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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Crazy On Tap - A new kind of diet

Crazy On Tap - A new kind of diet: "As the article says, one should self-experiment. These principles (prune-ciples?) are derived from self-experimentation.

That I and this psych professor were able to come up with completely contrasting principles speaks to the variety of dietary experiences. Or that when it comes to food, anything is provable.

Of course, the article then goes on to contradict itself by telling you exactly what to do (ie, not experiment, just follow the rules). Cause there is no book to sell in self-experimenting with values. Even Nietzsche could tell you that.

I think humans are naturally attuned to eat according to social cues. But most of us are content to be followers, to be the scrawny, needy dog who gets table scraps from the masters and creators of diets."

Crazy On Tap - Going

Crazy On Tap - Going: "There are differences in how often people have to go. based on both genes and lower GI microflora. For some people twice a day, for others every two days. I'd be wary of anyone who was as an absolutist zealot on the issue. (As it takes 2-5 hours to digest food, going right after every meal sounds like a psychological conditioning more than anything. Not there's wrong with it. Unless one like to go on picnics.)

The infomercial is a classic case of appealing to cultural anti-establishmentism - we're always looking for cultural cues about our eating (and shitting, I guess) habits. Some people are predisposed to look for culturally dominant cues, others look for culturally contrarian ones.

The infomercial dude is playing on people's fears and doubts about the medical establishment, to push his own theory (and of course, product). That one can find other people to agree with him on the web isn't surprising - it's a very wide web, and, as Willam James would say, the variety of human experience is such that of course there are doctors who go twice a day themselves and are egotistic enough to believe that everyone else should be just like them.

The informecial is the form of a cult appeal (decry the authority, reinforce self-righteousness among those who do go often, preach that that is the only one way to 'go', bring out the evil goo and appeal to disgust, make the whole thing a moral issue).

But ask oneself this ... was there anything wrong with one's health before or is there an overwhelming desire to fart in the general direction of the system?"

The disgust of seeing goo is leveraged into amoral disgust.

Psychology Today: The Hidden Side of Happiness

Psychology Today: The Hidden Side of Happiness: "Happiness is only one among many values in human life,' contends Laura King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Compassion, wisdom, altruism, insight, creativity—sometimes only the trials of adversity can foster these qualities, because sometimes only drastic situations can force us to take on the painful process of change. To live a full human life, a tranquil, carefree existence is not enough. We also need to grow—and sometimes growing hurts."