Reading the Best of 2015: Part Three

(Previous installments)

Trump, Card by William Germano is vaguely interesting, but I have no idea what it's doing on this list. Etymology is a surprisingly interesting subject, but it rarely gives you anything to think about or anything more than an interesting tidbit to take away. This essay is no exception.

Izabella Kaminska's Cryptic Bullet Points could not be any more of a contrast. It is not an essay, rather it is simply a list of blog posts that she lacks the time to write properly.

This is a kind of blogging which I am happy to endorse. I'm unlikely to practice it myself, because nowadays when I have a good idea I'm less likely to blog it than to put it on my list of "potential academic papers", but I'm glad that there are people who are giving us the opportunity to learn from them rather than hoarding their ideas.

Did I learn anything from the list? Not really, largely because I didn't really understand much of it. If the post was intended for anything even close to the average reader then this could be a problem, since (having studied economics for two years in undergrad) I probably know a fair bit more about the financial industry than most people. However, the average investor presumably knows a fair bit more than I do, so perhaps it would be more useful for them. Given that I still have 91 essays to read, I'm not going to take the time to find out.

The award for "most misleading title", at least of the articles so far, goes to Evan Ratliff's My Wife Found my Email in the Ashley Madison database. The article is not about the resulting struggle to repair his marriage, but rather about the various other Mr/Mrs E Ratliffs who enter his email when they log in to a variety of sites. As with many of these articles it's interesting; as with many I would not place it in the top 100 articles that I've read this year. Most of it is just short stories, flashes from the lives of people who, were it not for that shared initial and surname, would be perfect strangers to the author.

An article which very firmly does belong on this list is Rachel Ward's I'm Sorry I Didn't Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago. This piece is a (somewhat) light-hearted retrospective on her experiences of becoming and being a widow, presented in dialogue form. I'm not certain what this presentation adds to it - perhaps it's supposed to be quirky and characterful, but really there are many more people who believe themselves to be madcap pixies than there are actual madcap pixies.

The essay is both funny and serious, but above all it's unpretentious. Ward explains what she has learned and what has changed in her life as a result of her husband's passing, but she doesn't try to make it into anything that it's not.

[The nurse] told me I’d see him again, at the funeral, and that I should just focus on sleeping and eating. And then I said “I can’t believe it, he was such a good husband.”

And she said, “Yeah, but he did a shitty thing today.”

And that was the first time I laughed after Steve died.

It would be fair to describe this as my favourite essay so far.

Reading the Best of 2015, Part Two

(Previous instalment, and all future instalments, can be found under the Golden Giraffes tag)

A Magical Answer to an 80-Year-Old Problem, by Erica Klarreich, was interesting enough to be worth reading, but I don't feel like I really learned anything from it. It's very easy to understand, which is a massive plus when writing about maths, but that's because there's very little actual mathematical content.

Les Green's Bullshit Titles was the first essay on the list that I had already read, but was worth reading again. This essay says nothing which is profound or of great importance, but it is a worthy contribution to the philosophy of bullshit as well as an easy introduction to the subject for people who have no prior acquaintance with it. As with Klarreich's essay I would recommend it more as entertainment than as making a substantial addition to one's mental toolkit, but it should perhaps be read by all prospective humanities PhD students:

In particular, never allow doctoral students to use subtitles. Either there is good reason to study three years of decisions of the Milk-Marketing Board or there isn’t. (By ‘good reason’ I mean dissertation-wise. It’s a low standard.) If there is, they should have the courage of their convictions and make the subject their title. If there isn’t, do not allow them to waste their intellectual careers on trivia and then package it up in a bullshit title.

Past Perfect, by Richard. H. McAdams, is an extended review of Go Set a Watchman. I have not read GSAW and have not read beyond the first few pages of To Kill a Mockingbird, but this essay reinforced my impression that I really should. McAdams made the point well that, as much as an individual mights be more morally enlightened than the society in which they live, they will still be constrained by it. In TKAM Atticus Finch is genuinely a hero, but it is his respect for due process and equality before the law that motivates him: not, as we might like to imagine, a genuine belief in racial equality. This is the longest read so far, but it's worth the time.



Perhaps I would have found Peter McCleery's Thank you for calling Mamet's Appliance Centre more amusing if I were more familiar with Mamet's work. I assume that there's background I'm missing, because without that context this is nothing more than a needlessly foul-mouthed, slightly absurdist conversation between two rather dim people.



Alain de Botton starts in Why We Hate Cheap Things with the observation that experiences which a hundred or more years ago would have been enrapturing - eating a pineapple from exotic climes, flying in an aeroplane to touch the face of God, etc - are nowadays seen as commonplace, even boring. His thesis is that this is because we tend to conflate value and cost, assuming that things which cost more must necessarily provide us with greater utility. This is plainly false when one thinks about it, yet de Dotton believes that we tend to behave as though we believe it - and thereby deny ourselves a lot of the wonder of the world. The solution, then, is to be more childlike and to appreciate more the amazing world in which we live.

de Botton is correct at the start of his essay, and at the end of it. The modern world is indeed an incredible place, which we would do well to appreciate more, and goods which used to inspire great envy and desire are indeed quite ordinary. Some rainbows have, alas, been unwoven. But de Botton's explanation for this phenomenon is sorely lacking the concept of social status, which would explain most (all? I'm not certain about the aeroplanes) of what he wants to without raising a whole bunch of side questions.

Like: why do people have this tendency? de Botton claims it emerged in a time when price and quality genuinely did go hand in hand, but (a) is it really plausible to think that there was ever a time when all goods provided equal marginal utility, so that there were no cheap but really worthwhile goods? (b) Even this were the case, why would people follow this heuristic rather than one of (imperfect) utility maximisation? (c) Why do we still have this tendency? Is it biological, like many of our ethical impulses, or is it social and learned?

I did enjoy de Botton's elegy to advertising towards the end of the piece, but in general you could get the good of this essay without the bad by reading "I, Pencil." That's not to say this is a bad essay - it's just, unfortunately, wrong.

Reading the Best of 2015: part one

The Browser has a list of what it suggests are the top 100 online essays of the last year, and is conducting a survey. A handful of them are familiar, but the vast majority are not, so I'm going to attempt to read through them all - and what is more, subject the readers of this blog to my mini-reviews of each and every essay.

For the most part I'll follow the order they appear on the website. However, I'll start with Four and Twenty Bluebeards by Matthew Spellburg, which caught my eye because last month I saw Bluebeard's Castle at the Hungarian State Opera. (I didn't tremendously enjoy it, though having given some of the music a second listen I think that may be more to do with the performance than with the opera itself).

It's a magnificent tribute to Matthew Aucoin that Four and Twenty Bluebeards is still only an Honourable Mention for my "most pretentious essay of the year" award. (What is it with these musicians?) Numerous sections making points which are typically unrelated to the actual opera; musical analysis barely more complicated than that available on the opera's Wikipedia page; bold, sweeping claims made with an air of disdain for the notion of empirical support; and above all, the notion that opera is somehow a humanistic venture of the first importance:

Opera can only teach us to be who we are not, to demand a complete transformation, in which the whole of experience undergoes a great estrangement. Only once we’ve stepped into the circle of transformation—a kind of spiritual transvestitism—can we learn something. Opera says: you must believe this is the way the world is, even though it obviously isn’t like that at all. And this is why it mirrors a culture, the total sum of a society’s reinvention of the world. And this is why it is at once the most complete and most impossible of art forms.

I can't recommend reading this essay.


Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution by David Chapman makes similarly grand claims, although is perhaps more justified in doing so. Indeed, the claim which makes me most suspicious is his suggestion that the ideal ratio of Geeks (i.e. content creators and service providers) to MOPs (members of the public) within any subculture is about 1:6. Until this point I had been reading the article mainly as an exercise in abstract reasoning which might turn out to usefully model actual subcultures; the injection of an actual number, but as a conclusion, was very jarring and came across as unsupported and arbitrary

There were a couple of other things which made me sceptical. First, the claim that "subcultures died around about 2000". I could just as easily claim that subcultures exist, and are more common than ever - if perhaps shorter-lived on average. The internet is an incredible tool for creating subcultures, and even if it also accelerates their collapses then so long as they create positive social value - as Chapman thinks they do - I would be very surprised if they were indeed to die out. Perhaps Doge is a less iconic subculture than Prog Rock, and perhaps the role for Chapman's "fanatics" is reduced to providing publicity, but until there are concrete statistics showing a decline I will be highly sceptical of one of Chapman's key theses.

Second, suppose Chapman is right. His solutions are at best vague, and at worst impossible to practise.

“Slightly evil” defense of a subculture requires realism: letting go of eternalist hope and faith in imaginary guarantees that the New Thing will triumph.

Perhaps deliberate creation requires faith in the value of what one is doing. In this case, the option may be between delusion, which leaves subcultures vulnerable to sociopaths, and having no subculture in the first place.

With all that I've said in criticism, though, the piece is worth reading and its insights are worth adding to your mental armoury.



Charles Pierce's The Death of Evan Murray should be filed under "Taboo Tradeoffs". I don't necessarily disagree with the object-level campaign - at the very least, the cost to human lives of American Football seems to render it a poor "choice" for a national sport of choice - but one could just as easily argue that sending children to school will inevitably lead to some dying in car accidents, etc. The answer, in both cases, is that there is a good to be had in children's playing sport and in their being educated. Would it have been so difficult for Pierce to make the extra bit of argument showing that American Football could be replaced by a sport (more baseball or basketball? Soccer?) with lower human cost?

Why Study History of Philosophy?

In undergrad I was fairly successful in avoiding having to study the history of philosophy. Unfortunately this could not last; as part of my MA I'm having to take no fewer than three courses on it - Ancient Philosophy, Rationalism and Empiricism (i.e. early modern philsophy - Descartes et al) and Continental Philosophy. This is a fairly fixed part of the curricula for degrees in philosophy, and for a long time I have wondered why. In this post I shall attempt to make a positive case for studying history of philosophy; I currently have no concrete plans to make the opposite case, but one might just happen to appear.

(1) The value of past philosophers
The fact that something is old does not mean its ideas are irrelevant. Indeed they may be stronger, for having stood the test of time. And perhaps there are some ideas which are just flat-out wrong (the world is not, for example, made entirely of water) but studying these ideas is useful for understanding the climate in which other, more valuable ideas, emerged. Perhaps much pre-Socratic philosophy reads like mysticism, but given that Socrates - at least in the earlier dialogues - is concerned not so much with making positive arguments so much as tearing down the ideas of others, it is important to know what he was responding to.

Kantian arguments still command respect in ethics; Jeremy Bentham, if he were alive today, would be accepted but broadly within the mainstream. The case is easier to make for ethics than for "natural philosophy", it is true, but this shows that there is still value to be had by learning historical ideas.

(2) Unlearning assumptions
Nowadays we take a great many ideas for granted. But these are not ideas you can genuinely project from a blank canvas: we believe them because we were brought up to believe them. If we are to hold (for example) advocacy of democracy as a substantive belief rather than as a tenet of unreasoning faith, we need to look at the thoughts of people for whom democracy was a strange and frightening idea. (And who knows, they might be right! The historical progression of ideas is not guaranteed to be in a positive direction!)

(3) Practice at interpretation
One of the key tasks of any philosopher is to respond to other philosophers and their arguments. Studying the history of philosophy helps to develop a number of skills useful for this. Upon first reading, many historical philosophers appear to be obscure and/or blatantly wrong. To properly apprehend what they have to say, we have to apply hermeneutics and the principle of charity - both of which will be useful when engaged in discussions with fellow contemporary philosophers.

NB. Even if the case I am making here is correct, I doubt it is really why we have to study history of philosophy. (1) provides little justification for reading anyone in the original, rather than merely in summary; (2) provides little justification for teaching history of philosophy as independent courses, when we could teach history of metaphysics as part of a metaphysics class*; (3) suggests that the choice of texts is in fact fairly arbitrary.


* Imagine that! A class mixing metaphysics with history of philosophy! The ultimate feast of utterly worthless mental masturbation!

An Operatic Miniature

A large part of being good at chess is pattern recognition: seeing that the position in front of you is similar to one you've seen before, and is therefore likely to reward the same principles. I had a recent example of this in a cute little game which rather neatly resembled the famous Opera House Game.

The Opera House Game was a game played in 1858 between Paul Morphy, an American would-be lawyer and likely the greatest player of his generation, and a pair of European aristocrats who compelled him to play them while he was trying to enjoy a performance of Norma.

As a brief run-though of the Opera House Game: 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 Bg4 4. dxe5 Bxf3 5. Qxf3 dxe5 6.Bc4

White has got two pieces out while Black has none, and already threats are appearing on the board.
6... Nf6 7. Qb3 Qe7
White could actually win two pawns here, via 8. Bxf7+ Kd8 (8...Qxf7? 9. Qxb7) 9. Qxb7 Qb4+, but the queens come off and Morphy opts to just continue getting his pieces out.
8. Nc3 c6 9. Bg5 b5?

White has four pieces out and his rooks will arrive very shortly; Black has two pieces developed, one of which is pinned against the other. He also faces a real struggle to get pieces active, with both the c6 and e7 square occupied.
10. Nxb5! cxb5 11. Bxb5+ Nbd7 12. 0-0-0 Rd8

Black has very little space, with his king trapped in the centre and few of his pieces doing anything much. White now crashes through with a temporary exchange sacrifice:
13. Rxd7! Rxd7 14. Rd1
When attacking in chess, sacrificing one rook then bringing the other into its place is a classic maneuvre.
14... Qe6 15. Bxd7+ Nxd7

All is now set for the final flourish:
16. Qb8+! Nxb8 17. Rd8#
And White delivers mate with his last two remaining pieces.


My game does not have quite so nice an ending - largely because my opponent resigned when he saw what was coming - but is still rather nice.

loserforsale - nachtfalter, Chess.com, 10th October 2015
10 mins/game

1. d4 e5 2. dxe5 Nc6 3. Nf3 Qe7 4. e4 Nxe5 5. Nc3 Nxf3+ 6. Qxf3 Nf6 7. Bg5

You may already recognise some of the same patterns here. My plan as white is to castle and then to pay Nd5, which brings massive power to bear on f6 to win a pawn and prevent black from ever castling.
7...d6 8. 0-0-0 Be6??
This removes the queen's coverage of e5, which makes White's attack much easier.
9. e5 dxe5 10. Bxb7 Rd8 11. Bb5+ Bd7

Based upon the Opera House Game, can you guess what's coming?
12. Rxd7 Rxd7 13. Rd1

At this point my opponent resigned, though mate would likely have followed within five moves, e.g. 13...h6 14. Rxd7 Qxd7 15. Qc8+ Ke7 16. Qxd7#

Against Libertarian Libertinism

In the wake of the recent World Health Organisation (WHO)'s announcement that eating bacon raised your risk of cancer, there has been a rash(er?) of libertarians denouncing this and defending eating bacon. From a certain standpoint, this is rather strange.

An example, taken from the European Students For Liberty Facebook page.

The fact that a food raises your risk of cancer is, unless you are fine with getting cancer, a reason against eating that food. Not at all a decisive reason - you might well think that the enjoyment you get from the bacon is well worth the minute or two by which you shorten your life. Indeed, this is precisely the kind of choice that, as libertarians, we are committed to thinking people ought to be able to make for themselves. But if we recognise people's right to make that choice, we ought to recognise their right to choose either way. We ought not to be pressuring people to choose a particular way.

("But pressuring someone to make a particular choice is hardly the same as forcing them to make it!" It's imposing negative consequences upon their making a particular choice, and is from that perspective no different to taxing them for making a particular choice. Haven't you read Mill?)

Now perhaps this is a natural reaction to being "told what not to do." I'm not sure how plausible this interpretation is. The WHO has insisted that it is not telling people not to eat bacon, but (a) this is coming after the fact, potentially as a PR move, and (b) just because the WHO doesn't intend it that way doesn't mean that national governments won't take it that way.

Out of these, (b) seems most important. Western governments do an awful lot of moralising about tobacco, sugar, and such things, and this moralising is typically accompanied by taxation, censorship of advertising, and other deeply illiberal measures.

But it's far from obvious that the best way to respond to this is with anger. What I fear here is that something will happen similar to what has happened in the global warming debate. Global warming has been used by various left-wing people as a justification for policies that we all know they would be pushing for anyway - more taxes, monetary transfers from the first world to the third world, and (most damaging of all) a deliberate end to the search for economic growth. There are two ways that those of us opposed to such policies can respond. One is to point out that tackling CO2 emissions is perfectly compatible with a free market: just impose a Pigou Tax (which I view as just a particular way of enforcing rights) and you're done. The second is to dispute that global warming is actually happening. Unfortunately, most people seemed to take this second route, despite it relying upon demonstrably false premises. (One wonders whether many deniers on some level know that climate change is indeed happening, and continue to deny it as a form of ingroup signalling).

This allowed people opposed to massive government intervention against global warming to be painted as anti-science. My worry is that the same could happen with diet: the debate could become a purely scientific debate over which foods are bad for you, rather than a debate over values: do we want to live in a society which doesn't trust its members to take care of themselves?

The biggest problem with a scientific debate from the libertarian perspective is not that we might turn out to be wrong - governments' dietary suggestions have, as with most dietary suggestions, a long history of being terrible - but that even if we're right, we still can't win. Suppose it turns out that, contrary to official claims, food X is in fact good for you. Then the ground changes. Statists will stop advocating a ban on X and will start advocating subsidies, in a way that is just as harmful to liberty.

Ultimately, the debate has to be over values. They're the important thing, and they're the battle which we can - ultimately - win.

CEU Philosophers' Hand Jive Society show off their sweet moves

"The Teapot"

"The Stop Signal"

"The Bolt"

"The Creepy-Crawly"

"The Cosmic"

"The Torus"

Apparently not everyone's in the mood for dancing :(

(My apologies to everyone in these photos and to the photographers, but also my thanks for helping to make my first few weeks at CEU so enjoyable!)