Pirates 4

Not impressed with the trailer.

Black Swan

Once in a while I read something that's just good.

Like this movie review. Read the 1st four paragraphs.

Harvard

When you apply for financial aid at Harvard you're asked if you are:

A lineal or collateral descendant of: ... Harvard Class of 1889 [or] 1902

I guess Harvard graduates assumed their descendants wouldn't be able to pay the tuition.

Foreign Policy

When I was a kid I always thought foreign aid was the most important "policy" issue. At Church we had operation rice bowl for those starving people on T.V. I knew people are poor in America, but not like those Ethiopians. And if Americans come first, then at least as a foreign policy issue, making sure everyone can eat should come before say . . . partitioning Jerusalem.

I was probably 14 or 15 before I realize how strange my point of view was. I was reminded of it today. I'm taking a class on foreign policy. Our TA asked everyone to vote for what they consider the 2 most important foreign policy issues (there wasn't a prompt, you could write anything). There were 15 voters, and I cast the only vote for foreign aid.

Here's my rationale for why (the inspiration is John Rawls). Suppose you didn't know where you were going to be born. You're just a random person. You can implement on one policy and then you are born into that world. What policy do you implement?

The natural thing to ask is: what is likely to kill me and the answer isn't WMDs or terrorism: its diarrhea, AIDS, or indoor air pollution killing you as a child. So a rational person is going to prioritize that.

Completeness

Completeness is a pretty simple concept. Rules are complete if they you can always get an answer by going to the rulebook and incomplete otherwise. It's so obvious--and so obviously--that we assume the rules of the games we play are complete.

But they rarely are. I was watching a football game today, Colts vs. Cowboys. The Colts called a timeout but they weren't granted it. The Colts committed a penalty that wasn't relevant to a play on the field and it pretty much gave the Cowboys the game when the refs called it.

Now what happens when people argue about whether the refs made a mistake. Colts fans are going to point to fact that the penalty was obscure, is never called, and didn't affect the play. So it shouldn't have been called--fouls are missed or ignored all the time. Cowboys fans are going to point to the rulebook--the rules are the rules and you call them like you see them. But Colts fans will point out that the rules say the Colts can call a timeout. If you look at the video its clear they called a time out long before the play started, but it was just missed. Cowboys fans can then say that's part of the game--not every timeout is recognized. But Colts fans argue that not every penalty is recognized and they know Cowboys fans' argument implies that if the refs missed a call that cost them the game they should accept it. Everyone knows no Cowboys fan would accept that--they get mad about "missed calls" like everyone else.

So the argument is really a mess. Who is actually right according to the rules? You could argue about the literal meaning of the rulebook and about the intent of the rule writings as if their is a right answer to the two critical questions: Do the refs have to recognize a clearly called time out and should the refs call an obscure inconsequential penalty? That is what lawyers do when they argue issues of law. I think most of them think there is a real right answer, or at least most laymen do.

But I don't think there is a right answer. I think American law and the NFL rules are incomplete. They just don't specify what is supposed to happen in all instances. In theory the rules are complete because of a clause like "in the event of something not in the rules the refs should use their best judgment." But when the refs themselves are corrupt or inept (they are often inept, no one doubts that!) then what?

What counts as interesting?

I was talking to a friend and they said they think the standardized test writing prompts tend to be interesting. I don't know how common that sentiment is. My guess is that for people with a background in philosophy or who tend to think things out, the topics are very bland and trite. (This will sound extremely condescending. It is, but I don't judge people's worth on intelligence.) For people who don't think very often or study English (or something like that), I can see why they are interesting.

Let me explain with a few examples I grabbed from the web:

"Do memories hinder or help people in their effort to learn from the past and succeed in the present?"

This is a scientific question. I don't think anyone has ever studied it so who the hell knows. Is it an important question? Not really--the question doesn't propose any programs for solving the problem if it exists. The key here, though, is that this isn't the kind of issue you can expect to make any progress on by writing down a bunch of "case studies" (e.g. anecdotes).

"Should schools help students understand moral choices and social issues?"

No one thinks schools shouldn't. Understanding moral/political issues are important and we do it in English and social science classes. The one thing that makes people feel uneasy is that schools can't avoid inculcating a certain moral perspective on issues. But teachers' views and peers' views are going to socialize students anyway, that is unavoidable. I think this one was settled a long time ago. The real question is to what extent should schools tell people what to think when discussing the issues. That is interesting but society has settled more or less on a consensus even there: schools should teach things nearly everyone believes, and if there is any controversy whatsoever, not discuss it. Maybe an interesting question that could come out of this is "What percentage of society has to disagree with a moral claim before it becomes unacceptable to teach it as accepted in schools?" (For example: what percentage of Americans have to find gay marriage acceptable for it to become acceptable to write about gay marriage in history books the same way we write about civil rights for blacks.)

"Do newspapers, magazines, television, radio, movies, the Internet, and other media determine what is important to most people?"

This is another scientific question. You can find out by running experiments to test to what extent changing the paper someone reads changes their priorities. I believe the answer is that, as anyone would expect, it changes their views a little bit. (There are two studies I can think of: one that studied the impact of Fox News on voting behavior and one that studied the impact of having a conservative or liberal paper deliver to the door.) The real question here is how much impact media has on values? That is going to be very hard to estimate and isn't even properly framed to start with. But whatever it is, writing some anecdotes about how watching CNN made you want to join the Peace Corp doesn't get us anywhere. But that's what the SAT wants . . . I think. (Comment: What do they mean by determine anyway? Do they mean if I ran a regression I'd get an R^2 of 1, as if nothing else beyond media socialized people's values. I'm just assuming they couldn't possibly mean that.)

GRE prompts can be even worse. My prompt was, in so many words, "can the ends justify the means?" That one was settled a long time ago. The answer is obvious.  Even more probing version of the question  are obvious (e.g. "when do the ends justify the means?" Answer: When the net outcome is better than the next best alternative.) I have a feeling that a lot of people in English departments never found out that that question was settled hundreds of years ago.

What does literature teach people?

I've probably written this introduction before, but it's necessary. When I read fiction and watch movies, I have fun. I love movies. But I rarely learn from watching films. I'd say that probably only 1 out of every 100 movies or books is really intellectually stimulating the way even bad non-fiction is.

A lot of people, however, claim that some movies (the kind that win Oscars?) are "smart." I've never understood what that means. The classic novels and plays we read in high school are also supposed to be "deep" or "smart" but I don't understand why. Let me respond to obvious counterpoints if that sounds incredibly ignorant.

First, I'm not stupid. I understand that Othello is about jealous and that Romeo and Juliet speaks to the fickle and passion nature of love. I know one of the lessons of Hamlet is that indecision can be a (tragic) flaw. But none of those ideas are new. Little kids know jealousy is bad. Teens usually feel love long before they read Shakespeare and anyone who ever spent time agonizing between chocolate and vanilla ice cream understands Hamlet. So when I say those plays aren't "smart" what I mean is that their themes are things everyone already knows--and if you already know it, you aren't learning it. (Movies have the same problem: Star Wars is about the problems of relying too much on technology; The Hurt Locker shows how war changes people; Inception shows us experience is more important than reality. I don't think any of that is ground-breaking. Also, the Neo-luddite pretensions of Star Wars are the worst thing about it.)

Now not all movies and books have trite themes. Some are kind of novel. Before I read Brave New World I'd never thought much about the relative value of truth and happiness. If you've never read "Politics and the English Language," then 1984's commentary on the government's use of language to control the populace is interesting. Avatar has the most innovative idea I've seen in a movie: the planet can think. It's trees are connected like neurons and collectively they constitute analogous to a brain. Far out. That said, I think all of these only count as borderline "smart" art. Brave New World is completely wrong: happiness is vastly more important than the truth. It's completely implausible that a government would ever try to control people through language the way it does in 1984, which is way over the top in general (and vastly inferior to Orwell's more measured essays for that reason). And of course the implication in Avatar is that we need to protect our planet--but our planet can't think, which Cameron might have been trying to imply.

So my question is this: Can anyone point out something novel they learned from fiction? What brilliant insights did I miss in Shakespeare? What did you learn from Moby Dick? To count it has to be something someone reasonably acquainted with philosophy isn't familiar with and has to be scientifically correct. (Ruminations on pseudo-psychology don't count.)