John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

This week, I finally read Bryan Caplan’s “The Myth of the Rational Voter,” which I had been looking forward to reading for some time now. I loved the book, as could probably have been expected by most informed readers given my own discontent with democracy as an institution and Caplan’s, as well as my recent fascination with economics.

That said, I’ve decided to take up a new hobby: proposing new electoral systems to circumvent some of the worst excesses of democratic government. Here’s my first approach, which I’ll call the dehumanization approach, by analogy with desalinization systems that remove a toxic element (salt) to create drinkable water from an unsafe source. The human element in politics is one of the things I think most toxic in democratic countries’ elections, because a focus on the “human side” tends to corrode rational analysis of platforms. (As a suggestive bit of evidence, consider this research bit from Stanford indicating that voters might choose candidates based on facial similarities.)

My proposed solution is simple: elect platforms, not candidates. Remove the candidates’ personalities entirely from the race, so that ideas alone determine the victor. You could so by creating an ordered list of essential issues and, for each, an spectrum of possible positions. Survey the American public on their preferences. Then survey the candidates (who are kept secret until after votes are cast) and perform a least squares analysis to determine which candidate comes closest to the mean positions and the median positions. One of these matches is the elected official.

Obviously, there are flaws with this approach, but I think it would be interesting to compare and contrast it with our current cult-of-personality-driven democratic elections in the US.

The plural of standard -s plural words never has an s sound added to indicate possession, so simply write an apostrophe at the end to show possession.

“The boys’ bikes all broke that day.”

The possessive of singular nouns ending in an s sound in contrast does add another s sound, so add an apostrophe and then an s in writing.

“Jesus’s words were often polemical.”

In the end, it’s a simple test of pronunciation: add an ’s where you make an extra s sound and add only an apostrophe where you do not.

[Before I begin I feel like I should note that I've been both too busy and too sick the past few days to write on this site, but I do have notes and nearly complete entries from the recently past days that I will edit soon and place online in the chronology. The following, being an open question, is something I wanted to get online as soon as possible without concern for careful editing.]

What do people think of the idea of using a wiki to manage a database of translations of classic works? I’m disposed to believe that the literary task for which the wiki is best suited is exactly translating as it is the area of literature where colloborabation and second opinions are most valuable and least detrimental.

That said, I have a translation of San Manuel Bueno, Martir that I’ve been debating putting online and asking for comments and suggestions for improvements. And after just installing Mediawiki for use with The Reading List (see some previous proposals for more information on The Reading List), I’m tempted to put the translation online using Mediawiki as well. So, opinions?

For a long time now, there’s been a list of books I’ve kept in my head and occasionally on paper: a list consisting of those books that truly are classics in their fields, those books that take away the purpose for other books to even exist, books that so perfectly instruct and systematize a field that no other book could approach their level of quality.

This list is of the greatest value to any and all autodidacts. Those who would teach themselves need books from which to learn and the little time they can find to spend on their self-education is easily wasted without the focus a good teacher imparts. They require the right books to guide them along the path to self-development.

So, I’d like to work on creating this list and giving the public access to it.

The truth is that I’ve even had a brief version of this list on the site before, but it’s never been taken very seriously by me, so that it’s only right that no one else should ever have taken it seriously. What I’d like to do now — with the help of all of you who are willing and able — is to compile an ever increasingly more complete and more perfect list of the best books.

To make it clear what this list should consist of, I can say simply that each book on it should be the sort of book that one would do better to reread five times than to read it and four other books once. The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie is a perfect example: there is simply no reason to read any other introduction to C after reading this book.

Of course, all of the books on the list will be hard books, because what defines these books is that they have more real content in five pages than other books have in five hundred. These books are of the sort that mathematics students know well: books with prefaces that remind the reader that they are not stupid if they are working slowly through the book, that they are probably going too fast if they read more than a page a day. For what is important in learning is to gain a complete mastery of the material: these books present the material without anything superfluous and in proper order. It is up to the student to work on the material and to constantly reapproach it until it is fully mastered.

This goal stated, I’d like advice on how to approach making a public project out of this idea. I’m thinking to purchase the domain name thereadinglist.org (the .com and .net domains already being taken) and place a sort of Wiki on it to allow for colloborative development. But that’s only a rough idea. A lot more details need to go into this project if it’s going to be valuable to anyone.

But I think it would be enormously valuable if done well. As a friend once said to me while I was still in high school, the problem of human life is never that there is not enough information: it’s knowing what to learn and when to learn it and where to find it.

All knowledge is not created equal and this project is an attempt to see to it that people are taught the most important things properly. One of my great interests in this life is the as yet undeveloped art and science of pedagogy: to develop a truly definitive list of works for instruction would be a great step in this direction.

And, beyond everything else, there’s the fun in the irony that while so many are fighting against the canon, I am here trying to create a new one built upon better principles.

Like everyone else on Myspace, I constantly get friend requests from bands and musicians I don’t know and who would never become actual friends with me. My first reaction to this annoyance was to add the following words to my profile:

Note that I do not add bands I haven’t met.

This did not work, though. I continued to get requests from bands, which only proves that these bands have never once read my profile and are just mass emailing out through the system. My next move was simple: I started denying every band arbitrarily. One band, though, then showed the dedication to continue resending the request I was denying, so I until now have just left any new friend requests from bands hanging permanently in the request queue.

Today, though, I got the following email.

you can approove or deny me to be your myspace friend just dont leave me lingering in internet space about it..

If this person weren’t such an utter ass and so self-centered as to seem to me insufferable, I would have just let this slide. Instead, I wrote back with what follows, which I made a point to keep surprisingly unrude, despite the original author’s level of character.

Are you kidding me? You sent me a friend request clearly never having read my profile, which makes a point to state that “I do not add bands I haven’t met.”

The fact is that I don’t deny requests because people will often resend these undesired requests even though I’ve stated clearly I don’t want them. You’re using this service as just a form of advertising and never showed enough interest in me as a person to read my profile once.

So, really think: how dare you give me an attitude when you never paid attention to what I had clearly said about never adding bands or musicians I don’t know personally?

So, if you want, I’ll deny you, but I don’t want to ever see another friend request from you.

- John

I’ve come to a firm conclusion after today’s experience: bands should never be allowed to send friend requests or emails on Myspace. There’s too much exploitation of the service to create what I consider a musical spam system for advertising terrible musicians — I’ve never once seen a real group do something this stupid — to allow it to go on. At the very least, Myspace should create a user-settable option allowing us to filter out all emails and friend requests from those labelled as artists.

If you read this and agree with it, let’s get to work on convincing Myspace.

While looking for an example of the Cajun Bayou accent, I came upon the following pages examples of English accents. It’s a lot of fun. Most of the examples seem to me to have been chosen to be as intelligible as possibly, though I would prefer to hear the accents at their strongest and least intelligible. The Indian accent, for example, is especially weak.

Accents In English

(I must admit the Ode To Haggis is strong enough for my taste.)

I’d love to start a resource to collect examples of the accents found in all the world’s languages. Any one else interested?

We all know sometimes I speak too quickly.

We sure do all know that. So I’m volunteering to let everyone come up with the best examples of me speaking too quickly and making an ass of myself. What can I say? I’m in a haircoat kind of mood and think there’s probably some fun to be had in thinking of how many stupid things I’ve done. (In my defense, some of them are really quite funny. Not a moral justification, but at least an aesthetic one.) Take advantage of this offer as quite possibly by next week I’ll be in a mood where I’ll think you all should stop being so needlessly critical of me. Plus, those of you who play along get the added bonus of me apologizing yet again for what I did wrong. Which would be what? The 956th time for some of you, no? (Another fun game would be to count how many people I’ve apologized to enough times they finally started apologizing to me after reconsidering the situation.)

Now that I think of it, though, we’ll set the game so that you’ll also get special points for coming up with unusually cold things I’ve said to people who certainly deserved the insults they were given, when the insults were surprisingly accurate and entertaining. This part of the contest we’ll relate to the very different quotation below.

I don’t give a fuck if my words have grown old:
I’ve never been so willing to see a relationship fray.
I don’t give a fuck how thin this ice has become:
I’m stomping on it anyway.

Send all contest submissions to jmw@johnmyleswhite.com.

Lately, I’ve been debating undertaking the creation of an experiment in psychology full of open-source hacking fun. The project’s basic idea is this: apply evolutionary programming concepts and ideas from neural net design to a personals matching site. In short, making a match.com that’s intellectually exciting and potentially much more successful. Above all else, do it for fun and do it for free.

So who’s interested in hearing more? We’ll need a few hackers and at least some person willing to design a UI. We’ll also need weirdos like myself who are prepared to reduce love and everything else about human beings into a 32 bit value.