Which Ferdinand?

...is the Stephen King of cinema. In the literal sense. (But not the hyperliteral sense; in the hyperliteral sense, of course, Stephen King is the Stephen King of cinema, duh [1]). Of course, in that same literal sense, The Beatles etc. are the Paolo Coelho [2](sorry, Russian link) of music.


[This is opaque, and I don't feel like trying to write this out linearly. So: I'm looking at the sensibility, and it's pretty much the same for King and Lynch: a sense for transgression and frisson-seeking, combined with a conventional big city sort of moralism. But the effect is different, to an extent. Because of the medium. But we shouldn't get carried away, b/c if Paolo Coelho could write songs well, he'd write the conventional sort of good rock song. So we shouldn't get carried away. Because: the medium.)


God this is a stupid post, but I'm posting anyway.




[1] Aside from WF: the 14-y.o. twin still has 6 years to really like The Shawshank Redemption, at which point he'll embark on a 2-year weaning period, culminating in complete indifference to the wretched movie.

[2] Disclaimer: I haven't read Paolo Coelho to any appreciable extent.

The Chaser's War on Everything, arguably the best comedy show ever, counting M-nthy P-thon's Flying Circus, Seinfeld, and FOTC [1], is back.

No really it is the BEST. THING. EVER. Honest.

You have to catch up on Australian politics to get all of it, but it's worth it.


[1] Which, IMO, isn't that great usually, but when it's great it's great. Actually, the same goes for Flying Circus

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use my powers for chaotic neutral. It's pretty incredible, but nobody's thought of this one before.

(x-posted to fb)

Adrian Glibert, halfe brother to Sir Walter Raleigh, who was a great Chymist in those days, and a man of excellent naturall Parts; but very Sarcastick and the greatest Buffoon in the Nation.

By popular request, guests posts written by my fourteen-year-old evil twin [1] will henceforth be tagged accordingly, starting with the post immediately below.


[1] Is "clone" more plausible? Only if you ignore the possibility of placing the evil twin in a stasis chamber for a while!

I have a post which went nowhere discussing my thought here. The upshot: a counterargument that maybe works is that we more or less think of some politicians as pure bullshitters and some politicians as part-time bullshitters, sure, but more or less worthwhile people on the whole. But maybe not.

Quotes from around the internet:
1. "Policy-based evidence making"
2.

My first semester in grad school, many years ago, at the first department talk I went to, Josh Cohen gave a paper. John Kekes, whose accent probably in fact isn’t as sinisterly Eastern European as I like to remember it being, asked the first question. He started out, “Yeess, I vonder vhy you have incluuuded a false preemissse in your argumeeent?” Before he could say what the “false premise” was supposed to be, Cohen replied, “Well, of course, because I need it to make my conclusion come out true.”

, is my GPA, forever and ever. Not that anybody cares about master's students' GPAs. Truly, good marks are wasted on the not-so-young-anymore [1]

[of course Google knows instances of people saying "four point oh, bitches." It's not a hard joke to come up with. That's how two people came up with it before me. You'd come up with it too if your GPA were four point oh, bitches]


[1] BTW, is there a sweet spot when you still have all your hair but don't anymore have any of your acne? Probably not. [2]

[2] Variation on a theme: "I'm not old! I still get acne!"

Lemma.

Google has heard of it, but only to a limited extent.

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Lots of people who should know better think that valid arguments (an argument is defined, natch, as a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition, i.e., a finite number of statements and a conclusion) are somehow better than invalid arguments, regardless of the truth of the premises. Those people are wrong: for every invalid argument A there is a valid argument that is actually worse than A.

Take the following invalid argument:

1. All men are mortal
2. Socrates is a man
3. Therefore, the moon is made of green cheese

The corresponding valid argument is

1. A := "1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man 3. Therefore, the moon is made of green cheese"
2. A is a valid argument, and the premises of A are true.
3. Therefore, the conclusion of A is true
4. Therefore, the moon is made of green cheese

This argument is like the first one, except worse.

Admittedly, while there are exactly as many valid arguments as invalid arguments of a given quality [1], you might try to say that for a given length (in symbols) of an argument, the valid arguments are on average better than the invalid ones. But you never hear this kind of nuanced position articulated by the radical validists, do you.




[1] The set of arguments written in English maps to a subset of the set of finite strings of English letters, which is countable. There is an infinite number of arguments of a given quality because you can always add premises from {"1=1", "2=2", "3=3", ...} to the arguments without changing them. So all the sets of interest are infinitely countable.

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...today.

I have two complaints really, but I think substituting "The NPV of the potential future" for just "potential future" is a clear Pareto-improvement of the joke.

My other complaint is that taking the previous problems into account might be construed as considering sunk costs as part of the equation, but see below for some problems with that.

Anyway, so does it make sense to talk about the NPV of relationship satisfaction? It's sort of a heady question, but luckily what the comic is concerned with is the relationship(s)-related contributions to the (non-net present) value of future life satisfaction, so some philosophical issues go away here.

Still, it's not immediately clear whether it makes sense to talk about the NPV of life satisfaction. You can't put happiness in a bank. You can lose it trading stocks, but not in the way that's relevant here.

You might try converting happiness into dollars and investing the money rather than the happiness. Say you have some happiness to spare. You take an unsatisfying but high-paying job, and then take early retirement, converting your money back into happiness. Works for some people, no doubt, but not, I would think, that great of a strategy in general. The transaction costs are just too high.

The biggest problem, though, is that you don't observe people becoming a little happy, and then exponentially growing to be really, truly, disgustingly happy [1]. Happiness doesn't grow exponentially.

What we need here is a better model. Suppose we take life satisfaction to be some combination of the happiness and the misery you experience. This solves our problems, since misery can in fact be observed to be growing exponentially in people [2], and happiness can plausibly be thought to be reasonably efficiently convertible into neg-misery [5].

So the way to invest happiness is to convert it into negative misery.


Apologies to my officemate's advisor and for useful discussions with said officemate. And to you, dear readers, for recycling content

[1] That's not because the discount rate of happiness is too high. Proof: people go to grad school. QED, j/k, but you see my point.

[2] http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Philip_Larkin/1052 [3] [4]

[3] Clearly the reference in the poem is to the exponential part of the continental shelf. Note also the astute observation that misery can be used as a medium of exchange.

[4] Did you know there was a response poem? From Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption:

How sharper than a serpent's tooth
To hear your child make such a fuss.
It isn't fair -- it's not the truth --
He's fucked up, yes, but not by us."

[5] It's unclear whether misery is converted into neg-happiness. The best we can hope for is that the conversion doesn't happen spontaneously too often.

Tags: jokes, philosophizing, x-posted

(x-posted)

David Mamet, it is true, is sort of the poor man's Harold Pinter. But on the other hand, he's the poor man's Harold Pinter.

Played around with the book ranking/recommendation features of LibraryThing.

The recommendation features themselves aren't that interesting -- they basically recommend other books by authors whose books you liked -- but the "will I like this book?" feature appears to work. (I haven't tested it systematically or anything).

Except that it thinks that I will "like"/"probably like" (rather than "love" or "hate") all the books on which I've declared holy jihad. Which I suppose is fair enough -- I wouldn't have finished them if I really had hated them. Still, funny. Kinda.

-The journey is more important than the destination
-Yeah, that's what she didn't say

Может быть, это потому, что Алексей Иващенко -- это наше все, а исследования показывают, что если у тебя достаточно высокий социальный статус, то смеяться будут все над всеми твоими шутками, но я уже третий раз слушаю, и каждый раз смеюсь над анекдотом вот здесь (начинается в 25:55).

You are friendly, gentle, and modest, with a good heart and a lusty nature. You laugh easily, have a well-developed sense of irony, and tend to understand people intuitively. You are interested in new people, but will always maintain notions of insider vs. outsider, and this will lead you to commit to a group of friends and lovers who will be with you your entire life. If you have a weakness it's your timidity -- you feel pressure to remain 'lagom' -- on an even par with others. But this is also your strength.

For you non-Swedes, since you're not well-versed in irony, an explanation is warranted. Memo to new friends:
1)I hate you
2)You're stuck with me forever anyway

I believe that's also the plain reading of "commit to a group of [...] lovers who will be with you your entire life."


EDIT: A non-Swede informs me that that's convoluted. Slightly edited explanation from gchat:

"You are interested in new people, but will always maintain notions of insider vs. outsider" => 1)I hate you
"will lead you to commit to a group of friends and lovers who will be with you your entire life" => 2)You're stuck with me forever anyway
the last sentence is a riff on the "commit to a group of lovers who will be with you your entire life," which i take it means you're going to be having relationships on the side.

his mom comes up to him and asks, "Son, what's 'racialized' 'discourse'?"

No, not by saying that the enlightenment brought your interlocutor the light bulb which even now makes it possible for them to drink beer in the evening without worrying about expensive candles.

I mean, that's one possible way, and I confess to not actually trying it, but I've seen the light bulb deployed on the internet and it's not the show stopper you think it is.

The WF argument, OTOH, has been empirically shown to make people pause for a while, say they'll go get beer, and then not return [1].

Anyway, isn't religion like science, your interlocutor inquires. It is, after all, a way to find stuff out about the world. Sure, you say, why not. It's an attempt to do science. That doesn't mean it's successful; lots of attempts at science fail. Maybe you write down your data incorrectly; maybe you do your math wrong; maybe you don't use your apparatus the way you intended (getting warmer there); maybe you're biased and see what you want to see rather than what's there. Happens all the time in physics, and everywhere. People are easily confused.

But could religion be science? Well of course it could. In fact, if you see, say, a person with wings, let your biologist friends know, I'm sure they'll be interested.


Relatedly, it's time to settle the question of what is art. The answer is that it's a stupid question. Art is basically just self-expression. Good art, on the other hand is (1)successful self-expression of (2)interesting selves.



[1] I know that observation can be given multiple interpretations. That's the problem with science right there.

EDIT: You know what's a good movie? Star Wars Episode 4. You know what's another good movie? Juno.

So this is pretty exciting. The upshot is that there is this chimp who first stocked/manufactured stones when he was calm and then threw them at visitors when he was agitated. So that's planning for a future mental state, maybe.

What confounds me a little bit is that there's a Skinnerian conditioning story to be told here. Throwing stones at obnoxious people presumably feels good. So having stones around might just be a conditioned stimulus? So you just try to have stones around.

I dunno.


EDIT: Okay, maybe not after all. From a previous study:

Apes selected, transported, and saved a suitable tool not because they currently needed it but because they would need it in the future. These data taken all together cannot be easily explained by invoking traditional operant learning, because there was at least a 1-hour delay between the response (tool selection and transport) and the reinforcement. Typically, instrumental conditioning fails to occur if the response-reinforcement interval is greater than a few seconds in the absence of conditioned reinforcers (3, 15, 16), as evidenced by the poor performance of the subjects in experiment 4 as compared to other experiments

EDIT EDIT: Or maybe not?

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The management regrets the posting of non-original content. The post below should have read:


Hitler was a descriptivist, you know



Some might cry foul at the violation of Godwin's Law, but sensible people realize that Godwin's Law is an ass.

We apologize for the incnvenience.

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