Constructive criticism

It's not the only kind of criticism worth giving.

Why do people say "colorblindness" is racist?

The Church of Rationality lists a few possible reasons why people so often express this odd view. My favorite point:

You're not much of a punk rock insider if you like the Ramones. Everyone likes the Ramones. If you're an expert concerning some Portugese band whose whole output consists of flexidiscs published with Greek fanzines in the late 1980s, then we're talking. Likewise, you're not much of an anti-racist if you're simply against racism. Even the conservatives are against racism these days. You'll have to offer a little more. The more extreme, the better.

The best blog posts of 2009

Here they are, collected by Church of Rationality. He categorizes them by length and by "low-brow"/"mid-brow"/"high-brow."

I am biased since one of my blog posts is on the list. Mine is "long, mid-brow."

The post of "random thoughts" is full of life observations that I can strongly relate to. I do this all the time:

Have you ever been walking down the street and realized that you’re going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you’re crazy by randomly switching directions on the sidewalk.

This is the one observation from that post that stands out as being off the mark: 

I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it’s on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.

I have the opposite experience. If I look for music to listen to by scrolling through my iPod library arranged by artist, I always feel disappointed with how little of it I actually want to listen to compared with how much work I've put into building up the library. But if I put it on shuffle, I instantly realize that it's full of great music. My theory is that I enjoy the process of actually creating my own library more than the goal of having all the music I want. This might be why setting the music on shuffle is more enjoyable than trying to answer the question, "What's the very best music I could listen to right now?" -- because the shuffle simulates the more unpredictable process of discovering music in the first place.

The time-management theory of appreciating art and thought

LemmusLemmus swiftly refutes Ayn Rand's philosophy in this post on his blog, The Church of Rationality. 

I've never read Ayn Rand. And now that I've read that blog post, I feel fine about missing out on her work. Is that ignorant or close-minded of me?

Well, LemmusLemmus goes on to say:

And that's it with Ayn Rand and me. Of course I could read all of her books and see whether she has addressed this rather obvious objection anywhere, but given that time is a scarce resource I prefer to spend mine on stuff that promises to be more worthwhile. The fact that pretty much everyone acts like this is the reason that most people who call someone's work overrated aren't terribly qualified to make that judgment.

This is the same point I quoted from a Metafilter commenter in the post about "simple concepts":

By the time you have paid enough attention to a work of art to know whether it was a waste of time to take seriously, it is already too late for the answer to be useful.

I also made this point in my post about "my problem with rap":

I have a finite amount of free time in my life for listening to new music. Like every other person in the world, I can't build up an encyclopedic familiarity with every music genre in existence, so the most I can do is thoroughly explore some of them while writing off others as not worth my time. That's a time-management strategy, not an objective judgment. I'm sure there's brilliant rap music that I'm missing out on. (I loved the Outkast song "Miss Jackson" from a few years ago, for instance.) But I've heard enough from rappers about "bitches," "hos," and "niggers" to decide: my time would be better spent on music that might not make a single controversial statement about society but is challenging to the listener in more unexpected ways.

For the sake of simplicity, from now on I'll refer to this general observation as "the time-management theory of appreciating art and thought."

Who cares about blasphemy? Who'd want immortality?

I don't read novels anymore now that I'm not required to for school. So I'm grateful when people who do read them excerpt some of the good parts. Example:

She had always found a paradox in the crime of blasphemy, for it seemed to her that any God who could be discountenanced by the words of human beings was by definition not worthy of reverence.

That's from Michal Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, quoted by LemmusLemmus on his blog, The Church of Rationality. He gives the obvious solution:

[A]nti-blasphemy rules were not made by and for gods, but by and for believers.

Once you decide that it's OK to rationally scrutinize religion, the flaws become so obvious that, whether or not you're a believer, it feels a little embarrassing.

Another one:

Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

That's from Susan Ertz's Anger in the Sky, excerpted in the Yale Book of Quotations, via AskMetafilter.

Here's what I don't understand about how Heaven fits in with Christianity: I thought Christians justify the existence of evil in the world by saying you need free will to allow for goodness, and free will leads to evil human behavior. If Heaven is free of evil, doesn't that also mean people in Heaven aren't free, and doesn't that mean Heaven isn't very good?

Does free will solve the problem of evil?

I've been enjoying Bertrand Russell's concise refutations of influential philosophical arguments in his book History of Western Philosophy. Here's Russell's refutation of Spinoza's theory that your misfortunes only seem bad from your self-centered perspective, but cease to be problematic when seen as part of the universe as a whole:

I cannot accept this; I think that particular events are what they are, and do not become different by absorption into a whole. Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part.

Now here's his refutation of Leibniz's argument that there's a benevolent God who made this "the best of all possible worlds." Leibniz said the best possible world would contain free will, so God created a world with free will, which explains why bad things happen: they're human acts of free will. There are many obvious problems with this argument — for instance, there's a lot of bad stuff in the world that's not caused by human action. But Russell's refutation is particularly clever:

A Manichaean might retort that this is the worst of all possible worlds, in which the good things that exist serve only to heighten the evils. The world, he might say, was created by a wicked demiurge [i.e. a demon], who allowed free will, which is good, in order to make sure of sin, which is bad, and of which the evil outweighs the good of free will. The demiurge, he might continue, created some virtuous men, in order that they might be punished by the wicked; for the punishment of the virtuous is so great an evil that it makes the world worse than if no good men existed.

It's a commonplace to ridicule Leibniz's view that God has ensured that we live in "the best of all possible worlds." I mean, Voltaire made fun of it in his novel Candide, so it must be wrong. I'm guessing that people will balk at the "best of all possible worlds" idea when phrased like that, but if you phrase it more gently — "Things work out for the best" — it seems hugely influential.

I agree with Russell's response to Spinoza: cruel acts aren't transformed into good by being absorbed into the whole universe. This might be why I'm generally indifferent to religion. Unlike many secularists, though, I don't believe that cruelty and suffering are "just there" and don't have any larger meaning in the grand scheme of things. I don't have any more interest in an "It's all meaningless" view than in an "It's all for the best" view. What I do believe is that even if things that happen in the world do have some kind of ultimate meaning, the suffering is still there, and it shouldn't be rationalized away.

This explains the overwhelming instinct, cutting across political lines, that torture is just wrong, period. Even those who argue for exceptions to society's general "don't torture people" rule tend to rely on scenarios where the suffering caused by torture is far outweighed by preventing others from suffering -- the classic "ticking bomb," etc. This still implies that suffering itself is the basic unit that we're looking at in making moral assessments. So people are quibbling over a very narrow exception — maybe an important exception, but not one that calls into question the fundamental "torture is bad" consensus.

And so, no one takes the position: "Hey, go ahead and torture as much as you like! It's sure to be a net plus in the end — it'll be a learning experience, or it will be a ringing affirmation of our own free will, or something." Well ... no one applies this to human beings. But it's regularly applied to God. Bizarrely, God is held to lower moral standards than humans are.

UPDATE: Church of Rationality remarks on that last sentence: "John Althouse Cohen puts in another application to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations..."

UPDATE: Continued here.

The philosopher paradox

"Philosophers should be people who think especially well, but to have decided upon a career in philosophy marks you as irrational. How do you deal with that raging incoherence?"

That's my mom responding to a report on the hard economic times for philosophers.

Based on that report, it seems that philosophers at the latest American Philosophical Association conference have gotten desperate for topics. Their papers and panels at the conference included the following:

Philosophical Perspectives on Female Sexuality

Depression, Infertility and Erectile Dysfunction: The Invisibility of Female Sexuality in Medicine

Analyzing Bias in Evolutionary Explanations of Female Orgasm

Can you detect the subtle theme?

I'm not sure what the point of philosophy is, if that's what it's become.

But then, I've never quite understood the point of philosophy anyway. In the early days of this blog, I wrote:

I agree with what John Searle says in an interview in What Philosophers Think: that skepticism about the existence of the-real-world-as-we-know-it is like Zeno's Paradox: an intriguing, mind-bending puzzle that smart people will mull over but then quickly move on from, to focus on more important philosophical problems. You don't let Zeno's Paradox reshape your whole view of what philosophers do -- they're not on a mission to explain how there can be motion. But that seems to be roughly what's happened with analytic philosophy, thanks largely to Descartes. (Thus, my philosophy professor felt the need to qualify the steps of an argument with, "Assuming you believe that tables and chairs really exist ...")

This is one problem with studying philosophy: you're constantly told that you need to see certain things as problems. But they're not "problems" like "How do we fix the health care system?" or "How do we reduce crime?" In other words, they're not things that a normal person who's completely unfamiliar with the field would perceive as problems in need of solutions.

Of course, you could find problems in other fields that wouldn't be understood on their face as problems because they're laden with jargon or esoteric concepts. If these are real problems, though, they can at least be "understood" insofar as an expert can patiently explain the goal to a layperson: "It's important for us to figure out ____ because it could help us find a cure for such-and-such a disease," or whatever it does.

Even after spending hours and hours studying the philosophy of language (to take another example), I'd be hard-pressed to make the case that it's important for anyone to devote their life to explaining how it is that we can mean things through words. If you're like 99+% of humankind, you just accept that we do this, and move on with your life. And it seems pretty clear that if there's an option -- a perfectly feasible, easy option -- of just saying, "Oh well!" and moving on with your life ... and if this isn't a mere luxury enjoyed by some of the people while other people have to worry about it, but in fact the world would be just fine if no one worried about it ... then it's just not much of a "problem" at all.

That's my anti-philosophy philosophy.

And it's another example of the paradox my mom identified: if you're so brilliant at analyzing the world,* then why haven't you done a utilitarian calculus to figure out the extremely low probability that your philosophizing is going to accomplish anything?

* And have no doubt that philosophers are at least implicitly purporting to be brilliant. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has even made it explicit, saying that you should be "supersmart" to be a philosopher.


UPDATE: Church of Rationality gives a shot at answering that last question, declaring it the "Snarl of the Month." Or is it the Snark of the Month?

The problem with incentives under capitalism

First of all: 100th post!

OK . . . I don't know much about economics, but it's important to me to have some strong opinions about it anyway. If I have a strong opinion about something, that gives me a good feeling that I have some minimal understanding of it (which is open to question when it comes to me and economics).

[UPDATE: That paragraph elicited an unexpectedly strong reaction from LemmusLemmus over at Church of Rationality:

I say hats off for writing that. I'm pretty sure that 99% of humans, including myself, are like that, but no one ever admits it.]

So hearing this brief comment by Mickey Kaus in the latest "Bob & Mickey" Bloggingheads diavlog was a minor revelation for me. It could certainly provide the impetus for one to shift significantly leftward in one's economic views. The point seems so obvious that he couldn't have been the first to come up with it, but it hadn't occurred to me before.



I'm going to try to notice more instances of this, not just about bankruptcy. It obviously has huge implications for the controversy over the United States government's bailout of Wall Street in the current financial crisis, which is the context in which Kaus brought it up.

Someone should write a whole article based on this insight. Not me! To steal an old running feature that a blogger used to have, I should start "Jalcoh's assignment desk." I assign this to . . . Mickey Kaus! (By the way, the first paragraph in the blog post I just linked to was pretty prescient about terrorism.)

"Why is he waving a stuffed moose?"
No, it has nothing to do with Sarah Palin.

The 40 greatest grunge songs (35-31)

It's Friday, which means another 5 songs from the grunge top 40.

(Click here for the whole list.)

A quick disclaimer, since the definitional boundaries of the list have drawn comment from around the blogosphere:

As I said last week, my goal is not to spend two months just providing a dictionary definition of the word "grunge." If anyone wants to make a list like that, more power to you — send me your blog post and we can compare our lists! (Church of Rationality has already accepted the challenge! Except instead of staying with "grunge" and narrowing the definition, he's taken the opposite route: switching from "grunge" to "alternative" and expanding the timeline.)

I'm trying to collect songs that fit in that general style (and time period) but that stretched the boundaries of grunge and milked it for all it was worth. If they stretch the boundaries past the breaking point so it's a whole other genre that you wouldn't even call "grunge," then ... cool!

But more important than any of that, the "grunge" premise wasn't intended to open up an academic debate on the proper use of the term (which could hardly be more antithetical to the whole idea of grunge) — it's just an excuse for me to make a list of music I like. If you like the songs too, then mission accomplished.

On that note, here's this week's installment:

35. Dig - Believe

This is how it's done: young people who are really adamant about something or other, with five chords and two great hooks.




34. Superchunk - Hyper Enough

The intro to this video is an all-too-accurate reminder of a thousand band practices. No envelopes being pushed here, just a great guitar lead and tons of energy.




33. Belly - Feed the Tree

Here's a twist: a song without a wall of distorted guitars. Clean grunge!




32. My Bloody Valentine - Only Shallow

I think this is the earliest song on the list. I've made a point of staying within the '90s. You could start looking for "seminal" grunge songs from the '80s, and then pretty soon you're listing tracks from the Velvet Underground and the White Album. This is from 1990 — ancient.

You have to give them credit for pretty much inventing the Smashing Pumpkins. Compare this song to the next one, "Rocket," which came out a few years later. (Of course, you'll notice I rated the Pumpkins higher than MBV. Originality isn't everything!)




31. The Smashing Pumpkins - Rocket

Guitar-fuzz ecstasy with a video about childhood that always gives me goosebumps.

This song has a beautiful production that couldn't possibly be captured on YouTube, so make sure to get out your copy of Siamese Dream, turn up the volume, and give it a listen.

I shall be free!



I highly recommend the Smashing Pumpkins music video collection on DVD — each song includes the official video + an alternate version + commentary by band members and others.

>>> Go to #30-26 >>>