“questions”
36 posts under this tag.
There are two ways we can produce automobiles. We can build them in Detroit or we can grow them in Iowa. Everyone knows how we build automobiles. To grow automobiles, we first grow the raw material from which they are made—wheat. We put the wheat on ships and send the ships out into the Pacific. They come back with Hondas on them.
From our standpoint, growing Hondas is just as much a form of production—using American farmworkers instead of American autoworkers—as building them. What happens on the other side of the Pacific is irrelevant; the effect would be just hte same for us if there really where a gigantic machine sitting somewhere between Hawaii and Japan turning wheat into automobiles. Tariffs are indeed a way of protecting American workers —from other American workers.
David D. Friedman, Hidden Order
particularly now that my lil sis studies economics, how funny it is that economists are far and away mostly of use to govt’s. While theirs is a fine and beautiful knowledge, the only people that actually pay economists to work —besides universities, who employ them to train more economists, a nice pyramid scheme— are either bureaucrats or lobbyists warding or manipulating bureaucrats. At first that made me wary, but lately I’ve come to realize that what good economists (as opposed to bribed sycophants or bad economists) actually have to say to the gov’t is fuck off—stay away, you do more harm than good. Dismantling or even just holding off the gov’t beast is a worthy mission, quite possibly one of the most important.
Final part of Stunde Null, following Part 1 and Part 2
As I would better learn the next morning, the detention center was a nice, non-descript government building in the middle of, get this, upper-middle-class Phoenix suburbia. They take, though, such care in camouflaging that I doubt many neighbors know right next door illegal aliens are being held captive.
They searched me again, and again for weapons. They took away my book. Cops where white, some Hispanic, one of them had some arm-covering tattoos, San Francisco style. A bus was being loaded with a throng of short, tiny, Latin Americans of obvious illegality and indigenous roots, people whom you can tell just by looking that they have never eaten meat on a regular basis, faces and bodies eaten away by poverty and disease. They weren’t treated badly, what I saw was the same detached professionalism afforded to me.
For my sister, Alex, who will start her Economics major this July
Economists are philosophers of human action.
They’re close to psychologists, neurologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and ethicists.
But psychologists focus on the mind behind the human action, neurologists focus on the underlying brain, sociologists on the surrounding society, anthropologists on the enveloping culture. Ethicists focus on the aesthetics of human action, on what human action should be.
Economists, on the other hand, focus on the actions themselves, on trying to understand them in their own terms. They ask questions like:
What patterns does human action follow? What different kinds can we usefully distinguish? Why are these actions taken? What are the goals behind these actions? What would the consequences be of these actions? Why do these actions have these consequences? In other words, what is the interplay between goals, conditions, actions, and consequences? If someone took these actions what actions are others expected to take? How will these actions affect others? What are the best actions to take given these goals? How best to organize and coordinate human action? What are the limits of human action? How to improve human action?
Grouped under the ARG, Alternate Reality Gaming, label for lack of a better term. I think all 3 exemplify something new, unsettling, and fascinating that I don’t yet have a word for.
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Little BrotherELZR, now available as atoms and bits, has a glorious climax of hundreds of vampires invading San Francisco’s civic center, messing with general paranoia.
> RULES FOR VAMPMOB
> You are part of a clan of daylight vampires. You’ve discovered the secret of surviving the terrible light of the sun. The secret was cannibalism: the blood of another vampire can give you the strength to walk among the living.
> You need to bite as many other vampires as you can in order to stay in the game. If one minute goes by without a bite, you’re out. Once you’re out, turn your shirt around backwards and go referee—watch two or three vamps to see if they’re getting their bites in.
> To bite another vamp, you have to say “Bite!” five times before they do. So you run up to a vamp, make eye-contact, and shout “bite bite bite bite bite!” and if you get it out before she does, you live and she crumbles to dust.
> You and the other vamps you meet at your rendezvous are a team. They are your clan. You derive no nourishment from their blood.
> You can “go invisible” by standing still and folding your arms over your chest. You can’t bite invisible vamps, and they can’t bite you.
> This game is played on the honor system. The point is to have fun and get your vamp on, not to win.
> There is an end-game that will be passed by word of mouth as winners begin to emerge. The game-masters will start a whisper campaign among the players when the time comes. Spread the whisper as quickly as you can and watch for the sign.
> M1k3y
> bite bite bite bite bite!
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Freezing Grand Central, a most elegant improv piece (via Alan).
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That great Free Hugs campaign a while ago:
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Got more samples along these lines? I wanted to quote something from SFZero but I’m still too new to it…
To be is to change
for how can something that never changes itself or others be said to exist?
one might as well call it even with nothingness
To change is to die
for something else always results
something always is no more
To die is to birth
for something else always results
something new always is
This strange text above was inspired by Greg Egan, who has in a few months become my favorite author, and who in all his novels I’ve read—Schild’s Ladder, Permutation City, Diaspora—is obsessed by identity in far deeper and more interesting ways than everything I’d found, thought, or imagined before—how to grow up without being replaced by a stranger, asks Tchicaya? how to be immortal without changing to death, asks Peer? how not to unravel without bounding oneself, asks Yatima?
Speaking of dogs, I wonder: if a dog is just about to be ran over by a car and you suddenly save her, would she be aware she almost became roadkill? Would she be shaken afterwards, replaying endlessly in her mind what could have just happened? Would she be grateful? Would she even understand what you just did for her? Could that be as life changing a moment for her as it could be for a person?
More than the past, the present, or the future, our true home as humans is the could. Even more, it is only by reflecting in it the past, the present, and the future that we can see them clearly. A near-death experience—an unhappening in other words—could well be a turning point in our lives, rearranging in one fell swoop our past, present and future. Could matters to us, its phantasmagoria walks among us, and it is or, fittingly, could be, a major component of every single issue that we care about.
Consider abortion
One important problem with it is that even if you don’t consider an early fetus alive or aware, by impeding its growth you’re stumping the future possibility of a very alive and aware being. What are the rights of the inhabitants of could? The ingredients of a cake don’t make a cake until mixed and baked but how can a human not look at flour, eggs, and butter and not see the cake?
Consider sex
Imagine we come up with something to prevent absolutely all STDs and unwanted pregnancies (we ain’t far). Would you still think of sex as something sacred? Would premarital sex or promiscuity still strike you as taboo? Would whores or pedophilia or incest still shock you? Would you consider sex as just one more source of meaning and pleasure, like, say, food? Next time you are shocked by something sexual consider this and realize how much of your shock hinges on pregnancy and STD considerations.
Consider death
What if, as has become increasingly likely the more we learn about biology and our bodies, we could stop it or at least hold it at bay much, much longer? What if we could reverse aging? Doesn’t that possibility merit our consideration? Shouldn’t helping this research or at least knowing about it be one of our top priorities? Who among the death scarred won’t cry could tears if the day comes when it becomes clear that death is not only defeatable but could have been defeated—should have been defeated—decades, centuries ago?
Could matters.
Aristotle famously said that the mark of an educated mind was being able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Personally, I think the mark of an educated mind is to be able to entertain unrealities and see how they matter to reality, to be able to act and think dreams with open eyes.
(It is, by the way, my fascination with could that makes me a fan of science fiction and fantasy—could’s official literatures. Even more than sensawunda I crave sensacould.)
“The Humean predicament is the human predicament”
What are you absolutely certain of? Of what are you sure without any conceivable doubt? What is true no matter what? What is necessarily true? Just one thing. Whatever. As long as you’re sure.
I’ve been playing the game for a while and I’ve been shocked to be unable to answer the question. Now, of course I’m familiar with Hume’s skepticism (you don’t really know an apple is going to fall, you’ve just seen all similar objects fall before at similar conditions but you don’t know) and I thought I knew how dear truth was but lately, slowly, I’ve started to realize that not even reason or logic are to be trusted.
Let’s start by quickly demolishing every statement about experience, like, say, that you are, well, you, that you broke your knee when you were fifteen, that your mother exists, that other people exist (solipsism). The usual shortcut is just to ask you how do you know it isn’t all a dream, but I prefer Russell’s more imaginative version, the extreme omphalos hypothesis: how do you know that the world wasn’t created five seconds ago, set in motion, and with fake memories? Clever, huh?
OK, that sweeps off a good big swath of possible answers. As for reason/logic, its problem is that it’s either redundant or not binding at all. But don’t 2 + 2 = 4 whatever fucking nightmare the world might turn out to be? How could time or space not exist? My gosh, can you look me in the eye, and tell me that numbers aren’t infinite? How demented do you need to be to doubt Aristotle’s syllogisms, the very rules of thought (if it’s true that humans are mortal and that Socrates is human, Socrates has to be mortal!)?
But it turns out these conceptual statements aren’t certainties either. When you probe them further, carefully, rigorously, you realize that to advance you have to start defining. If you do it conscientiously, defining or making explicit even the dumbest, most-taken-for-granted assumptions you start to realize that 2 + 2 = 4 because you said so, because you assumed your conclusion from the get-go, and your statements are true in the same empty way that a bachelor can’t be married or a car has to be an automobile too. Yes, it’s a kind of truth, but a rather measly one.
The other thing that usually happens when you probe concepts is one of the most wondrous experiences I know of, exhilarating and unnerving at the same time, dizzying. I call it sense of could. It means taking an entrenched concept and realizing it is not necessarily so, discovering your singularity is just an instance of something subtler, deeper, finding out your rose is one among thousands, seeing that what you thought fixed is just another degree of motion.
Like when Cantor found out there are many kinds of infinities, some bigger than others (!). Like when you realize logic isn’t the complete science Kant thought and open the gates to the non-classical logics. Like when you probe the very fabric of the universe by looking for primitives to space and time. More worldly, like when you question your ethics, your religion, your politics, and you find only possibility where you were looking for necessity.
Now, those two options, redundancy and non-necessity, are the ones I’ve always stumbled upon but I don’t really know that happens for every concept. Or neither do I know if you can dismiss all experience in one fell stroke. That is, I’m, of course, not even sure that you can’t be sure of anything. Would you care volunteering an answer? %(p)Or a question?)%
Right outside my friendly neighborhood store I found this tiniest of weeds clinging to life by the sidewalk. She’s doomed, I know, but how to tell her?
Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
-Anonymous
By focusing on the number of individuals (genders) required for reproduction we can distinguish species into three classes: those that require one individual (self-reproducers), those that require two (pair reproducers), and those that require three or more (group reproducers). The question is thus: are there group reproducer species? why?
We usually refer to the first class as asexuals, the second as sexuals, and it is a major puzzle of evolutionary biology to account for the existence of the latterD, WP. Like the bee that fluttered in the face of our best aerodynamic theories, sexuals mate impudently in the face of our best evolutionary theories.
But sexuals exist. Everywhere, in fact, at our order of magnitude. So we can’t just sweep pair reproducers aside and carry on our happy, simple theorizing of a self-reproducing world.
Asking the group reproducer question, on the other hand, I’ve been surprised by people to whom it comes as a revelation that the class is obviously empty. I don’t think it is. Obvious, that is. Life on earth does some pretty
fucked up stuff, natural gangbanging doesn’t strike me as particularly eccentric. Asimov describes a group reproducer species in great detail in The God Themselves and neither the author nor I (before) ever thought the point merited any explanation.
And if there are no group reproducers (or precious few) their non-existence (or extreme dearth) is as much a fact in need of explanation as their existence (or abundance).
A fairly unique thing about democracy and capitalism is that —as opposed to, say, monarchy or theocracy— both are formal systems for collective decision making, both specify clear rules for obtaining and aggregating the ends of differing individuals.
As such systems, they both necessarily hinge in what we shall refer to as ballots. Usually the paper in which votes are cast, we will here use the word ‘ballot’ to mean ”an external expression of preference.” The key part is ‘external’. Externality has problems all its own but is also our only hope of finding out what others think—telepathy, guessing, and revelation are our other options.
In democracy, votes are the ballots. In capitalism, it’s money. In democracy, a clinic will be built if the majority of voters vote in its favor. It will keep in operation as long as people don’t vote it out of existence. In capitalism, a clinic will be built if enough people pool the money for its construction and it will keep in operation as long as it makes a profit—that is, as long as it ends up receiving more money than it gives away.
Seeing votes and money as instances of the same concept begs an intriguing question: How then do they differ? How is a vote different than a buck? What specific changes do you need to make to a vote ballot to turn it into a money ballot?
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