy emerges from the advances in math and science (especially the theory of relativity) in the late 19th/early 20th centuries when the scientific worldview was turned completely upside down. In an effort to understand how science provides us with reasonable beliefs that seem (1) at first glance completely unreasonable, and (2) capable of such completely radical conceptual revision, they moved to replace the mushy, slippery ordinary language with something more rigorous, an absolutely clean logical language in which philosophical problems could be stripped down to empirical questions and shipped off to scientists to answer or exposed as pseudo-questions which don't really have an answer and can therefore be forgotten. The goal here is to analyze (not deconstruct) statements to make it completely clear what they mean and what would have to be the case for them to be true.

In this way, they followed distinct historical developments that brought with them different tools and methods. That being said, what one sees now across the divide, is the two starting to trend back towards common insights -- the ways in which the objective is interwoven with the social. I don't thihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnk this will mean a resolution of the philosophical community anytime soon, but relations will likely become less frosty.

While we're on the topic of logic, jigamo asks

"Why do logical proofs often use the letters P and Q? Does this have any relation to 'minding your Ps and Qs?'"

Nope. Independent. The saying is British and p's and q's may or may not have been the letters p and q. The earliest usages are from the writings of playwright Thomas Dekker:

The date of the coinage of 'mind your Ps and Qs' is uncertain. There is a citation from Thomas Dekker's play, The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet, 1602, which appears to be the earliest use of the expression:

Afinius: ...here's your cloak; I think it rains too.
Horace: Hide my shoulders in't.
Afinius: 'Troth, so thou'dst need; for now thou art in thy Pee and Kue: thou hast such a villanous broad back...

'Pee and Kue' in that citation seem to be referring to a form of clothing, but that is somewhat ambiguous. It is also not clear that the 'Pee and Kue' in Dekker's work are the same as those in 'mind one's Ps and Qs'. Dekker later used the term in West-ward Hoe, a joint work with John Webster, 1607:

At her p. and q. neither Marchantes Daughter, Aldermans Wife, young countrey Gentlewoman, nor Courtiers Mistris, can match her.

In that piece it is less apparent that 'p. and q.' refer to a form of clothing.

In logic, we just need letters to represent properties or qualities, so we often select P and Q. Strangely, we often use F and G for relations which means logic teachers find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to discuss the property of p-ness and the f'ing relation and whether it is symmetric and transitive.

Avrohom Kaufman asks,

"We learned in your class (back when you were just the new guy on the block in the late 90's) that science can't prove anything only disprove. This begs the question (though just as a side note) if science can't prove anything to begin with than how can it disprove; what barometer is it using if proof (i.e., truth) is not counted amongst it's starting points?"

The asymmetry between proof and disproof here comes from what is trying to be shown -- that some sentence is a universal law of nature, that is, something that describes the behavior of some complete class of phenomena. If the claim says that it holds for every single instance of X, and there could be an infinite number of X's, then we could never prove it. But if you show me one case where there is an X that doesn't work the way my supposedly universal theory about X's claims, then my universal claim is falsified, proven false.

More tomorrow.

Auto Mechanics to Quantum Mechanics: Any Questions?

2011-12-02T06:23:00.003-05:00

We'll put this weekend's post up a day early to get things rolling. I have a schtick I do at the beginning of every class where I take a few minutes and let the students ask me any question from auto mechanics to quantum mechanics. When I started the Playground years ago, some former students asked if I'd bring it here. So, as an occasional series of posts, I throw it open. If there was ever a question you just wanted to ask, here's your chance. We'll discuss as many as I can get to next week.

Bullshit or Not: Woody Allen Edition

2011-12-01T09:56:00.002-05:00

Here's a bit that used to be a regular at the Playground, but which I haven't dusted off in a while. The title comes from a sketch in the old film "Amazon Women on the Moon" which included a spoof of the old Leonard Nemoy series "In Search of..." The satire had the tag line "Bullshit or Not...you decide" and I thought it would be a good idea to use it as a theme for a series of posts. I provide a quotation and you weigh in...bullshit or not.

Since today is Woody Allen's birthday, let's go with one of his more cynical quotations. From "Shadows and Fog":

"There's only one kind of love that lasts. That's unrequited love. It stays with you forever."

So, bullshit or not? You decide. Feel free to leave in the comments anything from a single word to a dissertation.

Presbyopia and Other Milestones

2011-11-30T03:55:00.001-05:00

When I was 13, I had a bar mitzvah. It was supposed to celebrate my moving from childhood to adulthood, but at 13 I hadn't even figured out how to be a teenager much less a man. But the idea is right. There are times and events that are universally human -- or at least culturally nearly universal -- which mark different phases of life.

Yesterday, I had THAT optometrist visit. My glasses will now become as progressive as I am (although that might mean I only have a lens on the left). I asked my optometrist whether presbyopia, age-related far-sightedness, was seen cross-culturally. He explained that it is truly universal. Environmental factors play some role in time of onset -- his academic and accountant patients would get it a few years earlier on average in his experience -- but it crossed all demographic categories and always started in the early 40s and subsided in the late 50s. The human eye is just built that way. So, reaching that point is something that everyone has or will experience. It was my blur mitzvah.

What other events would be that sort of shared milestone that virtually all others would be able to identify with that mark a change in life phase?

Losing your first tooth
Riding without training wheels for the first time
Having your first crush
Getting your driver's license (a car mitzvah)
The first funeral of someone in your age cohort

Others?

Are Boring Classes More Difficult?

2011-11-29T06:02:00.000-05:00

I just had my logic class translate the sentence "Boring classes are more difficult than demanding courses" into first order predicate logic. It made me wonder whether it was true or not. Is it?

How Do We Protect Ourselves from the Corporate Corruption of Science?

2011-11-28T06:31:00.002-05:00

I've been reading David Michaels' book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. Truly a must read. As an insider, he chronicles the ways in which corporations are not only undermining the public's understanding of science by infusing misinformation and illegitimate doubt and having Republican cronies insert unreasonable and carefully crafted rules into the regulatory process that keep the government from acting in the public's best interest when we have strong scientific consensus of dangers to our health, but corporations are also corrupting the scientific process itself.

Where corporate interests are quick to scream "junk science" whenever legitimate scientists show that the world works in a fashion that is not in line with maximizing profits, the fact is that they are intentionally junking up the scientific system. They do this in three ways. The first is to find hired guns, scientists willing to design flawed studies that are guaranteed to give the industry the result it wants. You can do this if it is a comparative study, say demonstrating the increased efficacy of a new drug over an alternative already on the market, by putting up a straw opponent. Study your drug at full dose against the competitor at half dose. Hey, what do you know, this one works better.

Another way is to cherry pick your data and your results. If we're looking at rare diseases caused by chemicals in industrial work sites, make sure you only record some but not all of them. Have several data sets demonstrating the results of exposure to something used in your manufacturing process or a chemical you want to put on the market, only analyze the ones that give you what you want to show. Did you have the foresight to have several different groups run experiments under one of your hired scientists? Only let the ones that support you see the light of day.

A third is to not do the science yourself, but to reanalyze all the results that show the problems you are causing. A little adjustment in some of the assumptions of the model over here and a tweak of the statistical methods over there and, poof, the evidence that you are the one killing the parents of those cute little orphans has disappeared. Must have been lifestyle choices. thanks to Richard Shelby, the Senator from Alabama, it is the law that industries have access to the raw data of all of the scientists working in the public interest so that they can monkey with it and create false doubt in the public mind while corporations and the front organizations they finance to do their junk science can hide from the public and regulators everything they don't want us to know.

They work very hard disguising the junk they put out, trying their hardest to slip it into peer-reviewed journals so that they then have studies they can point to in court. With no moral values and tons of cash, they are succeeding in undermining the system.

Merck just pleaded guilty in the Vioxx case. They hid data from regulators so that they could generate profits on a drug that they knew would unnecessarily cause heart attacks. Somewhere between 88,000 and 139,000 people had heart attacks they otherwise would not have had because of Merck's actions and 30-40% of those were fatal. that means that somewhere between 26,000 and 55,000 families lost loved ones for no reason other than corporate profits. 3,000 people died on 9/11 and we call it terrorism and go to war. Ten times that many die from corporate malfeasance and we make sure they get tax breaks and legal protection to keep misleading and killing our family members.

So, given that they have the means to influence both the process of science and the reporting of it, do non-specialists in a field have good reason to form any belief about scientific consensus? Look at what they are doing with global warming. The misinformation campaign is massive. Where can we, the non-technicians, get information that is not filtered through the corporate spin and doubt machine so that we can get some sense of what the actual consensus among legitimate scientists is on issues that concern our health and well-being?

Are the Three Stooges Timeless?

2011-11-27T07:39:00.003-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

I've been working my way through Robert Solomon's piece on the Three Stooges. The short people LOVE the Stooges, while TheWife cannot stand them. This would not seem unusual. There is clearly an age and gender divide in Stooge appreciation. But is this indicative of a larger sense in which the Stooges' work is time limited? The Stooges are clearly an artifact of the Depression era when life itself was rough, especially for immigrants without access to education. But in that ability to represent over-the-top reactions to adversity do they touch something deeper in the human condition? Is there something timeless about the Stooges or are they temporally located? Will they become less and less funny to each passing generation of adults? Will they always be funny to kids?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

The Problems of Evil and Free Will

2011-11-25T09:45:00.003-05:00

Guest-post today from Todd Furman at McNeese State:

A plausible theodicy must accomplish at least two tasks. First, it must clear God of bringing evil into the universe; and two it must absolve God from being culpable for any existent evils. The Fall, be it in the form of Satan’s fall, or Adam and Eve’s, is supposed to be the starting point of the ever popular free will defense -– God didn’t bring evil into the world, Satan and/or Mankind brought evil into existence by abuse of their free will. But John Hick finds both of these falls to be nonsensical: God’s original creations must be wholly good; else God is responsible for the introduction of evil into the universe and if Satan and Adam and Eve were created wholly good, then they would have no motive to ever actually do evil, even though they possess free will; hence, any resulting evil must actually be due to a non-culpable act of ignorance or to an already fallen nature provided by God, a nature that admits to envy and disobedience.

This much seems on target until one begins to think about J.L. Mackie’s classic paper on the logical problem of evil. At one point, Mackie claims that God should have made persons that freely always do the good; and if God can’t, then He isn’t omnipotent; if He won’t, then God isn’t all good. The classic, and accepted, rejoinder to Mackie is to claim that a creature that always freely chooses the good is a logical impossibility. Hence, not even an omnipotent God could make such a being.

But isn’t this sort of being just the sort of beings that Hick supposes Satan and Adam and Eve to be pre-fall? I believe so. In this case, who is right; those that assert or deny the possibility of a being that always freely chooses the good?

I have always been tempted to side with those that argue that such a being is a logical impossibility, but consider the following: being free entails that X could have done other than she did (in identical circumstances). So, suppose that X has three choices A, B, and C. Suppose too that A and B are morally permissible but C is not. If X were all good and chose A, but could have chosen B, and would never choose an option like C, doesn’t X count as a free creature that would always do good? Perhaps we believe that a free creature that always does good is a logical impossibility because we incorrectly assume that choices are always between good and evil, in which case a free creature that always chooses the good might be nonsensical.

God As My Witness, I Thought Turkeys Could Fly

2011-11-24T06:12:00.002-05:00

Hat tip to Gwydion for reminding us all of the funniest Thanksgiving sitcom episode ever. Happy Turkey Day everyone.

Why Don't We Like Dollar Coins?

2011-11-23T00:24:00.002-05:00

If the treasury switched from paper dollar bills to exclusively producing dollar coins, it would save us $5.5 billion according to a GAO report. but every attempt to roll out a dollar coin recently has failed.

Is it the size? The dollar has to be larger than the quarter. Does that make it too big? The Susan B. Anthonys weren't that bog. Neither were the Sacagaweas. Nor the present presidential coins. They are a bit thicker, but are they really uncomfortably bigger? Why won't we embrace the dollar coin?

What Does It Mean to "Accept Full Responsibility"?

2011-11-22T08:26:00.004-05:00

In the wake of the unprovoked spraying of peaceful demonstrators at the University of California at Davis with pepper spray by a police officer associated with the campus, the Chancellor, Linda Katehi, said,

"I am deeply saddened that this happened on our campus, and as chancellor, I take full responsibility for the incident. However, I pledge to take the actions needed to ensure that this does not happen again."

The word "however" in that utterance is odd. It functions logically as a conjunction, that is, like the word "and" in saying that what comes before and after the "however" will both be true. But "however" is different from "and" in that it also connotes that the two sentences connected are not ones that one would expect to be linked. Consider a more normal use -- "I am not feeling well, however, I will make it into the office today." The idea being conveyed is that both the clauses are true, but that given the truth of the first, my being ill, that the second, my coming into work, is unexpected. But if Chancellor Katehi is accepting "full responsibility," then it should be expected that she would make sure this never happens again. No?

I suppose it depends upon what one means by "taking full responsibility." What does that mean? It is a phrase we demand people utter. Anthony Wiener took "full responsibility" after his misdeed was exposed. Chevron just took "full responsibility" for an oil spill off the coast of Brazil. Richard Nixon, after the release of the smoking gun tape, said "This was a serious act of omission for which I take full responsibility." Lots of people do it...or at least say they do it. But what is it that they are actually claiming to do?

Sometimes saying is the same as doing. There are what ordinary language philosophers call performative utterances. When you say "I promise to do x," you have done something -- promising -- by saying the words. Similarly with making a bet, taking an oath, or pronouncing "I do." In this case, to say is to do. We tell out children that they must say "please." They must write thank you notes for gifts. They must say "excuse me" when they accidentally bump into someone. In all of these cases, the saying IS the doing.

Is that the case with taking full responsibility? In basketball when a player is called for a foul, he or she has to face the scorers' table and raise a hand. Is taking responsibility the same sort of act where one stands up and acknowledges one's role in bringing the unfortunate act about or is it more?

There is a difference between "excuse me" and "I'm sorry." "Excuse me" says, "It was me who did it and I know it displeased you." "I'm sorry," on the other hand not only points out one's own role in something unpleasant, but also implies that the displeasure was significant, that I am empathetic, will try to stop it henceforth and make whatever amends are necessary to repair the damage of the act. To mean less is not to apologize, but -- to play with a phrase from "All the President's Men" -- to offer a non-apology apology.

"I take full responsibility" seems more like I'm sorry than excuse me. But what is entailed by it? Does it mean to be the one solely accountable for the act? The officer who sprayed the students is on administrative leave, so she did not accept his share of responsibility. He may be fired, but she might not resign. If the act was worthy of losing one's job, would that be accepting full responsibility?

What responsibility is it that is being accepted? Is it not a question of accepting all of the retribution, but rather accepting full responsibility for changing the system moving forward? Is that the case, then when one leader is fired for misdeeds and another takes over the new leader who may have had nothing to do with the situation would take full responsibility in this sense. But that does not seem appropriate. Surely, that's not what we mean.

But what then do we mean? When someone accepts full responsibility, what is it they are now responsible for? Is it something they were not responsible for before? Some they already were responsible for but they are now publicly acknowledging it? The negative effects of their actions? Changing the way they act or the system that brought this about? What does it mean to "take full responsibility"?...if anything.

Ayn Rand, Occupy, and Irony

2011-11-21T05:52:00.003-05:00

Watching the Afghanistan war veterans and little old ladies getting assaulted as police are sent in to rough up Occupy protesters across the country gives rise to many reactions -- bafflement, outrage, and sorrow. But there is also a deep appreciation of the irony that is present on so many levels. Here are just five of those levels:

1. The protesters, not the opponents, embody that which is the basis of what is being protested.

The Occupy Wall Street movement arose in response to a political structure in which the governmental rules and regulations have been intentionally designed to redistribute the wealth in the United States, systematically stripping it from the working and middle classes who spend it and thereby multiply its positive economic effects, and transferring it to the wealthiest who hoard it so that it is much less effective at creating jobs and elevating the general standard of living. The initial intellectual justification for this clearly unfair and unhealthy approach to governing was the trickle-down theory of economics in which dumping twenty gallons of paint on the roof would magically cause the paint to evenly coat the house. By making the rich into the mega-rich, everyone beneath would benefit. It is false. It has never worked. Even the first president Bush referred to it decades ago as "voodoo economics."

But when it was shown to be conceptually bankrupt, the other justification came out. The real one. The wealth of the nation as a whole was not being given to the already wealthy because it would help everyone, but because the wealthy are the ones who deserve it. Helping those who need help is not the good thing we think it is, it is the worst thing we could do. The worst thing for whom? For the species. For the human race. Thus spake Ayn Rand.

If you take everything smart, insightful, and funny out of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche what is left are the writings of Ayn Rand. The human race is not an interconnected social web in which we lift each other up, establishing the conditions of human flourishing as a community, no, we are atoms, individuals, single entities creating greatness through triumphant self-affirmation at the cost of another. It is the great individual that advances the race, that makes history by breaking history. If we care for weak, the poor, the hungry, it removes the resources from the strong,the brave, the smart, in a zero sum game. We need to create heroes, to let the magnificent ones rise and thrive. Eat the weak, their only purpose is to feed the strong. Traditional ethics with its accent on helping the helpless and downtrodden must be overturned if we are to become what we can be. Instead, we must have maximum freedom, allowing the great to rise and removing the impediments from their ascent. We must unshackle the great ones who will create and their creations will transform life and the world. Human progress comes from the unbound individual.

This line was bought by everyone from Alan Greenspan to Paul Ryan. The ideas of Rand inform the conservative worldview and its approach to governance, the approach that got us where we are. The redistribution of wealth on this view is a good thing and needs to continue. But does it really help the smartest and most creative, the ones who are transforming life and the world as we know it?

No. The irony is that if you want to see the best and brightest, look in the tents in Zuccotti Park. It's the protesters who represent the most admirable elevators of the species. A former poet laureate of the United States was just assaulted at the Occupy gathering in Berkeley. But, but, but they're hippies. Yeah, they are. It was the hippies who created the iPhone and the technological basis for the internet. It was hippies who helped eradicate smallpox. these are the people across space and time that have always brought us the great advances. Einstein was a socialist and a pacifist who wore sandals and long hair. Nobel Peace Prize winner An Sung Suu Kyi is a deadhead. These folks are the ones who will pave the way to the future.

Want an example? Look how the occupiers solve their own problems -- keeping a community going in the cold after the police seized your generators? No problem. Be scientifically well-informed and extremely clever:

The Randians? Not so much. As humans we are programmed to be irrationally optimistic, to think things are better than they are. We think we are richer than we are relative to the average. We think we are more talented than we are relative to the average. And we think we are smarter than we are relative to the average. If you spend lots of your time reading and talking about Ayn Rand, you're not one of the great individuals -- that in and of itself makes you one of the sheep. If you were really that smart, you would realize that the field of sociology exists and the ways in which human interactions and helping all people does establish the preconditions for human flourishing. You'd realize that every time those folks are given power they really, really, really screw things up for everyone.

2. The brutality is to stop the freedom that is supposed to be at the heart of the vision the opponents desire.

It is funny how much of a threat the Occupy movement seems to them, though. If these are folks who are the weak fighting for the weak, let them gather, they can't do any damage to the rise of the great ones. But we must shut them down, after all they are saying things and making funny signs. They are marching and worst of all they are being mean to the strongest, toughest, greatest of the species and that might hurt their little feelings. So, in the name of freedom and liberty we need to remove their camps and libraries from public spaces and spray them with pepper spray in the face. we must defend liberty and freedom by making sure that they cannot speak and petition their government for redress of grievances. After all the only way to make sure we are free is to deny them their freedom because they might rise and change things and that would be bad because only the smartest and most creative are supposed to use the freedom to successfully change things.

3. The real criminals destroy the lives of millions and get coddled, the ones standing up for the victims get victimized.

Real people are suffering around the globe because these folks have controlled government for a generation and built up a house of cards to serve themselves and it finally collapsed. We have had two decades of creative accounting, bribery, predatory lending, ignoring of safety standards, and illegal and immoral acts that led us to an unhealthy place. What happens? They get tax breaks while those who stand up and demand change for the actual victims are arrested and beaten.

4. The police fight against the protesters while the protesters fight for the police

Accounts of the behavior of some police officers have been shocking. You have people who are engaged in peaceful demonstrations, clearly not armed, clearly not violent, and being physically abused for being rationally angry and having the nerve to express it in public. Whether it is an 84-year old former school teacher or college students sitting on the ground, the behavior towards these American citizens has been outrageous.

So, the police are angry. They feel the need to strike back at these protestors. They cannot stand what the occupiers stand for. But suppose the protestors lose. Suppose the people the occupiers are opposing get into power. What then?

We don't need hypotheticals. It's happening. Take two examples, Scott Walker the new governor of Wisconsin and John Kasich the new governor of Ohio. These guys are funded by the Koch brothers, two of the leaders of the conservative movement and the money behind much of the tea party. When the Koch brothers' elected representative take office what is the first thing they were told to do? Strip collective bargaining rights from...wait for it...public unions including teachers and...yup, POLICE OFFICERS. The protestors are protesting, amongst other things, to protect the police officers' ability to put food in their table and send their kids to college. How dare you fight for my family, I better hit you with this knight stick.

5. The 1% are poisoning the well they drink from, too.

We are a short-sighted species. As much as the libertarians love to think of us as rational, we are built with a small horizon that often shields from us what is actually in our own best self-interest. As Robert Frank argues, when group interests and individual interests in the short term appear to diverge, we often think we are best off by pursuing our own interests at the expense of the greater good. But while we might gain a small advantage now, we deprive ourselves of the larger windfall that comes from the broad-based prosperity. As Robert Reich puts it,

"If an economy is functioning correctly, everyone wins -- the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent.

For three decades after World War II, that's the kind of economy we had. Labor productivity doubled, and the incomes of almost all Americans doubled as well. In fact, the pay of workers in the bottom fifth more than doubled -- rising at a faster pace than the pay of people at the top. The vast majority of Americans did so well they had enough money to buy just about everything they produced -- which, in turn, kept the economy growing at full tilt.

But over the last three decades, the opposite has happened. The economy has doubled in size but the pay of most workers has barely risen, adjusted for inflation. Almost all the gains have gone to the very top. America's middle class maintained its purchasing power for a time because wives and mothers enter the paid work force, and then, during the housing boom, it could borrow trillions against their homes.

But those coping mechanisms are now exhausted. Which means most Americans no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going. That's why we're in the mess we're in. So to get the economy moving again we have to restore broad-based prosperity -- not just for the top 1 percent and not just for the bottom 99 percent, but for everyone.

The top 1 percent should be eager to do this. As we learned in the three decades after World War II, the rich do far better with a smaller share of a rapidly-growing economy than they do with a big share of one that's barely growing at all."

It turns out that with the "greater good," the good is in fact greater. In order to stick it to us, the wealthy are actually sticking to themselves in the end.

Ah, the irony.

Funniest Cartoon

2011-11-19T10:04:00.002-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

This week marks the 83rd anniversary of the release of Steamboat Willie, the first animated cartoon with sound. From the beginning, the medium was seen as a good one for comedy because the sort of slapstick gags we saw coming out of Vaudeville and into the early silents with masters like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and then into the talkies with Laurel and Hardy could be ramped up to be even more absurd. Eyeballs could bulge out of heads, people would not get hit with boards but anvils, you could do anything to your characters and not have to worry about the next thirty seconds much less the next performance. But the humor slowly became more linguistic and the comedy more sophisticated.

So, the question is the high water mark. What is the funniest cartoon -- both series and individual episode -- ever?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Plato's Revenge

2011-11-18T05:26:00.000-05:00

Plato smiles as the elected prime ministers of Greece and Italy are replaced with technocrats from global financial institutions. Plato argued that political power should reside with specially trained experts he called philosopher-kings, or in today’s case, economist-kings. This system – ironically developed in Greece and implemented in Italy – is flawed, but presents insights that remain prescient in this time of great turmoil.

On a ship full of sailors, Plato argued, each one will think himself most qualified to be captain. But the one who takes the wheel will not be the person most able to account for the complexities of wind and weather, most schooled in reading the intricate maps and star charts, but rather will be the one who knows how best to exploit the weaknesses and insecurities of the other crew members. Getting elected does not make you qualified for the office. Virtues for effective candidates may be vices for effective leaders.

The troubles with many of the teetering economies (and perhaps not only those in Europe) arose in part from unsustainable structures within the political systems. But austerity of any degree is a tricky sell because it does mean real human suffering. Even when populations acknowledge the need, they will almost universally be unwilling to elect people to do the difficult and painful work. As a teacher, I know how much students cheer the cancelling of a class or assignment. They know that doing the work benefits them, yet they prefer to avoid it. Given the opportunity, the majority will vote for more recess almost every time.

But this does not mean that the people assigning the work or demanding the austerity are necessarily the adults in the room. Plato’s republic was notable for a feature that we see in no contemporary political system, an absolute barrier between wealth and power. Those who seek enrichment are encouraged to do so. Become as rich as you can, have as much as you want; just be aware that you will have no role whatsoever in governance. The merchants will have no power and rulers will possess no property and accumulate no wealth.

But when we look at those who are installing the new leaders in Europe they are not only the ones whose risky investments kicked off the current crisis, but also those who are benefiting most and sacrificing least from the proposed way out. The concern was whether the markets would react favorably to the replacement of Greece’s Papandreou and Italy’s Berlusconi. “The market is demanding seven percent interest on bonds,” we were told and that requires bold action to avoid a bailout. It is the market whose wisdom is being put above that of the people.

Plato dismissed the rationality of the populace, but he also knew firsthand that oligarchies lead to injustice. Giving influence to a small group of wealthy citizens will result in a swelling the ranks of the poor who will become increasingly impoverished. Excess and consumption will be mistaken for ethical superiority. The poor will become beggars, thieves, or thugs with the rich expressing more and more need to repress them, lest they rise up.

In Plato’s time, leaders of the Athenian democracy were replaced by the thirty tyrants, a group that ruled over the citizens of Athens, only 3000 of whom were given legal recognition making the oligarchs quite literally the 1%. Combining the hording of wealth with the accumulation of power results in the suppression of human flourishing, as the classical Greeks witnessed.

While Plato’s sentiments are being echoed nationwide from those in the Occupy movement, he would be equally scornful of their radically democratic approach. So, if we cannot look to the markets or the majority to select the appropriate leaders and we dismiss the possibility of breeding them according to Plato’s vision of political eugenics, where do we find them? Who are the experts we can trust to find us the experts we should trust? Where are the wise and moral leaders we need at this time who can avoid both the perils of popularity and the financial interests of the financially interested? Are Lucas Papademos and Mario Monti the right people to save Greece, Italy, the European Union and the world economy? That’s an empirical question, the sort philosophers have a long history of answering badly. We can only hope that as they walk down into the cave in which the world financial system dwells, that they have indeed basked in the sunlight of the Form of the Good.

Bargaining for Beliefs

2011-11-17T05:27:00.003-05:00

There is a scene in Through the Looking Glass in which Alice meets a unicorn who thought humans were fanciful monsters of the imagination. As they confront each other, the unicorn offers Alice a deal,

'if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?'

A bargain is a contract that both parties have to enter into willingly and with the ability to fulfill their end. Is that the case here? Is belief something we can decide to choose or not? If I offered you $100 to believe in unicorns, is that an arrangement someone could enter into? You could say "I believe in unicorns, but could you choose to really believe? How free are we to determine what we believe?

The Market Is Up On News That I Wrote This Post

2011-11-16T06:30:00.000-05:00

Everyday we hear an interesting causal claim "The market is up(down) on news that..." How do the financial reporters make this statement? Seem like there are three possibilities:

(1) They interview traders and ask them what influenced their thinking on the day.

(2) They examine stocks that are reasonably associated with the news of the day and imply the effect from the movement of those particular companies.

(3) They simply look for something important that happened and infer causation from correlation, post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Which one is it or is there another possibility?

Pluralism and Constraint

2011-11-15T09:33:00.007-05:00

Our friends Scott Aikin and Bob Talisse over at 3 Quarks Daily have an interesting discussion of pluralism. Following the argument in Bob's new book, Pluralism and Liberal Politics, they call it a "halo term," a notion that has such a positive connotation and is so connected with virtue that attacking it seems beyond the pale. But attack it they do. "Vacuous!" they assert. (O.k., the exclamation point is mine, but they should be tolerant of one's punctuational choices.)

They point to certain terms like "exclusionary" that have negative connotations, that are loaded with ethical baggage. But for each negative term , there is one that expresses the same sentiment with a positive sense. "Selective" is an affirmative way of being exclusionary. The selective person excludes, but does so for good reason where the exclusionary person merely excludes for the sake of excluding. In the same way, the flip side of pluralism is relativism. The relativist is a buffoon who allows that if Joseph Stalin thought that murdering hundreds of thousands of people was morally right, then it is morally right for Stalin. The relativist is absurd, the pluralist is thoughtful and open-minded.

But there is a significant difference between relativism and pluralism. Relativism is a philosophical free-for-all. Like taste in ice cream, holding a view justifies the view. If I like vanilla more than chocolate, then I do regardless of any rational argument that could be offered. Pluralism, however, is different from relativism. Pluralism allows that there are sidelines that mark what is out of bounds, but still has plenty of room on the field of play for people to run with the ball in different directions. Pluralism implies constraint without complete determination.

We could differentiate between two flavors of pluralism: co-deterministic pluralism and under-deterministic pluralism. Co-deterministic pluralism is where the ethical, epistemological, or metaphysical constraints allow that two answers are equally correct and other pragmatic considerations must then be used to break the tie. Suppose you are ordered to build a bridge 15 plus the square root of four feet long. The square root of four is both positive and negative two, so you follow orders by building either a seventeen or thirteen foot bridge. Which should you build? It would be cheaper to build the short one, but perhaps more stable to have the long one. Other factors need to be considered, but either selection would be correct.

Under-deterministic pluralism is where the constraints simply limit the possible right answers, but do not select a unique one. Unlike the co-deterministic case, the answers are mutually exclusive; they are not both right, but which one is the right one needs further determination than the agreed upon conditions. the example I think of here comes from a short essay by Jean-Paul Sartre who considers a student who came to him during WWII with a problem. His father had become a Nazi sympathizer and thrown out of the family. his brother had been killed in the war. He was all that his beloved mother had left and she lived only for him. If he fought to liberate his country, a duty he felt, his mother would die alone and brokenhearted. If he stayed, he would be neglecting his deeply felt duty to his country and the urge to avenge his brother's death. What should he do? It seems that either decision has its virtues and its flaws. Ethical theory does not seem to answer the question. But hacking his mother up with an axe and joining the Nazis is not a moral option. There are wrong answers even if we do not have a way of absolutely determining the single right one.

It is here that pluralism is connected with open-mindedness without dissolving into relativism. I can understand that there is a limited field of possible options and I can have a sense that mine is the strongest thereof, but still have a sense that my reasoning may be faulty and be open to hearing those who want to move in the other direction. Pluralism is the admission that i need to be kept honest by someone who is smart and disagrees with me because while I think I'm right, it's only through vigorous intellectual wrestling that I can be assured of the strength of my view -- something I believe without certainty.

Deconsecration

2011-11-14T06:40:00.003-05:00

The earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand caused major structural damage to the Anglican Cathedral causing it to be condemned for safety reasons. Because it is a cathedral, before it was torn down, it had to be deconsecrated, that is, it had to be transformed from a place with special designation and recognition as more meaningful than other places back into a mundane building.

The act of consecration is fairly unproblematic. Because of an event that occurred at a place or a social need to conduct certain socially important functions, we specify a location and endow it with special significance. From the Vatican to Graceland, from City Hall to the Ben and Jerry's factory, consecration -- either secular or religious -- occurs because we do attach special meaning to places.

But is it really possible to deconsecrate a location? The people of Christchurch clearly understand the reason why the Cathedral needs to be torn down and no one is arguing that it shouldn't be. But it clearly still holds special significance for them. Jewish weddings end with the breaking of a glass, an irreversible reaction. Once the glass breaks, the world is different. It cannot go back to the way it was. Is consecration the same sort of thing? We move courthouses and churches all the time. Broadway theatres are renamed for more recent celebrities. Is it irrational romanticism to think that places cannot be deconsecrated or is a place, once endowed with meaning, forever?

Why Is Pantsing Funny?

2011-11-12T07:27:00.003-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

I had cause this week to look up the word "pants" in the Oxford English Dictionary. The noun form is surprisingly contemporary, not appearing in the language until the mid-19th century. More interesting is that the verb "to pants" someone appears in the early 20th century, originally meaning to put pants on someone, then acquiring the meaning of partially taking the pants off someone in the late 20th century.Why is this funny? There are three primary accounts in humor theory. Freud argues that laughter is the result of making ourselves superior to someone else. The victim of the pantsing is made to be in a situation he or she does not want and by doing the pantsing or watching the pantsing, we are therefore superior to the mark and that is why we find it pleasant to watch.

Robert Solomon argued that humor can arise when we empathize with someone who is in a position of inferiority, allowing us to safely admit our own inferiority. In this way, seeing the pantsing, we identify with the victim and can project our own discomfort and powerlessness finding pleasure in company.

The classic incongruity account would argue that what is funny is the bizarre experience of seeing pants pulled down in public when we expect pants to be up in public. It could be a cognitive incongruity or a shock of seeing the absurd, but it is hard to make sense of this sight or this behavior in a situation where it is not generally observed and runs contrary to expectation.

So, why is pantsing considered funny?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Penn State's Other Disgrace: Academic Department For Sale

2011-11-11T06:45:00.002-05:00

I've not written on the horrible events that have been uncovered in State College because I've no idea what to say other than how absolutely horrible it all is. A reporter this morning discussing the internal committee at Penn State that would be investigating the matter, said that the goal would be both to uncover the truth but would include high profile names in order to protect the reputation of the institution. The host remarked that the scandal itself came in part from the desire to protect the institution's reputation.

But for those who live in parts of Pennsylvania, Penn State's reputation is already sullied. When a geologist steps forward as an expert and identifies himself as being from Penn State, locals know not to take him at his word, words that have been bought and paid for, words that he could lose his job if he does not utter. The geology department at Penn State is a model of the lack of academic integrity we expect from researchers. If you've not listened to this program, please do:

What we see in the financial sector, the banks controlling government and using "deregulation" as a means of shifting wealth from the rest of society to the richest is no longer subject to the Willie Sutton rule -- banks aren't the only places where the money is. The Mafia knows to get its fingers in all sorts of pies and the banksters are like the gangsters; they branch out when there's money to be found elsewhere and that has meant science.

I'll comment more on this issue in the coming weeks (I'm reading David Michaels' book Doubt Is their Product, a must-read), but here I just want to carve out a first spot to begin to reflect on the corrupting influence of corporate money in science.

Herman Cain's Butterfly Effect

2011-11-10T09:40:00.008-05:00

UPDATE: Either Matt Bors and I think alike...or he reads the Playground...

O.k., so Herman Cain argues two things: (1) the sexual harassment and assault claims against him are false, and (2) they are part of a Democratic conspiracy against him.

The first proposition is probably false. You have four completely independent women who did not know each other or of each other who told pretty much the same story. Two of them were given full years' salaries and made to sign gag agreements. One of the others, someone with an Ivy League education, immediately told her physician partner and her lawyer, both of whom have signed affidavits to that effect. These women have nothing to gain, but lots to lose in coming forward. Are they all lying? It is possible, but not likely.

But does the fact that (1) is false mean that (2) is also false? It would be odd for it not to be, but it isn't necessarily false.

Now, in order for the whole thing to be a conspiracy to sabotage his 2012 presidential campaign, the women in the 1990s would have had to known they needed to put themselves in positions to be harassed by a presidential contender. This is tough because, let's face it, just three years ago when an African-American Senator and former constitutional law professor with degrees from Columbia and Harvard ran, folks were shocked he was elected. "I never thought I'd live to see this day..." was heard often. So, twenty-some years ago, an African-American with no legal or public service background who ran pizza restaurants and Burger Kings and served as a lobbyist for the fast food industry would not have been thought to be a real contender for the post of commander-in-chief. So, we can't believe that people in the past were part of the conspiracy.

Further, if you ask Democratic pols and consultants now who among all the Republican candidates they would most like to run against, they'd say Cain. He is seen as the weakest of the bunch from polling data and in term of strategy. They wouldn't be trying to weaken him, but build him up and weaken his opponents. As such, present Democrats would not be conspiring against Cain.

But, Democrats have been here before, wishing they could run against a particular candidate. They did it with Reagan and look what happened. Maybe history is repeating itself. Maybe an unhindered Herman Cain would have gone on to roll through the primaries and become President. And maybe this would come to be seen by Democrats in the future as a dangerous turning point in history...a turning point that would need to be changed. Maybe this long view occurs once science has progressed to the point where time travel is possible. If past or present Democrats would not be the conspirators, perhaps it is future Democrats whose lived experience makes clear the need to send women back into the past to change the flow of history by tempting Cain by repeatedly asking for help finding jobs. Maybe Cain was, in fact, set up by Democratic operatives from the future to save the future.

But, of course, if Democrats had a time machine, Republicans would possess the technology as well. They would realize the plot and see the need to defeat it. They couldn't destroy just the Democrats' time machine, but would need to destroy the time machine project itself. Now, going after just time travel would seem suspect. so, they would need to attack the credibility and funding of science itself, of all science. Hence, they point their time machine earlier than the Democrats and seek do all they can to damage the reputation of all scientific research and theories -- whether it is global warming, evolution, or whatever. Republicans seek to de-fund and discredit science in the public mind in order to stop the progress of science that would lead to time travel.

So, should we believe the women? Yes. But does this mean that what we are seeing is not a Democratic conspiracy? Not by a long shot. Eventually when the truth is told on film, the title of the documentary will, of course, "The Hermanator."

Outlawing Synthetic Marijuana: What is the Target?

2011-11-09T10:52:00.003-05:00

The legislature in Virginia has banned synthetic marijuana, manufactured substances that are not pot, but when smoked induce similar effects. Things have gotten difficult because manufacturers stay one step ahead of enforcement by changing the formula.

"It seems that once a compound becomes prohibited, the people who are manufacturing these preparations just take that compound out because it is prohibited, and they now add in another one that is not," says Department of Forensic Science Chemistry Program manager Linda Jackson.

My question is what is the target here? On the one hand, it is the substance and not the effect of ingesting it. Alcohol makes you intoxicated, marijuana makes you intoxicated. Alcohol is legal, marijuana is not. So, it is not the intoxication, but the substance that seems to be the target for elimination.

On the other hand, in the mind of the authorities, by changing the chemical make-up of the synthetic pot, it does not become a new thing, but is still the same thing they sought to outlaw, synthetic pot. But how can two different things be the same thing? This makes sense if the substance is not the issue, but the effect of it. Both chemical substances cause intoxication and so are functionally identical despite being chemically distinct. So, here it is the intoxication that they are trying to eliminate, not the substance.

So, exactly what is it that they are seeking to eliminate? What is the target?

Idaho's Ignorance, Technology, and Privatizing Schools

2011-11-08T09:35:00.003-05:00

Idaho just passed a law mandating on-line classes as a requirement for a high school diploma. The argument is (1) it saves school districts money by outsourcing teaching to private firms instead of paying public servants (that is, teachers), and (2) it prepares students better for the real world in which this sort of learning will become standard. It does indeed save money, but that's because you will generally pay less for an inferior product. Idaho is undermining their educational system.

I teach. That's what I do. My most effective pedagogical tool is my eyes. A teacher sees everyone in the classroom. You see the faces. You know who is engaged, who is sleeping, who got it and -- most importantly -- who is struggling. You can see the faces and adjust how you say something in working through the question again, take two steps back and build back up to your point, make a joke and relax the person before trying again,... There are any number of strategies teachers pull out on the fly to connect with students so that the students learn. But in an on-line course, none of this is there. Going back to the ancients, the key to education has been a relationship between the student, the teacher, and the material. On-line education does not allow for that relationship to form and as a result, the foundation of healthy human learning is undermined.

Can you learn in other ways? Of course. In grad school, I needed to pick up tensor calculus, so I got a couple of textbooks on the subject and taught myself. It can be done and with certain studies, especially those that are about skill acquisition, it may be easier than those that deal with abstract reasoning or wrestling with questions of ethics or meaning. But even in the learning to do type classes, on-line is inferior. When I have a struggling student in my office and I watch him try to work on a problem, I can see the thought process. I know what he is looking to do, what he is missing, and when the light bulb goes off. I know how to give hints so that I don't do the problem for him, but help to prod him along the way to the light bulb moment. None of this is possible in on-line learning.

Do the folks in Idaho know this? I don't know. there seem to be two possibilities.

Maybe they don't know it. It's a conceivable mistake. Ever since the end of World War II, we have had a cultural infatuation with technology. Anything technological is presumed to be superior to anything more natural. We yearn to be the Jetsons because theirs must be a better life. Labor-saving devices are leisure-enhancing devices and leisure is when we are who we really are. So, technology makes us healthier and more human.

Of course, this is false. Along the way two things happened. First, we confused technological with corporately mass produced. TV dinners, Big Macs, and twinkies became food and food became less than food. The technological stopped being tools we used and became things we consume. Second, the technology may have made us more efficient, but that doesn't mean that it increases our leisure time, our time to pursue our projects and activities that lead to self-improvement and growth. No, it has meant that we can no longer separate ourselves from work, we are not only more efficient, but we are never off the clock. We have, in deep ways, lost ourselves to the technology. And so, the people of Idaho may wrongly think that they are helping their children when in fact they are harming them.

But maybe they do know. Maybe they are fully aware that the education will be inferior and just don't care because either education doesn't really matter to them or it matters less than not paying the taxes needed to support teachers. Maybe in a state as conservative as Idaho, ideology has become so poisonous that decreasing taxes is seen as more important than educating their children. Cynical, horribly, horribly cynical. Of course, cynical and false are not synonymous.

Either way, I am sorry for the children of Idaho. Good luck and feel free to audit the philosophy course here at the Playground. It's fun, but not as good as my real classroom.

Gendering Leisure

2011-11-07T07:18:00.003-05:00

TheWife and I took the short people rollerskating yesterday. Everyone had a good time, but noticed something odd. The place was 4:1 girls to boys. I had noticed something similar, although not that stark at other roller rinks. When did skating become a girl thing?

It is interesting what leisure time activities that are male-dominated elsewhere have become female dominated here. When you have 4-6 year old daughter, you are expected to do the ballet/tap dance class. Think of all the great tap dancers that come to mind -- all male. No boys in tap classes.

Once they turn 5 or 6 for the next several years, it is an expectation that you will put your daughter on a soccer team. Soccer is to young girls what little league used to be for boys, just a natural part of American life. Soccer is a male game everywhere else on planet earth, and while the men's game here is certainly growing (among young men who are clearly not manly enough to play American football), it is a regular part of the life of young American girls.

Theater classes, again, virtually no males. No one looks at leading men in Hollywood, take, for example, Rock Hudson, and thinks he's anything but a model of masculinity. But acting classes and drama productions have to regularly deal with interest from few young men.

Later in life, when women want to stay in shape, many will think of yoga classes. The famous yogis are men (or male bears in Jellystone), but yoga instructors are almost universally female as are the classes they teach. Yoga is gendered here.

It is odd and sad in this age of obesity how many active activities boys are culturally discouraged from. Why is it that we've gendered certain leisure time hobbies?

Unintendend Caricature

2011-11-06T07:08:00.003-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

A few weeks back we talked about what makes in impersonation funny. The theory I proposed involved creating an icon of the target, a simplified version that stresses certain properties and then verbally and visually recreating that icon. A similar type of humorous act is drawing a caricature. But what happens when the caricature is unintended? I came across this drawing the other week:If I had sat for a caricature, that is most likely what it would have looked like. But it isn't me (to the best of my knowledge). It is a representation of an icon, not the icon of a particular individual, but of an archetype. You can't draw dog with drawing a specific dog. Here, you can't draw a liberal without drawing a specific liberal. And the archetypal image in this artist's head just happens to look a lot like me. Is there extra humor in the "found art" sense that it seems to be a caricature of me, but isn't? In any meaningful way, can it be said that it is a caricature of me?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Papandreou vs. Plato: Greece and Democracy

2011-11-04T04:29:00.003-05:00

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou is in a bad spot. Greece's economy is on the verge of collapse, France and Germany are offering to try to save it if Greece surrenders part of its national sovereignty to them, the Greek people are resentful that they are suffering and told they need to suffer more not believing that the suffering will do any good for them or the country, the opposition is calling for his resignation, and his own party is saying that they don't support him either. So Papandreou, finding himself trapped between Scylla and Charybdis, damned if he goes along with the bailout and damned if he doesn't, decided to emulate Solon instead of Odysseus. He decided that if the people are unhappy with the bailout, let them say so and be responsible for the decision -- Greece would once again be the site of direct democracy. This is a matter that concerns the lives of all of the Greek people in a very direct way, so why shouldn't they have a direct voice in deciding the direction?

He received an unbelievable amount of pressure and condemnation for the move, so much that he backed off from the idea yesterday. You are the leader, lead. The people might vote it down, they do not know what is really in the best interest of the country and markets hate uncertainty. It is unacceptable, after all, to make markets suffer, only people. This is not something that should be democratically decided, it is too important.

Plato, the greatest of the Greek philosophers, would agree with this line. Plato was rabidly anti-democratic because he believed the people on average too stupid to rule. Macroeconomics is tricky, technical stuff. It isn't something most people understand. If you put this matter to a vote, a platonic line would go, there is absolutely no reason to believe that you would find yourself taking the most thoughtful, well-informed, rational course.

In this case, does Plato have a point? Was the proposed referendum a good idea? Should large decisions that have both major impact on a population and technical, complex elements be taken to the people or decided by a group of elites that may have been themselves selected by the people?

Goldline, Glenn Beck, and the Ethics of the Hard Sell: Autonomy or Psychology?

2011-11-03T10:14:00.004-05:00

The company Goldline, sponsor of Glenn Beck's program as well as a number of other conservative talk shows, has been accused of running an illegal bait and switch operation. The charge brings up a fascinating and ironic question connected with the fairness of the free market so radically espoused by these talking heads.

The scam on its face is simple. Goldline lures in customers by convincing them that gold bullion is something they should acquire. Then, they talk them into buying collectable gold coins instead that are sold above their actual value. So, people think they are buying something as a safe investment when they are really being fleeced for something that will depreciate instead.

The reason the conservative talk show hosts are a part of the scam is that the people who listen to them are ripe for the plucking. They come in already believing that the country and world in general are going to hell. They listen to receive confirmation of their dark worldview and this leaves them open to conditioning for other beliefs. Obama takes a Republican health plan and puts it forward as a compromise. They call it evil socialism, their listeners believe it. Government sponsored death panels? Jack-booted thugs confiscating guns? Gay people recruiting children? They buy it.

So, you've got people who have a preexisting notion that the culture is collapsing, who are told that things are worse than they thought and told what to think and how to think about it. And then you've got the people seen as authorities putting commercials into their programs in a fashion that does not clearly delineate them from the other portions and those commercials tell them that when the world collapses, money will be worthless, they need to buy gold, lots of gold. And here's where I buy MY gold -- Goldline. so they call and are given the hard sell into buying something that will not do what they were led to believe it will do -- hold value better than their cash.

Is it illegal? Dunno. Is it slimy? Absolutely. Is it wrong? Oooooh. The marks could have said no. They were not forced to buy the coins at a terrible price. They agreed to do so. But, of course, the people at Goldline know exactly what they are doing. they are setting up a scenario in which people are psychologically primed and therefore much more likely to act in a particular way. Think of the old gag where you ask a person to pronounce T-W-A and T-W-E and T-W-I, then T-W-O. If you had just asked them to pronounce T-W-O without the others first, they would have said the name of the number 2, but because of the priming, if one has not heard the gag before, they pronounce it phonetically. It works every time. It's the basis for most of the illusions magicians perform. It's why movie music is what it is -- listen to the cello swells from Jaws and try to keep your heart-rate from increasing. We know it works and how to do it.

And so, the Goldline people know how to apply psychology to get people to act irrationally in a fashion that benefits them financially. If it was a matter of physical or psychological coercion, we'd say that the people were not free and the responsibility is on the person being coercive. But what if it is psychological manipulation, not coercion?

The conservative, libertarian line is caveat emptor, buyer beware. People are all self-interested and rational and thus the marketplace should be left alone because it is the shopper's responsibility to do his homework to decide whether this is in his best interest. The conservative beliefs of the victims are justifying their being shafted. The liberal line is the paternalistic approach in which the psychological manipulation is seen on a par with coercion and the act is wrong. But this removes the autonomy from the agent, it undermines our picture of ourselves as in control and responsible for our own actions.

So, in this case, which takes precedent, autonomy or psychology? Is Goldline's approach morally wrong? Suppose we look only at the hard sell without the psychological priming, like with time shares or used cars. Does that make a difference if we have good reason to think that it will work?

Truth and Falsity in Advertising

2011-11-02T05:33:00.001-05:00

Heard on NPR yesterday that New York mayor and uber-rich guy Michael Bloomberg broke with his tradition and did not hand out full-sized candy bars to trick-or-treaters this year, but just the little ones. Makes you think about truth in advertising because anytime a kid comes across a house that gives the big chocolate bars, extreme joy results. Yet what do they call the little ones? "Fun-sized." Yes, because nothing is more fun than getting less candy. It's homeopathic confectionery: the less you get of something that makes you happy, the happier you will actually be.

On the other hand, the brand that I've always thought had the most accurate name for their product: Laz-y-boy recliners. When your backside is too big to fit in a normal chair...Laz-y-boy.

Other examples of truth or falsity in advertising?

Modern Saints: Where Have You Gone Joe DiMaggio?

2011-11-01T03:55:00.002-05:00

On All Saints Day, let's think about the notion of a saint. Auguste Comte thought that while the metaphysical elements of religion would eventually fade away as part of an immature phase of human development, the structure of religious institutions would remain necessary for the majority of people. He proposed founding a "religion of man," wherein we use the Church as a model for secular belief system with rituals and an ethical code. This would even come with saints whom we would use archetypes to hold up as representatives of human greatness. For Comte, these would be scientists of monumental achievement -- Saint Newton, Saint Darwin,...

If we broaden the notion, whom would we hold up as modern saints?

I suppose those who championed justice through non-violence like Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Cesar Chavez would be the first to be considered. We erect a hall of fame where we make great athletes and coaches into cultural saints -- Babe Ruth, Vince Lombardi, Wilt Chamberlain. Occasionally, the two overlap with folks like Jackie Robinson and Billie Jean King. We have popular art forms like film and music where the work of modern saints allow them to remain forever young -- Frank Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, Madonna.

From all aspects of contemporary life, where do we and where should we look for our modern saints? Or should we at all? Is the notion of a saint harmful? Knowing that all humans were just humans and anyone we elevate, we will be able to find evidence of moral and personal fallibility, is this myth making unfair to those whom we select? Should we create false images to strive for or should we develop our own internal drives based on our own projects and circumstances?

What's the Difference: Halloween Edition

2011-10-31T03:15:00.001-05:00

In honor of Halloween, what's the difference between fear, horror, and terror?

Butts and Subjects

2011-10-29T08:36:00.003-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

A technical question this weekend. Is there a difference between being the subject of a joke and the butt of a joke? If a joke turns on an ambiguity about a property associated with a group, does that joke necessarily make fun of that group? If someone in traffic in front of you had a bumper sticker that said "Autistic kids rock," would that seem inappropriate? Would the fact that the pun is based on a recognizable behavior be an act of mocking? Does it have to portray it in a negative light, does it have to belittle the act, or is pointing it out, drawing attention to it enough? The point here is that, unlike Polish or blonde jokes, where the stereotypical element is clearly intended to denegrate the members of the group, this is simply a recognizable difference with no judgment made about it. If it is morally problematic, is it the drawing attention to it that is the problem, or is it the appropriation, that is, is it the using the unusual behavior as a tool for some else to get laughs even if we are not saying that it is a bad thing?

Other examples, jokes that do not necessarily cast a group in a negative light, but have a mechanism that plays off of recognizable features?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

The Meaning of the Statue of Liberty

2011-10-28T05:23:00.003-05:00

Today is the 125th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. Like the Colossus of Rhodes, the giant depiction of the Roman goddess of Liberty stands at the harbor entrance to send a message to those arriving. The proximity of Liberty Island to Ellis Island made that message overwhelming for generations of immigrants arriving at our shores.

But with air travel being the means of entrance and anti-immigrant sentiment rampant in the culture, the Statue no longer is what it was. It no longer does what it did. But does it still mean what it used to mean? It may be reduced to an icon, but is it still an iconic representation of the same sense?

The poet Emma Lazarus put these famous words in the statue's mouth,

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Do they still hold true?

What's the Difference: Guilt, Shame, Regret

2011-10-27T08:36:00.000-05:00

So, what is the difference between guilt, shame, and regret? And, um, have you called your mother lately?

Acquring Diversity

2011-10-26T05:25:00.002-05:00

One of the shocks in moving from grad school at a research university to a small liberal arts college was the degree of homogeneity within the community. Johns Hopkins, where I was, is a microcosm. There are people there from everywhere. Yes, they were brilliant, arrogant, stressed out nerds from everywhere, but they are from everywhere. Gettysburg, on the other hand, is different. There are lots of reasons -- cost, location, selectivity, liberal arts vs. a more vo-tech approach to education -- why the student body is less diverse. The joke here is that diversity means having people that wear both Abercrombie AND Fitch.

And it is not only the students. There is here, like most other institutions, a push to diversify the faculty. This is a good thing. Diversity on campus, and especially at the front of the classroom does a number of positive things for a college community. Among them is to widen the spectrum of perspectives on intellectual and social matters. We like to think that seeing is believing, but this presupposes that seeing is a passive act, a taking in of things as they are. But what we see is in part an act of interpretation. To see something is to take the sensory input and build the something out of it in a way that makes sense to us. But what makes sense is a function of the categories we use to understand the world and these come from our personal experience and the community from which we come. Diversity reminds us that everything we see is to some degree affected by a culturally constructed lens which can be changed. Being in a diverse intellectual community is like going to the optometrist and looking at the fourth line and being asked better now or now? A or B? Diversity in an intellectual community means constantly having to wrestle with multiple ways of seeing things because you come to understand the different lived experiences of different folks in the same situations.

This then leads to the question, what ought to count as desirable diversity? I remember being in a cubicle when I was adjuncting at Towson University and listening to a member of the English department, a middle-aged white woman, having a discussion with one of her young African-American students who was arguing that nothing had changed since the 50s. This was a woman whose husband of several decades was an African-American professor at the university. She spoke to me exasperated after the conversation about the ways in which this young man could have no clue about what it was like to be in a mixed marriage in the early 60s, the discrimination they faced and the recriminations directed towards her for being in love with the person she loves.

I think of several other colleagues. One's wife became severely limited physically because of a disease that has left her in a wheelchair. He sees the campus and life on it in a way that is radically different from what he saw twenty years ago. He cannot but see it, in part, through his wife's eyes. Similarly, I have had other colleagues with special needs children. Again, because of the nature of the parent/child relationship and because of the way that those with special needs experience our society, they bring a different perspective to conversations.

In these cases, the people I am talking about hail from the privileged class, they have all of the advantages that come with being in the in-group that has the power. But, because of choice or happenstance they have acquired perspectives that are those of the out-group, of those whose experience differs from most. Because they therefore bring to the intellectual community what is it we look for in a diverse community, should we think of these folks as bringing diversity? When we are purposeful in acting to diversify our community, should we think of these kinds of people as having acquired diversity?

Hotels and Kant

2011-10-25T06:09:00.002-05:00

I've been fascinated by the way in which hotels now play up the fact that they send in folks to freshen up rooms less frequently as something that has environmentally friendly effects. By using less water and energy washing towels and sheets, the hotel industry is having less of a negative impact on the earth. For this, they seek credit.

There is a famous passage in Kant's Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, in which he argues that the only morally good acts are those which are the right thing done by an agent who receives no reward or who suffers harm as a result. If there is any way in which you benefit from doing the right thing, even if it is just a warm and fuzzy feeling, then the act deserves no moral praise since you may have done the right thing for the wrong reason. To act rightly is to act solely from duty for the sake of duty.

This is a section that students always find counter-intuitive. On the one hand, sure, intentions matter. But then again, shouldn't you give credit wherever credit is due. Even if there is some reward, the person did the right thing and doesn't that in itself make the act a good one?

The hotel case reminded me of this passage because, while it is wonderful that hotels are in this case are having a less harmful impact on the planet, they also are saving significant money on electricity, labor, water, detergent, and wear and tear on industrial washing machines and driers. And strangely, these hotels that put such nice pictures of nature on the page explaining this policy also have no means of recycling the paper they leave for you every morning whether you intend to read it not.

So, is Kant right here? Does the hotel industry deserve any greenie brownie points?

Occupy Wall Street, Thomas Kuhn, and Goldman-Sachs

2011-10-24T05:35:00.004-05:00

Kerry pointed me to this insightful commentary on Occupy Wall Street:The central metaphor of the three card monty came is, indeed, apt, but what is it a metaphor for? What is the game in this case?

This is the point that allows the shills to plead ignorance. When millions of people were in the streets across the world to try to stop the U.S. from going to war in Iraq, the media largely ignored or belittled the movement, instead bringing on talking heads to tell us why the war was necessary. It was a thing and they could skew coverage to support the thing. But what is the thing here?

Thomas Kuhn, in his masterwork The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, makes use of the notion of a paradigm, that is, a conceptual framework that determines what are meaningful questions, what are acceptable ways of answering the questions, and what count as legitimate answers. Scientists work through their paradigm, never seeing it just as someone with glasses uses the lenses to view the world, but doesn't see the glasses. Anyone who questions the paradigm, Kuhn argues, is seen as irrational because it is the paradigm itself that defines rationality. When it is the system itself that is under consideration, the questions seem to make no sense to those who assume the system is the way the world must work.

The exception, Kuhn argues, is times of scientific crisis. A crisis occurs when anomalies pop up, when questions the paradigm deems as legitimate are approached using the tools the paradigm provides, but still will not yield answers the paradigm can accept. The Occupy Wall Street folks are ridiculed by those on the right for being middle class spoiled brats who just want to bring back the 60s. It is true that these are largely people from places of elevated socio-economic standing, but that is exactly the point.

Ever since the white guilt exhaustion of the Reagan 80s, when we decided to replace justice with greed as a national virtue, we've been sold the fictitious "meritocracy" line. Those who are better off, have more because they deserve it. These people are smarter, work harder, and are more entrepreneurial. If they didn't deserve more, the unfalsifiable nonsense goes, they wouldn't have it. Anything done to defend it, to keep the wealth where it is fairly or unfairly is therefore perfectly just and reasonable because these privileged white people should have it.

But we've been seeing the anomalies pop up. People who went into debt, getting a good education, who played by all of the rules made up to defend the "meritocracy," who were promised a privileged place in society and all the shallow material goods that are supposed to bring happiness, but who can't find work or are underemployed. Just like Nixon's southern strategy used racial fear to galvanize white voters against civil rights, fear of downward class mobility was used to unite the upper-middle class behind policies that only served the wealthy. But now, the middle-class is not getting the small cut it was promised and the class insecurity that was used to make sure the largest voting bloc in the country would not consider the working class and poor, is more acutely than ever feeling that fear in a way that that no longer plays into the desire to maintain the structure that shifts all wealth upwards.

And it does. Since the Reagan administration through Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, on through Obama, the policies of the government have been designed to shift wealth away from the country to a small group at the top. We use terms like "deregulation" in order to endow it a connotation of freedom and liberty, but really it is nothing but simple class warfare. It is a redistributing of wealth to those who have the most. Economic advisory positions and officials have largely come from the group whom this benefits. Lobbyists work with the beneficiaries to redesign the system to more efficiently move the wealth up and then those lobbyists are put in power to legally change the system in that way. In terms of the financial workings of the system, for example, it is run by Goldman-Sachs, an investment bank that rules the world in the way anti-Semites think of the Rothschilds. If you've not read Matt Taibbi's piece on Goldman-Sachs, do it now.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

THIS is the three card monty game. It is not a policy, a war, or a law that folks want changed. It is a socio-economic-political game of calvinball in which those who have the most constantly change and rework the rules to make sure that no matter what happens, all wealth and opportunity is shipped up to the most well-off. As long as the middle-class was given new episodes of Friends and shiny SUVs to distract them, the whole thing could be masked. But now that the shifting of wealth has undermined their expectations. Now that white collar unemployment is real, the line that the unemployed are lazy good-for-nothing, lucky ducks (as the Wall Street Journal editorial board referred to them) who were looking for a free hand-out and permanent weekends can no longer be maintained. The lie Reagan sold us and which was amplified repeatedly over the last couple of decades has been shown for what it is. We see the emperor's ensemble for what it is -- or isn't -- now. But we also see who has all the wealth and power. THAT is what is being protested. That is the scam and the question is whether those who benefit from the scam and benefit from protecting the scam have put themselves in a strong enough gated community that they will continue to feel that they can simply ignore the rest of the world outside. A world that is becoming less and less dazzled by them, seeing clearer and clearer what has been done to them, what they themselves were a part of creating and protecting.

Impersonation

2011-10-22T16:24:00.002-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

This weekend, let's talk about impersonations. John Powers, in an essay on "Fresh Air," argues for an incongruity account for the humor of impressions. He contends:

Of course, mimicry is not the world's most exalted talent, but I would cheerfully spend a whole night watching Bryden and Coogan do their warring James Bonds. This isn't simply because I am myself the world's worst mimic — I once reduced my sister, Becky, to hysterics with my hapless Howard Cosell, perhaps the all-time easiest person to impersonate. It's because good mimicry is kissed with the uncanny. Whether it's Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin or Jimmy Fallon's Neil Young, we hear the right voice coming from the wrong body. And in the process, we're shown something new about the person being mimicked.

The idea that impressions are funny because we see the right voice come out of the wrong body, I believe, is completely wrong. What makes impressions funny is not an incongruity being revealed, like a joke that uncovers some unspoken truth of the mark, but rather a congruity, a similarity made absurd, in the same way that a caricature or political cartoon does. Impressions, like those of Rich Little or Frank Caliendo, are not recreations of the target -- as say an Elvis impersonator strives to do -- but rather a recreation of a culturally constructed icon, a simplified, flattened image of the person. The standard Bogart impression, for example, makes use of the phrase "Play it again, Sam," something Bogart himself never said -- but the cartoon icon we have of him, did.

Consider the example that Powers uses, a piece of The Trip, a BBC series following comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as they go from great restaurant to restaurant:Brydon and Coogan are not arguing about Michael Caine, they are arguing about the icon of Michael Caine and what are essential properties of it. The standard impersonation, therefore, is to recreate the icon of a well-known individual.

But the more intricate version is the incongruent situation icon where we take the incon of a well-known figure and put it in a context that one would never expect to find the actual target in and use it to create absurdity or find unexpected congruences. A magnificent example has gone viral lately, the "Ira Glass Sex Tape." Masterful. It not only hits an icon of the target, but does so in a way that is exactly what it would sound like if...

Other favorite impersonations?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

What Do You Think? Cover for Einstein's Jewish Sceince

2011-10-21T06:42:00.003-05:00

My next book, Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion, is due out in April and my publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, has sent me a work up of a cover. Not sure what I think about it and have gotten a full range of responses from folks to whom I've shown it already. Thought we might use today's post as a focus group opportunity. Be honest, what do you think?

The Ethics of Being an On-line Freerider

2011-10-20T08:49:00.003-05:00

Farhad Manjoo has a wonderful article over at Slate entitled "Blocked Ads, Clean Conscience" in which he questions the moral status of ad blocking software. The ads on various websites are unwanted and disliked, but they are part of what allows the content on the page to exist. Things cost money and this applies to the delivery of online content. But with ad blocking software, we can get the spoonful of sugar without the medicine.

But, of course, that is a terrible metaphor. Medicine makes you healthy, marketing does not. Marketing is not merely drawing attention to products and serves, but actively trying to alter your views and perceptions about them to influence you to purchase them. In our house, it is a standard practice to mute all commercials -- even ones we would otherwise find cute or funny. We do not want our minds influenced by people who have nothing but maximizing corporate profits in mind and care not one whit what is in the best interest of me or my family.

So, is there something wrong with being an on-line freeloader? Are you not paying your fair share by blocking the ads? Is it reasonable to expect you to open your eyes and mind to influences you may not want in order to have your mind influenced by sources you seek out?

Categorizing Jobs for Philosophers

2011-10-19T05:51:00.002-05:00

The American Philosophical Association produces a publication called "Jobs for Philosophers" (and, no, the plural is not meant ironically) that lists pretty much every open academic position in the field. When you have a line to fill, you run an ad in the JFP.

As long as I can remember, it was organized by region. It listed in alphabetical order, jobs in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Midwest, Southwest, and West in separate sections. Glancing at this year's JFP, I noticed that the geographical divisions were gone. This makes sense since no one really searches by region anymore. Teaching gigs are so tough to land and often so specialized that you take a spot in your field (or something you can reasonably pretend to be your field) wherever you can get it. So the old regional categorization is meaningless in today's world.

But surely there is some way to organize the positions that would be helpful. After all, there are very different kinds of jobs in philosophy and very different kinds of folks looking. The senior endowed positions at Princeton are not looking for the same folks as a small teaching college in Kentucky.

Would it make sense to organize them by sub-field? Are the sub-sub-sub-fields so scattered or jobs that cover a range so regular that this would be impossible? Could we arrange it by teaching load? A 1-2 job clearly has a different audience from a 4-5 job (that's classes taught per semester, for the non-academics). Should we have one section for R1s, another for r2s, one for liberal arts colleges, and another for teaching universities? Would that make a classist academic structure even worse?

What would be a sensible way to categorize the jobs in Jobs for Philosophers?

BBC as a Force for Smart in the World

2011-10-18T10:52:00.003-05:00

Today is the 89th anniversary of the founding of the British Broadcasting Corporation, originally the British Broadcasting Company. Originally, a collection of interested parties, companies that were beginning to experiment with the new radio technology, with the intent that the communication across distance could be used to help foment peace in the world.

In the 50s, the beeb would make the move into television, but the radio would remain. The BBC world service is the largest international broadcaster, with programing in 27 languages that spans the globe. It is a voice of thoughtfulness that takes perspectives from around the globe and brings them together in insightful and provocative ways. In certain ways, it is the closest we have to a global village and it is one in which ideas instead of profit or propaganda are the rule.

I heard a heart-wrenching interview on BBC a few months ago with a British couple that had been seized by pirates off the coast of Somalia while trying to sail around the world. They had been imprisoned and separated from each other. When asked how they kept their sanity, the answer was the BBC world service. As they recalled hearing the annual choir concert in the Christmas broadcast, they both broke down and you realized just how powerful good radio can be.

Happy birthday BBC, and despite the nefarious efforts of Rupert Murdoch and David Cameron, may you have many, many more.

Class and Ethics

2011-10-17T05:15:00.002-05:00

I had a buddy at a conference this weekend discussing an interesting phenomenon he has observed. He moved from one campus of his state university to another. The first was a working class campus full of first generation college students, the move was to a more upscale student population from families with a history of higher ed. What he noticed was that at the first campus, in several years of experience, he had virtually no cases of plagiarism. But in his limited time at the second campus, plagiarism was rampant.

There seem to be three possibilities here. One is that it is an accidental correlation due to small sample size. Two is that it is a real correlation that requires explanation, but that it is a local phenomenon about relative campus cultures limited to those two campuses. Three is that it is indicative of a larger set of social phenomena that are worth thinking about.

My guess is number three. Regular readers are familiar with my hypothesis that class insecurity is the single most important explanatory factor for understanding contemporary American social phenomena. I do not want to play into the romanticized Joe Sixpack mythology, that there is something more wholesome and moral about working class Americans. But it is interesting that this particular immoral act may have class implications. There is an important difference between working class and middle/upper-middle class students. All come to college with the expectation that their college degree will have a positive effect in terms of social capital, that higher education is a necessary component of maintaining or advancing social status. But where working class students are hoping for advancement, for middle/upper-middle class students there is an almost paralyzing fear of social backsliding, that if they do not remain in the social strata in which they were raised, that their life will be horribly unfulfilling and unbearable.

This pressure from class insecurity is combined with the meritocracy kabuki. We are better off because we work harder and are better than those who are blue collar. For that, we need to show better results, even if we do not do it legitimately, but it's o.k. because we are better than them. We have high school students engaged in all sorts of activities they are not really interested in because "it will help me get into a better college" where "a better college" means one that will make sure I stay in my current social stratum. If it was o.k. to half-heartedly volunteer at a soup kitchen to get into college, why would it be any different to half-heartedly cheat on a paper to get through? The whole thing is just a big hazing ritual for the fraternity of socio-economic class anyway, right?

Is plagiarism a class-related crime or is my buddy's observation a statistical blip?

Is a Sense of Humor a Virtue?

2011-10-14T21:26:00.002-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

Thinking about a paper at today's Lighthearted Philosophers' Society meeting. Is a sense of humor a virtue? Is a sense of humor a necessary part of a well-lived human life? If you do not have an appreciation for things funny, if you are not someone who enjoys humor and engages in humorous acts, can you live a complete human life?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

The Problems with Herman Cain's 999 Plan

2011-10-13T09:37:00.000-05:00

So, Herman Cain has his 999 plan that completely reworks the tax code. He would replace the progressive income tax with a flat 9% income tax, a 9% national sales tax, and a 9% corporate tax. Take away the deductions, the loopholes, make it flat and simple. Seems a great idea...at first glance.

We replace income taxes with consumption taxes, something that many conservatives like because, they argue, it spurs investment which in turn spurs growth. Whether this is true or not, we'll leave open, but there is good evidence that it does not. But the big claim is that it ends up being revenue neutral, that is, it brings in the same amount of money. If that is true, and again, it is a claim I doubt, but if we grant it for the sake of argument, we see the real point behind the move.

Money can be used for two things: (1) to buy stuff, (2) to make more money. If you look at the way the wealthy use their money compared to the middle class, working class, and poor, you see a marked difference in the percentage allotted to 1 versus 2. The less money you have, the greater the percentage you spend. The more money you have, the smaller the percentage you spend. By taking the basis of taxation from income to consumption, what you do is make the poor and the middle class pay the lion's share of taxes. If the same amount of money is coming in from taxes, the rich pay MUCH MUCH less.

But what about the flat income tax part? That's more fair isn't it? The problem with the flat tax argument is that it confuses “wealth” with “value.” Money can be used to do two things, it can be used to purchase goods or services and it can be used to make more money. If you have greater wealth, more money, each dollar has a greater value. Consider two brothers, one a poor philosopher and the other a wealthy new economy entrepreneur. Both brush their teeth with equal frequency, for the same amount of time, applying the same amount of tooth paste. One is barely scraping by and can only spare a little money for toothpaste each week and so must buy the small tube. The other has plenty expendable income and so can buy the larger tube, the economy sized. Over the course of the year, the poorer brother has had to spend more on tooth paste because he had less money. If you have more money, each dollar is more valuable in that it can purchase more goods. Similarly, suppose you were given the following offer, “Either you can invest one million dollars for a year and keep all the money you make with it or you can have ten million dollars to invest and keep one tenth of what you make.” You should choose the ten million because having more money opens up more lucrative opportunities. If you have more money, each dollar is worth more because it can be used to make more money.

Finally, the income tax does not really touch the rich whose income primarily comes from capital gains -- that is, income from investments, not incomes from actually going out there and working for a living like the rest of us slobs. So, by moving to income and consumption taxes, you pretty much make sure that the middle class and working poor completely support the country with the rich not pitching at all.

The Social contract and Generations to Come

2011-10-12T01:10:00.000-05:00

Hopefully by now, everyone has seen this clip of Elizabeth Warren. Phil, a longtime Playground friend, asked me about a claim she makes at the end. She says that "part of the underlying social contract is that you take a hunk of that [earnings] and pay forward for the next kid who comes along." Is the social contract really temporal?

The idea behind social contractarianism is that we need a social contract to keep us out of a state of nature, to create a clear sense of what rights we have and do not have, of contracts and how they are enforced. But this is a contemporary sense of the contract, it is designed to order society here and now, so that I don't kill or cheat you and you don't kill or cheat me. I certainly want to make sure that the contract is in place for the near future because the contracts I enter into will often involve delayed satisfaction. I'll give you the money now, and you give me the goods later.

But contracts with me cannot extend beyond my lifetime because then the person you contracted with no longer exists. Do I have an interest in the social contract considering future generations? If I have kids, sure, but what about in general? Is there a sense in the social contract that the society created is designed to be lasting beyond the implicit signatories of the contract as it is now? Does the social contract really include obligations for me to future generations or do we need something other than a social contract to make sense of such claims of obligation?

Quizzes and Paternalism

2011-10-11T09:26:00.000-05:00

So, at this time of semester I give quizzes every class drilling the rules of inference and equivalences needed to do natural deduction proofs. It is the same quiz day after day after day. When a student asked why I do this, I was honest and said that it is because they don't know how to study and that I have found that the repeated quizzes forces them to learn something they need to know. By giving the quizzes, they acquire a knowledge of these basic moves and the grades on the homeworks and quizzes go up. It is a purely paternalistic move. I treat them like children and they learn, but it is first order learning, not the higher level learning -- learning how to learn. They are adults, albeit young ones who behave in predictably self-defeating ways. By removing some autonomy, I can help them help themselves in ways they wouldn't otherwise. Is there a problem with paternalism in cases like this or as a teacher am I expected to be metaphorically paternal?

The Ontology of Cupcakes

2011-10-10T09:07:00.000-05:00

So, if you have a piece of cake and a cupcake of the same volume and from the same batter, are they equivalent? Is a cupcake and a piece of cake variants of the same thing or are they different types of things? In solid state physics, you see how surfaces have different properties from the insides of materials, is a cupcake a different thing because of the increased external surface area compared to pieces of cake? Is the difference in the application of icing meaningful? If you were given a choice between a piece of cake and an equivalent sized cupcake, would you have a preference? If so, does this indicate a difference or is it purely a matter of pragmatic elements -- that one is more easily portable?

Comedist Anti-Fundamentalism

2011-10-08T01:20:00.000-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

A bit of theology this weekend.

The central concept in Comedism is the joke. Think about how most jokes work. There are two parts to a joke. First comes the set up that makes you think about some situation in a particular way. A chicken crosses the road; the Pope, a rabbi, and a Viagra salesman walk into a bar..., some possible world is sketched for you, a scene that you think you understand.

Then comes the punchline -- "to get to the other side" or "well, at least my beer is no longer flat." What makes the punchline funny is the incongruity that it forces upon you. You now must make sense of the situation from the set-up in a completely different way. The humor exists in that moment when your brain is struggling to make sense of the two completely different competing scenarios. For a joke to be a joke, there must be more than one way to look at the world.

And that is the central belief of Comedism. There are always different ways to look at reality. The world is a multifaceted place and it is the appreciation of these distinct perspectives, even ones that seem irreconcilable, that makes life rich, interesting, and most of all, funny.

But this is exactly what the fundamentalists of all stripes deny. They think there is one truth and one truth only...and they think that they alone have it. They do not even allow the possibility that there are multiple ways to understand reality.

I was reminded of this foundational doctrine of Comedism this week when a student brought out the old chestnut "the Department of Redundancy Department." Of course, the full address used to be:

The Department of Redundancy Department
Twin Towers
New York, New York

But now, we can't make that joke. Another victim of fundamentalism.

But we need to reclaim our place. So, go out and look at the world in new and exciting ways.

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Steve Jobs, No Jobs, and the Job of the Teacher

2011-10-07T05:54:00.002-05:00

It's been interesting listening to all of the reflections on the life of Steve Jobs on news programs sandwiched between reports on the failing world economy. We've got a fiscal infrastructure on the verge of collapse because of uncontrolled greed. Yet here is a man who changed the way people live, think, and communicate and in the process created a large amount of wealth. How did he do it? By not wanting to.

Much is being made of the way in which Jobs was a visionary in terms of design, in integrating form and function. Jobs humanized technology, saw it as life-changing only if it was life-enhancing in both an aesthetic and a functional sense. These were not gadgets created with the purpose of making money, but designed to enrich the lived experience of the user. He was a deadhead and a Buddhist, not someone dedicated to the acquisition of wealth for its own sake. He launched a visionary company and as soon as it started making money, the grey-suited, grey-minded business types made sure to run out the dirty hippies who would only inhibit the profit making capacity of the organization. And, as anyone not blinded by green could have guessed, they killed it. Of course, it was resurrected, but only when the hippies were brought back in.

The people who killed Apple are cut from the same cloth as those who killed the larger economy. Jobs saw money as a means and his work as an end in itself. The capitalists see the work as a means and money as an end in itself. That change of perspective is deadly. There's nothing wrong with capitalism...just as long as you don't let in the capitalists. Chuang Tzu tells a parable about a great archer whose intense desire to win an archery contest destroys his concentration. His need to win, we are told, robs him of his power to do what he needs to do to win. The all-consuming desire to maximize profits, likewise destroys not only your profits, but the entire system as well. If we lay-off all of the Carly Fiorinas, all of the MBAs with their skewed priorities and values, we might be able to have a capitalism that helps better the human condition.

But my fear is that the contagion is spreading. We see the same sort of thing infecting education. No longer is it about learning and growing, it's about assessment mechanisms that show how much we're learning and growing. In secondary education, the march of standardized testing has overtaken teachers ability to teach to their students, forcing them to teach to the test. Test scores are the coin of the realm, they are the new currency of education. In higher ed, we get regular orders to clearly lay out our learning goals and explicitly disclose what sort of assessment regimen we will be using to evaluate our success in achieving them. You build your classes around how you assess preconceived learning outcomes; you don't till the soil of your students mind and allow the intellectual wildflowers to be nurtured and develop. But the great teachers are the Steve Jobs of education. Just like Apple in the 80s, their ability to do what it is they do is now being subjugated to some larger grey-suited artificial end. A tool, a means, is being placed where ours ends go.

Maybe the passing of Steve Jobs will cause a moment of reflection that will begin to allow us to reassess how we structure the economy and education. Maybe we'll realize that a different approach which takes the emphasis off of what we are seeking will actually give us what we are seeking. Maybe we will realize how self-defeating our current path is. Maybe we'll let the Buddhist hippies back into the room to do what they do best, what they do for all of us.

Hank Williams, Jr.: O.k., Obama as Hitler, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah...But Netanyahu?

2011-10-06T08:54:00.002-05:00

Everyone has surely seen the Hank Williams, Jr. rant from Fox's morning show by now. But, to remind you: So, Obama playing golf with Boehner is like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu? I get the Obama/Hitler reference -- both are hated by conservatives and by the transitivity property of right-wing loathing, if conservatives hate Hitler and conservatives hate x, then x is like Hitler.

But what is the Netanyahu reference here? Is it that Republicans are nationalist hawks and Netanyahu is a nationalist hawk, so Netanyahu is a metaphorical Republican? Dominionists have warm fuzzies over pro-war Israelis, so is that a peculiar compliment?

Is it, as Bocephus seems to mean, an attack, lumping him in with the "enemies"? Is this enemy status a simple result of Netanyahu being a Jew? Was is naive, straight forward anti-Semitism? Was it that he was metaphorically John Boehner who was working with the enemy, so Netanyahu being a Jew is a modern day Judas?

Trust me, there is no love here for Netanyahu, but my beef with him (brisket) is surely not that of Hank Jr (double bacon cheeseburger). So, what sense should we make of the reference?

Lutheran Sharia

2011-10-05T06:24:00.002-05:00

The Supreme court today hears the case of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. in the case, one of the Lutheran school's teachers, Cheryl Perich, was diagnosed with narcolepsy. After a medical leave of absence, she informed the school that her doctor said that given her course of treatment she should be able to return to the classroom in a matter of months. The school changed their health insurance policy to one that was covered less and told her that she should resign. When she declined and threatened to sue under the Americans with Disabilities Act, she was fired -- something the ADA explicitly and clearly forbids.

The school openly admits that it was a retribution firing, but argues that because Perich attended a Lutheran college and received a degree, that she is a minister and since it is a religious school, they can extend a big ol' middle finger of Christian charity at their former employee because the law does not apply to them. They are arguing that the ministerial exception allows them to be above the law. Because they are a religious organization and this math and science teacher also had a couple of religious-related duties, that they can simply ignore the law of the land.

We have witnessed the spectacle of Christian conservatives passing laws to make sure that Islamic sharia law cannot become US law or influence judicial decision making in any way. But here, we have the same sort of folks arguing that internal Lutheran decision making needs to completely trump US law. The fact that this person is associated with a Christian denomination, the line goes, means that US law does not apply, internal church procedures are the only recourse for decision making.

We allow religious institutions to discriminate in hiring and in the benefits they off er their workers. This is wrong. But this case is particularly egregious. In the name of fairness and justice, these exceptions need to end. If it violates your theology to follow the law, I'm sorry. Laws need to apply to everyone regardless of race, sex, creed, or sexual orientation. These exceptions are simply wrong and hopefully we will see a decision in this case in favor of liberty and justice for ALL.

Dark Energy and the Nobel in Physics

2011-10-04T08:14:00.003-05:00

The Nobel Prize for physics was announced and it goes to Saul Permutter of Berkeley, Brian Schmidt from the Australian National Observatory, and Adam Reiss from some school in Baltimore with a lacrosse team. The prize was given for the discovery that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing.

We've known for almost a century that the universe is expanding. When something moves relative to us, there is a Doppler shift. Think of the sound of a fire engine siren going past you. As it approaches, the tone goes up and as it recedes, the tone goes down. The same thing happens with light. So, when we look around us at stars which give off light in the same way and so should have roughly the same color of light emitted from them, we notice some of them have light that is shifted towards the red end of spectrum and others that have their light shifted towards the blue. The father away the star is, the more likely it is to be moving away and moving away faster (which we know from the amount of the shift). This means that the universe is expanding. Think of raisin bread dough rising. As the dough expands, the raisins separate, but the raisins that are farthest apart at the start of the rise are farther apart than those that started off closer together. A longer distance over a fixed time means a greater relative velocity. This is what we see when we look out.

Of the four forces in nature, the only one that acts in a non-trivial fashion over any significant distance is gravitation which is an attractive force. As such, if the universe is expanding and full of objects pulling on each other in the opposite direction to the expansion, we expect that gravity is putting on the brakes. We weren't sure by how much, but the universe had to be at most constant in its expansion.

What the two teams led by these three physicists did was to look at objects very far away that are very, very old. Assuming the universe's expansion to be constant or slowing due to gravity, they expected to measure certain quantities in a certain range. But that's not what they found -- and they we looking independently. The only way these observations make sense is if the universal expansion is not slowing, but accelerating. But the only force out there that is operative is gravity which can only slow it down. What is causing this acceleration? That answer remains to be found. Some contend that it's a new force caused by something unknown to us but given the very cool name "dark energy." Others think that a fifth force is unlikely, but are at a loss to explain it. What ever it ends up being, it's just darn good stuff.

Gandhi's Legacy

2011-10-03T10:04:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was Mohandas Gandhi's birthday. A brilliant man who was also a stunningly capable leader, two things that do not often get combined, much less come together at the right place at the right time. Now, though, it seems that Gandhi is simply a caricature, an icon for "smart and nice."

Is there more to the cultural meaning of Gandhi? Is non-violent protest really now a part of our collective consciousness? You look at the difference between the way the Tea Party has been treated by the mainstream media and the folks occupying Wall Street and you have to wonder. The Tea Party movement has always had an undertone of violence, that "if we don't get our way we could take up arms at any moment" sentiment. They made sure to carry weapons openly on national park land just to be provocative. Many signs made reference to watering the tree of liberty with blood. Their mouth pieces, like Glenn Beck, made liberal use of violent rhetoric. And they were babied by the mainstream media. Events that were billed as major gatherings that only attracted dozens were treated as cultural watersheds. Yet, where the Tea Party is a corporate sponsored astroturf movement, on Wall Street you have a growing collection of people who spontaneously are brought together to call attention to the actual plight of suffering Americans who are being preyed upon by an unjust system that is biased to the wealthy and powerful. Yet, you have a virtual blackout in the mainstream press about it and where you do see any coverage, it tends to be eye rolling condescension. This is no different from the anti-war protests before the invasion of Iraq. Millions of people in the streets across the globe all treated with a dismissive hand wave.

We love to put Gandhi bumper stickers on our cars and talk about how we are all Martin Luther King, Jr. now. But have these non-violent leaders really left us anything cultural that is lasting or have they been co-opted by those they were leading us against and turned into cartoon characters that cease to threaten the powerful?

Best Comedians Working Today

2011-10-01T08:02:00.002-05:00

My Fellow Comedists,

This weekend let's turn back to the professionals. Who are the best comics working today? For my money, it's Demetri Martin:

and Jim Gaffigan:

Who would you say are the best in business today?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve