I picked up this unusual book in a wonderful book store, Buxton Books, in Charleston. If ever you are in Charleston, it’s well worth popping in and supporting them and maybe even get chatting to the charming and knowledgeable owners.
The Undiscovered Peter Cook
Hopefully this will find its way onto youtube. “Following the death of Britain’s greatest satirist in 1995, Peter Cook’s widow Lin locked the door of his house and refused all access to the media. Until this year, when she invited her friend Victor Lewis-Smith and a BBC crew inside to make a documentary about the man she knew and loved, with unprecedented access to Peter’s private recordings, diaries, letters, photographs and much more”. Peter would have relished taking on the humourless and censorious regressive left castrati.
Susan Haack’s Five Answers on Philosophy of Logic
As some will know Susan is my other philosophical “based mom”. (click image for pdf)
Bittersweet Nitro
If ever there was a “comfort” brew, this is it. Looking forward to working my way through Left Hand’s other beers.
Walker Percy Wednesday 110
I am straddling them, trying to wedge them apart. Good God: a New York-New Orleans Democrat Jew fighting it out with a Birmingham Italian Confederate Republican.
*****
A discovery: A shrink accomplishes more these days by his fecklessness than by his lordliness in the great days of Freud.
*****
Time was when I’d have tested their neurones with my lapsometer. But there’s more to it than neurones. There’s such a thing as the psyche, I discovered. I became a psyche-iatrist, as I’ve said, a doctor of the soul, an old-style Freudian analyst, plus a dose of Adler and Jung. I discovered that it is not sex that terrifies people. It is that they are stuck with themselves. It is not knowing who they are or what to do with themselves. They are frightened out of their wits that they are not doing what, according to experts, books, films, TV, they are supposed to be doing. They, the experts, know, don’t they?
Then I became somewhat simpleminded. I developed a private classification of people, a not exactly scientific taxonomy which I find useful in working with people. It fits or fitted nearly all the people I knew, patients, neurotic people, so-called normal people.
According to my private classification, people are either bluebirds or jaybirds. Most women, it turns out, are bluebirds. Most men, by no means all, are jaybirds.
*****
It is not for me to say whether one should try to be happy—though it always struck me as an odd pursuit, like trying to be blue-eyed—or whether one should try to beat all the other jaybirds on the block. But it is my observation that neither pursuit succeeds very well. I only know that people who set their hearts on either usually end up seeing me or somebody like me, or having heart attacks, or climbing into a bottle.
*****
B. F. Skinner, the jaybird of psychologists, put it this way: The object of life is to gratify yourself without getting arrested. Not exactly the noblest sentiment expressed in two thousand years of Western civilization, but it has a certain elementary validity. True jaybird wisdom.
Complexity + Stupidity
Sam Harris chats with David Krakauer head of the complexity mecca — Santa Fe Institute. SFI offers some free programmes of real substance and difficulty well worth signing up for in an attempt to offset the illiteracy of philosophers on unavoidable matters of complexity.
Leon Russell
Leon Russell — a truly class act.
Does science have all the answers?
The eminently sensible and intellectually honest Susan Haack — an evidence-based philosopher who rightly rejects the epistemic immodesty characteristic of the prevailing rationalistic arrogance of philosophers and scientists. Philosophy for such folk is about what to think and not about how to think: whatever else might be attributed to liberalism, it has primarily embodied the idea that conceptions of the good and goals of action are irreducibly plural. Witness these castrati bleating about dealing with their students who have gone off-reservation — an unambiguous sign of disrespect not only to their students but to their “profession”. With shrinking tenure most are climbing the greasy pole and have no compunction to compromise their ostensible existential commitment to TRUTH. Their so-called “progressivism” is no more than a “grand narrative” notion which on closer scrutiny is subject to all the weaknesses of such constructions. They just can’t (will not) wrap their heads around the stochastic nature of sociality and then are frustrated by trying to shoehorn reality into their favored mono-maniacal outlook. It is reassuring that computer scientists, applied mathematicians and other complexity theorists at a recent conference, do by contrast, get this fundamental aspect to reality (H/T Jakub Ryszard Matyja).
[Progress] . . . I’m not sure you measure it at all, and I’m not sure you measure it in science either.
Premature Triumphalism
Images linked to original sources.
Economics in the Era of Natural Computationalism and Big Data
Celebrating the 50th anniversary of John von Neumann’s the “Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata”. Here is the C+T panel and some background to Neumann: Unleashing the Power ‘Turing’s Cathedral.
And Von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of Von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. But it was Von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility.
— Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman
manwithoutqualities 