Mostly this quip is used defend sloppy decision-making, or to justify the indefinite deferral of decision-making. In other words, laziness.
The New York Times today belittles craigslist’s censorship, calling it a “stunt” and “ploy” and labeling as “screeds” craisglist CEO Jim Buckmaster’s defenses of the service-and of free speech-against attorneys general and against ratings-starved CNN ambushing Craig. Nowhere does The Times disclose its own dead dog in this hunt, its loss of billions in classified revenue (in blogs, we’d be expected to, eh?). But the paper does acknowledge that the law is on craigslist’s side even if its enforcers are not and that this is a matter of free speech, which should put The Times and its journalists on craigslist’s side as well.
But they’re not. I’m not suggesting conspiracy; I rarely do. But I do see old power structures huddling together against the cold breath of technologists bringing change.
‘He was not to be described as a happy person,” Diana Trilling wrote in a memoir about her husband, the critic Lionel Trilling. “Indeed, he thought poorly of happiness and of people who claimed to be happy or desired happiness above other gratifications in life … seriousness was the desirable condition of man.” It is easy to make all sorts of assumptions about why an unhappy person would not value happiness; and indeed why seriousness might be seen as an alternative to happiness; or just to say that it was seriousness that made Trilling happy. One of the ways in which happiness is made to seem like an inclusive ideal – the ways it charms us – is by our asserting that by definition the things that matter most to us must make us happy, that that is how we know they are good. It’s as though one word could do the work of the moral imagination.
Or can we just say that if happiness is one’s aspiration, then learning about the history of the slave trade, say, or watching the news, or indeed ageing are all to be avoided. And yet learning about the terrible things people can do to each other, and the history of the terrible things people have done to each other, is important – we can’t imagine a life without it – and gives some people a great deal of pleasure; pleasure, as psychoanalysts might say, of various kinds. Anyone who has or knows children, or remembers being a child, will know how happy it can make them tormenting their siblings. And so if we value happiness we can’t help but wonder what morality it entails, what kind of morality it might involve us in.
The feel-good conclusion from our work is that in most majors (e.g., History, English, Biology, social sciences, …) students with modest SAT scores can still obtain high GPAs, presumably through hard work. However, we found almost no cases of SAT-M scorers below about 90th percentile who obtained high upper division GPAs in physics or pure mathematics (second link below).
If you want to make excellent stuff, you need to make a lot of stuff.
If you want to make a lot of stuff, you’ll make a lot of crap. If you want to make excellent stuff, you need to make a lot of crap…
And that’s okay, because you get judged by your best work, not your bad work.
— How do I write so much, you ask? Well, glad you asked - Sebastian Marshall
Not sure I agree. But interesting.
Recently, while seeing a patient in an intensive-care unit at my hospital, I stopped to talk with the critical-care physician on duty, someone I’d known since college. “I’m running a warehouse for the dying,” she said bleakly. Out of the ten patients in her unit, she said, only two were likely to leave the hospital for any length of time. More typical was an almost eighty-year-old woman at the end of her life, with irreversible congestive heart failure, who was in the I.C.U. for the second time in three weeks, drugged to oblivion and tubed in most natural orifices and a few artificial ones. Or the seventy-year-old with a cancer that had metastasized to her lungs and bone, and a fungal pneumonia that arises only in the final phase of the illness. She had chosen to forgo treatment, but her oncologist pushed her to change her mind, and she was put on a ventilator and antibiotics. Another woman, in her eighties, with end-stage respiratory and kidney failure, had been in the unit for two weeks. Her husband had died after a long illness, with a feeding tube and a tracheotomy, and she had mentioned that she didn’t want to die that way. But her children couldn’t let her go, and asked to proceed with the placement of various devices: a permanent tracheotomy, a feeding tube, and a dialysis catheter. So now she just lay there tethered to her pumps, drifting in and out of consciousness.
Almost all these patients had known, for some time, that they had a terminal condition. Yet they—along with their families and doctors—were unprepared for the final stage. “We are having more conversation now about what patients want for the end of their life, by far, than they have had in all their lives to this point,” my friend said. “The problem is that’s way too late.” In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.”
— Hospice medical care for dying patients - Atul Gawande
The article is outstanding; please take the time to go read it, and think about what you want to happen to you when you become terminally ill.
What the authors conclude from this accumulated evidence is that coprolalia, then, comes from some sort of urge to disrupt or disturb others. In fact, they say, coprolalia is a kind of linguistic aggression: “The utterance of obscenities is a form of aggressive behavior, and there may be failure in the control of these brief aggressive impulses in Tourette syndrome.” That’s an entirely different dysfunction—and, in my mind, a far more interesting one—than some twitchy vocal cords.
But if you really, truly are just defining the word “moral,” then all you are doing is assigning a symbol (“moral”) to a concept (increasing human flourishing). You have not proven anything about that concept; you’ve just given it a new name. One has to wonder what the point is. After all, just as in the “God” example above, we already have a name for the concept of increasing human flourishing – we call it “increasing human flourishing.”
And if it feels like you’re doing more than just re-naming something, that’s probably because you haven’t sufficiently scrubbed the symbol “moral” clean of its other associations before you defined it. Typically, the word is used to refer to how people ought to behave, and you haven’t scrubbed away that implicit definition before adding a new one. So instead of setting a symbol equal to a concept (“moral” = increasing human flourishing), you have the sense that you have equated a concept with another concept (how people ought to behave = increasing human flourishing). That’s not a definition, it’s a claim, and it needs support.
Instead of growing a random network forward according to an evolutionary model, we decompose the actual observed network backwards in time, as dictated by the model,” they say. “The resulting sequence of networks constitute a model-inferred history of the present-day network.” This is network archaeology.
That’s significant because the result depends specifically on the network under investigation, rather than solely on the growth model used to generate it.
They go on to show the power of this idea by inferring the history of several networks. For example, they are able to accurately estimate the time at which users of last.fm joined the network simply by looking at the structure today.
From an economic point of view, we should expect firms that compete for and rely on government contracts, such as weapons manufacturers and prison operators, to maximise the spread between the amount billed and the actual cost of delivering the service. If contractors can get away with providing less value for money than would the government-run alternative, they will. Moreover, contractors have every incentive to make themselves seem necessary. It is well-known that public prison employee unions constitute a powerful constituency for tough sentencing policies that lead to larger prison populations requiring additional prisons and personnel. The great hazard of contracting out incarceration “services” is that private firms may well turn out to be even more efficient and effective than unions in lobbying for policies that would increase prison populations.
Ignoring variance and how it relates to group size is a simple but common error. As Wainer notes, building on a discussion in Gelman and Nolan, counties with low cancer rates tend to be rural counties in the south, mid-west and west. Is it the clean country air or some other factor peculiar to rural counties which accounts for this fact? Probably not. The countries with the highest cancer rates also tend to be rural counties in the south, mid-west and west! Once again, small size and random variation appear to be the main culprit.
About a year and a half ago, after dinner at a favourite local restaurant, and having entered into that zone of philosophical clarity that sets in around the dessert wine, my wife and I had the sudden simultaneous realisation that it was time for a change. For most of our adult lives, we had lived in the suburb of Newtown in Sydney - a hyper-urban jungle densely packed with coffee shops and theatres, inhabited by a thronging mixture of students and bohemians with counterculturally-correct hairdos. It was all beginning to seem a bit tired and same-ish. We needed more time and more space. We needed to get back to the essentials of life.
Four weeks later our furniture was in a shipping container en-route to Dunedin, a small university town near the southern tip of New Zealand. We decided to work together from home, keeping our schedules flexible to make time for walks, reading, cooking, and (more recently) spending time with our son. It was a huge risk - it was quite possible that the isolation would impose a punishing work travel regime on me, or put a crimp in my wife’s very specialised career in linguistics. It took enterprise, determination and a no small amount of possibly-foolish optimism, but it’s all worked out. Our leap of faith has turned out to be one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. Dunedin is a breathtakingly beautiful place to live - I still can’t quite believe that I can get up from my desk, and within 20 minutes be on a deserted beach littered with lazy sea lions basking in the winter sun.
