Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 12:15 am
Recently I’ve drifted through Jaroslav Pelikan’s odd little book, Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution (mostly reading this material while on airplanes in the last week). I say odd, because while Mr Pelikan makes a lot of interesting connections between the hermeneutical traditions behind the extraction of meaning by the Church from the Bible and the legal community from the Constitution it is hard to see what to do with the connections thus made.
One such striking observation made by Mr Pelikan are in some of the parallels between their traditions. One such interesting parallel is that today academic theology and academic legal thinking no longer actively orders its study to serve the practice of its attendant organs (as it once did). Specifically, academic legal writing and thought is not directed at aiding and influencing the practice of practical law and theology is not aimed at producing insights for pastoral application.
Another thought which struck me concerned the divisions in the modern church on the other hand … and the Civil War and other political organs of power which prevent similar divisions from occurring in the Union. Modern evangelicals and protestants deride and dismiss the hierarchical structure of the Eastern and Roman churches and particularly point to efforts to keep ecclesiastic and theological unity within those churches. However, those same people applaud the civil war and stand firmly against separatist movements within the nation.
Mr Pelikan does occasionally amuse himself (and the reader) by tweaking the reader’s expectations. Allusions to liturgical trappings … are found to allude not to Church at times but to the rite and rituals (and dress) of the law courts.
Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
This video sequence is making the rounds. You know, prior to seeing this I opposed prop 8 on the principles of government I’ve espoused on this blog. However, seeing this gives me pause. If that is the opposition to prop 8, I might have voted for it just to oppose that sort of behavior.
Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 12:41 am
For the “throwaway book” I read on my recent business trip, for entertainment value I selected Walter Jon Williams Implied Spaces. This book is a relatively straightforward science fiction far future book in the modern vein. The name of the book, “implied spaces” is in away all about squinches. The residents of this far future world live in and construct for their entertainment pocket universes designed to order. However, in designing your perfect fjords and vistas … between them what appears is not to design … and those pockets end up being, like squinches or being “spaces who’s construction is implied” and not designed by intent. At the beginning, we find our somewhat implausible hero entertaining himself by personally exploring “implied spaces” finding mostly deserts and spiders. (Note: spoilers ahead), but I’d like to comment on some of implied spaces in Mr Williams story arc itself. Read the rest of this entry
Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
Recently in a conversation on prop 8, it was suggested the religion of the Blacks which was why Black vote perhaps tipped prop 8 pass.
This seems an odd charge to make. Yes, time and time again we’ve heard how religion is the basis and foundation for so much anti-homosexual bigotry … but I don’t think that holds so much water. Yes, the “high atheists” do not hold fervent anti-gay positions. But … that’s not the whole of the matter. Look at two counter examples:
- Where did the big atheist 20th century Marxist horrors which were adamantly and ideologically atheist, such as China and the Soviet Union fall on the gay rights issues?
- Yes, the high atheists are not so anti-gay, but then again neither are the “high theists.” How about the six-pack or “low” atheists. What evidence do you have that they are more OK about gay rights than the bible belt/Wednesday night bingo crowd?
Try to compare apples and apples not apples and frogs.
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
From my “links” page, a response to the claim that “sore losers” are at work regarding claims of racism:
From sore winners:
People have to complain about the states that did go for McCain, claiming that all the white Southerners who voted for McCain were doing so merely because of racism rather than because they think Obama’s policies would be awful.
Nobody would argue that everybody who voted against Obama did so out of racism. However, when the old confederacy is pretty much the only place in the entire country that voted more Republican than last time, it makes you wonder. Unless you’re completely blind (willingly or not) to history.
One of the confusing things for me is the claim that voting against Mr Obama on the basis of race is racism and at the same time voting for him on the basis of race is not. It seems to me either both are or none is. If race is a valid basis to make a decision for a candidate … then that necessarily cuts both ways and that it is also is a valid reason for making a decision against a candidate. One claim on the Southern voting numbers is that a lot of those white Southern voters are Scots/Irish … and they voted more than some other regions for Mr McCain on account of ethnic heritage. But that is a little off topic. The salient point is if a decision by one person based on membership in group “A” is just (or unjust), then the particulars of membership in which group is not important.
The only argument that I’ve heard suggested that this claim that the logic works “both ways” is that one group is disadvantaged. That is is only moral to prefer one group over another if the group you prefer is disadvantaged. This apparently is very Rawlsian wiki cites the “2nd principle of justice” as:
- Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that (Rawls, 1971, p.303):
-
- a) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle).
- b) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity
This is a statement which I’ve been mulling over somewhat recently. I can’t make heads of tails of it … especially the first part. This is described as a “principle of justice”. This connects with the above in proposing that the notion that one decision based on group membership is just if it is of benefit to the “least-advantaged” members of that society (which is read as connecting specifically with that group). That is specifically, Blacks in America have had a long history of suffering injustice and therefore on account of that they are entitled in this case to be located as “least-advantaged”. That being the case, according to this “rule” then it the logic is not reversible via the “difference principle.”
Earlier forms of justice don’t take the economic or status of an individual into account, hence statues of “blind justice” and so on. The idea there is that justice is meted out not according to your membership in group or your personal status (or lack thereof) but based only on circumstance, deed, and perhaps motive. I’m unclear on why abandoning this is a good idea or how Mr Rawl’s notion of justice connects with and can be demonstrated to be “superior” to a the the standard blind one.
Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Mr Taleb in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable makes an essentially clean distinction between “Mediocristan” and “Extremistan” (I’ll attempt to summarize those in a bit). This distinction however is strained. He cites, for example, the extreme income disparities in Extremistan occupations, for example the high wages pulled in by celebrities. Now, there are fundamental differences in some high wage situations. It may be argued, perhaps successfully, that hundreds, if not thousands, could step into the shoes of say any given news broadcast anchor and pick up with not a big hitch. However, consider another big category of very visible salary discrepancies … sports. It might be interesting to say that Tom Warner(for example who is playing on MNF right now), any given baseball pitcher, or to pick on my favorite sport cycling do not deserve their wage. The problem is … people pay and are interested in that sport and their place is not replaceable. Their status and position is very much meritocratic. The reason that I, a once and future (ahem) amateur cyclist, am not a “highly compensated” star of the international peloton is not a factor of luck. Not luck but the meritocratic factors talent, abililty, and training tell more. Or consider for a moment your fate on a professional football field. Read the rest of this entry
Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 12:21 am
On my flight to the East Coast (New Jersey) I read the The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which in an of itself being #76 on the Amazon best-seller list is by the authors criteria itself a “Black Swan”. This book has a number of good ideas, but alas uses a number of fallacious notions and claims, some less critical some more so to stake its claim.
One of the interesting repeated targets of Mr Taleb’s scorn, which he terms Platonism, is one which is carried too far. Platonism, that is essentially the use of abstraction, is ridiculed and dismissed repeatedly. However, one might at the same time, put alongside the paper cited a few days ago of Mr Wigner’s on the unreasonable success of Mathematics in Physics (or one might say … the unreasonable success of Platonism in explaining the Physical universe).
I plan to get into more detail about some of the notions in this book during the rest of this week, but I’ll leave with a few short comments tonight.
- I had mentioned when I noted that I was going to be reading this book, that camparisons to the more traditional historical work by David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, might serve as a counterbalance to this book. In The Great Wave, Mr Fisher notes some intruiging research. In the last 800 years of Western history there have been a small countable number of periods of dramatic stability (or in the Mr Taleb’s terms the “Black Swans” had little impact) and periods of great instability (lots of Black Swans having greater effect) on political and social fronts. Mr Fisher correlates ecomonic price data of staples and commodities and lines them up with those historical periods and found a strong correlation. Periods of growing price instability especially in staples and other commodities precede and continue throughout periods of instabliity and during periods of relative price stability … political stability was also seen.
- Mr Taleb “cleans” up his argument a great deal. He presents occupations as being part of, or disconnected from, the affect of Black Swans, i.e. the improbable. One of his consistent examples is writing. However there in addition to luck (or the improbable) as connected with the career of writing at the same time a stable (non-Black Swan) related career one can derive from that. Not all aspiring writers are either wildly successful novelists like Ms Rowlings or operating machinery in Starbucks. Many, if not most, writers are writing copy for ordinary use. Writing technical manuals, textbooks, advertising copy, white papers, and so on. Programmers like the Woz made a killing, but there is an ordinary profession and stable livelihood to be made from perfecting and developing skill at programming (as at writing).
- It’s interesting to note that the ancient Chinese Lao-Tzu philosopher also considered the problem of the danger of upheaval and perhaps loosely interpreted the Black Swan in the political arena. Lao-Tzu suggested becoming a craftsman in a trade that was specifically not useful for the machinery of State, so you wouldn’t get drafted into the games of Nations and at the same time, being useful for society, but not useful for the state insured the greatest chance of not being caught up gristmill of intra-national and inter-national strife.
