I definitely can't publish Rick's correspondence without asking him, but I can publish my own consideration of his philosophy, right?
Maybe not; maybe this is dubious. But we'll get into the ethical debate later.
I'm pretty sure this entry is too obscure to be really considered as anything but evidence that at least I'm writing every day.
> So I said that the Space shuttle is a clear sign of newness: we never had
> space shuttles before a certain year (definitely not before 1959) and then
> we did have them.
>
> it applies to building a better mousetrap and it doesn't
>
> you maintain that the "freshness" you define in the paper is even more
> "new" than building a better mousetrap; in this case building the space
> shuttle
>
> (part of me is disbelieving: why should we subtract the awe from such an
> awe-inspiring achievement? Why is the newness of the space shuttle
> inconsequential here? Why is creating a new space shuttle only building a
> better mousetrap?)
>
> I think that it has to do with the individual's formation of reality as
> experienced in the present
>
> but like Alex I want to reduce it to only that; and if it is only that
> then why should we write the paper on it?
>
> Maybe more than should be answered in an email.
>
>
>
> -jrg
Friday, November 6, 2009
Some correspondence with Rick
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Sometimes when people want me to do an option, they will offer it seemingly out of nowhere (out of nowhere in Latin might be phrased creatio ex nihilo, or creation from nothing).
So with this friend of mine when we were out for dinner, I would finish my dinner and she would finish hers. She would then present an option, saying, "Do you want to have desert or are you going to not have desert?" Then I would say that I wanted desert. By presenting the option that wasn't there before, my friend Diane mastered a fundamental sales technique. The creation of the situation is what prompted the option to have it be chosen.
The option was not there in the first place.
People do this intentionally and unintentionally. For Diane it was a mixture of both.
Come to think of it, I believe that a great number of our actions are more of a cross between raw functional habit and intense focus and consideration.
Maybe we in fact do these extremes (feel these extremes) during acts of doing. Maybe right now, as I am typing, the action is a combination of intense consideration or maybe it's completely absent minded.
On a different note:
What about gum on the bottom of desks? I reach down to feel how smooth the desk is to find some semi-sticky lump.
We don't consider this that big of a crime because it's not seen. No one is going to start an anti-gum placing campaign because this isn't like littering.
I told my friend Rick that the worst crimes are the crimes that are legal. The crimes that are the worst are the ones where no one really notices. Of course, this is a mistake, but I think there is some truth to it.
One of my editors has been ragging on me at the Technician. He gives out orders when he does not have to and he does it in a way that makes me feel bad, which I call pulling rank.
But no one knows about this problem and there is not too much I can do about it.
So with this friend of mine when we were out for dinner, I would finish my dinner and she would finish hers. She would then present an option, saying, "Do you want to have desert or are you going to not have desert?" Then I would say that I wanted desert. By presenting the option that wasn't there before, my friend Diane mastered a fundamental sales technique. The creation of the situation is what prompted the option to have it be chosen.
The option was not there in the first place.
People do this intentionally and unintentionally. For Diane it was a mixture of both.
Come to think of it, I believe that a great number of our actions are more of a cross between raw functional habit and intense focus and consideration.
Maybe we in fact do these extremes (feel these extremes) during acts of doing. Maybe right now, as I am typing, the action is a combination of intense consideration or maybe it's completely absent minded.
On a different note:
What about gum on the bottom of desks? I reach down to feel how smooth the desk is to find some semi-sticky lump.
We don't consider this that big of a crime because it's not seen. No one is going to start an anti-gum placing campaign because this isn't like littering.
I told my friend Rick that the worst crimes are the crimes that are legal. The crimes that are the worst are the ones where no one really notices. Of course, this is a mistake, but I think there is some truth to it.
One of my editors has been ragging on me at the Technician. He gives out orders when he does not have to and he does it in a way that makes me feel bad, which I call pulling rank.
But no one knows about this problem and there is not too much I can do about it.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Notes on Scandal 3, "Deserving it" 2
My friend Jason will beat the crap out of me in a game; like any parlor game such as trivia questions, pool, poker, gin rummy, and board games; and then he has the audacity to make me feel bad about it.
This momentary interaction has brought out the worst in me in the past.
This realization should be no small admission: how often can we point out when we are at our worst?
Finally I stopped playing with the kid.
He asked me to tell him a story about when I failed at palmistry. I told him that one time I read palms for a beautiful woman; who's name I won't mention here; and that I ended up hooking up with her.
Now this is a true story for all of us. Lately I have been bragging to my friends about being able to talk to beautiful women. Maybe I'm trying to Lord over my friends with this garbage like Jason tried to Lord over me with the trivial games.
And I declare: Some of the same ways that Jason finds peace are found in his grades and his work ethic. He is competitive and razor sharp; he gets perfect grades. His successes are many.
It took me a long time to realize that I had to stand up to the kid by not playing the games with him. It did not take any discussion or debate with the person, I just had to decide that I did not want to be told I was stupid or slow for being lousy at board games.
Two:
This is a cool story because it shows what my friend Rick was trying to tell me the other day: there has to be a time when the vulgar meets the learned (re: the other two Notes on Scandal entries of this web blog; I've been using Berkeley's famous statement "We have to speak with the vulgar and think with the Learned" to comment on the intersection of moral ideals and social pragmatism.) We have to set up a guideline of morality that accounts for the real world.
My three feminist Duke University friends got into heated debates about the Duke University Lacrosse Scandal: what did it all mean?
On one occasion, I said to one of them that wearing revealing clothing is genuinely a way to invite sex. I mean, on commonsense intuition: isn't it? I was specifically talking about cleavage. Perhaps needless to say, the feminist yelled at me.
She said that no one invites rape, and that rape is never warranted.
In this blog, I said in Notes on Scandal 2 (I think), that one of the groups that I visited at North Carolina Central University, one of the group leaders said that a woman should be able to walk down the street in the middle of the night in a dark alley and not get raped.
This is because rape is wrong.
So my friend Rick said that this is correct, but we should still account for the problems of what's going on. Feminists account for this too (I've written a little bit in this blog on Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs, a call to self-responsibility of women).
If a woman is naked and says, "Let's have sex," to a man, and then regrets it because he's ugly, that's not really rape in the same way as the one that everyone is thinking of.
Which is what happened with the Duke University scandal; which is what happened with the Hofstra scandal a couple of weeks ago. (I know the woman didn't have sex in the Duke scandal, but I'm trying to make a certain point here).
We have to speak with the vulgar and think with the learned. The intersection of morality and realism I think in this case is that we have to account for reality in all possible ways.
Think with the learned: That is, we certainly can affirm the fact that rape is a terrible thing, that you should not judge a woman as promiscuous because of what she wears (nor conclude anything prejudiced because of the way someone looks); nor should you deem that rape is a wonderful occurrence when it is in fact a crime.
Speak with the vulgar: We have to be as realistic as possible in our prescriptions for people (ourselves). We have to warn people that going naked in dark alleys in the middle of gang-riddled Durham is a dangerous thing. We have to take into account all possible real facts and conceptual facts.
I think that is an okay conclusion for now.
Two Postscript:
I've been thinking about making a stand, too. William Salatan's science blog talks about how people are getting cosmetic surgery to fit in.
At what point should a person who is short say, okay now society has to fit in to me, and not the other way around?
Is it the naked woman in the alley? But this is such a strange way to make that case.
Is it the hippy-scientist; or the Black President; or the short-cool person?
But more on this later.....
This momentary interaction has brought out the worst in me in the past.
This realization should be no small admission: how often can we point out when we are at our worst?
Finally I stopped playing with the kid.
He asked me to tell him a story about when I failed at palmistry. I told him that one time I read palms for a beautiful woman; who's name I won't mention here; and that I ended up hooking up with her.
Now this is a true story for all of us. Lately I have been bragging to my friends about being able to talk to beautiful women. Maybe I'm trying to Lord over my friends with this garbage like Jason tried to Lord over me with the trivial games.
And I declare: Some of the same ways that Jason finds peace are found in his grades and his work ethic. He is competitive and razor sharp; he gets perfect grades. His successes are many.
It took me a long time to realize that I had to stand up to the kid by not playing the games with him. It did not take any discussion or debate with the person, I just had to decide that I did not want to be told I was stupid or slow for being lousy at board games.
Two:
This is a cool story because it shows what my friend Rick was trying to tell me the other day: there has to be a time when the vulgar meets the learned (re: the other two Notes on Scandal entries of this web blog; I've been using Berkeley's famous statement "We have to speak with the vulgar and think with the Learned" to comment on the intersection of moral ideals and social pragmatism.) We have to set up a guideline of morality that accounts for the real world.
My three feminist Duke University friends got into heated debates about the Duke University Lacrosse Scandal: what did it all mean?
On one occasion, I said to one of them that wearing revealing clothing is genuinely a way to invite sex. I mean, on commonsense intuition: isn't it? I was specifically talking about cleavage. Perhaps needless to say, the feminist yelled at me.
She said that no one invites rape, and that rape is never warranted.
In this blog, I said in Notes on Scandal 2 (I think), that one of the groups that I visited at North Carolina Central University, one of the group leaders said that a woman should be able to walk down the street in the middle of the night in a dark alley and not get raped.
This is because rape is wrong.
So my friend Rick said that this is correct, but we should still account for the problems of what's going on. Feminists account for this too (I've written a little bit in this blog on Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs, a call to self-responsibility of women).
If a woman is naked and says, "Let's have sex," to a man, and then regrets it because he's ugly, that's not really rape in the same way as the one that everyone is thinking of.
Which is what happened with the Duke University scandal; which is what happened with the Hofstra scandal a couple of weeks ago. (I know the woman didn't have sex in the Duke scandal, but I'm trying to make a certain point here).
We have to speak with the vulgar and think with the learned. The intersection of morality and realism I think in this case is that we have to account for reality in all possible ways.
Think with the learned: That is, we certainly can affirm the fact that rape is a terrible thing, that you should not judge a woman as promiscuous because of what she wears (nor conclude anything prejudiced because of the way someone looks); nor should you deem that rape is a wonderful occurrence when it is in fact a crime.
Speak with the vulgar: We have to be as realistic as possible in our prescriptions for people (ourselves). We have to warn people that going naked in dark alleys in the middle of gang-riddled Durham is a dangerous thing. We have to take into account all possible real facts and conceptual facts.
I think that is an okay conclusion for now.
Two Postscript:
I've been thinking about making a stand, too. William Salatan's science blog talks about how people are getting cosmetic surgery to fit in.
At what point should a person who is short say, okay now society has to fit in to me, and not the other way around?
Is it the naked woman in the alley? But this is such a strange way to make that case.
Is it the hippy-scientist; or the Black President; or the short-cool person?
But more on this later.....
Monday, November 2, 2009
Some more postmodernism
I just read David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster.
The most fun that Wallace has is consideration of meta-irony and post modernism.
Consider how sprite markets itself as the anti-drink. Well, then Sprite is still marketing itself, isn't it? Or independent music markets itself as outsider image; but this is still an image. The pop musician Pink, for example, sings music written by Max Martin just like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera; which would be great except that Pink markets the image that she is different from or better than or at least separate from these other two singers.
Well I have another one: Ben Folds' song "Hiroshima."
There is something unnerving about the song, which is a "benign" pop song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNqj-0YLOoM&feature=related
In it, Folds (the explanation is in the video before the song) explains that he hit his head after he fell at a show in Hiroshima, Japan.
The dandy point of the song is that in the midst of a fall, he was able to get up and succeed at singing.
The song could be taken even more literal than that, in the way that he sings, "They're watching me, watching me, watching me fall."
The point is that we're all in front of other people and these people watch us whether we succeed or fail.
The reason that Hiroshima is supposed to be a big deal for everyone else, or have emotional significance, is because it's about thousands of people dying when a nuclear weapon went off.
The reason why this is a memorable title is because thousands of people died.
I mean it gets down to this "no you didn't" thing because it's so straightforward: Folds simply fell on the stage in Hiroshima, Japan.
But is comparing his humiliation or our humiliation (of being human and empathizing with him) okay for writing a pop song when the name has so many connotations?
So there's this one level where it's just him saying he hit his head in Japan. Then there's this other level where he's using the name of a city which was bombed in World War II and has significance because of that. Either we know the significance of the people bombed, in which case I think he's wrong to use that song name, or we don't and that doesn't eliminate the significance, and we're still wrong about it.
Come on Ben, there's too much of an in-joke on this one. Postmodernism strikes again!!!
The most fun that Wallace has is consideration of meta-irony and post modernism.
Consider how sprite markets itself as the anti-drink. Well, then Sprite is still marketing itself, isn't it? Or independent music markets itself as outsider image; but this is still an image. The pop musician Pink, for example, sings music written by Max Martin just like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera; which would be great except that Pink markets the image that she is different from or better than or at least separate from these other two singers.
Well I have another one: Ben Folds' song "Hiroshima."
There is something unnerving about the song, which is a "benign" pop song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNqj-0YLOoM&feature=related
In it, Folds (the explanation is in the video before the song) explains that he hit his head after he fell at a show in Hiroshima, Japan.
The dandy point of the song is that in the midst of a fall, he was able to get up and succeed at singing.
The song could be taken even more literal than that, in the way that he sings, "They're watching me, watching me, watching me fall."
The point is that we're all in front of other people and these people watch us whether we succeed or fail.
The reason that Hiroshima is supposed to be a big deal for everyone else, or have emotional significance, is because it's about thousands of people dying when a nuclear weapon went off.
The reason why this is a memorable title is because thousands of people died.
I mean it gets down to this "no you didn't" thing because it's so straightforward: Folds simply fell on the stage in Hiroshima, Japan.
But is comparing his humiliation or our humiliation (of being human and empathizing with him) okay for writing a pop song when the name has so many connotations?
So there's this one level where it's just him saying he hit his head in Japan. Then there's this other level where he's using the name of a city which was bombed in World War II and has significance because of that. Either we know the significance of the people bombed, in which case I think he's wrong to use that song name, or we don't and that doesn't eliminate the significance, and we're still wrong about it.
Come on Ben, there's too much of an in-joke on this one. Postmodernism strikes again!!!
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