Thursday, April 24, 2014

Rhetoric and rewards

The cynic claims he is wise because he no longer responds to “empty rhetoric.” But what his lack of response really shows is not that the rhetoric is empty, but that his soul is empty of the higher motives to which rhetoric once successfully appealed. The cynic is certain rhetoric alone will never persuade others to help him. If he wants to avoid being left out in the cold, he needs not eloquence but cold, hard cash. When others ask him for help, he ignores rhetorical appeals to kindness and mercy and asks what’s in it for him.

The life of the cynic is concerned primarily with rewards in all its phases. In the first phase, he learns the skills he needs to earn rewards. In the second, he earns rewards. In the third, he leisurely enjoys the rewards he has earned. A life motivated by higher motives would not have this tripartite division. If I’m motivated by a passion to learn, I will learn for my entire life. If I’m motivated by love for my fellow men, I will work to help them for my entire life.

Confucius advises me to rank the effort above the prize. Buddha advises me to look away from the glittering world and concentrate on improving my mind. When I run around busily seeking rewards and summarily dismiss all who would detain me with their “empty rhetoric,” I show my values are inverted. It is rewards that are empty, while rhetoric alone can help me return to the path to intellectual and moral excellence.

Monday, April 21, 2014

Charm and good looks

In the quest to win friends and influence people, what's more important—charm and good behavior—or money and good looks? The cynics are probably right that most people don’t really care if I’m nice, and care only about looks and money. But if I deceive myself with some false optimism, and keep trying to be charming, I will eventually attract people who do appreciate it. Smile, say charming things, be on your best behavior, even when everyone around you is ridiculing you for the absurd optimism that someone might appreciate it. What matters in the end isn’t the overall statistics, it’s the statistics in the relevant sample space. My optimism will attract people who appreciate good behavior. Then, within that sample space, the statistics will be different. The cynic, on the other hand, will be correct in his assessment of the average man, and will be left surrounded by average men. My beliefs about people determine the sort of people I attract, and are self-fulfilling. By assuming everyone is a genius, I bring out the genius in people. By assuming everyone is a saint, I bring out the saint in people. To me this seems like a much better life than the life of the cynic, even if requires some sacrifice of intellectual conscience at the outset.

Friday, April 18, 2014

Insurrection in the kingdom of intellect

The cowardly mind doesn’t want to get in trouble for having insurrectionary thoughts, but the courageous mind knows it can get away with insurrectionary thoughts as long as it never becomes involved in insurrectionary deeds. We imagine that the present social order must be rational, that we must conform our thoughts to its principles. If the present social order is capitalist, my thoughts must be capitalist, if socialist, socialist, if Christian, Christian, etc. But once we get outside purely theoretical disciplines like mathematics, there is no way to avoid the confrontation between the truth that’s convenient for my rulers and the truth I discover. A cowardly intellect, when it begins to get close to a boundary where further logical thought will lead away from peaceful intellectual coexistence with rulers, immediately backs down. To the cowardly mind, rulers, whether monarchs or majorities, must always be right. Even if the values rulers commend are contradictory, there's no reason to question them. My ruler was rational enough to build the most tanks, the coward reasons, I must be rational enough to fear them

Thursday, April 17, 2014

bourgeossification (n): the loss of neuronal plasticity that comes about as a result of seeking to cash in on what one has already learned, rather than seeking to continue learning.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

The bourgeois

You will often find a Steinway in his living room. But you will notice that he has almost always given up on playing it. In his value system, there is no point in doing something unless you can do it well enough to make a lot of money. The pomp of earlier aristocrats interests him immensely, because he can hire someone else to create it. The dilettantish pleasures of earlier aristocrats interest him hardly at all, because they demand far too much intellectual effort.

What will take him a lifetime to achieve, others have at birth without effort. Yet this never lessons his confidence that his aims in life are the right ones. If he has any intellectual, moral or artistic excellences that the heir to wealth lacks, the bourgeois might consider himself superior to the heir of wealth. But as soon as the bourgeois degrades his talents to mere means to wealth, any claim to dignity he might have had in the eyes of the heir to wealth, or in his own eyes, vanishes at once.

Monday, April 14, 2014

Why aphorisms?

After his second book Nietzsche stopped composing long narratives. He adopted the form of short essays and aphorisms. Why? Perhaps he feared he would sully and corrupt sentences he wrote in exceptional states of mind if he tried to weave them into a narrative while he was in a different state of mind. Each aphorism represents the voice of a different character. The author of aphorism 1 is Nietzsche(t1). The author of aphorism 2 is Nietzsche(t2). The idea that the author is a constant rather than a variable is among the most perilous of all fictions. The idea that a human being is a constant rather than a variable is among the most perilous of all fictions.

Once Nietzsche decided he would no longer attempt to weave a narrative from disparate thoughts that occurred in disparate states of mind, the question must have arisen, in what order shall I place my thoughts? How about the order in which they occurred? Is that good enough? Or should I try to improve it?

The answer Nietzsche hit upon seems to be this: follow each thought by the thought most nearly its opposite. He recognized that to refuse to commit himself to a position, to make his assaults upon truth merely tentative, was among the foremost intellectual virtues.

Thursday, April 10, 2014

Read this lentissimo

Repetition and variation are used to excellent effect in music. Why not in philosophy? In fact, what if I were to take this to an extreme, to write philosophy the way Philip Glass writes music, repeating a theme until it saturates the mind, and only then proceeding to the next.
A monk dwells practicing body-contemplation on the body, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, having overcome covetousness and grief concerning the world; he dwells practicing feeling-contemplation on the feelings, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, having overcome covetousness and grief concerning the world; he dwells practicing mind-contemplation on the mind, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, having overcome covetousness and grief concerning the world.
Nyanaponika Thera’s translation of the Pali Canon in The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965)
Nietzsche complains that his readers read him too fast. He wants to force them, somehow, to change the tempo from presto to lentissimo. But how?

One method: repeat the fundamental teachings over and over. Make them into a chant. Nietzsche didn’t use this method. Buddhists, on the other hand, often do, to excellent effect. Repetition, like silence, allows the mind to turn its attention inward. It gives it time to chew a thought, digest it, assimilate it.

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

The holy division of labor

“The error in positivism,” says Adorno, “is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative.” Once philosophy has been demoted to one specialty among others, it is no more able to call in question the division of labor than the medieval philosophy that served the Church could call in question the existence of God.

Monday, April 7, 2014

When the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was published in 1952, homosexuality was listed as a sociopathic personality disturbance. There is no question that homosexual behavior produced many difficulties in the lives of those who practiced it. The error made by psychiatry was a failure to ask whether these problems were caused by homosexual behavior, or by society’s persecution of homosexual behavior. In this respect, the methodology used in creating the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual remains unchanged.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

The language of leisure

The language of leisure is articulate about joy and contentment. The language of commerce is mute. It speaks only of maximizing utility functions. As our language becomes ever more colonized by commerce, we lose our simple joys, because we lose our ability to speak of simple joys. Bombarded with a perpetual message of ‘buy this,’ ‘buy that,’ we have forgotten joys in which money is irrelevant. The pleasure of loving. The pleasure of learning. All one needs for a joyful life can be found in the public library. The rest of our time and money can be reserved for the joy of sharing.

Thursday, April 3, 2014

The Science of Charm

Intuition may occasionally lead me to the right answer to a physics problem. But in order to consistently find right answers, I need method. The same is true in problems of human interaction. Intuition occasionally leads me to say and do the right thing. But to be consistently charming, I need a scientific method.

Tolstoy gives a precise scientific analysis of his characters’ motives. Hollywood entertainment, with rare exceptions, sacrifices scientific precision for entertainment value. Peer review is important in art, just as it is in science. The more time I dedicate to peer-reviewed books, the better will be my understanding of human psychology.

My success in science has always been consistent. But my success in social life was intermittent at best. Things would go fine sometimes. But disasters were a regular occurrence. Scientific precision, my teachers said, was irrelevant in the social world. Socializing, they said, is intuitive. There are no formulas. For a mind that lives and breathes scientific precision, this was the worst thing they could possibly have said.

Social life is not physics. But, I now know, the same intellectual virtues that allow me to succeed in physics also allow me to succeed in social life. The teachers who insisted socializing could never be raised above the level of intuition could not have been more wrong. I later learned they were merely the astrologers of social life. There was a rigorous science of conduct they were entirely ignorant of.

A physicist who expects coworkers to teach her the fundamental theories of physics will quickly discover the workplace is not the place were they are taught. What she learns at work is a supplement to her theoretical training, not a substitute for it. Yet we find ourselves thrust into social life with no training in the theory of good behavior. Even if we’re eager to learn, we quickly discover that those who are good at socializing are busy socializing. They have no time to teach us their theories. The most important skills for socializing, paradoxically, I sometimes have to learn in solitary study.

The best way to learn physics is first to struggle to solve a problem without a method. After repeated failures, the method will seem like manna from heaven. No matter how succulent Newton’s laws are, I must build up an appetite for them, or they will taste like bitter medicine. My struggles to reinvent charm were not wasted. After my repeated failures I was ready and eager to learn the science of good behavior.

The same intellectual virtues that give us our exquisite competence in science can allow us to be exquisitely competent in social life too. The astrologers of social life have undermined our confidence. It is time to put them in their place.

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

p values

If a coin is tossed four times and turns up three tails and one head, should we infer that the coin is loaded? Probably not. For a fair coin, there’s a one in four chance that the tosses would come out this way. It could just be a coincidence. If a coin is tossed forty times and turns up thirty tails and ten heads, should we infer that the coin is loaded? Probably. For a fair coin, the chance it could have come up ten or fewer heads randomly is only about one in a thousand. It is really not hard to explain p-values to the man on the street. If I perform an experiment whose outcome is partly due to chance and partly not, the more trials I run, the more certain I can be that the result was not entirely due to chance. That’s the beauty of statistics.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Denatured philosophy

When alcohol is used as a paint remover, a denaturant is added. The technical vocabulary of philosophers serves a similar purpose. They have made philosophy so artless, no one can possibly derive pleasure from it. Only a philistine can endure it.