technological words

I had a thought while I was working the other day, and it really astounded me for a few seconds, but then I realized that it probably wasn’t that interesting. Nonetheless, here it is.

Languages track technological development. For example, computers, in their first form, were largely developed in the United States and Britain during WWII. Unsurprisingly, this word was then imported to other languages who needed a word to denote what had been up until that point, nonexistent. So, computer in German is “der Computer” even though apparently, German tried to institute its own homegrown word, “die Datenverarbeitungsanlage,” which roughly means “the data working device.” (wonder why that didn’t catch on?). Also, in Japanese, computer is KONPYUTA, spelled in script that indicates that it is a loan word.

So, the provisional thesis is that the group that develops a technology gets to have their discovery immortalized forever in the language that they spoke. A small piece of historical research confirms this. In Europe, aqueducts were introduced by the Romans (and named by them), and so, unsurprisingly, we still use this word today, and it survives in French and German as well.

The death of altruism

Psychological  egoism is a doctrine about the way the world is. The claim is that people are self-interested and never altruistic, but the truth of this claim depends on how it’s interpreted.

One view would claim that an action is egoistic if one’s own advancement is it’s goal. On this interpretation, it seems that psychological egoism is plainly false, because we act for the benefit of other people all the time. People take their  parents to the hospital, play with the neighbor’s kids, and give to charity, for the benefit of helping others. One might say, “but these people gain from such actions; they feel better for being better people.” This may be true but this satisfaction is only a side effect, and oftentimes, to get this satisfaction, one must act for the benefit of the other person. Giving to charity in front of one’s boss to try to help raise one’s chances for a promotion usually doesn’t make us feel good, but giving for the sake of giving does.

The move that psychological egoist partisans often make at this point is something like the following “well, if you did something, then you must have wanted to do it, which means that you did it for some reason that appealed to you and thus your action was egoistic.” The problem with this approach is that it misses the point. Of course we can only intentionally (as opposed to by accident) do things that we want to do, but this is just to say that the action is ours and not someone else’s. The more important point is that the person who wants to help others, though they want to help others, is the very paradigm of an altruistic person: they have a desire to help others.

If an egoistic action is just one that we choose to do, then of course there are no actions that are no egoistic, but that’s a tautological and uninteresting formulation of the theory. The better question to ask is “what is the content of a particular choice?” If the goal of my action is the benefit to someone else, then my action is altruistic even if I cannot help but being pleased by the good that I do.

the worst street in America

I haven’t visited every street in America, but I think Boston is a great place to begin the search for our country’s worst street.

And in fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve already found my answer. Dorchester Ave, the main street running through *duh* — Dorchester, is pretty terrible. It’s very similar to Main street in Everett, except worse. The street is just two lanes, and is used by every bus, commuter, and trash collection truck in the city. Of course, there are many, many lights, most of which come on and off, and they aren’t synchronized. I spent about 25 minutes, crawling through about 10 blocks.

Of course everything I’ve said so far is just to say that Dorchester Ave is a street in Boston, but there’s something about Dorchester Ave that makes it particularly ineffective. Maybe its the criss-crossing roads that splice into it at all sorts of angles, or the density of shops, but in any case, maneuvering is almost impossible. Google maps says that my route should have taken about 4 minutes, which was only off by about a factor of 5: the Boston destination multiplier.

Put your name on your paper?

I sat in on the first session of a class that I’m TAing and I was struck by a thought: I should grade papers blind.

Almost every competitive system that has benefits attached to its operation operates on this principle. Judges must abstain if they are personally known to or affiliated with one of the parties, muscians auditioning for a position often play from behind a curtain, and philosophy papers that have been submitted for publication are also read blind. Why are the papers of students not read in this fashion?

The risks are large for not employing this procedure. First of all, TAs have contact with students fairly regularly throughout the semester and so often develop opinions about them that can become deep. Second, TA/student romances are not unheard of, again skewing the possibility of objectivity.

The unfortunate downside is that TAs often need to be able to connect a paper with a student, that way, the TA can connect the student’s writing to their positions in class, and can see if the student followed advice given in office hours. In fact, the personal relationship is what TAs are supposed to be for.

Nonetheless, I think from my personal perspective, blind grading probably has more benefits than burdens. Just today, someone in my class answered a question, and I didn’t like the answer, and I’m sure, subconsciously, this will affect me when I grade this student’s paper, even if I try to compensate for it. Better to just take the names off of the papers entirely.

an objection to utilitarianism?

Is utility a homogenous good that can be compared in discrete lumps like bricks or ounces of coffee?

Take this case. I could prevent you from having to pass a kidney stone (one of the most painful thing that can happen to someone, second to childbirth according to some) or I could prevent 100,000 people from experiencing a 10 minute long and relatively mild headache (assume there will be more total pain with the 100,000). Utilitarianism says that I should prevent the headaches, but it seems that our sympathies lie with the kidney stone victim.

What I think is interesting about this case is that pain or disutility can be so easily aggregated in the way necessary for utilitarianism. The headaches here contemplated, though they are painful, are just something people should endure, and thus, to reach the equivalent of certain pains requires more than just adding up a bunch of smaller ones.

This is kind of a shallow criticism of utilitarianism, but one that I can’t help thinking has something to it.

a theory of good music

People often wonder what standards apply in art. What makes Led Zeppelin better than Taylor Swift. To many people, Taylor Swift is more enjoyable, but if music quality shouldn’t be a democracy, than what are the standards that govern it?

Here is my theory. When I first listened, to Led Zeppelin, I liked many of their songs. For instance, songs like Black Dog and Rock and Roll are pretty much universally appealing. However, I skipped many other songs because they started too slow, or didn’t stand out. I just wanted to go back to the hits. But then something happened, and from my conversations with other people, this is not a rare occurrence: the more obscure songs would play longer and longer before I would realize that they were playing and the reach to move on to the next hit, and at some magical moment, the song that I thought of as “after Black Dog” became “that great song after Black Dog” that I would then find out the name of.

What this indicates to me  is that great music has the ability to train the ear to appreciate new types of music, and to make sense (not in an explicit intellectual way, but in a more intuitive way). For bands like Zeppelin, the Beatles, and the Cars (for me anyway), each song  is a gateway to the rest of the bands corpus. Not so for some pop sensations. A pop hit is a catchy tune that’s good in its own right, but its horizons are limited; it doesn’t aim at anything else. In fact, to extend the point, the best bands can regiment the ear to even move to different genres and bands altogether.

Thus, in a nutshell, my theory as it stands right now, is that good music is educational in a non-cognitive sense. Weight lifting trains muscles to lift more weight, and music, in a much more eloquent fashion, trains the ear to hear more.

moral particularism

I’m taking  a class this semester that investigates a doctrine known as moral particularism. I hadn’t heard of it until now.

According to the standard view of morality, there are different factors, when taken together, yield a conclusion about whether the action (usually its an action, but it could be a person or an institution etc. etc.) is morally right or wrong. For example, a common view is that an increase in total utility is always good. It may not be a decisive, but if there are two exactly similar situations, and one had more total utility than the other, than the one with more utility is the better situation. A summary for this view is that moral factors always function in the same way.

Particularism claims that moral factors operate like words, and can have different effects in different situations. A good example, which isn’t mine, is the word “and.” It doesn’t always function as a conjunction. Take these two sentences:  “two and two make four” and “And just what do you think you’re doing?” In these sentences, and means something different than it usually does, or it means nothing at all. The particularist claims that moral factors works this way too so that inferences like this: “if factor F makes this action wrong, then it must operate in the same way over in this situation over here,” are false.

I’m not sure what to think about particularism except that in one sense, its already well accepted. Of course some moral factors change in the presence of others. For example, hurting someone tends to make actions wrong, but not if they consent. The presence of consent changes the force of hurting someone from wrong making to right making. But again, this would mean that moral factors interact in complex ways, doing one thing in one situation and something else in another, just like the elements. But even the elements have rules, its just that they are complex. In a similar way, why can’t moral rules be complex too, ie self defense is justified, but not against innocent threats, or lying is wrong, except to save a friend. Must the particularist claim that there are no moral principles? It seems that suitably complex, there are such principles, but this debate will be sharpened hopefully in this class I’m taking.

Obama’s bank tax

It’s too early to tell what sort of form Obama’s proposed bank tax will take, but I confess that I don’t really know what’s going on.

First, the idea was that the banks needed subsidies because if they were forced to accept the consequences of their risky actions, then we would all lose due to the freeze of credit markets. So we gave the banks a bunch of money.

But having done that, Obama’s new idea is to tax banks based on the assets that they have. In a recent speech, Obama said “we want our money back, and we’re going to get it,” which is fine, but I thought we loaned money to the banks (actually, I’m not really sure how TARP works), so won’t we get it back? In this same speech though, Obama also says that his economic team has gotten most of the money back, but if that’s true, why get so heavy-handed about getting it back? Is it just a political maneuver that is supposed to play on a supposedly innate prejudice against wall street?

I don’t mean for this to be a whiny ad hominem attack on Obama’s policies though, so I’ll try to get to a substantive point. Here it is: how will taxing assets make banks take less risky decisions. Sure, a tax will reduce the payoff to gambling by making the “winnings” less, but if the tax is on current assets as well, then it also makes banks poorer if they don’t gamble at all. To dissuade a certain type of behavior, one has to tax that behavior and not just the wealth of the banks in general, which will just leave them poorer. Now, as I understand, traditional capital that is raised from savings accounts (like mine and yours) is immune to this tax, and so in that sense, some amount of risk taking will be averted since banks who raise capital the old fashioned way — by holding it for people — will gain under this regime.

Maybe there is something here about bonuses, and Obama seems to get pretty worked up when talking about them (and I don’t blame him), but surely there is a better way to get at large bonuses other than taxing the entire asset bases of large banks.

Obama and course correction

Matt Yglesias has this post in which he notes that Obama’s popularity has declined, but is still at 50%. Also, the people who don’t like the job he’s doing is a few points less. Here’s Matt’s graph.

Matt also goes on to say that Obama’s numbers, from a liberal standpoint, are better than they appear, because some of his loss in popularity is due to liberals who don’t think he’s liberal enough; they’ve become disillusioned with his moderate turn.

What’s more, more than zero people who don’t like Obama anymore don’t like him because he hasn’t been leftwing enough.

Of course, this point is a little deceptive, because contained in the 50% who support Obama currently are presumably people who now like him because he’s more conservative than they expected.

If these two effects balance each other out, then the numbers in the graph above represent exactly what they purport to represent; that Obama has become less popular, although not terribly so.

Now, Matt might be saying that Obama’s loss in popularity is due to his moderate turn, and that he would have retained his higher ratings if only he had remained more steadfastly liberal, which is a thesis I can’t rule out on the evidence I have. However, if the dissatisfaction registered in this graph is related to Obama’s perceived day to day competence and not his issue stances, then it’s not biased or exaggerated in the way that Matt claims.

We just don’t have any controls to assess what Obama’s popularity would look like under various levels of liberal policy stumping. It might be that Obama’s popularity would have fallen much more rapidly if he had tried to steer a more liberal course.

are television shows better than they used to be?

On this episode of blogging heads, the claim is made that the past decade had the greatest TV, and Matt Yglesias argues that this is due to the growth of DVD sales and DVR equipment. The relative ease with which people can record their favorite shows, according to this theory, allows writers and execs to pursue more  story driven formats. The example offered is The Wire.

It’s hard to get good data on this theory, but even crude measure cast doubt on this claim. First, DVR penetration was roughly 10% in 2005, and the wire began in 2002, and never really attained an extremely high viewership at any point in its run. So, at the very least it doesn’t seem like DVR proliferation allowed TV execs to experiment with a different show format; it seems HBO was just doing what it always does, using its pay base to create good TV. Rather than technology, it seems that the artistic vision of the writer, David Simon, played a large part in  making The Wire so great.

(source)

Also, it’s not clear that the use of DVRs necessarily means people will watch episodes they would have otherwise missed, some people just use DVR’s as a convenience to watch the show later in the night or without the commercials.

Finally, a more general point, which is that the rise of DVRs will likely mean worse TV in the future. True, people can watch complicated shows, but there will be no incentive to write such shows, because advertisement space for primetime (or whenever) will be worth much less. Of course, HBO will be immune to these sorts of cost pressures, but again, HBO was always immune to these cost pressures; their model was around before and  it will  likely stay around.