On beliefs in mostly a roundabout way
Enlightenment is emptiness. For a scion of the modernist paradigm, that's a hard truth to accept, but accept it you must.
Enlightenment narrows the space for belief. Belief is an odd word. We use the same word for two different, but related, concepts. When I say I believe that Paris is the capital of France, or that 2 plus 2 is 4, or that rust is iron oxide, I am saying something different from saying that I believe in a god, or that life has a purpose, or that I will have an afterlife.
The first set of beliefs are conventions that you can know or not know, but you cannot challenge. You cannot have a true belief that Toulouse is the capital of France (if you are sane) unless you simply do not know properly what France is. But of course you do know that--no one who reads this is that lacking in knowledge, or at least I wouldn't have thought so--but doubtless for each of you we could find something that is true by convention but you do not know it.
And it should be clear that this kind of belief does not involve a judgement. To be clear, consider the difference between saying I believe that Medoc comes from southeast France, from the Bordeaux region, and saying I believe that Medoc is the world's finest wine. (I think also that it is hard to describe it as a lie if you are wrong in the first case, because you would not ordinarily lie about facts by convention, and if you are wrong, you would not be assumed to be lying, just mistaken; but in the second case, it is easy to lie, and you may be assumed to be some of the time, because you can easily misrepresent your beliefs of this type. But am I lying if I say that Medoc is the world's finest wine? I do not actually hold that belief--I don't have an opinion. Am I lying if you agree and not if you don't? We often believe that people are lying simply because what they believe is different from what we believe. Indeed, you can lie about the former type of belief more readily when your correspondent doesn't know the truth, and your lie should correspondingly be more believable: if you do not know where Medoc is, I can likely tell you that it is in Burgundy and you have no reason not to believe it. What generally stops us from doing this is the likelihood of your being unmisled.)
But increasing the set of beliefs of the first kind tends to leave you unable to have the second kind. The world, when explicable, becomes mundane, and the space in which beliefs in the intangible can live is narrowed. In a sense, you stop caring whether there is more to it: the solution you have is complete in itself and the world becomes manageable.
***
I don't know where I was going with that. My point is quite small though: as you learn more about
how things work, you have less space for fantasies about how things work.
So if I know that I am a purely physical being, and can explain the appearance of a self purely mechanically, I no longer have space in my worldview for an eternal life.
Which is a pisser.
But on the other hand, I sometimes think to myself, well, you don't do anything much with your life now, so what use would more of it be? And I have a clear insight that this is true of any one of us: our achievements will be dust given the right timeframe. This seems to me to excuse lack of purpose or ambition. Purpose is ridiculous in a huge universe, and ambition meaningless in a life with a limit that is so short.
***
I was thinking today about Searle's
Chinese room. I disagree with Searle that semantics is separate from syntax, as it happens. I believe "understanding", in the sense he is using it, is an epiphenomenon of the processing of information by syntactical rules, not something that exists as a thing in itself.
In other words, you understand Chinese because you can do certain sorts of mental processing, not because there is a property of understanding Chinese that is somehow an overlay on that processing.
I am interested in Searle's Chinese gym answer to Churchland's connectionist attack on his thought experiment.
Imagine, if you will, a Chinese gymnasium, with many monolingual English speakers working in parallel, producing output indistinguishable from that of native Chinese speakers: each follows their own (more limited) set of instructions in English. Still, Searle insists, obviously, none of these individuals understands; and neither does the whole company of them collectively. It's intuitively utterly obvious, Searle maintains, that no one and nothing in the revised "Chinese gym" experiment understands a word of Chinese either individually or collectively. Both individually and collectively, nothing is being done in the Chinese gym except meaningless syntactic manipulations from which intentionality and consequently meaningful thought could not conceivably arise.
I am not clear though why the human brain should be considered to be any different from the Chinese gym. The instructions that neurons follow are like the instructions in English that the people in the gym receive, and their outputs are like the sentences of Chinese that Searle's Chinese room produces. The neurons do not understand the process.
Searle wants an explanation for the
understanding that a Chinese speaker has of Chinese. But he is making the assumption that the Chinese speaker
does understand Chinese without plainly explaining what understanding it is and how it differs from simply being able to produce it by following certain rules.
Why does that explanation lack? Because Searle assumes it. He assumes that there
just is a mind that
just does think, and that thinking does not need to be defined in this case (well, we all know what it feels like, at least, so we know it as a phenomenon).
I've never been much convinced by arguments that piles of stones and cardboard tubes cannot think, because I do not see how a pile of stones and a cardboard tube are sufficiently different from a bunch of neurons that one can say the latter is capable of something the former is not
just because of some special factor one has that the other doesn't. (By special factor, I mean not some ordinary factor such as being organic, because I think Searle and his kin would claim that a machine made out of hydrocarbons could not think either.)
In other words, I am not a dualist.
***
Eastern religions see enlightenment as the extinction of the self. You wake up to reality (which is unitary) and realise it has no space for the self. Science is proving Eastern thought right in that respect.
But it is, imo, massively wrong in many other respects. Most religions address a couple of fundamental questions: how did I get here and why should I live in a particular way? (The second question is not so much, what is a good life? although that is a precursor to it.) It seems that you could pretty much define any metaphysics as a religion so long as it answers those questions. The formal aspects of religion are in many ways just frills.
But without ego, it's hard to see why
I should live in any particular way, or why how you got here is a particularly difficult question.
If we extinguish the self, it's hard to see why we need to escape becoming. If I am not, I did not ever become and will not become again.
(Before I receive a spanking from someone who understands Buddhism, please be clear that I understand how these contradictions are resolved; but I reject the resolution.)
Partly, of course, you need a theory of afterlife to provide a motivation for moral behaviour. We have motivation on a mundane level for cooperative behaviour (and this is arguably sufficient for a moral code, particularly if it is reinforced with a range of punitive behaviours that can be expected from others) but we do not have a motivation for
being good as an aim in itself.
There is for sure a contradiction between nonself and becoming, and I don't think the analogy of a candle lighting another candle explains it away. I think that in the development of Eastern thought, it's likely that the concept of a continuing self must once have been established but was abandoned. We
feel like we are not extinguishable, that we are something separate from the material world, separate even from our own bodies (even if you are not a dualist, the horse and jockey metaphor likely works for you, because it
feels somewhat right).
***
We all have many beliefs that we believe to be of the first type but we do not know the evidence for them. I am not sure whether they are a third type of belief. I suppose they are. The first are nearly all "beliefs by convention": 2 + 2 is 4 because that is what those symbols are. I do not know whether 2 + 2 = 4 is the same thing as "two rocks plus two rocks are four rocks" but I think it is at least possible that it isn't. (I have been reading about number theory and it's quite striking that some of the fundamental numbers are not readily expressible in our number system: by which I mean they are not "closable". Pi is almost ineffable! You can describe its effects; you can explain methods of deriving it; but you cannot say what it, itself, is. It's just pi. And by "closable", I mean that you cannot describe it in finite terms by our number system: the description of pi cannot be smaller than our universe, even though pi can be contained by it. The same is true of e and i. Maybe they have a kind of meaning for mathematicians that they do not for me; I do not know what to make of their oddness, their "unclosability" (I am not sure whether there is any difference between that and "irrationality"). Anyway, number theory resembles a bag of clever tricks to make numbers work more than it does a description of anything "real". Anyone who has looked into how quite simple theorems were proved will know what I mean.)
I mean something like the big bang. I was talking to A today about the big bang, and she asked, as people are wont to do, how something could come out of nothing. Now, I know that something did not come out of nothing, because there wasn't even nothing, but I don't know what that means.
I believe it was like that but I don't know why you would believe it was like that.
I'm not in general fond of belief by trust (although it's a necessary outcome of the specialisation of knowledge that is a necessary outcome of the sheer volume of stuff we know) but I do not know how I would be able to acquire, or having acquired, understand, the evidence. I mean, I can go to Paris and verify that it is the capital of France, or I can take the view that it is because everyone says so (a sort of "black swan" theory of Paris' being the capital of France: a black swan disproves "swans are white" and someone's saying that Toulouse is the capital of France may not be a disproof but at least provides some evidence, however tiny, that Paris might not be--which allows the meaning of "is capital of" to be extended sufficiently to be useful in both "Paris is the capital of France" and "Jerusalem is the capital of Israel").
***
I think that if music has meaning then it disproves Searle.
I think you can view music as being absolute, but we interpret it as having meaning by some mechanism that does not belong in music, or you can view it as having meaning within itself.
Is it clear that numbers are the same? I think it should be. Either they are meaningful because their meaning lies within them and the processes that elaborate them, or they are meaningful because we apply an external semantics to them.
I do not think that music has meaning but I think Searle is still wrong.
There is no contradiction in this section and I defy anyone to find one. If you think there is one, you are simply unable to understand that disproofs are not limited by the nonexistence of any particular disproof (although that does not mean that they cannot be limited--although in general, they
are unlimited: in other words, you can't prove a thing true because you do not know whether there really are no black swans, only that none of the previous swans was in fact black, even though some were claimed to be). In other words, even if I can't disprove Searle this way, it doesn't mean he cannot be disproved in another way. This truth is precisely what creationists rely on, and why they cannot be dismissed
finally. It's also why PZ Myers is an idiot, I'm sorry to say, and Dawkins too. Each of them is correct that there are no black swans in evidence but each makes the mistake of thinking that this proves there are no black swans. God can create a black swan at any point that he wishes though, and there is nothing PZ can do to prove that wrong. That is simply an axiom of reason, painful though it may be to accept fully. God
can exist: I do not believe that the belief space for God will ever be sufficiently small, even if it does seem small enough right now.
On beliefs in mostly a roundabout way
Enlightenment is emptiness. For a scion of the modernist paradigm, that's a hard truth to accept, but accept it you must.
Enlightenment narrows the space for belief. Belief is an odd word. We use the same word for two different, but related, concepts. When I say I believe that Paris is the capital of France, or that 2 plus 2 is 4, or that rust is iron oxide, I am saying something different from saying that I believe in a god, or that life has a purpose, or that I will have an afterlife.
The first set of beliefs are conventions that you can know or not know, but you cannot challenge. You cannot have a true belief that Toulouse is the capital of France (if you are sane) unless you simply do not know properly what France is. But of course you do know that--no one who reads this is that lacking in knowledge, or at least I wouldn't have thought so--but doubtless for each of you we could find something that is true by convention but you do not know it.
And it should be clear that this kind of belief does not involve a judgement. To be clear, consider the difference between saying I believe that Medoc comes from southeast France, from the Bordeaux region, and saying I believe that Medoc is the world's finest wine. (I think also that it is hard to describe it as a lie if you are wrong in the first case, because you would not ordinarily lie about facts by convention, and if you are wrong, you would not be assumed to be lying, just mistaken; but in the second case, it is easy to lie, and you may be assumed to be some of the time, because you can easily misrepresent your beliefs of this type. But am I lying if I say that Medoc is the world's finest wine? I do not actually hold that belief--I don't have an opinion. Am I lying if you agree and not if you don't? We often believe that people are lying simply because what they believe is different from what we believe. Indeed, you can lie about the former type of belief more readily when your correspondent doesn't know the truth, and your lie should correspondingly be more believable: if you do not know where Medoc is, I can likely tell you that it is in Burgundy and you have no reason not to believe it. What generally stops us from doing this is the likelihood of your being unmisled.)
But increasing the set of beliefs of the first kind tends to leave you unable to have the second kind. The world, when explicable, becomes mundane, and the space in which beliefs in the intangible can live is narrowed. In a sense, you stop caring whether there is more to it: the solution you have is complete in itself and the world becomes manageable.
***
I don't know where I was going with that. My point is quite small though: as you learn more about
how things work, you have less space for fantasies about how things work.
So if I know that I am a purely physical being, and can explain the appearance of a self purely mechanically, I no longer have space in my worldview for an eternal life.
Which is a pisser.
But on the other hand, I sometimes think to myself, well, you don't do anything much with your life now, so what use would more of it be? And I have a clear insight that this is true of any one of us: our achievements will be dust given the right timeframe. This seems to me to excuse lack of purpose or ambition. Purpose is ridiculous in a huge universe, and ambition meaningless in a life with a limit that is so short.
***
I was thinking today about Searle's
Chinese room. I disagree with Searle that semantics is separate from syntax, as it happens. I believe "understanding", in the sense he is using it, is an epiphenomenon of the processing of information by syntactical rules, not something that exists as a thing in itself.
In other words, you understand Chinese because you can do certain sorts of mental processing, not because there is a property of understanding Chinese that is somehow an overlay on that processing.
I am interested in Searle's Chinese gym answer to Churchland's connectionist attack on his thought experiment.
Imagine, if you will, a Chinese gymnasium, with many monolingual English speakers working in parallel, producing output indistinguishable from that of native Chinese speakers: each follows their own (more limited) set of instructions in English. Still, Searle insists, obviously, none of these individuals understands; and neither does the whole company of them collectively. It's intuitively utterly obvious, Searle maintains, that no one and nothing in the revised "Chinese gym" experiment understands a word of Chinese either individually or collectively. Both individually and collectively, nothing is being done in the Chinese gym except meaningless syntactic manipulations from which intentionality and consequently meaningful thought could not conceivably arise.
I am not clear though why the human brain should be considered to be any different from the Chinese gym. The instructions that neurons follow are like the instructions in English that the people in the gym receive, and their outputs are like the sentences of Chinese that Searle's Chinese room produces. The neurons do not understand the process.
Searle wants an explanation for the
understanding that a Chinese speaker has of Chinese. But he is making the assumption that the Chinese speaker
does understand Chinese without plainly explaining what understanding it is and how it differs from simply being able to produce it by following certain rules.
Why does that explanation lack? Because Searle assumes it. He assumes that there
just is a mind that
just does think, and that thinking does not need to be defined in this case (well, we all know what it feels like, at least, so we know it as a phenomenon).
I've never been much convinced by arguments that piles of stones and cardboard tubes cannot think, because I do not see how a pile of stones and a cardboard tube are sufficiently different from a bunch of neurons that one can say the latter is capable of something the former is not
just because of some special factor one has that the other doesn't. (By special factor, I mean not some ordinary factor such as being organic, because I think Searle and his kin would claim that a machine made out of hydrocarbons could not think either.)
In other words, I am not a dualist.
***
Eastern religions see enlightenment as the extinction of the self. You wake up to reality (which is unitary) and realise it has no space for the self. Science is proving Eastern thought right in that respect.
But it is, imo, massively wrong in many other respects. Most religions address a couple of fundamental questions: how did I get here and why should I live in a particular way? (The second question is not so much, what is a good life? although that is a precursor to it.) It seems that you could pretty much define any metaphysics as a religion so long as it answers those questions. The formal aspects of religion are in many ways just frills.
But without ego, it's hard to see why
I should live in any particular way, or why how you got here is a particularly difficult question.
If we extinguish the self, it's hard to see why we need to escape becoming. If I am not, I did not ever become and will not become again.
(Before I receive a spanking from someone who understands Buddhism, please be clear that I understand how these contradictions are resolved; but I reject the resolution.)
Partly, of course, you need a theory of afterlife to provide a motivation for moral behaviour. We have motivation on a mundane level for cooperative behaviour (and this is arguably sufficient for a moral code, particularly if it is reinforced with a range of punitive behaviours that can be expected from others) but we do not have a motivation for
being good as an aim in itself.
There is for sure a contradiction between nonself and becoming, and I don't think the analogy of a candle lighting another candle explains it away. I think that in the development of Eastern thought, it's likely that the concept of a continuing self must once have been established but was abandoned. We
feel like we are not extinguishable, that we are something separate from the material world, separate even from our own bodies (even if you are not a dualist, the horse and jockey metaphor likely works for you, because it
feels somewhat right).
***
We all have many beliefs that we believe to be of the first type but we do not know the evidence for them. I am not sure whether they are a third type of belief. I suppose they are. The first are nearly all "beliefs by convention": 2 + 2 is 4 because that is what those symbols are. I do not know whether 2 + 2 = 4 is the same thing as "two rocks plus two rocks are four rocks" but I think it is at least possible that it isn't. (I have been reading about number theory and it's quite striking that some of the fundamental numbers are not readily expressible in our number system: by which I mean they are not "closable". Pi is almost ineffable! You can describe its effects; you can explain methods of deriving it; but you cannot say what it, itself, is. It's just pi. And by "closable", I mean that you cannot describe it in finite terms by our number system: the description of pi cannot be smaller than our universe, even though pi can be contained by it. The same is true of e and i. Maybe they have a kind of meaning for mathematicians that they do not for me; I do not know what to make of their oddness, their "unclosability" (I am not sure whether there is any difference between that and "irrationality"). Anyway, number theory resembles a bag of clever tricks to make numbers work more than it does a description of anything "real". Anyone who has looked into how quite simple theorems were proved will know what I mean.)
I mean something like the big bang. I was talking to A today about the big bang, and she asked, as people are wont to do, how something could come out of nothing. Now, I know that something did not come out of nothing, because there wasn't even nothing, but I don't know what that means.
I believe it was like that but I don't know why you would believe it was like that.
I'm not in general fond of belief by trust (although it's a necessary outcome of the specialisation of knowledge that is a necessary outcome of the sheer volume of stuff we know) but I do not know how I would be able to acquire, or having acquired, understand, the evidence. I mean, I can go to Paris and verify that it is the capital of France, or I can take the view that it is because everyone says so (a sort of "black swan" theory of Paris' being the capital of France: a black swan disproves "swans are white" and someone's saying that Toulouse is the capital of France may not be a disproof but at least provides some evidence, however tiny, that Paris might not be--which allows the meaning of "is capital of" to be extended sufficiently to be useful in both "Paris is the capital of France" and "Jerusalem is the capital of Israel").
***
I think that if music has meaning then it disproves Searle.
I think you can view music as being absolute, but we interpret it as having meaning by some mechanism that does not belong in music, or you can view it as having meaning within itself.
Is it clear that numbers are the same? I think it should be. Either they are meaningful because their meaning lies within them and the processes that elaborate them, or they are meaningful because we apply an external semantics to them.
I do not think that music has meaning but I think Searle is still wrong.
There is no contradiction in this section and I defy anyone to find one. If you think there is one, you are simply unable to understand that disproofs are not limited by the nonexistence of any particular disproof (although that does not mean that they cannot be limited--although in general, they
are unlimited: in other words, you can't prove a thing true because you do not know whether there really are no black swans, only that none of the previous swans was in fact black, even though some were claimed to be). In other words, even if I can't disprove Searle this way, it doesn't mean he cannot be disproved in another way. This truth is precisely what creationists rely on, and why they cannot be dismissed
finally. It's also why PZ Myers is a fucking idiot, I'm sorry to say, and Dawkins too. Each of them is correct that there are no black swans in evidence but each makes the mistake of thinking that this proves there are no black swans. God can create a black swan at any point that he wishes though, and there is nothing PZ can do to prove that wrong. That is simply an axiom of reason, painful though it may be to accept fully. God
can exist: I do not believe that the belief space for God will ever be sufficiently small, even if it does seem small enough right now.
Fair shares
Ultimately, the best way to
reduce illegal filesharing will be for record companies to realise that the days of ripping us off for 30 bucks a CD are now over, and they need to find a new revenue model.
We want artists to get paid. No one thinks that the guy who puts the effort in should not. But we also know that the
last guy to get paid is that guy.
The record industry used to work by controlling the flow of music from artist to consumer. In the pre-Internet world, it was just too difficult for artists to reach a wide audience if they did not have the support of the record company. This allowed the industry to exploit the artists thoroughly. The more a person
relieson another to provide the setting for making a living, the more they can be exploited. And record companies are not in the art business--don't kid yourself--they're in the money business.
Now though, the record industry cannot control the flow of music and consequently they cannot exploit artists as thoroughly. They are doomed, dinosaurs in the cyber age. Sooner or later, artists will realise that they no longer need record companies: there's a moment of realisation in today's music world--whether consumer or producer--which comes when you realise that all you cared about was the music, not the packaging, just as really when it comes to washing powder, all you actually care about is that your clothes get clean.
So we realise that we have no real preference for CDs over computer files, and artists will realise that they don't actually need much in the way of marketing or distribution, and whe you take them out, there's nothing left but a pretty cover. Artists will realise that they can just cut out the middleman and do it for themselves (and some do). New entrepreneurs may arise, who are making less off the back of artists, but because they have lower overhead, still make a profit.
But EMI is doomed. Because really it doesn't have a relationship with the artists, or with us. It just feeds on both. And its response to the new paradigm of music consumption is to try to punish us, not to try to serve us better.
It may be that some sort of licence,
as suggested by Billy Bragg, will allow the likes of EMI to make money from music temporarily--and I think I would be willing to pay 50 bucks a month to download music (although you can picture how it would work: there'd still be "premium content" and so on), but this can't be the long-term solution, if only because not everyone will pay, and once filesharing is legitimised in this way, people will be asking why they should pay when others don't.
There is still money to be made in merchandise, and it may be that the EMIs will find ways to make more from that, using music as a sort of "loss leader". I can envisage EMI giving you the Arctic Monkeys for free, because if a band is successful in this paradigm, their enormous name recognition and market penetration will allow you to sell a lot of t-shirts, and if EMI can't find a way to shoehorn advertising into free music, it shouldn't be in any sort of business. Ultimately, this is probably the future of music, just as it is for television: the advertiser pays, not the consumer (and I'm looking forward to the day that the BBC carries ads on its online service, if it doesn't already, because then it will quickly become available worldwide: reach is key for advertisers).
The British government is trying to change the risk/reward ratio for downloaders. Currently, as most of us know, we can either pay 30 bucks for CDs or pay nothing and risk a big fine. That risk is quite small, because the record companies do not want to spend millions pursuing grannies and teens for a few grand apiece. The publicity is terrible and the payoff is not enough to make it worthwhile. They occasionally pursue someone pour encourager les autres, and try to shut down the major sites, but they recognise the impossibility of seriously affecting filesharers. We are distributed; there are no "Mr Bigs" that you can take down and destroy the network, because the system is thoroughly decentralised. Also, they are well aware that so many of us do it that it hurts their image to be seen suing people who are doing something that has become as common as blogging.
So the government wants to use ISPs to punish downloaders, or to frighten them at least. It's a bit like Cnut trying to hold back the tide. Music comes in the form of easily exchangeable files. We'll find a way to do it, no matter what you do. And slow us down on one ISP and we'll find another: does Baroness Vadera not realise that word will spread that ISP X hurts downloaders and ISP Y doesn't? It will become a selling point. The government will end up having to act against ISPs, and will be painted as taking the side of one industry against another, all so that it can punish teens who can't afford to pay for music in the old paradigm. Good luck getting those youngsters out to vote for you, Mr Broon, when you take away their 50 Cent.
In any case, the day is done for record companies, even if reactionaries like Vadera don't want to accept it. It's time for the model to change. As he often does, Billy Bragg nails it:
In an ideal world, such royalties or the blanket licence fee would not be paid to music companies themselves but to an independent collection agency that would pay the money directly to artists. The music industry treats the internet as a threat, whereas for artists it gives us an opportunity to get closer to our audience than ever before. We must be very, very careful that we don't alienate those fans and make it impossible for the next generation of singer-songwriters to have viable careers.
In an ideal world, we'd realise that EMI has had its day. We don't like EMI, and eventually we'll get what we do like: artists paid for their work and fatcat executives on the dole. But until then, the government will do what it is paid to do: not give us what we like, but try to coerce us into continuing to supply an outdated revenue stream for the record industry's Cnuts.
Ultimately, the best way to
reduce illegal filesharing will be for record companies to realise that the days of ripping us off for 30 bucks a CD are now over, and they need to find a new revenue model.
We want artists to get paid. No one thinks that the guy who puts the effort in should not. But we also know that the
last guy to get paid is that guy.
The record industry used to work by controlling the flow of music from artist to consumer. In the pre-Internet world, it was just too difficult for artists to reach a wide audience if they did not have the support of the record company. This allowed the industry to exploit the artists thoroughly. The more a person
relieson another to provide the setting for making a living, the more they can be exploited. And record companies are not in the art business--don't kid yourself--they're in the money business.
Now though, the record industry cannot control the flow of music and consequently they cannot exploit artists as thoroughly. They are doomed, dinosaurs in the cyber age. Sooner or later, artists will realise that they no longer need record companies: there's a moment of realisation in today's music world--whether consumer or producer--which comes when you realise that all you cared about was the music, not the packaging, just as really when it comes to washing powder, all you actually care about is that your clothes get clean.
So we realise that we have no real preference for CDs over computer files, and artists will realise that they don't actually need much in the way of marketing or distribution, and whe you take them out, there's nothing left but a pretty cover. Artists will realise that they can just cut out the middleman and do it for themselves (and some do). New entrepreneurs may arise, who are making less off the back of artists, but because they have lower overhead, still make a profit.
But EMI is fucked. Because really it doesn't have a relationship with the artists, or with us. It just feeds on both. And its response to the new paradigm of music consumption is to try to punish us, not to try to serve us better.
It may be that some sort of licence,
as suggested by Billy Bragg, will allow the likes of EMI to make money from music temporarily--and I think I would be willing to pay 50 bucks a month to download music (although you can picture how it would work: there'd still be "premium content" and so on), but this can't be the long-term solution, if only because not everyone will pay, and once filesharing is legitimised in this way, people will be asking why they should pay when others don't.
There is still money to be made in merchandise, and it may be that the EMIs will find ways to make more from that, using music as a sort of "loss leader". I can envisage EMI giving you the Arctic Monkeys for free, because if a band is successful in this paradigm, their enormous name recognition and market penetration will allow you to sell a lot of t-shirts, and if EMI can't find a way to shoehorn advertising into free music, it shouldn't be in any sort of business. Ultimately, this is probably the future of music, just as it is for television: the advertiser pays, not the consumer (and I'm looking forward to the day that the BBC carries ads on its online service, if it doesn't already, because then it will quickly become available worldwide: reach is key for advertisers).
The British government is trying to change the risk/reward ratio for downloaders. Currently, as most of us know, we can either pay 30 bucks for CDs or pay nothing and risk a big fine. That risk is quite small, because the record companies do not want to spend millions pursuing grannies and teens for a few grand apiece. The publicity is terrible and the payoff is not enough to make it worthwhile. They occasionally pursue someone pour encourager les autres, and try to shut down the major sites, but they recognise the impossibility of seriously affecting filesharers. We are distributed; there are no "Mr Bigs" that you can take down and destroy the network, because the system is thoroughly decentralised. Also, they are well aware that so many of us do it that it hurts their image to be seen suing people who are doing something that has become as common as blogging.
So the government wants to use ISPs to punish downloaders, or to frighten them at least. It's a bit like Cnut trying to hold back the tide. Music comes in the form of easily exchangeable files. We'll find a way to do it, no matter what you do. And slow us down on one ISP and we'll find another: does Baroness Vadera not realise that word will spread that ISP X hurts downloaders and ISP Y doesn't? It will become a selling point. The government will end up having to act against ISPs, and will be painted as taking the side of one industry against another, all so that it can punish teens who can't afford to pay for music in the old paradigm. Good luck getting those youngsters out to vote for you, Mr Broon, when you take away their 50 Cent.
In any case, the day is done for record companies, even if reactionaries like Vadera don't want to accept it. It's time for the model to change. As he often does, Billy Bragg nails it:
In an ideal world, such royalties or the blanket licence fee would not be paid to music companies themselves but to an independent collection agency that would pay the money directly to artists. The music industry treats the internet as a threat, whereas for artists it gives us an opportunity to get closer to our audience than ever before. We must be very, very careful that we don't alienate those fans and make it impossible for the next generation of singer-songwriters to have viable careers.
In an ideal world, we'd realise that EMI has had its day. We don't like EMI, and eventually we'll get what we do like: artists paid for their work and fatcat executives on the dole. But until then, the government will do what it is paid to do: not give us what we like, but try to coerce us into continuing to supply an outdated revenue stream for the record industry's Cnuts.
Lavas
The real truth about it is
no one gets it right
The real truth about it is
we're all supposed to try
There ain't no end to the sands
I've been trying to cross
The real truth about it is my kind of life's no better off
If it's got the map or if it's lost
We will try, know whatever we'll try
We will be gone but not forever
Come on, let's try, know whatever we'll try
We will be gone but not forever
The real truth about it is there ain't no end to the desert I'll cross
I've really known it all along
When I was a kid, to the great annoyance of everyone who knew me, I insisted on games being played by the rules. More than that, I would become enraged if people didn't. I would rail at them for cheating when they cheated. I couldn't let the small bendings of the rules that happen in all games pass. It infuriated me.
It's hard to describe how it feels. Mostly, people describe cognition as a cold, rational process, but I don't find it that way. My head seethes and boils, and I hardly know what will come out of the pot of lavas that collide. When people cheated, the cool part of my mind might just shrug and say, well whatever,
you worry about how you play and if they beat you by cheating, you can be the moral victor. But the rage in my head would scream NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, fuck that fuck that they deserve to be THRASHED for that shit.
It still does. I have a craving for justice that I cannot put aside. Even when I know that things must be unjust, I can't still that sick heaving in my head that something unfair brings on me.
I wish I had understood poker before I began to play it. It is decidedly not fair.
How could I describe what it really is? It is a bit like being cast into the ocean. Everyone wears a lifejacket, but when you begin, the jacket is almost entirely deflated. The air that it has in it to begin with is only your innate ability. For most of us, that's not enough, and we drown in chance. But some of us learn to inflate our jackets, and because we have done that, at some personal cost, and because experience has taught us to be aware of what the waves look like, we expect to float.
But we drown all the same. Poker is impossible to play if you have a need for justice, because you won't get it. What you will get is a kick in the nuts for your presumption. It feels a lot like you've been cheated when someone does the wrong thing and still wins. It feels like the universe has fucked you out of what was yours.
Life is much the same. Except some of us begin it in a boat and others don't have a jacket. But the rest of us do our best to blow furiously and try to stay afloat.
And then we drown anyway, and realise that the effort of swimming was not worth it.
***
So it looks like my coaching/staking deal is going to fall through. A guy I'm acquainted with, who is a very good STT player, offered to stake me to play at a higher level than I do now, and to coach me to be able to play higher.
This was a great opportunity for me, and I was pretty excited about it. But the guy wanted it for a year, and I could see a problem straight away, which is that a year may be too long.
It may not; I don't know. But this is the thing: STTs have a corpus of knowledge attached to them. Some is readily available and easy to learn; some is harder to learn but still, no problem finding it out. Some is harder to learn. There is a body of what you might consider secrets. These are valuable because you need a lot of experience to grasp them, unless someone clues you in. A coach can clue you in.
Two things are clear about this sort of information: one, it has a lot of value and two, there is not so much of it that it takes forever to learn.
Who knows how quickly I would progress? It's possible I would need the whole year. It's possible I would be at a very decent level after six months. But in the latter case, the deal would start to become onerous. I would be wanting to go pro, but would be unable to because I had to pay too much to this guy.
So I put a clause in the contract saying that either party could quit with a month's notice. The guy is not dumb though, even if he is an arsehole. He realises the same things I do: I might have everything he has to offer after six months and then bin him. I wouldn't, actually. I would allow him to make the money that would be equitable. I'd also need to be sure that I could sustain winnings at a high enough level to play professionally. If I was at a pro level after six months, three months would probably be enough. He would at that point be making quite a lot of money out of me.
But he starts to say, well, you're not going to be playing enough to begin with, so I can't be bothered much with coaching you. He says, I make 150 an hour playing poker. And the implication is that he should make that from coaching too.
But no one does. Not in STTs. And the reason is simple. There is that corpus of knowledge. When you have it, a coach has nothing to offer you. You will learn what more there is to learn by experience and observation. The only people who need coaching are learners like me. And we can't pay 150 an hour. It's not even worth that to us. It's not worth it because we can learn it; it's just the harder route.
Anyway, you do not make as much from coaching as from doing, no matter what you do. Law professors don't make the money barristers do! Coaching is something you do on top of your work, not instead of it.
So this guy wants to do a maximum of three hours a week, and I'm pretty stunned by that. It's nothing like enough. It's in his own interests to train me to be good enough to make a lot of money, because if I'm good enough, I'll play a lot more, and make him a lot more. But he doesn't get that. He whines at me that he can't count on it. And I'm like, dude,
you're a coach. You're supposed to help me improve. If you don't have faith that I will improve, your coaching isn't worth as much as you think! It would be realistic to train me a lot now, and then not so much; it would barely be needed at all given time. After a few months, he'd probably get nearly as much from coaching as I did, because discussing poker usually helps you get ideas and concepts straight.
So it will probably fall through. This greedy arsehole thinks he can't screw enough money out of me, so he won't bother. Well, that's okay. I did the right thing, and I will make it my own way. It means a lot to me to make it in poker, but not at any cost (and it's like my job: I want to keep it but not at any cost).
I could have just lied to him. I could have said, fine, take the clause out and then cheated him. It's what most people would have done. It would be no big deal just not to do what we agreed and to use an account on Party to play, which he wouldn't even know about. All he'd see is that I refused to carry out our deal, forcing him to break it. (And if he still goes ahead, this is exactly what I'll do.) I tried to be equitable.
A deal for six months, with a three months' option, and another three after that, would have been fair. It's true that I would be unlikely to do enough for him to get 150 an hour for his coaching. But he probably would have made 100.
I will leave it to you to decide whether 100 bucks an hour for talking someone through a game of poker is good or bad money. A hundred bucks without the stress of playing--we don't call it grinding for nothing.
Yeah, he is assuming risk, because I could lose his money, but if he's a good coach, not much risk. And if he's not a good coach, a hundred bucks is far too much for his time (it should be pretty clear that he has confused being a good player, which he is, and the rewards for that, and being a good coach, which remains to be seen, and the rewards for that).
And finally, there is another thing he isn't grasping. He says, well, this information is worth thousands to you. And it is. But that doesn't mean I should pay the earth to get it. It's comparable to going to law school or medical school. Pass them and you're set for life. But they don't say, well, because you're going to be set for life, you must pay an enormous amount of money (although you do have to pay quite a bit for both, and I'm not forgetting that doctors and, arguably, lawyers have a value to society that makes it worthwhile for the latter to contribute to them). The training itself has a value, but it is not priced according to what it's worth to you. And there is a way he is very different, in any case, from a law school. I can learn the information in other ways. And I will. It will be a spur to my learning that I want to get there to spite the greedy fucker. I look forward in nine months to sending him my results graph, with a very decent profit, and saying "half of this would have been yours, arsehole".
***
I feel sad about it though. Alongside the rage, there is a cloud that rains each time life disillusions me, when the indecency or the injustice just feels unbearable, and when people are just shit. Because, you know, I'm human, I have hopes and things I want, and this guy's behaviour has disregarded that. It hurts. I know that sometimes I am the cloud that rains on others' lives, but I have the decency at least to be sorry for that. Because I'd rather be sunshine.
But what does it matter? You can't force other people to walk alongside you when you are taking a journey. You can't make them care about you. You can't know what the pot of lavas in their own heads feels like, how it makes them feel about you, about life. You can't even know whether they have one. Maybe you all have cool rational machines in your heads. Maybe your thoughts proceed in orderly trains.
Maybe you don't think much at all. You are probably better off. It never seems to lead to anything good.
Benny Morris used to be reasonably evenhanded by Israeli standards, but fuck me,
he's a nutter now.
I feel a terrible sense of foreboding. If Morris is this insane, Israel is well over the edge. Many Iranians are going to die of this insanity, and possibly many Israelis too.
Morris has been on the slide since he came out in the open with his
transferism. After years of documenting, reasonably objectively, the bad Israel had done, the horror of its birth, he came out in favour of it, and I quote:
There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing.
A Jew wrote that!
A fucking Jew wrote that! You can scarcely credit it. He talks about the Israeli Arabs as being a "fifth column", who it might be necessary to "expel".
A Jew wrote that!
There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.
Himmler could have written that!
What sick fucking world is this, when the conscience of the Jewish people--a man renowned for being unafraid to examine the dark side of Israel's history--writes propaganda that even many Likudistas would think twice about writing.
But he's gone even further now. He's talking about nuking Iran. And what's scary is that this is someone who thinks he's "left wing". God help us.
Let's be clear. If the choice is a nuclear attack on Iran or leaving, you leave. You abandon Israel and you come to us. (I know how bad that is, this is how deep a moral crisis this presents.) You are not worth more than them. What the fuck makes you think you are? Are you really that insane? Thinking another people is less human than you are--where does that lead? Benny, where does that lead? Have you forgotten where it leads?
The only problem with
Gordon Brown's posturing is that Iran has not threatened Israel in any way.
Ahmadinejad did not say Israel should be wiped from the map. I'm pretty sure Brown is aware of this. He's not a complete idiot (although he has been a deeply unimpressive prime minister). Ahmadinejad said a day would come when Israel would not exist in its present form, disappearing as the Soviet Union disappeared. Now, clearly, Ahmadinejad would like to see that day, but I think it's fair to say that Israel would like to see the day on which Iran is no longer a theocracy. America openly agitates for that day. So who is being threatened?
So why is Brown doing this? The reason is simple, I think, but it's not good. He intends to back the American action that is imminent. He thinks he can get away with "they threatened Israel's very existence so it's fine to bomb them" as his defence when it's Iran's turn to have its citizens murdered by the US and/or Israel.
Careful readers of this blog know that I oppose Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons, and would reluctantly support action to prevent it. Honestly though, that's as much because I feel that destroying a couple of nuclear facilities will cause far fewer deaths than Israel's provoking a nuclear conflict with Iran, which would be all too possible, as it is because I fear that Iran would use nukes. It's also because I fear that Iran is unstable enough that "loose nukes" become a real possibility. It's bad enough that the former Soviet Union has them floating around, and terrible that Pakistan has them.
But Iran is not close, and I don't think it's likely to get close. There remains only one nuclear power in the Middle East.
Monkey
All the time it's like there's a monkey in my head, going "you are shit you are shit you are shit". It's saying "you are losing because you are shit you won last month because you were lucky you're not unlucky you
were lucky". It's saying "no one wants to talk to you you fool they're just polite you are always fucking it up". It's saying "they're playing with you they're fucking with you always trolling you no one really wants to know you". It's saying "that was just to tease you that was just to set you up for hurt you are not worth caring about".
***
Yesterday, I was saying something to Mrs Zen about turntaking in conversation and she went off at me. She didn't want to listen. It was just something interesting.
I said, wtf. This is something I studied. This is something I can be
interesting about.
She goes, you were just going to whine. Which was not true. But she says, you're like the people in London, you used to say, if you don't like it here, fuck off home.
And I'm like, yes please.
YES PLEASE!And the monkey is going, "you wanted to fix it you wanted this you wanted this shitty life that you can't escape from" and it feels like an avalanche of
shit and I can't breathe.
The monkey says over and over, "forget hope forget hope forget hope you are getting what you deserved".
And I am thinking, what the fuck does "deserving" have to do with it? Since when did anyone in this world get what they deserved?
I made some mistakes and now I have to pay for them with bitter unhappiness for the rest of my life. How could I have deserved that?
***
And I am fractured, smashed, with different parts of what I am running the show at different times, one part answering the question before the other has even heard it.
And the monkey is like "YES YES MOTHERFUCKER YOU ARE BROKEN AND NO ONE WANTS YOU no one wants damaged goods". And it seems true that no one wants me to be fixed so that I am healed, just so that they get what they want. And what they want is always so much less than I have to give, or just too different for me ever to be able to do it. And I want to say, do I have no value at all just as I am?
And I don't need the monkey to say a word; I know the answer--I know it deep in me and days like today, I don't know how I am living, because I'm barely living at all.
Nad
I am listening to Frog Pocket. It's the kind of quite nice IDM that you can't imagine listening to twice. It makes a change from Abba, which we have on 24/7 upstairs.
Zenella went to watch Mamma Mia, which features the music of Abba, and now the kids are all hooked. Naughtyman plays out the title track and breakdances on the rug in the loungeroom. Zenita boogies to Dancing queen.
I am touched that the band that was my first proper love in music has ensnared them too, *mumbles* years later.
I love music and I'm addicted to the new. I have tons of stuff I've never listened to (and some I doubt I ever will), but I still seek out more. Nothing is ever enough for me.
***
So I keep forgetting to put Skype on. I mean to have it on whenever I'm home alone, so that if by some far-out chance, someone wants to talk to me, they can. I'm not mega keen, because I'm too boring to be good on the phone, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to hear a human voice from time to time, given that I nearly never go outside the house. I am grace.note on Skype. Don't try to sell me anything though: I am a terrible prospect for the cold caller.
I have probably just invited some crazy nutter to call me up and shout "cuuuuuunt" at me, but P, resist the temptation, hey?
I don't know why I hate the telephone. I've always seen it as, at best, something functional. But I was talking to my sister, S, on Skype the other day with Mrs Zen, and I mentioned that I was bad at talking on it, and S said she was too, and Mrs Z noted that that did not stop us from having three-hour phone calls.
Which is about right: I have lots of things that I fear but for no good reason.
Partly it is that I am a catcher not a pitcher (oo-er, dodgy sexual innuendo alert). I understand the social skill of pretending to give a fuck what others think, but I've never been good at doing it. People want to be asked how they are, how their job is, what they've been up to. No one cares what the answers are. I know that, but it's still hard just to remember to ask.
I know that that makes me seem self-absorbed, maybe even Aspergery. But I am self-absorbed. I think it's natural. Who else should be number one? Who else should mean as much to me?
And I don't have Asperger Syndrome. Mrs Zen would love it if I did: a simple diagnosis for a complex man. Or a complex diagnosis for a simple man. Hard to say which would be more accurate. But I understand feelings and read them well enough. I don't wonder why you're crying when I make you cry.
***
Fingers crossed that
Mark Cavendish does not fail a drug test. The guy's a fucking phenom. When you watch the slowmo of his winning a stage, he seems to be cycling at the same speed I would, with everyone else standing still. It's one of the great sights in sport. He tools along for a couple of hundred ks and then bang!
F Ricco, f Duenas, f Beltran; fuck all the cheaters who have destroyed
this beautiful spectacle (do check out that link: with Google's street view, you can virtually ride the course yourself). There are more positive tests to come, and we already began without at least a dozen cyclists who would have had a genuine shot at winning either yellow or green jerseys. The worst of it is that you cannot enjoy a great performance without the nagging doubt. When Landis won back the time he'd lost in a brilliant ride the day before in the mountains, it was a truly wonderful moment in sport. F Landis. Now he's forever known as just another guy that cheated.
The Olympics, particularly when one considers American sprinting or Chinese anything, are the same story: we will see great sport, but always with that nagging doubt: is he? is she? And too often the answer will be yes.
I accept that using drugs is just along the spectrum from having a dietician or better facilities than the next guy. There is no level playing field. But the rules are clear enough, and winning is nothing outside the rules.
***
Talking of sporting glory, the wonder that is Youtube brings us
Leeds' spanking of Sheff Wed en route to
triumph in 1992. I was at the game at Sheff Utd that sewed up the title, and in these dire times, I remind myself that fortune does not always hide, but glory is always around the corner, if you believe, and I do, that you can be the best.
So yet again, hope springs, August is approaching and Super Leeds may break the heart that beats for them once more, but I'll love them all the same.
bollock
I have an agonising pain in my right bollock when I move the wrong way. Curiously, I'm not too worried. I am scared of being dead, but not scared of dying, not scared of pain, degeneration, whatever. I tend to be much more scared of the abstract than of the real. I fear shadows, words, concepts. I wish I wouldn't. I am so brave that it is just weird that I'm not courageous at all.
A few months ago (I mentioned it here), Zenita hit me on the tip of the right bollock. She was just messing around, meant nothing by it, but it hurt for a week. Then it was gone and I thought nothing more about it.
A couple of weeks ago, it started hurting again. Just for a couple of days. Now it has started again.
Maybe it is something else. A blocked duct, a cyst, who the fuck knows? Probably I will spend months seeing the doctor, who will be close to clueless, tests will show nothing, and just as with my guts, I will have an unexplained, unfixable ailment to accompany me in my dwindling years.
***
I should be happy. I have been offered a deal to be staked to play poker, and to get coaching in it. This is fantastic for me, but already in my mind, it's soured. I have been running really badly at poker and that's made me think that my coach will be thinking, when he sees my hand histories, that I am not good enough for his deal.
Why would I think that? I'm not having any luck. I don't feel like I'm playing badly, but of course, I refuse to do the correct thing to find out, which is to run them back in my replayer and see whether I made the right plays.
So this good thing has been spoiled. It looked like a road out for me, a hope of change, whatever, but I'm going to blow it.
Or, cosmic joke that life is, I will go pro as a poker player and one week later, be diagnosed with testicular cancer.
Dress redux
So my boss's response is "we've run companies for 25 years and always had a dress code". Right. So if I go before the beak for battering the missus, it would be a valid defence to say "I've been married for 25 years and have always battered the missus"?
So that was a nice rational discussion. And all my respect for my boss down the drain.
Dizzee; Daft; idiot
I'm listening to Dizzee Rascal. Time hasn't been kind to Dizzee from my POV. Music that relies on freshness for impact can suffer when it becomes stale.
So why listen to him? I've been listening to a lot of Ratatat. I am not sure how you'd describe it: it has a hiphop beat structure, but the music is electro, I suppose, with a healthy dose of stratospheric guitar. Ratatat, as well as making their own stuff, remix hiphop classics. I say "remix" but it's more like "throw away everything but the rap and put in a Ratatat track instead", which works really well. Except that the weakest remix imo is their redo of Fix up, look sharp. So I went back to the source to check that I remembered it well, because I haven't listened to it in some time.
I have also been listening a lot to Girl Talk, which I mentioned before (too lazy to find URL). It too takes raps and lays them over backing tracks, but the backing is an insane mix of snippets, so that the outcome is a bit like Jive Bunny vs the Avalanches vs Jay-Z. It has really grown on me. I'm not a fan of hiphop, but the isolated raps sound like a mad, modern poetry, and I defy anyone to resist Whoomp, there it is over Big country. I lol'd.
***
So I've moved on to Daft Punk, but I'm beginning to regret it, because I think their work has always been a bit meh. It sort of goes on and you can mostly take it or leave it, except that I have the sound a bit high, so it's bugging me. Daft Punk don't lack ideas; they just never do anything with them. I think that if you enjoy experimental music, the mundane just becomes flatter and flatter, and there's no real way back.
I am in a good frame of mind at the moment. One reason is that I can now openly have Skype and don't need to pretend not to, because my sister has it, and we can use it to make video calls and show each other our kids. So I saw live pictures of my niece, L, which was pretty cool. I am a baby person, although I fear I terrify them. Well, that's why they are crying all the time, no? That or nappy rash.
I am debating leaving it open, but I'm not sure whether I'll be happy that if someone wants to Skype me, they can feel free, or unhappy that no one wants to Skype me. I have AIM and often have it running, hoping that a poker buddy will want to chat, and sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't, and I end up feeling unloved.
Which clearly will not do.
***
I was reading
this in teh Graun, with mixed feelings. The comments indulge in the usual cavalcade of misrepresentations and bullshit, but reflect that it's a complex issue.
It's interesting for me, because this woman has a prejudice that I in no way share, yet I can't get as worked up as Sanderson about it (if you can't be arsed following the link, he is furious that a court has found in favour of a biblethumping registrar who was victimised after refusing to marry gays--"civil partnerships" are marriages in all but name, AFAIK). Now, I think the registrar is a silly shit, but I think she has a genuine problem of conscience, which is not difficult to work around. Yes, it would be much better if she wasn't homophobic. It would be nice if people didn't consider it a central tenet of their religion that they should hate gays. But most of the complaint against her is bogus, as many commenters point out. The law--and mores--shifted on her, leaving her noncompliant where previously she had complied; she is not the only registrar in town, and it had not been a problem working around her until Islington insisted on making an example out of her; and, as I noted, she has a genuine problem with her conscience. This is akin, as commenters also note, to doctors who refuse to do terminations, because they have a genuine belief that to do so would be to murder the foetus.
I'm not persuaded by arguments that you should not be permitted to be a doctor if you won't do terminations, however wrong I think the doctors are. There are plenty of other things doctors do, and you won't generally find it a problem to find one who will do it. The same goes for pharmacists who will not dispense birth control. It's bad, but not
that bad. If you are the only pharmacist in town, well, that's a problem; but if there are dozens of them, not so much.
I don't know. I can agree that we should not be tolerant, but on the other hand, tolerance is so easy that it seems petty not to just let it pass. But I can appreciate the slippery slope arguments. Although, obviously, I don't expect a spate of refusals to serve blacks in shops, because racism is not a tenet of Christianity, even if homophobia is, at least in some brands of it. However, one should not separate religious belief from other sincere beliefs, and it's hard to argue that one should tolerate someone who will not do their job for gays but at the same time insist that someone who genuinely believes he will be sullied by contact with blacks, for instance, should. To some extent, we have to be able to say, maybe a service-oriented job is not for you, son. But I'm not sure what that extent is. Ideally, I would say that the registrar should register the gay partnerships, and we should not tolerate her refusal, because homophobia has no place in our society; but could we say that doctors must perform terminations? We might accept that the perceived heinousness of the act should allow us to be more tolerant. But then, what if it is the woman's sincere belief that facilitating a redefinition of "marriage" is as sinful as murder?
I do not know how one weighs beliefs. I'm not in favour, on the whole, of the majority's imposing its views on minorities, nor of the powerful's simply imposing their mores on the less empowered. Does one set broad standards that one hopes are reasonably universal? Or does one simply weigh the harm? If the latter, are gays harmed by this woman's refusal to register their partnerships? If one permits this woman to do what she thinks is right, because after all there are many other registrars in Islington, is a person in a smaller town to be permitted the same latitude, and if not, how do we measure the harm to them?
Dress
So my boss wants to introduce a "dress code" at work. I was quite taken aback because it has been quite mellow working for her, and this is obviously not mellow. So I wrote her a letter:
Rather than stew on it, I thought I should mention this to you.
I was shocked and a bit upset that you want to impose a dress code. It seems so contrary to how you run your business. I wanted to discuss it with you, but not at the meeting, because I do not think it would be reasonable to seem to be causing trouble in that setting.
There are many ways to look at workplaces, but in my experience, they tend to be of two types. In one type, the workplace is collegiate, or adult. People are treated as responsible beings, trusted to achieve the goals of the organisation. They never feel coerced into doing what they do not want to, because they are only asked to do their professional duties. These are far the best workplaces to find yourself in, because you do not need to concern yourself with office politics and you feel respected and valued. In what you might describe as the school-type, or juvenile, workplace, things are different. Here you are not trusted, and bosses are concerned with the exercise of power, particularly in areas that are not directly concerned with work.
The key element of the collegiate workplace is consensus. Your boss does not have to give you orders, because he or she is never asking anything you would not agree was necessary to achieve the objectives you have been set. The boss exercises leadership with consent. It is no problem to do what they ask because you agree that it needs to be done.The key element of the school-type workplace is bullying. The boss exercises leadership by coercion. You are forced to do what he or she wants because of the implicit threat to your livelihood. Some of the demands placed on you are arbitrary or petty. You know the kind of thing I mean: in a collegiate workplace, if you need to be late into work because you have to see a doctor, or deliver your children to school, it is no drama, because you are trusted to complete the work before you in any case, and trusted to be reliable and honest about what you are doing. In the school-type workplace, this sort of thing creates a huge drama. I have worked in places in which a boss would ensure that you were docked pay -- even in a monthly paid job -- for turning up late. You can imagine that that does not create a happy work environment.
As far as dress codes go, it would be clearly reasonable were we customer facing to ask that we dress in a particular way. I'm not a huge fan of banks' asking their staff to wear corporate uniforms, but the notion that you should present yourself in a particular way in that enivronment is not unreasonable. Same too is something like the police, where one dresses in a uniform so as to be recognisable by the people you serve.
But we do not face customers. The only reason you have a dress code is that you want it. It is not a reasonable requirement of the workplace, because it is entirely arbitrary. There is no purpose for it but to please you. Well, of course, you pay my wages, and I'm inclined to please you. But I feel comfortable enough with you to let you know that I'm unhappy about it, and in my opinion, it changes the character of the workplace from a friendly, collegiate environment in which each feels secure and content to one in which the arbitrary exercise of power breeds insecurity. After all, in a school, the children must obey arbritary rules set by the principal, but they do not like it. In a university, one is not hassled about things that are not connected to study, such as one's clothing, and it is a much better place to study in.
Regards
Enhance my bitch up
So it's to the great amusement of the office that I crusade against the misuse of "enhance". I say "crusade", but what I mean is that it is one of the words I routinely strike out and replace with a more suitable word.
It's a losing battle, of course, so why bother fighting it? And isn't it odd that I should care, when I am a descriptivist? Surely, if everyone uses "enhance" to mean "increase" or "improve", that's fine with me?
Words have meanings that shift. We all know that. Absent an Academie to fix their meanings (and even with one, as French pedants often bemoan), words will mean whatever we wish them to. Effectively, meaning is a tyranny of the majority: if most of us think "fond" means "enamoured of", rather than "a bit crazy", then that's what it means; if we think "nice" means "agreeable", rather than "fine" or "narrow", then that's what it means. This is not, of course, a random process. There are "gatekeepers" who fight meaning change, "meaning issuers" who create new meanings (or new words) and others who have a great deal of influence. The chief subs of newspapers write style guides that govern their rags, and their personal choices gain weight by repetition on every page of the papers that employ them, sometimes long after they have left/been sacked/died (and some more so than others because they are aped by others: the Economist style guide, for instance, or here in Australia, Wiley's Style Guide).
Descriptivists do not mind meaning shift in itself. After all, we accept that usage rules over prescription. Language is after all a tool, not a monument. Its value is in its use, not as a thing of beauty to be left on a pedestal and admired. But that doesn't mean that we necessarily like it.
The reason is simple. Words have what you might call a "semantic field". This is a conceptual space that represents everything that word means. Some words--"set" is the archetypal example in English--have very wide semantic fields. You could argue that a word that means so many different things actually has a constellation of semantic fields, which overlap only somewhat. That seems a reasonable view. Other words have very narrow semantic fields. "Angioplasty" only means one thing (although it actually describes a whole set of angioplasties, they all have a common feature).
Arguably, "angioplasty" is a more powerful word than "set". It is so much more precise. We consider English a rich language because it allows us to be precise: we can say almost exactly what we mean and be understood closely because we have many words that we
could have used, but chose those with the meanings we intended. Few other words even border on "angioplasty"'s semantic field. There are other "plasty"'s but they are not the same kind of thing. There are other ways to say the same thing, but not in one word.
"Set" by way of contrast overlaps with many other words, duplicating their meanings, sharing spaces with many.
This is not a problem. Languages evolve homophones, and words take on new meanings. This too is part of their richness even: having a choice for more general words is useful, particularly for the stylist.
But what does create a problem is the abandonment of a semantic space. "Enhance" meant something quite specific (and when I use it, it still does): it means to increase or improve in terms of a quality. In other words, if you "enhance" something, you might magnify it or change the type of thing that it is; if you improve it, you change its nature, rather than simply making it better; if you increase it, you don't just make more of it, the more is something different. It's hard to explain what it means precisely, because, precisely, "enhance" means it!
Using it as a synonym for "increase" or "improve" simply destroys the semantic space it occupied. There is no longer a word for what "enhance" meant.
Well, so what? In a hundred years, the former meaning of "enhance" will reside in history's dustbin, alongside those of "fond" and "nice". Yeah, true, but I write now, and edit now, and preserving the sharpness of my tools is part of my task.
And, above and beyond that consideration, language is ground down into a grey mass if jargon goes unchallenged. Everything is "enhanced", "leveraged", "assisted" into oblivion. I have edited stuff that literally means nothing. People are employed to communicate precisely nothing. It's particularly horrible here in Australia, where a sort of "educated speak" has a grip on just about everyone who has ever been to university. Their textbooks are written in turgid, meaningless jargon, and they proceed to write it too. Writing in "educated speak" is a simulation of being educated: it's how the educated demonstrate that they have an education.
Enhance my bitch up
So it's to the great amusement of the office that I crusade against the misuse of "enhance". I say "crusade", but what I mean is that it is one of the words I routinely strike out and replace with a more suitable word.
It's a losing battle, of course, so why bother fighting it? And isn't it odd that I should care, when I am a descriptivist? Surely, if everyone uses "enhance" to mean "increase" or "improve", that's fine with me?
Words have meanings that shift. We all know that. Absent an Academie to fix their meanings (and even with one, as French pedants often bemoan), words will mean whatever we wish them to. Effectively, meaning is a tyranny of the majority: if most of us think "fond" means "enamoured of", rather than "a bit crazy", then that's what it means; if we think "nice" means "agreeable", rather than "fine" or "narrow", then that's what it means. This is not, of course, a random process. There are "gatekeepers" who fight meaning change, "meaning issuers" who create new meanings (or new words) and others who have a great deal of influence. The chief subs of newspapers write style guides that govern their rags, and their personal choices gain weight by repetition on every page of the papers that employ them, sometimes long after they have left/been sacked/died (and some more so than others because they are aped by others: the Economist style guide, for instance, or here in Australia, Wiley's Style Guide).
Descriptivists do not mind meaning shift in itself. After all, we accept that usage rules over prescription. Language is after all a tool, not a monument. Its value is in its use, not as a thing of beauty to be left on a pedestal and admired. But that doesn't mean that we necessarily like it.
The reason is simple. Words have what you might call a "semantic field". This is a conceptual space that represents everything that word means. Some words--"set" is the archetypal example in English--have very wide semantic fields. You could argue that a word that means so many different things actually has a constellation of semantic fields, which overlap only somewhat. That seems a reasonable view. Other words have very narrow semantic fields. "Angioplasty" only means one thing (although it actually describes a whole set of angioplasties, they all have a common feature).
Arguably, "angioplasty" is a more powerful word than "set". It is so much more precise. We consider English a rich language because it allows us to be precise: we can say almost exactly what we mean and be understood closely because we have many words that we
could have used, but chose those with the meanings we intended. Few other words even border on "angioplasty"'s semantic field. There are other "plasty"'s but they are not the same kind of thing. There are other ways to say the same thing, but not in one word.
"Set" by way of contrast overlaps with many other words, duplicating their meanings, sharing spaces with many.
This is not a problem. Languages evolve homophones, and words take on new meanings. This too is part of their richness even: having a choice for more general words is useful, particularly for the stylist.
But what does create a problem is the abandonment of a semantic space. "Enhance" meant something quite specific (and when I use it, it still does): it means to increase or improve in terms of a quality. In other words, if you "enhance" something, you might magnify it or change the type of thing that it is; if you improve it, you change its nature, rather than simply making it better; if you increase it, you don't just make more of it, the more is something different. It's hard to explain what it means precisely, because, precisely, "enhance" means it!
Using it as a synonym for "increase" or "improve" simply destroys the semantic space it occupied. There is no longer a word for what "enhance" meant.
Well, so what? In a hundred years, the former meaning of "enhance" will reside in history's dustbin, alongside those of "fond" and "nice". Yeah, true, but I write now, and edit now, and preserving the sharpness of my tools is part of my task.
And, above and beyond that consideration, language is ground down into a grey mass if jargon goes unchallenged. Everything is "enhanced", "leveraged", "assisted" into oblivion. I have edited stuff that literally means nothing. People are employed to communicate precisely nothing. It's particularly horrible here in Australia, where a sort of "educated speak" has a grip on just about everyone who has ever been to university. Their textbooks are written in turgid, meaningless jargon, and they proceed to write it too. Writing in "educated speak" is a simulation of being educated: it's how the educated demonstrate that they have an education.
Reasons you are not likeable today
1. You used all my razors and didn't replace them. Again. And instead of being sorry, and trying to make up for it by getting some more, your attitude is, as usual, tough shit.
2. You asked me whether I wanted anything from the shop and did not buy the thing I asked for. It feels like you purposely didn't in the hope that I would say something and you could start a fight over it, but really it's just that you are so inconsiderate.
3. I am not going to beg you any more to give me back my cash card. I am convinced you keep it like that so that I'll get angry and then you can make out that it's unreasonable. It's not. It's reasonable to be angry that someone will not give you back your access to your money and makes you beg over and over to have it. I asked you to put it back in my wallet when you were done with it, but for some reason, you feel that it is a terrible imposition. You prefer that I stew over it, knowing that I can't stand things being put off like that. It's impossible to believe you do not do it on purpose when you do it so often, never making any attempt to change your behaviour, and what's worse, getting a bitchy attitude whenever I suggest that you do the right thing.
4. You do not give a shit about important things, but you care about small stuff that is not important. What's worse, you bully me and the kids over it. You seriously need to get some fucking perspective.
5. You are so unwilling to communicate like an adult that I truly believe it is better for me to post this on my blog, so that strangers read how I feel about you, than it ever would be to send you this email.
6. Most important, you do not care that you're not likeable. You think it's my fault for not liking you. But actually, I'm trying to. That's how hard you are making it, because I am trying really hard.
Horse
I feel dreary and slow. I have nothing to say today; I had nothing to say yesterday; last week, last month, this year, ever.
I have stopped being able to write. I can blame time or circumstances all I like but it's me who stopped. I am not capable of anything. I had hopes of poker but I don't seem to be improving at all. I'm honest with myself: I'm not sure I can make it any more. When I'm winning, I feel like I can, but you have to feel you're a winner when you're losing, and I don't.
I hate my hair. I've hated it always. When I was a youngster, I wanted to grow it long and it refused. It grew into a bush. So I wear it short usually, but if I don't get it cut, it grows into a bouffant, middle-aged style that isn't me.
I am not me. I don't feel like me.
I think a wire has crossed, leaving me feeling marooned from myself. It's weirder than feeling as though you're on the wrong planet. I feel as though I'm in the wrong person.
It's possible, I think. I believe I know what we are. To understand, I began by thinking about evolution. I was watching
this, and wondering at how incredible it is that such complexity evolved. Not in a "wow, how could that happen, must be a god" way, but in a "wow, how could that happen, amazing that time can make cathedrals out of grains of sand" way. I am a staunch naturalist. I wish it was possible for me not to be. But it's not. Which is what we are discussing.
It occurred to me that we (by which I mean rational, scientific types like me, not the whole human race, which on balance is not included in that "we") are willing to accept that even though biological entities seem to have purpose, they do not. We are willing to believe that the world is on the whole purposeless and only seems to be purposeful.
Yet we believe we have purpose. By which I don't mean that our lives have a purpose, but that we believe we do things for purposes. But I am not sure we do. I believe we too have the appearance.
Do this for me. Think about raising your left arm. Well, you think, but it doesn't move, right? When it moves, it just moves. You are sure you moved it, but you couldn't say how. You just do it.
And that is what I think we are. Interpreters of a universe that carries on, purposelessly, without us. Our lives are interactions between bodies we have the illusion, but only the illusion, of controlling and patterns of firing neurons that somehow seem to be something more than flashes of light.
But aren't. I don't know why we feel as though we are real, but I am convinced we are not. Upset the chemistry of your brain and you go away; damage some of the connections and you go away. Time can and does change you.
I used to believe that we are jockeys holding the reins of a runaway horse. It seemed a good way to explain how we seem to sit astride an unconscious that does all the doing. (For instance, we seem to see things, but we do not do the processing that creates the vision: our unconscious does.) It seems to us that some things are "deeper" (processing vision, for example) and some "higher" or more "surface" (discussing what we see, for example). But I'm no longer convinced. I ask myself whether I can stop myself seeing. Of course, I can't, without physically damaging the apparatus. And even then, you'd probably "see", wouldn't you?
Well, you might argue, we do not control the motors of our body: can't stop seeing or our heart beating; can't stop breathing (you can suspend it, but not stop it altogether); can't stop our cells respirating. We are not in charge. So we're a jockey, right? Directing a horse that we cannot control?
No. I don't think so. Because we are not even in control of the jockey. Stop yourself from thinking. Go on. Do it. Go five minutes with no brain "chatter". You can't. You'd have to knock yourself unconscious. It's difficult even to direct your thoughts. Sometimes, often, they seem to be no more than reactions to the world you are in.
And how, when you are "in a mood", can you change that mood? It's not easy. You cannot, for instance, turn off grief like a tap. You cannot stop fear. You cannot "just cheer up" when you are depressed. We even know that some of these things are outcomes of chemistry, and use drugs to try to fix them. Doesn't it strike you that if your moods can be altered with chemistry, they are nothing but chemistry to begin with? And if that's true, maybe "you" are nothing but chemistry either.
We accept, don't we, that dogs do not think, that they just react to the world around them. We even think that they do not have memories, or a notion of time (those who protest that dogs "remember" things should consider the difference between knowing where something is and knowing how it got there). Why would we be different? We have convinced ourselves that the illusion of being able to manipulate symbols makes us something different from animals.
But fundamentally, I don't think we are.
I convinced myself of this view of the world while watching the kids play on the Wii. I asked myself whether a complex activity like that, which has no purpose but to pass time, could simply be a reaction to the world, prompted by a stimulus. And I couldn't see why not. It's easy to imagine that the good chemicals released by "having fun" are something your body would pursue, but harder to imagine that plugging in the Wii, firing up the game, picking your character, all that could be something your body does automatically, with "you" desperately rationalising the whole thing ex post facto. But I can't imagine how cells became so specialised in the body, either. I can't imagine a lot of things, but I do accept that some things that seem unimaginably complex are not; they are simply the outcomes of simple, small changes over enormous time.
So I am saying we evolved to imagine we are real, that we have control.
The ramifications of believing that are deep and wide. It asks questions about responsibility, among other things. If we are not real, how can we expect credit? Would there even be such a thing as being good? I've long believed that most "evil" is simply a pathological extension of fulfilling needs, which we all do.
You can tell I am not a philosopher, or a psychologist. But this is what I'm doing to keep from crying, because I am so sad today that I can barely stop spiralling inwards into my own head, to drown in self-pity. I am losing at poker this month, and I had a fight with Mrs Zen that inclines me to believe that I am not going to be able to live with her (which I had been doing very well). I don't think it's any big deal if I get angry when someone beats me in a hand of poker. It's a painful experience and expressing that pain surely isn't a terrible thing? Well, Mrs Zen thinks it is. She thinks I need a course in anger management to deal with it. I think she needs to chill the fuck out. I think that if she had her way, if she had had her way throughout our marriage, I would have been completely neutered. Rather than just mostly.
She is not the only person who, as soon as they think they have me in some way, have me bound to them, have a piece of me, immediately start wanting me to be someone different. I can't though. I don't think any of us can. If we change, it is not something we have effected from the inside, but something that is imposed on us. Some things you can train yourself in (and what is training if not trying to impose the outside on the inside) but if you are not apt for it, it can be like bouncing tennis balls off a wall: they don't ever become incorporated, and all you do is feel that the pain of smacking yourself with the tennis ball must be doing some good. (Which is how I feel about my poker study just now. I had believed I was incorporating some of it, albeit slowly. But I'm wondering whether I just mistake effort for achievement, pain for gain.)
You know, I am simple though. I mostly just want to be left alone, and when I don't, I want people to like me, without overly judging me, because I do not feel my motivations are ever really bad. I know I want to do the right thing, and when you know that, judgement that you are not hits harder than it might otherwise. Being caught weighs a lot less heavily than being falsely accused. I just want to be able to do what I
can do, and be appreciated for that, and not constantly to be pressed with what I cannot.
And maybe I should lead the charge. Instead of believing I am hopeless and useless, I should believe I am just the sparking of neurons, confusing itself, and celebrate what I can be and do, and have faith that that is enough, always was and always will be.
***
What, finally, convinces me that this view of what we are is essentially correct is the feeling of love without reason, which makes
this paragraph so easy to write:
I love my dad. I always have. Not for anything he's done or been to me but just because. I do not know how it would be possible not to love him. I can't imagine what he could do that would make me stop.
My love for my dad is
real. It's realler than almost everything else in my life. It does not have reason. It just is. And you note how naturally it comes to me to write that he would have to do something to
make me stop. Not "for me to stop loving him". But for me to be stopped from doing it.
My most fundamental feelings about the world are all like that: things that I cannot change, no matter how much I reflect on them, no matter how burdensome they are. I cannot make any dent in them at all, and I am aware that for them to change would require imposition from outside.
And reading further in that post, it becomes clear to me again that you cannot wallow in regret because you did what you could not choose otherwise than to do: "You have to negotiate with what there is, not what you wish there was." Sigh.
Wiki wiki whak
Whenever I read the pronouncements of Jimmy Wales, I want to slap the smug fuck. His
recent article in the Guardian provoked no different a feeling. Let's take a look at it:
The world is rich with languages and cultures, and because of this some contemporary thinkers doubt the possibility of any genuine collaboration in pursuit of truth.
Ah, what is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Which shows Pilate to have been wiser than he's often painted, because truth is much more slippery than Wales would have it.
Some things are true by convention. Moscow is the capital of Russia, and you would be wrong to deny it. But it is not true in the same sense to say that Moscow is a beautiful city. (And before we start assuming that the convention that a capital is whatever the government of the nation it is capital of says it is, note that there are several disputed capitals--either because it is disputed that a place is capital of its nation, or because the legitimacy of the nation is disputed: so Jerusalem is what Israel thinks is its capital but many countries do not agree, and Tiraspol is the capital of Transnistria, which not everyone agrees is a country.)
In the commerce of humanity, few
truths are conventional; most are matters of judgement. Postmodernism's great gift to human thought was to formalise the idea that what's true for you is not necessarily true for me.
And anyone who visits Wikipedia will quickly find that much of its content is the outcome of a war of truths, which, like most wars, is generally won by the side with the greater strength. Such is truth in our world: most often it belongs to the strongest, and the weaker must accept it, no matter how false it seems.
Laughably, given what Wales says here, his own encyclopaedia runs on the principle that it doesn't concern itself with the truth:
The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth.And, given its policies on sourcing (which were written specifically to have this end), this means that Wikipedia contains the truths of the powerful, and despises the truths of those without access to means of publishing, whether books or newspapers.
Articles should rely on reliable, third-party published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. IOW, articles should be built upon sources that were created by those who could afford to check the "facts".
While in principle this might seem a good idea, the policy goes on specifically to exclude eyewitnesses ("primary sources") and to promote the use of newspapers. I lol at the notion that newspapers are much concerned with facts, or for the most part bother checking them. (SlimVirgin, who wrote much of the body of this and other policy documents, is or was a journalist, so she has a higher opinion of hacks. But she is cynical enough to have fought for the inclusion of newspapers as "reputable sources" because they often support her positions in politics, and she is aware that as tools of the rich, they do not often support the disempowered and disenfranchised. In particular, she is a hardcore Likudnik, and American newspapers in particular steer clear of being critical of Israel.)
Humans are portrayed as irrational captives to their background and identity, unable to be objective. I do not share this view.
Clearly, Wales does not read Wikipedia, which demonstrates very clearly that humans are exactly that. Contentious issues are battlegrounds, on which people show no objectivity at all. Indeed, in Wikipedia, "objectivity" is measured by how much support you have. I've edited a fair bit in the (very biased) Israel-issue pages. Here, editors who relentlessly push a pro-Israel line are lauded as "objective". Given Wikipedia's strong US bias--the vast majority of editors are Americans, as you would expect--those who espouse orthodox American views are readily seen as not being biased. Few people in Wikipedia stop to think that the objective "facts" they hold to are themselves subjective, that they themselves are biased, sometimes in ways they are not aware of.
After all, valuing knowledge is itself a bias. A Taoist will tell you that knowledge is the ruin of the world.
Seven years ago, I founded Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia in which any reasonable person can join us in writing and editing entries on any encyclopedic topic.
Notice the weasel word "reasonable". Is that an "objective" word? I think not. If "reasonable" does not mean "agrees with me", it at least means "disagrees with me in a way I find agreeable". But let's be clear, if your frame is biased, your discourse is biased. If you set bounds on what you consider "reasonable" discourse, you bias that discourse.
So Wales does not require that everyone agrees with him on the specifics (although he's willing to engage in politics to harm those who do not), but he certainly requires that everyone agrees with him on the framework within which the specifics will be discussed. This is not objective. It's central to grasping the wrongness of Wales's worldview to grasp that bias does not just reside in which facts you present, but in how you present them.
We are a charitable humanitarian effort to create and distribute a free high-quality encyclopedia to every single person on the planet.
Leaving aside Wales's execrable English (how do you create something to someone else?), allow me to lol at this flat lie. Wikipedia is many things to many people, but what it is to Wales is a means to make himself richer and more famous. Wales rides on the volunteer effort that has made Wikipedia to provide himself with business opportunities and a jetset lifestyle.
Already, we are the biggest, fastest-growing, and most popular general reference work in the world.
The careful reader will note that what is missing is "the best".
Wikipedia attracts 683m visitors annually, with more than 10m articles in over 150 languages.
Very nice. It's great what can be achieved by a site that (inadvertently) games Google's search algorithm (which ranks sites by links, so a site that interlinks its own pages is at a huge advantage). Of course, Wikipedia has also succeeded because it forms a central repository of all the bullshit that is otherwise spread all over the web (and it would be a far better "encyclopaedia" if it contained more stuff, rather than pretending to be a second-rate Britannica). If you want to find out about something, you can visit the Wikipedia article and follow links to better-informed sites.
Today, there are around one billion people online. In the next five to 10 years, the next billion people will be joining the great global conversation by coming online to participate in blogs, mailing lists and, of course, Wikipedia itself. If we look beyond the languages of Europe plus Chinese and Japanese, most Wikipedia projects are small but fast growing.
Why would that be though? Hmmm, let me think.
Most languages outside Europe, China and Japan are somewhat small, with relatively few speakers, so they are not necessarily going to have had wikipedias long. You see where I'm going, obviously: start from a small base and your growth is likely to be very impressive. Percentage increases are misleading, because if you have a hundred things, 10 percent growth is a lot easier to attain than it is if you have a million things. (People who astonish themselves with the growth in the Chinese economy should note the same; although, to be fair, it's more complicated than that, because the number of people creating the increase is also a factor: the Chinese economy grows hugely if all the Chinese increase their economic activity just a small bit.)
Where the German Wikipedia is today, with more than a half million articles, the Hindi and Swahili editions of Wikipedia will be in just a few short years.
I fail to see what that proves. Most wikipedias are knockoffs of the English version, filled with transcluded articles. And Wales remains resolutely oblivious to the truth that more is not always better.
If we were to take seriously the ideas of those who view all human activity through a lens of irrationalism and conflict, we would imagine that all of this would be impossible.
Erm, what?
I view the history of the world through a lens of irrationalism and conflict, but that doesn't mean that I can't see that there are nations of millions of people who have built roads, monuments, whatever. They have built their nations largely
because of conflict and irrationalism, not even in spite of them.
And why should there be
less where there is conflict and irrationalism? There's tons of conflict on the Uselessnet, and most of it is barely rational. Yet it's enormous: there are tons of posts.
Ah, Wales will say, but the wikipedias are collaborative. But they are mostly not, any more than the Uselessnet is. You could say that I collaborated with Nancy Ahern to make long threads of bullshit and you'd have the same model, more or less, as Wikipedia's. It even has gangfucks: factionalism is rampant.
In any case, the model is not collaborative at all, but accretive. People bicker, but rarely discuss anything. They just add layers of bullshit to the existing bullshit, and others pare and sculpt the bullshit.
I suppose to a hardcore capitalist like Wales this looks a bit like collaboration, but it's not. Most collaboration that actually does take place does so in the backchannel, as the empowered work together to ensure that their views prevail. I know whereof I talk: the aforementioned SlimVirgin has enlisted my help before now, to push points of view she wants represented, and I don't doubt, given how active she is and how willing to manipulate others in whatever way, that many others can say the same; and she's far from alone. (I don't have a problem with it, particularly. I see social networking sites like Wikipedia as roleplaying games as much as they are anything else, and Slim has proven to be successful in playing the game, much to the chagrin of her enemies.)
But my experiences with Wikipedia have given me great optimism – optimism grounded in direct observation of the facts of reality – that the vast majority of people around the world are comfortable with the idea of working hard to present facts objectively.
Most people are quite happy to bicker endlessly over their version of the truth.
I note at this point that Wales's worldview is quite clear: there is a real world, full of facts, which people can, if they wish, see clearly and promulgate in the Wikipedia. Well yes, no doubt this is true to some extent.
Take George W. Bush (no, really, take him, please--ker-tish!). There are facts about him: he was born in such and such a place at such and such a time; he said and did this and this; he looks like this when viewed from this angle or that. But there are many more "facts". Wikipedia could have restricted itself to the first kind of fact, and then possibly Wales would have a point. But it does not. And even if it did, he still wouldn't.
Note this sentence (and ignore that it's gibberish): "Since entering office, President Bush has undertaken a number of educational priorities."
This sentence can be read either as saying that he has had some priorities in education that he has pursued, which is probably true (his priority would be to transfer as much government cash to the private sector as he can as quickly as he can), or that education has been a priority for him. This is not true, of course.
Much of the article is like this. It's a list of facts presented in a certain way (in horrible writing, mostly).
From Bangkok to Bogota, people can exchange ideas and share experiences.
Erm. Yes, they can try. But they'll get their experiences and ideas deleted unless they match the WASPocentric orthodoxy's notion of what an encylopaedia should be.
To the extent that we are thoughtful and reflective, we can learn from the best among us.
Of course, most of us can learn from the worst too. But why is Wales saying that we can learn from the best? Two reasons, I think. First, he has a growing obsession with "trolls": this is Wales's code for people who do not agree with him, mostly (and again, we do not necessarily mean those who do not agree with him on the specifics, but those who do not agree with him on the broader picture). If you agree that "rationality" can construct a utopia, you are not a troll. If you believe that conflict and disturbance are breeding grounds for achievement, you are. Second, Wales does not miss a chance to stroke the egos of the nerds and social misfits who make up Wikipedia's cadres. They are on the whole fucking horrible people, up themselves in a way that demands years of practice and an inability to see yourself as others see you that's rare in even the most self-absorbed. Wikipedia is a magnet for people that make you think "you twat" almost every time they trip over their keyboard to spew some ill-thought-out blather. Above all, they are largely unsuccessful, unloved
fools, shutins, fatties and ugs.
To the extent that we are committed to reason and the non-initiation of force as fundamental organising principles for a free world
Whoah! Where did that come from, and why does Wales think these are the fundamental organising principles of a free world?
Well, Wales is a Randian, that dismal species of being that adores Ayn Rand's "philosophy" of fuckyoujackism. Randians equate "reason" with "thinking like I do", of course. What they despise, above all, is emotion. Because they are horrible shitheads, who lack empathy, mostly. Actually, scrub the "mostly". Entirely. They are people who are scared of doing the right thing because it feels good, and need to do endless wrong things that hang together in a framework built by reason.
Anyone who has loved a child can tell you that emotion trumps reason though. And that same capacity for love is what makes us get all weepy when we see stick-thin African kids, so much so that we lose sight of reason, which would inform us that in a world with scarce resources, someone needs to be fucked if we are going to have plenty.
Randians are into the noninitiation of force thing because they are, like all reactionaries, deathly scared of someone taking what they have from them. They worship property, and conveniently ignore that all property is theft, having originally been taken from someone else by the initiation of force. What Wales, and others like him, opposes is justice, particularly if it is imposed on him. Most libertarians are status-quoists: they would like the world frozen as is, so that they can maintain the privilege that they benefit from.
Well yeah. But it's not philosophy. It's just greed rationalised. Those poor African kids wouldn't be suffering so, and wouldn't need fucking free encyclopaedias, were we living in a world in which it wasn't possible to make a ton of money by trading options. Not making anything, not even facilitating the making of anything. Nope. Gambling.
I do not knock making a living from gambling. I just don't pretend to be Gandhi.
we can come together to create values that would be impossible for people dedicated to eternal class or ethnic conflict.
wat
Hang on. Do you have any fucking idea what class conflict is, and why it happens? Let me clue you in, you buffoon. There are these super rich people, right? Who go poncing round the place in jets, starting up websites, exploiting the labour of others, and generally having it easy. Then there are these not so rich people, who labour all their (usually quite short) lives, mostly to the benefit of the aforesaid super rich people.
No wonder you don't want conflict, Wales. Because trolls would be the least of your fucking problems if all those poor people woke up to the truth that they so greatly outnumber you and your greedhead brethren that they could just
take it from you.
Some are concerned about the erosion of local culture in the face of a world of hyper-connectivity.
Are they? Poor fools, eh?
But the evidence so far suggests that people everywhere are rational enough for this to take place when it is a good thing, and to not take place when it is a bad thing.
Yes, people just rationally choose to drink Coke in India, rather than tea, and not because Coke spends a huge amount of money and effort promoting fizzy, sugary water. The people of Tonga rationally abandoned their reasonably healthsome diet of fish and taro for the not so healthy alternative of fried chicken because they reasoned that
goddamn, this stuff is more fucking tastier than that horrible taro pap.
In Wales's world, we are all making rational choices, deciding to adopt American culture not because America is so rich and powerful that we can't escape it but because hey, who liked that noseflute shit anyway?
As people become more educated, more in tune with the idea that knowledge is a good thing, they tend to throw out the worst elements of their culture (such as rights violations and ignorant prejudice) and preserve that which has genuine value (such as science and art).
It's a fucking wonder that he can write this with a straight face. Almost the opposite is true and I'm going to explain why.
Famously, Indian kids are pushed to excel academically by their parents. But why? Is it because Indians are more in tune with the idea that knowledge is a good thing? No. Like most people, they put little value on knowledge in the abstract, but see it as a means to an end. They want their kids to learn stuff that will help them make a living later in life. They want their kids to learn to be doctors, lawyers and accountants, not beach bums with a thirst for lifelong learning.
America is a powerhouse of knowledge. And what does it do with it? Builds better guns and bombs. To do what with? To pursue rights violations and ignorant prejudice. Or just to make more money.
I believe we are already beginning to see the fruits of this change worldwide. China has been widely, and properly, criticised for their extensive censorship of the internet, but it is not the criticism that is causing them to begin to dismantle that censorship. It is rather, I believe and hope, a growing understanding and appreciation for the power of a culture of communication both for prosperity, but also for the valid preservation of what is valuable in local culture.
Either that or they realise that the cost of imposing censorship is not matched by any benefit, and that they have other, more immediately useful ways of preventing the outside information's having impact: for example, jailing dissidents more assiduously.
In an effort to begin to resolve the long-standing Tibetan problem, China has recently committed, in partnership with the Louise T Blouin Foundation, $70m to Tibetan cultural preservation. In my view, this reflects
a total whitewash? an attempt to buy influential voices in the Western media? a cynical attempt to seem to give a shit about Tibet, while continuing to occupy it and oppress its people?
a preliminary but increasing understanding on the part of the Chinese leadership that free expression, particularly of the type fostered by projects such as Wikipedia with a kind focus on a loving effort to share knowledge, will lead to a stronger China.
Oh. Well yes, they think it will strengthen China. But "cultural preservation" (carefully packaging Tibetan culture so that it cannot be used as a rallying point for a minority you seek to disempower) is not the same thing as "free expression". Mr Wales is cordially invited to express freely the view that China is a vicious imperialist power and see whether China welcomes debate by allowing him a visa so that he can express that view in China itself.
I hope that they will soon recognise the right of the Chinese-speaking people to assist in explaining China to the world by ending their ban on participation in Wikipedia.
"If I kiss the yellow man's arse enough, maybe he will free his people so that they can further aggrandise me."
Wikipedia is booming in the languages of the developing world. People are writing in their own languages.
Well, you know, they will, won't they? Especially if they don't speak any others.
This is the opposite of the monolithic culture which would have been the product of a top-down broadcast-oriented media. One important fact about participatory media is that people will participate in their own ways, expressing and preserving the best things that they care about.
Yes. And hurting and oppressing others for not sharing their viewpoints.
I advocate for the value of a universal encyclopedia which is accessible to everyone and which rationally puts forward the basic facts about various arguments and controversies in such a manner that newcomers to an issue can understand what the disagreement is about. Don't tell me what to think, don't feed me one side of the story; give me actual facts and I will think for myself to decide. And I respect you as a human being enough to return the favour.
Wikipedia tends to be written by people who are significantly more educated than average, by people who are passionate about ideas, about getting it right. This is a good thing. Because thinking is not automatic, the avoidance of bias is not automatic. A ruthless precision in thinking is a great virtue in the project. And you have to bring that kind of precision because, unlike the comfortable writers of a classic top-down encyclopedia, you are likely to be contacted and challenged if you have made a flawed argument or based your conclusion on faulty premises. Such is the virtue of the marketplace of ideas.
On any Wikipedia entry, if you wonder who wrote it and why, you can click on the history tab and see every change made to the article and who made that change. You can visit that person's user page and ask them a question. You can, for the first time, directly engage in the validation of the work before you. Or, just as we are normally too busy to attend jury trials, you can take comfort in the fact that there is a process, a system, a genuine social design behind the project which seeks to empower and preserve the possibility of improvement when there is an error.
The overall lesson of Wikipedia is one of great humanitarian opportunity and hope. Tyrants and politicians have traditionally divided us and pushed us into war. People have been enslaved and abused in countless horrific ways. Ignorance and poverty, which go hand in hand with totalitarianism and control, continue to be widespread. And yet it turns out that as we have given a voice to millions of people with a mission to build "the sum of all human knowledge", nearly all of them are able to do so with kindness, compassion, and thoughtfulness.
Genuine collaboration is possible, and comes natural to us. Aristotle defined man as "the rational animal" and he was right. And when we set out in a spirit of genuine inquiry and respect for humanity, we can achieve great things. Each of us, coming to a project like Wikipedia for our own reasons, can help to build something that, I think, shows the promise of the future, our dreams of peace, to be within reach.
I can't do any more. The tears of laughter have become so hard to see through. What a vain and pompous man Wales is. He seems almost entirely unaware that his encyclopaedia was built by accretion, not collaboration, and that much of it is patrolled by people who ensure that it does not fairly represent all views, but is strongly biased.
Well, so are all encyclopaedias. But here's the difference: Britannica does not pretend that it's not written by people with certain views. Britannica is a centrepiece of the modernist worldview: it's basically the world as seen from the ivory tower. It is not, and does not claim to be, the last word. Wikipedia does. God help us if it is.
