Wow.
Welcome to Idiot America. Where intellectuals are mocked and expertise is suspicious. The organ of wisdom is the gut, the organ of elimination.
I have a philosophy degree and, as such, I am uppity and snippy about a great many philosophical ideas that the non-philosophy-degree-holding public ( that is to say, those not asking “want fries with that” as the heart of their occupation ( I kid, I kid, my decadently over-educated bretheren )) believe they already know plenty about.
Much like an engineering magazine left in marketing, which leads to promises of Flux Capacitors in the next release, the non-Philosophy students occasionally get exposed to strange ideas which enamor them and which they begin to speak of regularly and, more dangerously, knowingly.
Exhibit A: “begging the question”.
“Begging the question” is a phrase that denotes a common type of logical fallacy. It’s where you assert what you’re trying to prove, as though it’s an established fact. Logically speaking it looks like
Premiss1 Premiss2 Conclusion
——
Conclusion
Versus
Premiss1 Premiss2 Premissn
——
Conclusion
Every time someone uses this phrase in the context of: “The car is broken, which begs the question of how we will get to school” my teeth grit. Why not say:
Given that lack of options isn’t the reason for this misuse, it’s clear that there’s some sort of fascination with “beg the question”. Somehow people hear it once and, under its power, become like victims of Ampulex compressa. It’s compelling as an inter-sentence segue, it works a dark magic on the mind. As the pod-people continue to express the idea those of us with familiarity with the technical term chafe.
In this excellent article on how autistic children have a hard time understanding lying ( because they don’t have the ability to imagine minds with beliefs independent of fact ) the learned author writes:
If what other animals are doing when they appear to be dishonest is not real deception, this begs the question of what counts as real deception[1].
Now wait just a minute. Someone is writing scholarly work about autism research and misuses “beg the question”? Could it be? Have the scientists have been invaded by ampulex beggainterrogativa?
I think this phrase, quite like no other, is a shibboleth of “I went to a university and got a degree of consequence” . Ironically, it is usually the people who adopted the shibboleth for exactly that reason who most misuse it, leaving your fry cook’s teeth it ill-repair owing to the induced gnashing.
Footnotes:
I’ve recorded how I was recently in Boston at the beautiful Westin Boston Waterfront hotel. The foyer is beautiful, the bar dark and sleek, the staff courteous. In every way a high-calibre hotel should be enjoyable, it is.
Ancillary to this æsthetic, when turning on the beautiful plasma LG screen, you are given, instead of some graphic menu of “here are the movies we hope to bilk you an extra x bucks for”, a rotating series of interactive vignettes with this lovely, non-offensive, pretty, but not threateningly hot-pretty, conservatively-dressed, non-Caucasian ( because we’re down wit’ diversitay ) lady as your virtual interlocutor.
I named her Christina.
Christina reminds you that Westin wants to elevate all your senses, and advises you to buy White Tea scented candles - against a pseduo-shoji wall, perhaps taking the Asian thing a bit too far, we get it, yo.
Now, I was surprised when pretty, prim, Christina had the ignominious task of informing me of the movie selection options: “Hollywood Blockbusters, Children’s programing, and mature adult content”.
Say it with her “mature adult content”
She didn’t that, did she? Why Christina, you little minx, underneath your buttoned-up tweed there’s a scarlet A, eh? But then I thought about it a bit more…
I realize that they’re trying to give as many flags to parents in the facility that this is exactly what you don’t want your kids to be watching ( same reason, reversed, for road warrior salesfolk ), but in so doing they created a bit of a semantic conundrum.
As for you mature adults tuning in…well, boffo.
I realize this is coming some 2 months late from the event, nevertheless, in Google, every moment of history is now, so putting these words to bits late is no crime
During SXSW I saw this shirt everywhere.
Congratulations Target, with this particular item you hit your target demographic square in the chest.
You hit the:
Post-religious, but spiritual ( Buddha ), educated ( correlate to earning power and choices elsewhere in this summation ), making enough money to have disposable income but not so much that they’d be snobby about actually buying clothes at Target, working in the tech industry, Mac-inclined, likely to have relaxed workplace clothing strictures, buys pre-faded so that machine-wash isn’t a hassle male between 21 and 35.
Madison avenue I am your lapdog.
Had I been able to get over the sheer embarrassment that I associate with using Twitter during the conference I might well have organized a Buddha shirt guy meetup
Millions of dollars each year are spent figuring out how best to position a product within the aisles of a grocery store. For the pleasure of having a rickety cardboard kiosk set up on the corner a company will pay a premium to the store owner, or, in to the drug store chain that Lauren and I were patronizing this afternoon.
Now, as I walked past this kiosk I thought to myself: “This name is horrible, how can I improve this?”.
And then the answer became clear….
Something that’s stuck with me, unlike vinegary BBQ, is this ad on the air of NC TV.
Man, the people in Atlanta dress well - especially the African-American community. Man, great threads, great taste, and worn with great attitude.
I guess it’s what Milan is to us Anglo types.
In effort to contribute something to the internet community more substantial than my musings on music, people in the environment, and a laundry list of “what I did today”, I have decided to undertake ( perhaps ) a series of writings about living with the technology-minded partner. Today I will write on what I have come to call “twitch mode”: what it is, how it affects relationships, and how you and your partner can handle its presence.
Your guy can’t focus on you, your attention is distracted after a day hard at work, everything feels too slow, after juggling chainsaws all day you feel like you’re can’t be involved at home? This entry may help you.
Note: This was originally drafted in early January 2007, but is only now surfacing here.
The Leauge sent in an email to see if I had fallen off the edge of the world. Although it appears irony has fallen upon The League, for as I type this, his web site has, in fact, fallen off the edge of the world: Blogger appears to be down.
I have not left the gravitational field of this big, blue, glob. There’s a bunch of interesting work stuff going on ( more later ), my mom was in town and I started classes at Austin Community College.
I’m taking two classes: Intermediate Algebra and C++.
First, this is the kind of mathematics I learned in high school ( or should have learned better ). I eventually matriculated to the university and there went as far as 2 semesters of business calculus: integration, derivation, the whole shebang. But, after ten ( and I am astounded to type that ) years away from calculus, I’ve forgotten so much. So, here I am, back at square one, learning the basics again. It’s easy to forget a lot because, to answer those kids in high school who asked “when am I going to use this in the real world” the answer, I’m afraid to say, is rarely. So much, that, you’re right, you might be wasting your time. Sorry.
In any case, this time through I’m finding it much easier to learn and encode this information. I’ve thought about why, but I think that my brain must have been conditioned for understanding symbolic and abstract systems through years of programming and a bit of symbolic logic. As is suggested by the action of Snow Crash, I think that the brain arrives with just a tiny bit of software pre-installed. The first several routines (“primary routines”) decide whether or not you will be more or less receptive to new (“secondary”) routines.
The primary routines must be incredibly fundamental. Do you use symbolic language, pictorgrams, pictographs? Using pictographs may disincline a learner from picking up a certain set of secondary routines ( I don’t believe anything is un-learnable, although research shows that past the age of 7 there’s no chance for language acquisition if it hasn’t already happened, sorry Tarzan).
So this secondary routine, algebra, just didn’t stick for me. But I think that I’ve been running secondary programs of an abstracting and variant nature now for so many years that receiving new routines which share similar pathways as other abstracting secondary routines’ function has made it easier to integrate the data.
Or, maybe because my teacher is exceedingly competent. Gustavo Cepparo is one of the best lecturers I’ve had at any school I’ve ever attended. He does not advocate “niceness” he educates giving you an education (although he is very personable). He sees himself as your worthy adversary, trying your skills and, in so doing, giving you an education. Damn straight.
I was discussing this “inclination for symbolic systems” with Lauren who, in her own life, is also undertaking an effort to put some ‘new secondary routine momentum’ into her gray matter. She’s learning computer science and programming. Oddly, when she programs she feels the same structure and scalpel that she came to know doing her literature work: themes, repetition, motifs, it’s all there.
But then we came to a question: Why is it, if you want to go into programming, pedestrian ( or parental ) wisdom holds: “Are you good at math.”
This, parents, friends, teachers, I want to warn you away from asking. The question is not “are you good at math” but do you like symbolic systems, creating them, imagining them, adhering and bending them? That’s the question.
Good programmers are kids who memorize the armor charts to Dungeons and Dragons. Good programmers like to corollate data on baseball cards, they like to organize baseball cards. I’ve seen kids read chess books, or play Magic or play Yu-Gi-Oh, know the Dewy Decimal system, it’s all the same thing: breathing life into internal rules processing machines in your brain, and then using physical ( versus digital ) objects as the inputs to your automata.
So why do kids get asked “but are you good at math”.
Math is a convenient, albeit misleading, question, it’s a forced symbolic system that kids are forced to learn. To this extent, it can be used as a good measure of “will you be a good programmer”. Further, and a child has no way of knowing this, this lazy question implies that “liking math” and “liking the pedagogical approach used by the school board and as practiced by your teacher” are the same. They are wholly different and a child has no way of knowing this.
I disliked most of my math teachers, and the pedagogy was slow, pedantic, too slow to build connections, to sketch an architecture, to paint a direction. Math class, for me, was about exercises and who in their right mind gives a flip about that? I knew math was important, but there was no direction or structure for that statement beyond the obscure “but you’ll need it in college”.
Here’s how I now propose that math should be explained.
I don’t know much more about math than that, but with that framework I could have seen that learning that 3/4 * 4/3 = 1 was something important in the sense that it was as fundamental as learning the crucial verbs to express want or need or identity.
And that, balance, unknown, systems for discovery of unknown, systems for modeling the unknown is incredibly interesting. Had mathematics pedagogy been about systems of symbolic manipulation to discern the unknown versus timed tests and a litany of rules and obscure little “tricks”: loose islands of thought, I feel I would have grasped the beauty of math earlier.
And ultimately this brings me back to the most sublime poem ever written “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—-that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Algerbra, comes from the original Arabic book in which its tenets were first set: Science of the Reunion and the Opposition.
Isn’t that a beautiful phrasing for what algebra allows us to do? This is truth and this is beauty.
And hoary old double-entry accounting, it is a science of reuniting the not with the present, the received with the owed. That is truth, and that, to my good accountant friends, is beauty too. I can see why those who ply this craft love it.
And programming, it is the balancing of the abstract concepts against the abstract concepts. In this vacuum, you create, and you create function, and then you create beauty. And that’s why we love it.
And assuredly, if you choose to plumb the deepest depths of that digital reality, you will do a lot of math, but don’t scare off a child from playing in our world of pure abstraction because they mistakenly associate it with the pitiful educational quality in this country or rote, staid, pedagogy.
**I’m posting this, but I feel it’s incomplete, I think I need to read it some more and refine it, so, this content may update. **
At Geekfoolery.com the authors have noted that “LOL” as an acronym has undermined effective IM communication of amusement.
Some things are truly LOL moments: Most things that The Social Bobcat writes fall into this category ( e.g. this very old post of mine ).
Most things are not of this calibre, but a great many people use the LOL acronym to assert that what was said was of this uproarious nature. The Geekfoolery krewe sugest using BNS. Sure it’s a bit, uh, graphic, but after a few months of use, the acronym will take over the component and all we will have two meaningful acronyms for conveying mirth: mere amusement and uproarious hilarity.
I was talking to my girlfriend about this topic and she said this was one of the things she liked best about me: that when we IM’d I only used LOL in truly funny moments.