limit of sets and ontological proof of God

I'm not sure, Aaron. Occam's Razor would dictate against assuming you know what God wants. That does sound grandly presumptious of you. If you knew what God wanted and God was all-powerful (ie, was able to carry out the things you knew about), then you should be able to predict what will happen tomorrow. But you don't.

(You could say God knows that you know what he wants AND is maliciously subverting his own desires in order to thwart your predictions. But really, you are multiplying assumptions even more at this point.)

Hence, *you* do not know what God wants and do not know why God would want something less perfect than himself to exist and your argument just reduces to the standard problem of evil of problem. It's still a problem, for sure, but it's not particularly a novel disproof of God.

All these definition (ontological) proofs always sound like Cauchy limits and calculus to me. "When dealing with infinitimals or infinites, there are different rules." Which is true. One can't add to aleph-sub-zeros together in the same way one adds 2 and 2. So in a similar way, rules of human intentionality or control don't really apply to God who is both infinite (beyond natural numbers) and infinitesimal (between real ones).

Personally I have a very bland, Darwinian explanation for the existence of most suffering. As far as evil - I'm undecided if it exists. I've seen some bad shit: suffering where no one gains. Not even the sadists. A below-zero game. I can see why some posit the existence of another agent to account for the graft.

posrel, more on brands

The contempt for chains represents a brand-obsessed view of place, as if store names were all that mattered to a city’s character. For many critics, the name on the store really is all that matters. The planning consultant Robert Gibbs works with cities that want to revive their downtowns, and he also helps developers find space for retailers. To his frustration, he finds that many cities actually turn away national chains, preferring a moribund downtown that seems authentically local. But, he says, the same local activists who oppose chains “want specialty retail that sells exactly what the chains sell—the same price, the same fit, the same qualities, the same sizes, the same brands, even.” You can show people pictures of a Pottery Barn with nothing but the name changed, he says, and they’ll love the store. So downtown stores stay empty, or sell low-value tourist items like candles and kites, while the chains open on the edge of town. In the name of urbanism, officials and activists in cities like Ann Arbor and Fort Collins, Colorado, are driving business to the suburbs. “If people like shopping at the Banana Republic or the Gap, if that’s your market—or Payless Shoes—why not?” says an exasperated Gibbs. “Why not sell the goods and services people want?”

chains and choice

They increase local variety, even as they reduce the differences from place to place. People who mostly stay put get to have experiences once available only to frequent travelers, and this loss of exclusivity is one reason why frequent travelers are the ones who complain.

Exactly. The average (choice) is better than the extremes.

carl jung on burn out

DeGarmo had never studied it before. He was assigned Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and found himself beguiled by Carl Jung’s theories about the opposing parts of our personalities. “I remember Jung saying that the general trajectory of your life is to work to your strength in your younger life, going great guns to establish yourself at whatever you’re doing,” he continues. “But at some point in midlife, the other part of your personality—the feminine instead of masculine, or whatever other opposing trait—is looking for expression. And if you don’t allow it to express itself, you’re not, in effect, going to become a whole person. Brittle is the word he uses.”

addiction as an organizing principle

Increasingly, exercise can become the ‘organising principle’ in the persons life at the expense of non exercise activities - relationships, family, work etc.

An interesting notion. That addiction by reducing choice organizes a person's life. It's actually useful.

burnout aticle

In Israel, she adds, she consistently found lower levels of burnout than in her studies in the United States, even though the lives of its citizens are tangibly threatened in a way that most Americans’ are not. “And one explanation I have,” she says, “is that it’s because of the existential threats to our daily lives. You feel your own life is more significant.”

love aphorisms

1. "Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like
bread; re-made all the time, made new."  Ursula K. Le Guin

2.  "Love, like chicken salad or restaurant hash, must be taken on blind
faith or it loses all it's flavor."  Helen Rowland

3.  "Love sometimes is like the flower of the wild poppy; you can't
carry it home." Jaroslav Seifert

4.  "Love washes on me like rain on a dead man's shoes." Ellen Gilchrist

5.  "The man who is not loved hovers like a vulture over the sweetheart
of others."  Victor Hugo

6.  "Our love is like the misty rain that falls softly...but floods the
river."  African proverb

boundaries of intimacy

Typical of schizoid patients, this man had a lifelong pattern of detachment from people, few friends and limited emotional expressiveness. His well-meaning parents always encouraged him to make friends and, later on, to date, even though he was basically uninterested in social activities.

“We thought he was just shy but had lots of feeling inside,” his father told me.....

His therapist apparently believed that no one could genuinely prefer solitude and that there must be a psychological block preventing this patient from seeking intimacy....

Emotional intimacy, it seems, is not for everyone.

I guess in a world mediated by good standards (market, money) some people can specialize their intimacy away and others can just opt not to trade in intimacy at all.

people with money are different

By “priming” unconscious thoughts in similar ways, the researchers found that students with money on their minds, while clearly self-reliant, were less likely than peers who had not been primed to lend assistance: twice as slow to help a confused student on a word problem and about twice as cheap when asked to donate to help needy students.

Having money on the mind even caused the students to put more distance — literally — between themselves and others. Instructed to place two chairs together to meet another student, they put the chairs about 47 inches apart, compared with 31 inches for the students who had not been prompted.

The researchers say this effect of money is plainly evident in everyday life. People with resources do not recruit friends to help run a party. They hire a caterer. Students with money do not give a moving party with pizza. They hire a mover.

speaking in tongues, neuroscience

Contrary to what may be a common perception, studies suggest that people who speak in tongues rarely suffer from mental problems. A recent study of nearly 1,000 evangelical Christians in England found that those who engaged in the practice were more emotionally stable than those who did not. Researchers have identified at least two forms of the practice, one ecstatic and frenzied, the other subdued and nearly silent.

The new findings contrasted sharply with images taken of other spiritually inspired mental states like meditation, which is often a highly focused mental exercise, activating the frontal lobes.

contamination and germs get extended

The Excuse Me flag is a little yellow banner mounted on a lightweight pole, which is attached to one’s waist so it swings back and forth in front of the wearer during walking. Any other pedestrian who walks too close will be slapped in the face by the pole or the yellow flag, which reads “Excuse Me.”

social status self-perception and the brain

When the volunteers won more money than the three-star players, raising their status in the game, the brain scanner showed increased activity in three brain regions: the anterior cingulate, an area that has been shown to monitor conflict and resolve discrepancies; the medial prefrontal cortex, which processes thoughts about other people; and the precuneus, a newly discovered region that some scientists think may be the seat of self-consciousness, the brain’s ability to think about itself.

In contrast, when the one-star players won more money during the game than the volunteers, lowering their status, activity increased in the ventral striatum and the insular cortex, also known as the insula.

the pull of the now

The answer is that anything on offer right now is worth half as much, again, as it would otherwise be; that also means that any immediate cost, such as the pain of going to the gym, is similarly inflated.

religious delusions

Good points, sop. It's not that *I* want it both ways. I think it's that I'd like the analysis of religion to be more, um, scientific and less religious. The 'sleep of reason' analysis is cliche as pointed out in the link.

I *do* believe that God is delusion, but I also believe that either (a) delusions are necessary (like the suspension of belief in stories), or (b) that delusions are a byproduct (a spindle, or whatever Gould called it?) of other necessary human psychological machinery.

attributes of god (islam)

also nice site on islam principles (shia).

THE POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES OF ALLÁH
1) Qadím: Alláh is eternal. He has neither a beginning nor an end.
2) Qadir: Alláh is omnipotent. He has power over all things.
3) 'Alim: Alláh is omniscient. He is all-knowing.
4) Hai: Alláh is living. He is alive and will remain alive forever
5) Muríd: Alláh has his own discretion is all affairs. He does not do anything out of compulsion.
6) Mudrik: Alláh is all-perceiving. He is all-hearing, all-seeing, and is omnipresent. Alláh sees and hears everything though he has neither eyes nor ears.
7) Mutakalim: Alláh is the Lord of the Worlds. He can create speech in anything: the burning bush for Musa and the curtain of light for Muhammad.
8) Sadiq: Alláh is truthful. His words and promises are true.

THE NEGATIVE ATTRIBUTES OF ALLÁH
1) Sharík: Alláh has no partners.
2) Murakab: Alláh is neither made, nor composed, of any material.
3) Makán: Alláh is not confined to any place and has no body.
4) Hulúl: Alláh does not incarnate into anything or anybody.
5) Mahale hawadith: Alláh is not subject to changes. Alláh cannot change.
6) Marí: Alláh is not visible. He has not been seen, is not seen, and will never be seen, because he has no form or body.
7) Ihtiyaj: Alláh is not dependant. Alláh is not deficient, so he does not have any needs.
8) Sifate zayed: Alláh does not have added qualifications. The attributes of Alláh are not separate from His being.

augmentative suffix

An augmentative suffix is something one adds to the end of a word to make the root meaning bigger. A common augmentative in Romance languages is -on. For example, in Spanish, hombre means man. Now add -on, to get hombron, which means a big man, a stud, a real bruiser.

trading gender divisions for class ones

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/magazine/19wwln_idealab.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/magazine/19wwln_idealab.html?ex=1321592400&en=76ec89702499e283&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

"Are we [Americans] achieving more egalitarian marriages at the cost of a more egalitarian society?

Once, it was commonplace for doctors to marry nurses and executives to marry secretaries. Now the wedding pages are stocked with matched sets, men and women who share a tax bracket and even an alma mater. People, like other members of the animal kingdom, have always been prone to “assortative mating,” or choosing to have babies with a reassuringly similar partner. But observers like Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico and author of “The Mating Mind,” suggest that the innovations of modern society — from greater geographic mobility to specialized work environments to Internet dating — have made this matching process much more efficient. “Assortative mating is driven by our personal preferences, but also by whom we meet, and these days we have many more opportunities to meet others like ourselves,” he says.

The Jane Galt blogger mentioned the curious synchronization of class on wedding pages. But I don't know if the process is new.


"... Just as women have long sought to marry a good breadwinner, men, too, now find earning potential sexy.... 'Men are less interested in rescuing a woman from poverty. They want to find someone who will pull her weight.”"


I usually ask my prospects to do a pullup or a few pushups on the first date.

etymology of slave

Slave

The word slave and its Italian form schiavo merit mention here. They are both from a medieval Latin word Sclavus and its slightly later form Slavus, both of which referred first to any person who belonged to the large group of peoples of central and eastern Europe who spoke Slavonic languages. Medieval Latin borrowed the word from the Slavs’ own name for themselves. In Old Slavonic, Slovëne was the word for a Slavic person. It means literally “speaker” from Old Slavonic slovo, “word.” They were the people of the word; that is, they spoke a Slavonic language. The rest of the world spoke gibberish.

Almost every linguistic group on earth has words insulting those who do not speak their tongue. The Russian word meaning “a German person” does this: nyemets whose literal meaning in Old Slavonic is “does not speak.” But it means “does not speak Russian.” The word for baby talk, nonsense, and goo-goo in very ancient Greek was bar-bar. The Greeks thought if you were not speaking Greek, you were just uttering gibberish words like bar-bar. Such non-Greek speakers were the original barbaroi, “barbarians.” Even the philosopher Plato divided mankind into Greeks and Barbarians. Plato was also a big fan of slavery.

When did Slav come to mean “slave”? In the tenth century, during the eastward expansion of the Franks under Otto I (AD 913–973), many speakers of Old Slavonic were in fact conquered and enslaved. The change in meaning from Slav to slave occurred a little later in Italy , after the raids made by Venetians upon Slavonia during the time of the Crusades. By the time that the word schiavo had been altered and reduced to ciao, it meant simply “servant.”

birch etymology

Birch < birche, birk Middle English < birce, beorc Old English. Akin to Ukrainian bereza, German Birke, Old Norse björk, Sanskrit bhurja. A very old Indo-European tree word, its root *bherja means that birch is the ‘bright’ tree, a reference to its chalky-white bark. The words birch and bright are cognates, words stemming from the same root cluster in Indo-European: *bhel, *bher, *bhrek, all of which give words related to shining whitely, shimmering, blazing, burning. The Ukrainian word for the month of March is Berezen ‘time when the birch trees flower.’ And there is that refreshing Russian potion, berezovyi sok (birch drink).

Ukrainian Surnames

Ukrainian has the usual type of birch last names like Berezko = bereza Ukrainian ‘birch’ + ko surname suffix. But Ukrainian also has a group of unique and sometimes humorous surnames formed like Shakespeare was in English, namely, an imperative followed by a noun object. Some are actual surnames; others are names created by humorists and dramatists. Among the actual surnames is Lupibereza ‘peel the birch’ indicating either a woodsman or an ancestor who beat others or was beaten himself (?). A few others in this subgroup of playful Ukrainian surnames:

Peciborsc ‘cook the borsch’

Tovcigrecko ‘stamp the buckwheat’

Vernidub ‘pull out the oak’

Nepijvoda ‘don’t drink water’ (comic name of an alcoholic ancestor ?)

farcire, "farsch"

Farcire in Classical Latin meant 'to stuff, cram, fill full.'

For example, Pliny, writer of Rome's first encyclopedia, wrote of a mason who set out
medios parietes farcire fractis caementis
'to fill the interior of the walls with crushed stone.'

You can see the ancestor of our English word cement in the Latin caementis.

The passive form of the verb farcire was used to describe gagging as part of torture:
in os farciri pannos imperavit
'he ordered rags to be stuffed in the person's mouth.'

A farse was a word or phrase inserted or stuffed into the ordained words of prayers and of the Roman Catholic Mass. From the 9th to the 12th centuries, tropes (extra phrases) began to be added to the music and the texts of the Latin liturgy

"there is a short prayer called the kyrie eleison, which is Greek for 'Lord, have mercy.'"

kyrie genitor ingenite, vera essentia, eleison

'O Lord, unbegotten begetter, true being in all things, have mercy.'
The 'unbegotten begetter' referred to Christ's birth of the Virgin Mary.

Farses spoken or sung in vernaculars like Early French also served as a gloss on the Latin of the Mass, of prayers, and of epistles and readings, to make the congregation, who knew little or no Latin, aware of the meaning of the texts. Lessons and Epistles so altered were called in early French épitres farcies, used especially at important times in the church calendar, such as Christmas Day, to ensure the laity understood the story of the birth of Christ.

In 16th century Italy, these farse formed the basis for commedia dell'arte with stock characters like Arlecchino, Punchinello, Colombina, and Pantalone who influenced comedies by Ben Jonson and Molière, and gave rise to characters like Harlequin and Mr. Punch of Punch and Judy shows.

chocolate bonhomie

Must admit - chocolate is one of the most efficient presents - per dollar, a bonbon packs quite a bit of bonhomie (legal and OTC).

thanksgiving trimmings

went with my sister to her LTR bf's family Thanksgiving....

- Get a ride from grandpa and grandma. Am glad as I haven't been on this road for at least a dozen years and would have gotten lost with the new construction. It's also raining cats and dogs, hamsters and an occasional muskrat.

- The grandma told me that they are looking forward to my sister's wedding. Though they've been going out for 8 years (high school sweethearts), there hasn't been a wedding planned. The grandma also said that she feels my sister is like her own granddaughter already, and that M (the BF's mother) said she's "The One" even before they had began dating.

- The host got up at 3am to start cooking the turkey.

- A curious hodgepodge of New England WASP and New York Bohemian. The house is on one of the continent's most precious divides - one could sit the Red Sox fans on one side of the table and the Yankees fans on the other. We need mediation just to translate across accents.

- Everyone's buying or building a house on the Cape.

- The 22-year old is on speed or crack (or high on love) and peevishly demands cranberry sauce from a can (must have the correct can impressions to be considered authentic). She's wearing a too short sweater dress and knee high pompom moccasins.

- I'm still not used to the phrase "your mommies." As in "Jenny, where your mommies at?" - "They're watching TV."

- Though there are four sisters (and a few sisters-in-law even), the Thanksgiving dinner has been held in the same sister's household for 27 years. I calculate .. M&H have been hosting their parents and siblings since their mid-twenties. I'm impressed. They have even accumulated specialized tools for the task - turkey plates, pumpkin linens, cranberry silverware.

- Overheard ... "Though I'm a New York liberal but even I believe tenants should be kicked out of their apartments once in awhile."

- The black, cross-eyed, nervously energetic schnoodle dropped a tootsie roll on the carpet. A veritably Proustian analysis ensues ... "you need to clean it up ... it's hard so it didn't leave a mark ... use a wet paper towel ... no, water will smudge it in...."

- After dinner, half the people fall asleep on sofas throughout the house. the 14-year old walks around her iBook in hand, video-conferencing her snoring relatives with her friends.

- Grandma does some toothy Bush-bashing ("we could have paid for ten years of healthcare with that war").

- Watching Grey's Anatomy with a vascular surgeon is very insightful - "Hey, it's that girl from Silence of the Lambs .. 'Come here Precious. Precious, here's a bone, that's a good girl, Precious'." I think the dog in that movie may have been a schnoodle, too.

- Watching the Ali G show with people ranging from 14 to 79 is embarassing. including when Borat shows a beaver shot Polaroid of his wife. "I hope you never did that to me," says grandma's look to grandpa.

- New medical condition discovered ... Munchausen by proxy by proxy. It's when one feigns being healthy in order to make others believe one's caretaker has Munchausen by proxy. Hopefully it will be in the DSM-V or VI.

- At one point, after washing the dishes and putting the food away, all the women get into a circle and start braiding each others' hair. It's obvious to me then that the women - four sisters, two sisters-in-law, daughters and cousins, my sister even - are the focal point of this family. The men are ancilliary, on the periphary, mere satellites circling daintly around the center of power.

nytimes - ethics of parental investment

"I may seem to be asserting that you must treat each child strictly as an individual, selecting the best school for the older and ignoring the effects of that decision on the younger. But parental duties extend to both children and require a more nuanced calculus. At mealtime, you would not let the older child eat her fill before permitting the younger to approach the table and consume only what scraps, if any, remain. Neither for lunch nor for learning do I advocate primogeniture.

In some cases, parents must indeed make a greatest-good decision. That might mean sending one child to a less-expensive college rather than to her first choice, in order to make some of the family’s resources available to her siblings. In such a case, you would rightly weigh the quality of the schools. If choosing the more expensive meant paying full freight at Swarthmore and the less expensive were McGill, you might reasonably ask your daughter to bundle up and head north, confident that she could receive a fine education. If the alternatives were Princeton or cosmetology school, you would make a different choice. (Assuming you and your daughter have conventional feelings about mascara.)

But your actual decision here does not involve the equitable distribution of family resources. Rather, you contemplate sending your older child to a slightly worse school to game the system on behalf of her sister. This is too discouraging a lesson about merit, about fairness, to teach either child."

"Smellbound"

"The obvious choice would be to try to create the perfume Grenouille makes from the scent of the murdered virgins."

"As Strubi and Laudamiel watched the rough-cut scenes of the film together, she came up with a different idea. What if you could create a perfume that would enhance your own unique smell, a perfume that would smell different on you than on anyone else? In other words, your scent identity."

breakdown vs build up

>people who are really good at this sort of logical break-down are horrible at moving masses of people to action.

Isn't the answer to the conundrum right there? Those who can break down a task into disjoint chunks are un- (or less) able to move other things (like groups) in mass. Analytical versus synthentic.

The reason seems obvious - to move masses of people they need to be convinced that they are part of some unified whole of some sort. Some sort of coordination and conformity. Analytical engineers break tasks down so that they can focus more specially on each task.

> since the ancient Greeks Mathematics and Philosophy (which developed into physics) were considered necessary ingredients for a good education.

Before math, there was logic (applying rules), grammar (following someone else's rules), and rhetoric (persuading others to follow one's vision) on the curriculum. Afterward math/physics, there was philosophy and theology. Both of which, if one thinks about it, are attempts to find some sort of Grand Unified Theory. To what end? To move the masses, of course.

obsessive consumption

specialization and labeling in order to narrow choices.

Obsessive Consumption

In 2000, Kate Bingaman-Burt graduated from college and took a full-time job as a designer and art director for a gifts company in Omaha. She worked on ads and packaging and products but didn’t feel great about any of it. Mostly it was stuff that “people didn’t really need,” she says, and ultimately it made her wonder about why people buy what they buy. Eventually she quit, went to art school to pursue a master’s degree — and started wondering about the things she bought. This led to a project she called Obsessive Consumption, which involved documenting pretty much all of her purchases; soon she started collecting those images on a Web site. And this turned out to be the first iteration of something that continues to this day: “I basically built a brand out of Obsessive Consumption,” she says, “and ran with it.”

Since then the project — or brand — has taken two forms. She exhibits her work in shows with titles like “Love Your Money” and “Available Credit,” and she also sells things in an online shop: drawings; stuffed dollar signs sewn from “vintage and recycled materials”; and pillows with sewn-on designs inspired by credit-card logos. For $4, you can buy a zine of her pen-and-ink-drawings of purchases she made in May 2006: “Exciting stuff here kids. . . . Kate buys a lime on May 5, her second pair of sunglasses for the summer on May 1 and falls victim to purchasing trendy skinny jeans that do nothing for her figure on May 20.”

Although she no longer documents every product she buys, her own purchase patterns still occupy a prominent place in her work, through (for instance) an ongoing series of hand-drawn recreations of her credit-card bills — which are for sale through her Web site. Her first credit-card-statement drawing, as she recalls, was purchased by Jim Coudal, the founder of Coudal Partners, a design and advertising agency in Chicago. Coudal remembers seeing the drawings online and contacting Bingaman-Burt about acquiring the portrait (as it were) of her October 2004 Chase statement. At the time, she hadn’t figured out how to price them, and ended up charging him the minimum balance due, which happened to be $140.

“The credit-card statement is this thing that everyone in America understands, and it’s completely produced by machine,” Coudal observes. “No human touches it, except for the human at the other end, who has the card — and who affects the content of that statement by the purchases they make.” Coudal appreciated the idea of animating this soulless document through hand drawing (the Chase logo suddenly looked so attractive), but what he really liked was that it connected with the artist’s actual purchases. “It brought an anonymous part of everyone’s life and made you look at it in a completely different way,” he says.

Bingaman-Burt, who also teaches graphic design at Mississippi State University, does not see her work so much as a negative reaction to consumer culture as an attempt to cope with it on its own terms.

“Obsessive Consumption is repulsed and grossly fascinated by the branding of consumer culture,” her site explains. “It wants to eat the entire bag of candy and enjoy the sickness that it feels an hour later. It doesn’t want to be an outside critical observer. It wants to be an active participant.” Indeed, the June statements of her various cards showed a cumulative total balance of more than $23,000. She says that it has been reduced to something like $15,000, as she has recovered from grad-school-era debts — but she also acknowledges that there’s “a lot of guilt and emotion” involved in recreating evidence of money spent and interest racked up.

But of course that’s part of the point. And Bingaman-Burt knows perfectly well that nobody needs any of the Obsessive Consumption objects any more than the gifts and cards she designed and helped market in the early 2000s. Her hope, she says, is to engage an audience on a more conceptual level, inviting them to think about consumption and obsession and their after-effects (and to think of them more frequently than during the holiday retail frenzy that begins this coming “black Friday”). The objects she creates and sells are, in a way, simply “souvenirs” of that thought process. As a brand, Obsessive Consumption is about facing the stark realities of obsessive consumption. As Bingaman-Burt puts it: “The products are aware of their lack of necessity.”

concentrating the buying sprees

Americans buy 25% of their non-durable goods during the 30 days before Xmas. And they give most of that away.

Think how efficient it is to concentrate one's purchasing. It's like buying all your groceries once a week instead of wasting time shopping every day after work.

drug resume

list all the drugs a person did ... liek a resume

segmenting the holidays

Americans have segmented the holiday product line as any other (restaurants or television channels, say). A day for giving thanks, a day for exchanging gifts with family, a day for partying with friends, a day for jubilant self-congradulation, a day for rememberance.

It's much more efficient that way. Wasn't the old practice of saint days (or Athenian gods) like that too? Each focused on the task at hand.

Of all weeks in the year, the end of the harvest period is near optimal for such an emotion. (Last falls heavy flooding had leached the calcium out of the soil, and my garden lacked its regular inputs. The tomatoes were small and wrinkly. The bell peppers didn't flower till September throwing off the whole project schedule. "Don't blame us. We did our job," one could hear the bees as the diligently buzzed around their business.)

economics and institutions

This may not seem to have much to do with economics, but in fact it is very relevant to a related debate in economics: the role of institutions in development.

Everyone now agrees that "institutions matter", but this is partly because "institutions" is a catchall word that can include almost anything anyone cares about, if one squints hard enough and tilts one's head at just the right angle. Government, social structure, and economic practices get squashed into the word "institutions", whereupon we can all agree that the things that matter, matter.

outsourcing the emotions

Outsource the "hopelessness, fear, guilt, agonising self-doubt.... " to the arts - get a subscription to the local theater.

satire and power

Satire is tool to counteract power, prevent it from overheating and spinning out of control (see Aristophanes).

There's no question Stewart and Corbert are biased. We wouldn't them to be any other way. Sure they poke fun at the Democrats on occasion. A slightly right-biased show wouldn't be too bad to add to the mix. In an efficient market the number of viewer-jokes (# of anti-X jokes on show A multiplied by it audience plus the same on the other show) should be proportional to the perceived power of the target of the satire.

What would be sad if the shows specialized, each moving to an extreme - why would Stewart make a anti-Democrat joke that was made by this Fox fellow the night before?

childrearing marketplace

http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009542.html

The specialization/standardization process explains a lot. When a person or groups of people can do something better than others it's more economical for them to specialize in that area. They then have to trade/interface with other specialists for their outputs using some sort of standard (money, SAT scores, HTTP protocol, etc).

The effects of standardization are a higher average output (per total cost, the bread at the baker's is much cheaper than homemade) and lower variability (the baker's bread is never a bust [my dough doesn't always rise], and yet never as good as the best homemade bread [my best pizza crusts are to die for]).

Applied to childrearing there are a number of ways this process works ...

(a) When there are two parents doing all the childrearing, each will specialize in some aspect of the project at hand and standardize to coordinate activities. For example, one parent will play bad cop (disciplinarian) while the other plays good (experientialist). That works remarkably well as long as there is coordination/communication to keep the balance (a weekly Sunday dinner discussion/project management meeting, say).

(b) Single parents who try to do *all* the childrearing work will find they do none of the tasks particularly well, or as well as they could if they could narrow their focus. Though there will be some single parent households who are better than two parent ones, there will be a lot of duds too. And the average childrearing output will be lower.

(c) When parent(s) outsource childrearing, childrearing becomes normalized to the standard of care. Since almost everyone outsources their kids' education, the discussion of outsourcing is about how much is outsourced not whether it so. Here the same s/s process works too ... schools are accredited, split into education levels, level are integrated using standards (grades, SAT scores, and a development that came after me - the state boards, Regent's Exams). The average output is higher with lower variability (no more Aristotles or Leonardos, I'm afraid).

Same with nannies ... a parent wants them to meet a minimum standard (that they are not pedophiles, for example) that parents themselves don't need to meet to become parents! Again, higher overall average, yet lower variability - an accreditted, well-referenced nanny will never be as great as the best parent, nor will she be as bad as that mother who drowned her kids in the bathtub.

What works against a nanny specialization/standardization process is that people believe they are better parents than they really are. More than half of parents believe they are above median in their skills. Oh well, it's not the first belief economics had to jump over - people believed that financial specialization (charging interest rates on loans) was immoral too.

For single or full-time working parents, a nanny can be a further godsend - she adds variety to the skills exchange. She can be the disciplinarian while the parents are the permissive ones. Or vice versa, she can be the lenient, kind, experience-focused one, where what the parents bring to the exchange is their superior disciplinarian skills. It's additional data that the nanny literary stereotypes - Shakespeare, Jane Eyre, etc - fall into own of those two groups (and problem arise not because of speciaization, but because of poor coordination of standards).

(d) What is the goal of childrearing? Does anyone know? I'd propose that the goal is to raise the child to be a specialist (at a sufficient level) in a society where specialists interact through exchange stanards. Same process - the average citizen is more self-actualized while there are fewer outcasts or Alexanders the Great. Yet it only works if agreements on exchange standards are met. How very self-referential. :)

Lastly, I don't know how many hours a week it takes to raise a child - is it 80 as Jane hints at? Are two parents enough? Does it take a village? Is that they way our brains evolved way back when?

What I do believe is that childrearing task isn't different from any other economic activity and divvying up its work *is* an overall benefit, as long as coordination/standardization is met. I believe that the village, functioning as skills exchange, can raise a child better than one or two parents who believe in isolationism and keep their child away from the childrearing marketplace.

self-survivor bias

the egotistic phallacy/self-survivor bias at work !! .....

http://www.american.com/archive/2006/november/the-young-economist-1

Malmendier has extended her method well beyond the weight room—notably, into the boardroom. In her paper “Who Makes Acquisitions? CEO Overconfidence and the Market’s Reaction,” she asked why so many corporate CEOs, in making acquisitions, “overpay for target companies and undertake value-destroying mergers.” The study looked at simple overconfidence, especially when companies have abundant internal funding, as the answer.

“If you’re CEO of a top company, you’ve had a lot of success in your life...otherwise you wouldn’t be there. So maybe you tend to overestimate that everything you touch turns to gold,” says Malmendier. “They just truly believe it’s a good merger, and it’s not surprising that they do, given that everything else went so well in the past.”

good twin/evil twin

http://www.crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=12813&Posts=10

> so I doubt that birth order

yeah that was part of my point. it's not just birth order any difference can become stretched (though if parents refer to one as "the Elder" and "the Younger" too often, they make is an issue themselves).

I also should stress that neediness can be a virtue when it's called being persuasive. Getting someone to carry you to your goal (the rock) is a viable strategy. One used pride to get her father's affection, the other pity. These are both viable strategies. Marketing and the lovely arts of persuasion are underappreciated by us programmer types.

Thirdly, it's probably not a big deal. These kinds of roles can be limited to within family dynamics if the children have lots of outside the family experiences. The twins will most likely behave very similarly when they are apart and away from their parents. They have to find new roles under those circumstances, and the slight differences between them will be swamped out by the difference between either twin and the rest of the world.

I imagine the good twin/evil twin archetype came about because twins were reared too closely together. :) They found their niches and specialized into extremes. Their center of mass is normal, but each twin is far out on their end of the seesaw.

epistemology

http://www.crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=12826&Posts=9

It's possible that, crunch the equations of the universe and life falls out. I guess. I'd like to see the proof however. The proofs of life I've seen, like those of God, seem to presume their conclusion.

> much as nitrogen atoms in isolation will almost certainly triple-bond into nitrogen gas

I'm questioning the analogy though - how did those nitrogen atoms become isolated in the first place? Did something "force" them apart? If so, was this then the "N gas-making" force? Was it inevitable or did a will isolate them on purpose?

You see, in the causal chain of events, once one step becomes "inevitable" the question of evitability moves onto the previous step. In fact this is the dance between the known, inevitable, truths and those unknown and conditional that has been going on for millenia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

I'm not religiously affiliated myself (I think that creationists are wrong because they take things too literally, same as their critics, in fact). I just have the empathy to understand how one can be religious, in a metaphorical way.

There's an interview in a recent Time magazine article with both Richard Dawkins and Frances Collins (head of US's Human Genome Project). Dawkins doesn't need a religious introduction; Collins is Christian. It's an interesting pas de deux. I'll find the link if requested.

moral hazard/brother

Crazy On Tap - Let the expensive 1% die?

Yeah, Kenny, not everyone gets into the 1%. Some commit suicide, some die in a war before they get there. But those who want to extend their life by even a couple months, do spend thousands and thousands of dollars in those last few, too short, months.

I do agree with son of parnas that it's a question of acconting, a cold calculus. Not everyone's grandma is worth keeping around. $100,000 to keep my grandma around another five years? Sure. $1 million? Uh, well, not unless she's Nancy Pelosi.

On a personal note, I have a brother who is in that 1%. Three months in the hospital last year. Fewer this year (he's there now), but still at 24, he's already eaten up his share of the lifetime healthcare pie.

His illness? He's a walking (when he can walk) moral hazard - doesn't understand moral hazards whatsoever. Not just consciously like on an econ quiz, but subconsciously the way most of us are built. The risk to reward/loss feedback cycle is broken. So he does risky things even though he's experienced pain/loss from them before. The system (the state's health welfare, his family) prop him up. If anything, he seems to value his life by how much he takes out of the system - he bragged that his state-paid hepC meds cost $10,000 per month. Creative accounting, indeed.

wittgenstein on w james

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:-ESbfhUuGOAJ:www.phil.mq.edu.au/research/preprints/sutton/sutton-ch2.pdf+%22pneumatic+theory%22+folk+psychology&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2

How needed is the work of philosophy is shown by James'
psychology. Psychology, he says, is a science, but he
discusses almost no scientific questions. His movements
are merely (so many) attempts to extricate himself from
the cobwebs of metaphysics in which he is caught. He
cannot yet walk, or fly at all he only wriggles. Not
that that isn't interesting. Only it is not a
scientific activity.
(Wittgenstein MS 165:150-1, in Hilmy 1987:196-7)

grades and standardization

It be interesting to hear from managers themselves.

The thing is that standardization lowers the variability while raising the average (by streamlining what needs to be learned). So the average becomes higher (more people can read today than 100 years ago). But the smart people - those above average who would have learned to read anyway - feel that they are being pushed toward the average. Which for them, is lower. So I agree, grades do measure conformity to a standard. But do schools which don't use grades do any better (given the same inputs, ie, student and teacher pools and money allocation)? Replace reading with any other marketable skill, using the Internet, programming, etc, and the same applies.

Crazy On Tap - grades only measure your obedience to a manager

marriage market

http://www.economist.com/debate/freeexchange/2006/11/ithas_been_revealed_thatcurren.cfm



Couple things ...



(1) The wedding announcements in the NY Times Wedding section are not representative of the city's population, Only high status folks (Edlund's wealthy) get their announcements in.



(2) The blogger hints that the men market is poor everywhere. In Alaska where there are more of them, they are "odd." In New York City they are not "compatible". (Though the chart indicates that the male/female ratios for the US are dead even). Perhaps this has less to do with the poor market selection and more with ambition, wanting that which may be slightly out of one's reach.



For example, at least 40% of men in New York City have a bachelor's degree (one of the highest rates in the country). If you're a woman seeking to go on a date, isn't a bachelor's degree one of the things you look for? Even if you yourself don't have a bachelor's degree, it would be something sought after in a male date (it's a symbol, a proxy of wealth). If so, the other 60% of the male market has just been excluded and it seems like there are no "good, available" men in the city. If not a bachelor's degree, then an advanced degree, or "doesn't live with parents/roommates" or one of those other Internet dating questions. A mother's "you can do better than him" hangs in one's ears.



(3) With a lower childbirth rate and more fertility technology, a woman's natural fecundity is less valuable on its own. Men still seek some of the symbols of fecundity (youth and beauty) -- if innate, it speaks to how extremely valuable fecundity used to be -- but a woman doesn't need to be able to actually give birth as well as she used to. Hence, there's a shift from looking for reproduction income to looking for economic income in a female mate.



Fewer children (and more childrearing specialists) and improved household technology has made her less valuable in the home as well (society doesn't like free riders, so it kicked women out to go to work).



(4) It's odd that a Scandinavian would take marriage to be the defining characteristic of a male/female bond - how many Scandinavians don't ever get married but are in LTRs nevertheless? Perhaps marriage data was the only data available.

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Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets

Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets

This essay examines how repugnance sometimes constrains what transactions and markets we see. When my colleagues and I have helped design markets and allocation procedures, we have often found that distaste for certain kinds of transactions is a real constraint, every bit as real as the constraints imposed by technology or by the requirements of incentives and efficiency. I'll first consider a range of examples, from slavery and indentured servitude (which once were not as repugnant as they now are) to lending money for interest (which used to be widely repugnant and is now not), and from bans on eating horse meat in California to bans on dwarf tossing in France. An example of special interest will be the widespread laws against the buying and selling of organs for transplantation. The historical record suggests that while repugnance can change over time, change can be quite slow.

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kidney market

http://debate.economist.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi



A couple comments ...



(1) The law is simpler without a kidney market. A regulated market would not get rid of a black market, it would just make two marktets. Today if someone tries to sell you a kidney, it's clear that it's an illegal act. If there was a regulated kidney market, it would not be so clear whether the said kidney sale is legal or not.



It's true that there are many areas where regulation is a burden, but still an overall benefit (ie, telling between a registered nurse and one outside the system). But the ideas behind organ market are not easy, simple to explain. There are indocrination costs and costs of errors. For example, try explaining to an 18-year old why methodone is legal and regulated and heroin is neither - it's not an easy moral boundary. A kidney market would also cast be murky moral lines. (Whether morality *should* be easy is a different question, better left for the philosophers perhaps.)



(2) Wouldn't a free market impact not only the supply side but also the demand side of the equation? Isn't that what a market means - both sides are 'free'? If so, what evidence do we have that the demand for kidneys would not increase? As healthnut says, wouldn't it mean that rich folks would party more and abuse their kidneys because they knew they could buy new ones down the line for a relatively small fee?



It's not a classical moral hazard, as the reckless kidney recipient does have to pay the piper. But it would effectively lower the price of kidneys from today's astronomical lottery to what? $5000. That's cheaper than a good tummy tuck. And economists are the first to tell us that if the price of something falls, its use rises. Expect rich countries to outsource "growing a healthy kidney" to poor countries. It's what a specialization-centric, interdependent system would accomplish. Perhaps that would be a good thing too - ask the philosophers.

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poor chicken

Marginal Revolution

When a poor man eats a chicken, one of the two is sick

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mutual agreement through seeing

BPS Research Digest: “If I cover my eyes I’ll be hidden” – how young children understand visibility

That’s according to Nicola McGuigan and Martin Doherty who say this is probably because young children think of ‘seeing’ in terms of mutual engagement between people. It explains why kids often think they can’t be seen if they cover their eyes.

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http://www.crazyontap.com/post.php?TopicId=12784

the shift from private concerns to public concerns was a _very_ good thing for society



I guess I'm worried that this shift is a mirage of our 20-20 hindsight. We judge what is private/public by our current moral perspective. We judge those generations past by the same standard, so they look off one way (Prohibition, hemline length) or the other (lack of sex-offender websites, no pollution emission standards).



Perhaps the slow rachet of technology has enabled more power to individuals. Plebes didn't own an elephant in Caesar's time. Today, they drive Hummers.



Yet I believe that the same rachet of technology has enabled the group to increase its power as well (radio propoganda for the 30's Fascists, Cerebus for the 21st century ones, etc).



Individual vs. group arms race. Are we standing still?



the fact that we now rely on the government to punish wrong doers for instance is responsible for a huge amount of good



I was just thinking about that today (watching damn Desperate Housewives). How 'police' is a product of specialization. It's a fairly new occupation. Victorian provenance - Poe's Murder on the Rue Morgue was (one of) the first detective story because detectives were new - the notion that gathering evidence and judging it should be seperate jobs was possible only in countries rich enough to hire a police department. Subsequently, district attorneys, defense ones, forensic labs, etc (what specialties of justice will there be in 100 years).



the governments role is to balance out those competing ideas,



Yes. Ying-yang. To balance out the individual and group competing against each other.



But the environment keeps changing and the balance is never perfect. Which is good in that it keeps Law Order writers employed.

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reference

http://www.crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=12793 />

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economist kidneys

i just meant ... I was visiting my brother in the hospital today, and the nurse was talking about his Pxxxx protein numbers (where Pxxxx is some word I've never heard before, but is produced by muscle breakdown somehow and then processed by the kidneys).



She said that a normal range was 0.5-1.2. When he was admitted last Monday (after sitting in ER for 48 hours) his Pxxx number was 1.9. The next day it was 4.2. On Wed it was 5.3. At 6.0 they sorta "call" the kidneys and start dialysis (with chance of kidney recovery fairly low, I guess). His Pxxx number went down the next couple days yet is still triple normal range.



Anyway, the nurse told us today, "No one ever wants to go on dialysis. It's not pretty. It's not a choice one ever makes."



However dialysis is where people go who need kidneys but haven't gotten one. As are kidney transplants. If one made kidneys as plentiful as crutches, grew them in pigs, say, ....



Oh, damn. I just got choked up and lost my line of argument. Fine, use techology to let drug addicts risk the loss of their kidneys (it's his third major organ he's risked in as many years - heart in 2003, liver was almost gone last year).



But requiring everyone to donate their organs - isn't that crossing over between the private and the public? What would Hayek do?

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http://jim.com/hayek.htm

Let me read more of the article ...





Well, all right, but isn't that the whole point? That the boundary
between private and public is in dispute? No one thinks it's a private
affair for one person to murder another person. They think it's one for
society to handle (even monopolizing violence for the state). But what
about abortion? Is this a private or public matter? People seem to
disagree. (I know Hayek doesn't talk about abortion, and the Communists
were not anti-abortion, but it still serves as an example.) One may
think that anti-abortion activists are sticking their noses into
private business; yet Hayek's argument relies on a general agreement of
what is private and what isn't.





But that's exactly the problem - his argument is useless. It's like
saying "people would do the right thing if they knew what it was, so
let me tell them". Which contradicts the core of his "don't tell other
people what is right/wrong" individualism!





As for choice in abortions, same goes for marriage. Why is it a public affair that I marry two women?





If we all agreed on which of our relationships were private and public, it would make ethics trivial.

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The Psychological Consequences of Money

Money has been said to change people's motivation (mainly for the better) and their behavior toward others (mainly for the worse). The results of nine experiments suggest that money brings about a self-sufficient orientation in which people prefer to be free of dependency and dependents. Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance.

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Between Monster and Model

FeralChildren.com | Homo ferus: Between Monster and Model

Most studies of human monstrosity, however, found inspiration in the exciting new developments in embryology rather than in the static morphology of Linnaeus' system. They sought to demonstrate that anomalies were biologically reproduced, based on real, material connections, not just on similar appearance or similar traits. Some speculated that feral children were products of incongruous couplings like those that produce mules—perhaps between women and bears or women and apes.[16] While often discredited, accounts of animal-human interbreeding abound in eighteenth-century natural histories and reveal a curiosity mixed with repulsion for hybrids of all kinds. In 1699 Edward Tyson presented an account of a man-pig to the Royal Society; in 1757 Delisle de Sales claimed to have seen a girl with the head and feet of a monkey and records the exhibit of a calf-child and a wolf-child in Lyon in the 1750s; and Maupertuis exhorted the scientific community to experiments that might create new and more beautiful species of humans and animals.[17] Such creatures, and other specimens of physical abnormality, like the "Porcupine Man" and the albino Negro, were fascinating as grotesque carnival attractions and as clues to the mechanism of generation: they provided counter-examples to normal embryological development and fueled debates between advocates of preformationism and epigenesis.[18]

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Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors

Scotsman.com News - International - Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

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togetherness

An abstraction is an object, too, our Smalltalk friends tell us.

Happiness? Fuck that. I'd rather work for love. If kindly it could work for me.

My Girl Friday 

November 5th, 2006 10:25pm

---

Love without happiness?



No thanks.



Been there, done that.

Aaron F Stanton 

November 5th, 2006 10:29pm

----

No
that's not what I said. Having happiness be the sole goal - that's
kinda lame. Try working for love. Happiness, joie devivre, etc, will
follow.

My Girl Friday 

November 5th, 2006 10:31pm

---

For love of what?

Aaron F Stanton 

November 5th, 2006 10:35pm

----

"We
have seen how people describe the common characteristics of optimal
experience: a sense that one's skills are adequate to cope with the
challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound action system that
provides clear clues as to how well one is performing."



- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow. (4th chapter)

~~~x 

November 5th, 2006 10:38pm

> For love of what?



Dude, this is more self-centeredness. Just like the quest for happiness is fundementally a quest of the ego.



The question is not love of what (do you love objects that much?), the question is whose love.



Whose love am I working for? Wake up each morning and load that question into the goal sights.

My Girl Friday 

November 5th, 2006 10:43pm

----

You think a what is an object.  Interesting.  You seem to think that an abstraction cannot be a what, as far as I can tell.



Perhaps it's a person, or concept, or a divinity, or my dog.



Not that I have a dog - I don't.

Aaron F Stanton 

November 5th, 2006 10:55pm

----

And if you are working for the love of a person, that's *still* a goal.

Aaron F Stanton 

November 5th, 2006 10:55pm

----

Regardless, working for the love of a person is different than
working for the love of an object. Can objects, even abstractions,
love?



That's why the reaction against whatness. Whatness is not whoness. It is cold. It doesn't love back.



The love of one's friends, spouse, children, siblings, co-workers,
community - these are all persons with their own needs. Even God, if
you so wish. If one works for His love then it is because God has
personhood.



It is by fulfilling another's needs/potential with one's work/power
that love is built. You lose some power/independence/control, yes (a
parent should know what that feels like), but the combination is worth
more, the togetherness is stronger than the parts by themselves. The
bond itself is valuable, it has energy (surely a chemist understands
that :) ).



Sigh. I don't want to be too categorical either. Some people DO
find that objecs love them back. Numbers and proofs love mathematicians
(they pamper them so). The lone gardener is the center of attention
among his daffodils and zucchinis and bumblebees. And lo, we, know that
words wail at the death of a poet like no other.



If people's love is insufficient, figure out which objects and/or
abstractions will love you back. Which ones will have you. Work for
them.

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