John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

Those who say that everything happens for a reason should really say that everything can be turned to their advantage.

Some ideas are so big that they break a hole through nearly every mind they enter.

Ralph Nader’s candidacy should be a reminder to us all that, though we seldom use the word vanity today in its original sense, the reality behind the word is still very much with us.

From Marginal Revolution:

A simple ethical conundrum

A few days ago I was in a London taxicab when I noticed a possibly expensive purse in the seat next to me. I climbed out of the cab and without much thought (shame on me) gave it to the driver. I explained someone had left it there. Of course I was intent on treating the driver like a decent human being. But wait, I know I am honest and maybe he isn’t. But wait, maybe I couldn’t have gotten the purse to the woman very easily. But wait, I could have posted notice on this blog and had you help me track her down. But wait, isn’t it my obligation to simply leave the woman no worse off than she was in the first place? But wait, what is the default point for defining “in the first place”? But wait, what would the driver have thought if he saw me taking the purse out of his cab? But wait, isn’t a purse really really important? But wait, what if the purse belonged to the driver?¹

I think this anecdote contributes something useful to making clear why I believe that the problems of ethics are generally of an epistemological sort rather than of a deontological sort.

1. Marginal Revolution↩

Treated with restraint, sexuality can create love where there is none, but in excess it will destroy love wherever it is.

A moral life begins with the understanding that the lives of all are the product of the actions of each.

I just finished reading the marvelous book, “Born on a Blue Day.” While I could easily write a very extended piece on the many ideas it suggests to me, I thought I would rather quote this passage, which is perhaps the most beautiful description I have ever read of the reasoning process that would usually lead to an explicit proof by induction:

One of the exercises in the book read like this: There are twenty-seven people in a room and each shakes hands with everyone else. How many handshakes are there all together?

When I read the exercise I closed my eyes and imagined two men inside a large bubble, then I imagined a half bubble stuck to the side of the larger bubble with a third person inside it. The pair in the large bubble shook hands with each other, then each with the third man in the half bubble. That meant three handshakes for three people. Then I imagined a second half bubble stuck to the other side of the larger bubble with a fourth person in it. Then the pair in the large bubble needed to shake hands with him too, and then the half-bubble men shake hands with each other. That would make six handshakes between four people. I continued in this way, imagining two more men in two other half bubbles until there were six in all and fifteen handshakes between them. The sequence of handshakes looked like this:

1, 3, 6, 10, 15…¹

1. Daniel Tammet : Born on a Blue Day : School Days↩

We invariably take more pleasure in taking photos of ourselves than others have in looking at them.

Ah, the joys of reading…

Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, was recently quoted as saying, in reference to market events, that “Our economic models have never been particularly successful in capturing a process driven in large part by nonrational behavior.” For example, faced with a decision between two equally valued objects, subjects will often chose a different, lesser valued object to avoid making a decision between the two more similar ones (Tversky and Shafir, 1992).¹

1. J. Cohen, K. Blum : Neuron : 2002 : Reward and Decision↩

The central assumption of the aphorist is that the concerns of literature are few and abstract, rather than many and specific. In this way, he differs fundamentally from the journalist, who must present many details, but few general observations. Equally importantly, the aphorist believes in concision and exactitude; he believes that, by returning to the same themes again and again, we will each time see more in them than we previously did. With each iteration, we come closer to what is essential and remove more of the incidental.