Mote Quotes

08Feb10

Imagine how you’d feel about tokens if you detested Chucky Cheese.  That’s how I feel our money.

In love stories the question asked is always do you love me? I’m waiting for a love story that asks why love at all?

Nothing teases an invalid like the prisoner’s dilemma.

“Tolerance” in the sense of being socially acceptable is simply accepting modern social markers and rejecting the older ones.

Intelligence is not good for co-operation and co-operation is usually good.  That bodes ill for intelligence.

A light rain in Tucson keeps nearly everyone from using the city.

Psychology professors are known for two things; their rigid adherence to own constructed terms, and their general opaqueness.  The former creates an unnecessary, exclusive language and the latter ensures that it will be narrow in scope.

Platitudes overheard at my institute of higher learning:  I don’t understand a syllogism.  It’s cold in America.  It’s designed to be a miniature utopia.  I liked The Notebook. I sure wish professors would stop giving extra credit to these people and instead reward their drivel is extra discredit.

The only things worse than the people who saw Dear John are those people who liked it.

The moral high ground rests in our basements.

I’ve ideas to teach you about the ideas you’re being taught.  I’m a meta-teacher.

Everyone seeks local justification when they need global justification- losing the forest in the trees.

For a society of non-co-operators something as simple as talking to someone is a grand gesture.

Thinking of Valentine’s Day it occurs to me that I should invent a holiday to single people.  It would be lucrative since the market has plenty of room to allow it.  Also it could undermine marriage contracts- all of which are unjust.  Yes, March 3 will be Nolan’s Day and it will be a marketing extravaganza.

There’s that old truism: if you believe proposition P then you belief P is true.   As it happens that truism is false.  Believe me.

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Notable Psychology

05Feb10

Significant ideas are so rare in psychology that when I feel I’ve chanced upon one I also feel a post is warranted.

People are high self-monitors or low self-monitors.  Contrary to what you might think, this is not just a person’s watching over his actions.  More specifically it is the degree to which a person takes into account social norms and the degree to which that is acted upon.  If you are a low self-monitor then you are very concerned with social norms or you might not behave in a way that you know is consistent with social norms.

Neither high nor low self-monitoring is better than the other.  Certain situation might call for one or the other but that’s not to say that the opposite is dysfunctional or is necessarily at a disadvantage.   I might need to play the role of a poker player at a poker table to do well there.  I probably wouldn’t do so well walking down the street if I’m hyper-conscious of what others might be expecting of me (even if they don’t expect a lot).

From the little information I’ve gathered on this subject, this distinction is mutually exclusive.  That seems like a mistake.  As already noted, there are times when I am a socialite, rarely, and there are times when I’m driven by my own internal states, typically.  At times I am willing to adapt to the situation and other times I just don’t.

Questions arise from this distinction.  Have low self-monitors internalized social norms?  Are high self-monitored people more receptive to coercion?  Which is the more principled mindset?

Anyhow, it’s a decent formulation of a common sense idea.  That’s where psychology excels.  I’ll leave you with this thought, what about people who behave like someone is watching even when they are alone?

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Early February Thoughts

02Feb10

How absurd that the university setting hosts so many who wish to live in ideological stupor.

Nature might be florid, lush, and fecund.  Why should our theories be stark, arid, and austere?  (Quine?)

It doesn’t matter if you believe in God, voodoo, atheism, or science.  If you believe you are wrong because when you believe you adopt a method.

Nothing succeeds like success.  [Rien ne réussit comme le succès.]  (Helps)

Simplicity and God:  God is conceptually simple and he is logically simple.  But he is not ontologically simple.  Two out of three is sufficient to enjoy the advantages of simplicity.

In believing a proposition you believe that proposition is true.  (I’m not sure who to attribute this to, but it’s not my own thought.)

Pugnacity of the mind is the rarest virtue.

The most condescending thing I’ve seen this year:  In class a student inexplicably decided he wanted to prove a tautology, somehow wound up mistaking the negation of his original proposition, and exclaimed, that’s it! To which Professor Tolliver exclaimed, okay!

I have discovered that it is NOT appropriate to ask to be removed from your work listserv.

A UAlert went off in class today.  All I could think was that I would surely get brain cancer.

A growing movement among the utilitarians is the utilitarians against happiness movement.

The late Mr. Justice Homes once divided good lawyers into “razors” and “good kitchen knives” (Berlin)….Under that classification today’s lawyers are slender bread-knives.

Nothing distinguishes the layperson from the intellectual more than their interpretations of “schema for abduction.”

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A Quest for Virtue

30Jan10

At one time the object of people’s basic desires were not pre-ordained to them for life.  But now we’ve became so rich that we have never experienced life without our basic needs.  It’s no coincidence that with the rise of our wealth came the decline of our virtue.  Losing virtue isn’t a necessary result of a comfortable life.  But when ordinary people are given lots of spare time they opt to spend it in ordinary ways.  Before, when time still seen as precious, one’s leisure time had to be spent wisely.  If not, life became all work and no play.

Today there is not threat of life becoming all work.  More likely modern life entails no work at all.  Thus time is not valued as it once was and people spend their time on broad promiscuities.

What would your ancestors do if they knew they had built up a society for social loafers?  Would they have willed to create a world where people’s lives are so miserable that they are left watching Jersey Shore? Would they care that make friends?  That you love?  I suspect not.  Happiness, that unfulfilling pursuit, would never be sought by a healthy society.

A society must think for itself but only about itself.  How could a society be willing to build a better society for the future?  Why should they try to keep their brethren from sickness?  I think they would be wholly willing if they knew that ALL societies would do it.  They would accept as an ethical rule that one must always strive to better the world, because they could have just as easily been born at a different time in a different age.

A society must not think that its existence in the present relieves it of duty to others.  It must not think that it must only help itself.  This is the reasoning that mires a people in their own hedonism.  It relieves their time from urgency.  It turns them into worthless cattle who wander about without purpose or reason.

A herd of cattle is unlikely to better itself.  Instead it will consume until there is nothing left and it will drive itself into extinction.  This is unquestionably the society of today.  We are so dependent on happiness that we have no sense of the virtue that can save us.  Anyone who shows virtue is immediately and vigorously devoured by the herd.

If you think you are the exception I am here to tell you that you are not.  You have not the least bit of virtue.  Just answer the following for me and answer it with sincerity:  Would you giving up loving another in your life just to save the lives of three strangers?  A negative answer is given by a cow.  Any honest answer to this question should give you hope to stop wasting yourself.

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Luck of the Draw

28Jan10

The way I look at it I’m the most privileged person in the world.  Everything I need I have.  I’ve no reason to think that I’ll ever not have the things I need either.

Everything I want I already have or can reasonably expect to have.  No one else in the world can claim such incredible fortune.

There is a downside.  This year I opted to live just five blocks from school.  The plan was to enjoy fifteen or so minutes of me walking alone with my thoughts to get to school.  Things haven’t gone according to planned.

Those fifteen minutes have instead been spent pitying anyone and everyone I meet.  Dwelling on pity can turn a fifteen minute walk into forty years wandering the desert.  Even worse this habit happens other times as well.  In fact every passerby, every classmate, every dear friend- all are pitiful.  So extreme is their misfortune that by seeing it I am distressed.

No doubt this distress is a burden on me.  Why must I suffer only because others suffer?  After all, I’m the lucky one in all this.

Just being able to see this pity is a privilege in itself.  A sharp awareness of their suffering ensures that I shall never lose the precious perspective that helps to separate me from the unfortunate horde.

Still it is vexing that so many have been so unlucky.  They value happiness.  Hence its pursuit.  Their minds are weak and so they are exploited by minds of equal stature.  They are ignorant despite experience and thus doomed to perpetual mistakes.  They are poor and must therefore depend on others.  They live without regard for their potential and consequently they must be pitied.  Many will never overcome their peril.  They will live their entire lives like dead people.

I am the victor.  I beat the odds, triumphing over my environment to become free of my human duress.  The pity returns when I realize that I cannot rescue the masses from their plight.  Only they can extricate the bonds which tie them to tragedy.

I’ve succeeded against all odds, pitted one against billions.  It is only after tasting independence that it’s value can be realized.

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Philosophic Barriers (Bad Ideas)

25Jan10

I wholly understand the danger of a scientific anarchist calling certain ideas bad.  Nonetheless I present to you the worst, most awful philosophical excerpts I could think of.  The most intellectually stifling rubbish that required common sense or incredible genius to overcome:

One phenomenon feminist historians have focused on is the rape and torture metaphors in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon and others (e.g. Machiavelli) enthusiastic about the new scientific method. Traditional historians and philosophers have said that these metaphors are irrelevant to the real meanings and referents of scientific concepts held by those who used them and by the public for whom they wrote. But when it comes to regarding nature as a machine, they have quite a different analysis: here, we are told, the metaphor provides the interpretations of Newton’s mathematical laws: it directs inquirers to fruitful ways to apply his theory and suggests the appropriate methods of inquiry and the kind of metaphyiscs the new theory supports. But if we are to believe that mechanistic metaphors were a fundamental component of the explanations the new science provided, why should we believe that the gender metaphors were not? A consistent analysis would lead to the conclusion that understanding nature as a woman indifferent to or even welcoming rape was equally fundamental to the interpretations of these new conceptions of nature and inquiry. Presumably these metaphors, too, had fruitful pragmatic, methodological, and metaphysical consequences for science. In that case, why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton’s laws as “Newton’s rape manual” as it is to call them “Newton’s mechanics”?  (Sandra Harding)

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.

In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.  (Marx/Engels)

We live in the best of all possible worlds.  (Leibiz)

A dog, an oak, a horse, a reed are, to be sure, like Moses, Alexander, Cyrus, Jesus, etc., something more excellent [to understand than the quill pen], and both lines of organization [nature and history] are closer to philosophy than Herr Krug’s pen and the philosophical works he has authored. The philosophy of nature points out to him how he should have to comprehend the organization of an oak, rose, dog, and cat; and if he has the inclination and zeal to contract his human individuality to the stage of life of a rose or a dog in order to comprehend and grasp their living being completely, let him make the attempt. But he cannot expect this from others. And it would be better if he tried to expand his nature to the greatest individualities, such as Cyrus, Moses, Alexander, Jesus, etc., or even only of the great [to Krug] orator Cicero; then he could hardly fail to comprehend their necessity and to consider the construction of these individuals, as well as the series of the appearances of the world spirit which one calls history, more capable of a construction. But from the demand for a deduction of his pen he will have to desist entirely toward this end…”  (Hegel)

Here is a hand and here is another.  (Moore)

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Quoting a Professor

24Jan10

Here’s my notes from a recent lecture.

Our world is overpopulated.  We abuse each other.  We pollute.  The world sucks.

We’re insane and WE DOMINATE THE PLANET.

Who’s we?  We are the under-educated, immoral, thoughtless human beings who seek to establish their positions at any expense.

Why do we dominate the planet?  Because we’ve got a mind.

The human mind is the well of our problems.  The human mind give us experience, phenomenology.  But with your phenomenology you simply make a guess as to the cause of something and you choose to believe that guess.  There is no logical structure to this “method”.  All you get is a bunch of opinions that you believe.

Most of what you believe is superstition.  That sucks because what you believe does not answer to reality.  It ignores phenomenology.

Most of the things you believe lack any evidence for believing them.  The evidence says you are probably wrong.  That’s all evidence can do anyway.  It can tell you that you are wrong.  It can never affirm your belief, it can only reject or not reject it.  Only rejection is knowledge.

You were given beliefs by your parents.  Those beliefs are wrong.  When your parents gave you these wrong beliefs they didn’t teach you not to believe.  They didn’t teach you that understanding is what matters.  They didn’t teach you to suspend belief and to suspend disbelief.  So you believe what is wrong and then disbelieving keeps you wrong.  Make no mistake, you are wrong.  You aren’t wrong because I’m telling you that you are wrong, but you are wrong.

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Falsificationism Notes

24Jan10

The essence of science is “making mistakes in public—making mistakes for all to see, in the hopes of getting the others to help with the corrections.”  (Dennett)

“There’s a point in anybody’s train of reasoning when he looks back and says, ‘I didn’t see this straight.’  People in other walks of life need the ability to say without shame, ‘I was wrong about that.’  Science is a method of having this happen all the time.  You notice a conflict or some oddity about a number of things you’ve been thinking about for a long time.  It’s the shock that may cause you to think another thought .  That is the opposite of the worldly person’s endless web of rationalization to vindicate the initial error.”  (Oppenheimer)

“Though faulty hypotheses are excusable on the grounds that they will be superseded in due course by the acceptable one, the can do grave harm to those who hold them because scientists who fall deeply in love with their hypotheses are proportionately unwilling to take no as an experimental answer.  Sometimes instead of exposing a hypothesis to a cruelly critical test, they caper around it, testing only subsidiary implications, or follow up sidelines that have an indirect bearing on the hypothesis without exposing it to refutation….I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.”  (Medawar)

“He is the least defensive scientist I know.  If you found a way to show that his theory was wobbly or that his experimental finding was limited or flawed, Bob would beam with pleasure and plan the demise of his theory with you.”  (Banaji on Crowder)

“But thoughts are cheap.  Any person of intelligence can devise his half dozen before breakfast.”  (Gould)

Assuming that the truth-content and the falsity-content of two theories t₁ and t₂ are comparable, we can say that t₂ is more closely similar to the truth, or corresponds better to the facts, than t₁, if and only if either:  (a) the truth-content but not the falsity-content of t₂ exceeds that of t₁, or  (b) the falsity-content of t₁, but not its truth-content, exceeds that of t₂.  (Popper)

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Notables

20Jan10

Full-fledged consumerism soars free through the population, swooping down upon even the most deliberate consumer.

Individuals, by virtue of being themselves, have made ‘notorious’ and ‘nefarious’ nearly synonymous.

Despite a wholly negative conception of people I must admit that we do exhibit a propensity for goodness.  Regrettably this goodness is hardly the goodness for all mankind.

Being a social scientist entails being a unifier of the social scientists.  Of course the social sciences are more easily reconciles with one another than the hard sciences.

All sciences are little more than conjecture.

Just as in society, in befriending someone it is to both parties’ advantage to let the other be.

An awe-inspiring fact is the sheer number of people in the world.  India and China are more than a third of the world’s population.  America is a blip at less than 5% of the global population; we attend to here only because we just happen we live here and be rich.  Neither reason is defensible.

What would happen if we just up and abolished Medicaid and social security?  I mean if I can’t compel you to help others than you can’t coerce me into acting for others either.  To allow the first and not the second is to make me a slave.

The tragedy (irony) of Galileo is that he was speaking to charlatans and practitioners of pseudoscience.  This tragedy is ongoing.

It has been said that no man is an island.  All men are islands, I say.  But as philosophers we are not.  Philosophy can unify men.

Peer review is great but it also constrains publications to a paradigm.

I’ve wanted to write about mysterianism because there are times I think it’s sometimes an attractive view.  Pinker’s problems-mysteries distinction only intensifies that wanting.  He says that novelists make problems into mysteries.

A problem with commonsense is that it is a compound word in which one and only one of the constituents is always false.  The commonsense of the past is nonsense.  There are many conflicts with folk wisdom and with those who simply do not want to know.

Best methods of arguing discredit the evidence or to nullify it completely.

This is it?  This is the greatest country in the world?  Oh young idealism save me!  Hope is what remains where really affords us nothing.  Yet my hope has been multiplied by zero.

The ivory tower benefits its inhabitants and lets alone the outsiders.  The ivory tower is a fortress against the atrophy of our world but it is not impervious.

In relation to others my limited ability to introspect yields a wealth of knowledge.

Ask people what qualities today’s people share and they will answer with virtues.  The first constant in a today’s human being is his propensity for destruction.  Even those who strive for to be aware of this destruction are destructive.  That’s the second constant in all of us: ignorance.

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Ideas and Impressions

17Jan10

We are all so free to be able make of ourselves whatever we please.  The environment has no say on me, only the impediment of my inner being does.

As we know, consciousness and awareness are not perfect synonyms.  Yet the limits of consciousness are synonymous with the limits of awareness.

Shortness of time is prescribed to be the ceiling of our productivity.  In only a few is this claim accurate.

Revealing yourself is dumping chum in shark infested waters.

If we hope to retain any sensibility at all we must acknowledge that where we demonstrate ill sensibility it is unclear that there is sensibility.  By doing so we might preserve all sensibility, as it were, staying silent on matters that are not of our senses.

In their cleverness politicians sell change rather than improvements or positive change.

Obama’s aptitude as a president fails to match his brother-in-law’s deftness as a basketball coach.

The easiest measure for cleaning up science is to reveal to scientists that they must present their findings under the same light of underdeterminism they used in obtaining them.

Last week I was pleased to find that Vivaldi was playing before the start of class.  Next some Hawaiian gibberish played.  Thus my conservatism was illustrated in that I calculated precisely when I must now arrive at class in order to avoid hearing the music.

If Fareed Zakariah didn’t write for CNN would there be any benefit to CNN at all?  CNN even headlines his articles with his name.

It is whole unclear to me that desert is anything more than recognition.

Robert Gibbs…wow, that’s the fastest I’ve ever lost interest in anything.

If philosophy ever took physical form I would propose in a heartbeat.

It really doesn’t matter what we eat so long as we maintain our health.  (Taste is most depreciated marginal utility.)

I know I’ve said this before:  If you are in college,

Recently the market advertising has placed an incredible emphasis on jobs.  Job creation, job retention, job acceptance.  Our market has historically run 6% unemployment.  Bump that up 4% more and it becomes one of the biggest influences in marketing.

In truth my aversion to normative claims is that they are neighbors to prescriptive claims.  Following their neighbors into battle, normative claims unfailingly invade freedom.

Only if two people have sufficient common ground can they dispute the specifics.  When two people line up oppositely on a series of points, they in fact agree on almost everything.  (Popper and Carnap, Quine and Russel, Nozick and Rawls, Dworkin and Hart, etc.)

A marvelous paper could be written by defining deconstruction using and accepting Wittgenstein’s use-theory of language.

Just because there is no right method doesn’t mean their isn’t a propensity for one method over another- a moral vacuous statement.

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