Angry Rainbow Mermaids

Fame Fever (Preview)

November 27, 2019

Last night my husband got home late—he had been out to a movie with 15yo—I was reading in bed, and as soon as he came in I felt this well of relief and immediately blurted out: “I don’t feel well.”

He asked if something was physically wrong, or if anything upsetting had happened to me today: no.

Then what was wrong?

I didn’t know, but I felt really bad, horribly disgusted with myself, I wanted to disappear but that wasn’t enough, I wanted it to be the case that nobody in the world had ever known or would ever know who I was.

He said, “you have fame fever.”

And then I recognized the feeling from the past—I used to get it after going to parties, back when I went to parties. If you met me at a party you would assume from all my nonstop chatter that I love being the center of attention. And I do—for a while. Maybe all extroverts are like this? But then afterwards I crash—it is as though I expended all of my self at the party and now there is no self left for me to draw on. Sitting alone …

Advice for Humans (Preview)

November 26, 2019

Regular Human who used to read this blog: But I want to keep reading it!

Me: You really shouldn’t. You’re not welcome here anymore.

RH: Well you can’t stop me!

Me: That is true. But I can at least kindly request that you minimize your footprint by not commenting.

RH: But I want to comment.

Me: Look. There’s nothing I can do about that, either. I won’t delete comments by Regular Humans, because what if they are bots in disguise? But perhaps you could try to make your comments as bot-like as possible? Here is an example for you to emulate: ...

Naked Conversations vs. Online Conversations (Preview)

November 26, 2019

So I was chatting in the locker room with a woman who congratulated me on my NYT piece—“but did you see those comments?!”—and I told her my MIL had the same reaction, as to how mean people are—“they wouldn’t say those things to you if they knew you!” And that was when it occurred to me that chatting after yoga—naked, naturally—is just about the precise opposite way to meet someone as meeting in the NYT comments section....

I don’t feel oppressed. (Preview)

November 25, 2019

A short confessional essay.

I don’t feel oppressed by men. I don’t feel oppressed by academia. I don’t feel oppressed by big business, or Facebook, or Silicon Valley, or the pharmaceutical industry. I don’t feel oppressed by Donald Trump. I don’t feel oppressed by boomers or billionaires or billionaire boomers. I don’t feel oppressed by people who are a little bit richer than I am. I don’t feel oppressed by China or Russia. I don’t feel oppressed on account of my religion. I don’t feel oppressed as a mother. I don’t feel oppressed by Hollywood. I don’t feel oppressed by beautiful women. I don’t feel oppressed by people who think I am weird, or inappropriate, or a bad parent, or insufficiently attentive to questions of social justice. I don’t feel oppressed on behalf of others who are oppressed. I don’t feel oppressed by my colleagues, or the administration of my University. I don’t feel oppressed by climate change. I don’t feel oppressed as a philosopher, or by the ...

Give me the wretched refuse of your teeming shores

November 24, 2019

I need a personal loan of $15,000 in the next 3 hours is there any way to arrange this?

November 24, 2019

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ ...

Is big pharma keeping secrets from me about fungus treatment?

November 24, 2019

...

My teeth could be whiter

November 24, 2019

...

Are there any Russian women I could meet?

November 24, 2019

...

Is there a way I could work from home and still earn money?

November 24, 2019

...

Is there one simple trick I could use to lose weight?

November 24, 2019

...

Is my penis large enough?

November 24, 2019

...

Transgressivism

September 04, 2019

I think I am drawn to views that those around me deny, because they deny them. I like it when the people close to me disapprove of me. Call this “transgressivism.” Most people have the opposite condition, they are drawn to agree with some peer group, and they like it when those people approve of them. Call that “conformism.” My transgressivism is not “an act” any more than their conformism is; it is not a choice or a ploy. It is simply who I am, how I innately think about the world. It is important to remember that people are different from one another, and to be reflective about our tendency to interpret difference as maliciousness.

I am not less sincere than other people, since I am just as good at (really) convincing myself of the truth of what other people deny as conformists are of the corresponding truth. My transgressivism is more visible and looks more like a “condition” than conformism, because most people are conformists and do not see the degree to which they and the people around them are. (They only tend to see the conformism present in whatever group they oppose.) Thus transgressivism “stands out” more than conformism, but this is a kind of illusion.

Does transgressivism put me at an epistemic disadvantage? Yes, because what most people deny is more likely to be false than what most people accept. Do I have to fight against my own transgressivism? Yes, it would be irresponsible not to; the same is true of conformism, but perhaps to a lesser degree. Much of my life is taken up with fighting my own transgressivism, testing my arguments in personal conversations to see whether they hold up. I spend hours on the phone every day and the road from thought to paper passess through many, many, many conversations.

Though transgressivism puts me at something of an epistemic disadvantage when considered on my own, it makes me an excellent interlocutor because I explore possibilities other people don’t see. It also makes me appreciative of how much I need other people in order to think properly.

Solo Book Club

August 19, 2019

12 Facts about Solo Book Club{1}

(1) Stats: I tweeted 25 times over the course of a 250 page book.

(2) Reading a book “publicly” (via twitter) takes much more time, I would estimate at close to 2X for me.

(3) I found myself constantly asking myself, “is this passage worth tweeting” or “should I tell them about this?” This really changes the reading experience. Douthat is right: less immersive.

(4) But he’s not right for the reason he gives. I was not very tempted to use my phone for other purposes, because I saw it as ‘integrated’ into my reading, a tool for reading-recording. I wasn’t even that tempted to navigate away from the relevant page of twitter to, e.g. refresh my feed or check my mentions, bc it was so annoying to find the relevant tweet (to attach the next book-tweet to) again.

(5) It is hard to remember to have your phone near you every. single. time. you pick up your book.

(6) “The internet is counting on me to read this book!” is in fact a motivating thought, even if it is also insane.

(7) I think I will remember certain specific passages (e.g. flying horses, cloud fable, revenge as capture by the past) much better than I would have otherwise, simply because I tweeted them.

(8) As I was reading, I was not asking myself “how good is this book” so much as “what am I learning”? This is because my imagined audience is people who are watching me read it and want to know what I am getting out of it, not people who might read in future.

(9) I definitely do not want to switch over to doing all my fiction reading this way, but I might do it again at some point.

(10) Turning the pages feels more like “progress”: I had the thought “I am 1/3 way through!”, which I don’t remember ever having in private reading.

(11) I think, for those wishing to do more reading, (4) (6) and (10) may well outweigh (2). Public reading = virtue signaling and virtue signaling = aspiration (see here).

(12) I actually do feel like I somehow read this book with other people, not by myself, even if that thought is, like the thought in (6), insane.

What Should You Do When Someone Breaks Your Heart And It Hurts So Much You Want To Die?

July 21, 2019

32 answers for those who can’t abide good advice while feeling bad.{2}

(1) Watch this.

(2) Anger can be a relief from sadness, so take a break from depression every now and then to think about all the ways in which he{3} wronged you. Then go back to being sad. Think of anger and sadness as pools to dip yourself into, one hot one cold, you alternate between them to regulate your temperature.

(3) Concoct a positive conspiracy theory about the circumstances that led to the breakup: your beloved is (e.g.) really a spy of some kind, and was faced with the choice of allowing the whole world to be destroyed, or cutting off contact with you in a way that ensured the salvation of humanity, but required deceiving you into thinking he didn’t love you. The probability that such a story is true may be small, but it is greater than zero. If you concoct more than one, Bayesianism says you can add the probabilities together.

(4) When you cannot sleep at night: violent mental imagery. No one has to know.

(5) Write about what you are going through. If you need a place to start, you can always write a lists of tips for how to deal with heartbreak. Just put everything you are in fact doing on the list! (Researchshows that advice benefits the advisor more than the advisee.)

(6) Vengeance in some form may be necessary. Spend a lot of time trying to figure out what is precisely the right form, because this is an interesting puzzle.

(7) Seize opportunities to commune with his other exes. They are the only people who can possibly understand.

(8) Try to think about the breakup from God’s point of view. Then think about it from the devil’s.

(9) If he left you for another person, adopt the opposite political/ aesthetic/ religious views to those of that person. (See 12 below)

(10) Remember: You cannot rise like a pheonix from the ashes of your old self unless you get really and truly burnt to a crisp.

(11) Writing in his handwriting is a good way to creep him (or others, or yourself) out.

(12) Become a doxastic voluntarist (if you can).

(13) When your friends say “you are better off without him” and “he doesn’t deserve you,” don’t become enraged at them. Instead, just think to yourself, “I am better off without them” and “they don’t deserve me.”

(14) You probably shouldn’t burn everything he gave you in a bonfire, but never say never. (See 24 below)

(15) Don’t tell your therapist about the breakup, and relish the pleasure of one hour’s appearance of normalcy. (Keeping secrets from your therapist is, quite generally, underrated.)

(16) Keep in mind that this experience will not only make you a less boring person, but, because boringness is relative, it also makes the already boring people out there even more boring.

(17) Yes, there is a moral rule against entertaining yourself with the assumption that people who react negatively to your idiosyncracies rarely have sex (and when they do it’s as lame and conventional as they are), but there is also a heartbreak loophole.

(18) No one can hate you with the vehemence, precision and insightfulness that you can. Unleash the full force of your wrath upon yourself: you are your own best enemy!

(19) There are whole playlists on Spotify called, e.g., “lying naked on the floor;” they are made for times like this. Relish the fact that you are living inside a cliché.

(20) “Enjoy” the art of Egon Schiele, you can understand it better now than at any other time.

(21) In many nearby possible worlds, the two of you are still together. Ponder this.

(22) Perhaps too obvious to need saying, but: read a lot of novels. Now is the time to live in another reality.

(23) Play the game of identifying the character that represents you and the character that represents him in every novel you read.

(24) If you find yourself unable to believe yourself when you tell yourself that you would never, ever get back together with him, stop telling yourself that. It’s probably not true. You can always listen to the Taylor Swift song instead.

(25) Spend time around babies, crowds, foreigners who do not speak your language, or people who are unwilling to talk to you.

(26) If you are normally very literal, experiment with irony and sarcasm; and vice versa.

(27) Try to achieve a balance between the hours when you stalk him online and the hours when you pretend you are now able to ignore his existence entirely.

(28) Force yourself to understand that he is doing just fine without you. If necessary you can write those words down, over and over, Shining-style. (Extra points if you use his handwriting!)

(29) If you must socialize, visualize each person in your social group experiencing wrenching heartbreak. (You can use the image of them lying naked on the floor.)

(30) Challenge someone to a duel. You should be doing this regularly anyways, but most people have an inhibition about it, and the nihilism borne of heartbreak could be what it takes to get you over the hump.

(31) When you are ready to get out there again, use Fernando Pessoa’s Advice for Unhappily Married Women as your dating handbook. (It doesn’t matter whether you are married or whether you are a woman: you are unhappy, that’s what counts.)

(32) There is really only one fact, it is The Fact of heartbreak. It doesn’t matter why The Fact obtains, or whether anyone can be faulted for its obtaining. While he is breaking your heart, he will try to direct your attention away from The Fact, and afterwards everyone who comforts you will do the same, because they all think The Fact is too brutal and devastating for you to handle. But you should resist all of them, and spend as much time as you possibly can facing The Fact. The Fact is this: he does not love you nearly as much as you love him.

51 Tips For a Successful Life

December 07, 2018

(1) Get married. Then get divorced. Then get remarried.

(2) Every day, ask yourself, do I feel like showering today? If the answer is, “yes,” shower.

(3) Be in environments with the right amount of light.

(4) Subtly vary your bedtime and waking times every day, so that you never quite settle into a pattern. Same for mealtimes.

(5) Respond to emails immediately, except if they seem important, then trust that you’ll remember them at some indeterminate moment in the future.

(6) Be afraid for your children: Will they become good people? Will bad things happen to them? Will they love me when they grow up? These are good questions to ponder.

(8) Floss for the first few days after every dentist appointment.

(9) Sometimes, write all day, from morning to night. Other times, read all day. Yet other days should be nothing but meetings, as payment for the days of the first two kinds.

(10) Make sudden, unexpected changes in your appearance every few years.

(11) Allow yourself to admire (some) people to the point where you feel really bad about how much you fail to measure up.

(12) If you have a problem in your work--in my case these are problems with philosophical arguments--ask your kids to solve it for you. Kids should not be kept idle.

(13) Listen to music all the time, but have no taste in music.

(14) Avoid eye contact when socially acceptable, and also when not.

(15) Sometimes, eat yogurt and cereal for dinner, even when you are over 40.

(16) When you play games with you kids, try really hard to beat them.

(17) See paradoxes everywhere, and when people try to ‘solve’ them or smooth them out or call them “pseudo-paradoxes,” fight to keep seeing them. Hard.

(18) When you read some new interesting book/paper or have some new idea, find convenient segues that allow you to talk about it to everyone you meet, especially people who are unlikely to be interested in it.

(19) Every once in a while, lose touch with everyone you know. So that you can be ready when the mood strikes, keep a list of places you can hide away where no one will find you.

(20) When traveling, find all the idiosyncrasies of the culture you are in to be funny and absurd by comparison with the normal place you are from.

(21) At any given time, be pretty obsessed with one particular food and eat it for many meals in a row.

(22) Regularly find ways to be alone in crowded places.

(23) Learn to appreciate what is sublime about smoking and drunkenness. Assume other drugs are not sublime without trying them.

(24) Use coffee to make yourself better, and plan work around this.

(25) Work all the time, to the point of exhaustion, usually fruitlessly, but with many distractions.

(27) Don’t expect the unexpected, so that you can be shocked when it happens.

(28) When you feel guilty for the bad ways you have treated your loved ones, or regret for opportunities missed, or ashamed for not being a better person than you are, assume these feelings are correct.

(29) When people criticize you, even when they are anonymous internet men threatened by the hint of feminism in something that you wrote, assume that they are on to something.

(30) Don’t worry too much about your academic career until after you get tenure, that is when the hidden dangers set in.

(31) Be sure to tell your children fantastic lies while they are still young enough to believe them. For example, I am right now wearing shoes I convinced my 5yo are made out of dinosaur skin.

(32) Confuse other people.

(33) Confuse yourself.

(35) When participating in group deliberations, or really any group activities, avoid the temptation to get along.

(36) Test whether your loved ones really love you, but be explicit about it.

(38) Always be restarting your life with a new n-year plan.

(39) Argue a lot, often repeating arguments you have made before without remembering this fact. More generally, don’t worry about repeating yourself or making “progress.”

(40) Engage in the kind of group exercise that allows for secretive, invidious comparisons between bodies and abilities. That will keep you coming back for more.

(41) Stare at very beautiful people and wonder how so much beauty is possible. Reflect on the fact that no work of art can compare. Be sad that you never were nor will be one of those people.

(42) Fear death.

(43) Bookstores with chairs are good places to read the whole book and then you don’t have to buy it. More generally: try to own as few books as possible.

(44) Learn to read fast, but also learn to keep this power in check.

(45) When you are walking through your neighborhood, envy the people who own fancy houses but then imagine yourself having a miserable life living in them.

(46) At some point in your life, own and ride a motorcycle. But give it up before it kills you.

(47) Often ask yourself, “What would Socrates/Jesus/Julia Child [insert your hero] do? And why would that be a mistake?”

(48) Arrange your physical environment so that you can enjoy the textures and colors of things.

(49) Don’t be a contrarian.

(50) Doodle, and take real pleasure in it.

(51) If you encounter some evidence of impairment to your health, anything from the flu, to a food allergy, to mental illness of some kind--dismiss it and give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Avoid medical treatment, and just go ahead and eat what you want.

Notes:

(i) 7, 26, 34, 37 have been censored, they were about sex and my kids might find this blog one day.

(ii) This list is not a joke, nor is it meant ironically. I follow all these rules, and I am a successful person. So don’t dismiss the possibility that these tips might work for you!

What Fake Money Can’t Buy

November 04, 2018

Recently I emailed a friend a question, and he wanted to know what I would pay for an answer. There was no prospect of actual payment: so long as I put a number on how much the answer was worth to me, he would answer. His ‘price’ for answering was the knowledge of how much I wanted an answer. As a matter of fact, I really wanted him to answer, so at first I was relieved to think that I could extract one so easily. All I needed to do was produce a price, and I’d get my answer.

I discovered, to my surprise, that I was unable to put a number on the value of the answer. I couldn’t even fix a range: I was unable to rule out $1 as being too low, or $100,000 as being too high. I went as far as typing a dollar sign into an email, in anticipation that I would just write down whatever number flitted into my head. None did. This was frustrating. Why couldn’t I force myself to just write down some number?

I found myself blankly incapable of proceeding—like those times when someone asks you a question and you are struck dumb. I even tried the following: writing an elaborate pre-amble in which I explained to my friend that it was impossible to evaluate the worth of my answer in money, so I was just going to pick a number that didn’t necessarily reflect that. And then I waited for the number to come to me. It didn’t!

Do I have some kind of moral objection to monetizing human interactions? No, the problem turned out to be that my friend did. At a later point he made a joke about accepting $374 for an answer to a different question. He found this prospect absurd, but I did not—I would’ve considered paying him $374 for that one. So why was I unable to put a price on the answer to my own question? That way I could have gotten it for free, a much better deal than paying $374 for an answer to a less important question!

It is true that I knew I would not be paying him, but why does that matter? We can, after all, entertain hypothetical questions about the worth of various items. If the obstacle to payment were a contingent fact—such as that PayPal is down, this time I get a freebie—then I could ask myself, what would I pay him if PayPal weren’tdown? Consider: when you are asked “What would you pay for X?” you are usually trying to imagine yourself into a world in which you are presented with the prospect of acquiring X, for money. But in this case I was in fact already in that situation in the actual world—with the one exception being that my friend finds the idea of me paying him for the answer to be absurd, laughable, ridiculous. So the “hypothetical” nature of the question came solely from the fact that he would never accept money for an answer. But that is the same as him saying to me, “there is no possible world in which I am relevantly like me, and you are relevantly like you, and I take money from you for providing an answer.” He has made his own question—how much would you pay—not only unanswerable but even unaskable.

So we reach a stalemate: I want the answer. My friend wants a number. Is there any way for me to get the answer I so desire, and may even be willing to pay real money for? Could I, for instance, pay it to someone else and then report the amount to my friend? Consider: I could donate the maximum I am willing to pay to his favorite charity, and then tell him how much that was. But my donation does not ipso factosecure an answer from him—that was not our arrangement—and for this reason the amount donated does not equate to the worth of the answer. The number I give him shouldn’t be the amount that I donated, but the presumably higher amount I would have paid if I could’ve directly paid for (and thereby been assured of) the answer. But that’s precisely the number I can’t produce, because there is no possible world in which I could’ve paid for it directly.

My conclusion is that our stalemate is unbreakable, and reveals the limits of the ‘what would you pay’ thought experiment: if you’re flatly unwilling to take my money, you can’t use it to gauge my interest, either.

How Much Longer Till We Get There?

October 20, 2018

What’s the most annoying thing that kids do? This is a tough contest, but for me, the prize goes to insistent repetitions of my title question on cross-country drives. What do I hate about it so much? Is it that it’s an expression of impatience dressed up as something beautiful, a question? Is it the fact that the demand—I need to be there now!—is one I cannot meet, and the kid knows full well I cannot meet? Is it the prospect of bottomless possibilities for repetition that stem from its re-askability at every “now”? Is it, perhaps, that I am wondering the same myself, and grumpy that there is no one I can nag? (When one of my TAs came to my office to cry about having made a student cry, I wondered, “Whose office do I get to cry in?”)

It doesn’t really matter why I hate this so much, the important thing is that I do. And I have three children, all of whom are genetically related to me, which is to say, none of them is a paragon of patience. And: we take a lot of cross-country drives. So I needed to do something about it. And I did. I solved it. My solution is so simple, so easily transferrable, and yet at the same time so totally genius that it started to seem immoral of me not to share it with the parents of the world.

Does one really need a genius solution to this problem? One might be inclined just to tell them not to ask. But that (i) makes asking all the more appealing (ii) increases irritability and impatience, and (iii) uses up one of your valuable en route commands—and you never know how many times you might need to say “don’t [insert action that could lead to our immediate deaths]!” It was reflecting on this third and most important reason that led to my eureka moment. What if I could institute rationing on their side too?

Without further ado, I present My Greatest Parenting Hack. When we enter the car, the kids are each given some number of “how much longers.” They are allowed to pool them, to trade or gift them. They are allowed to use the clock on the dashboard to get the most bang for their buck out of each one. And they do! They wouldn’t think of using one before we are well underway, and they often deliberate carefully, as a three-body polis, before deploying a second one. At other times, when they are not getting along, things are a bit uglier. For instance they sometimes try to insist that, given their inability to come to a consensus over when they should be used, the others should have to cover their ears so as not to receive the benefits of “their” how-much-longer. But, as a parent these interactions are both funny to watch and fun to participate in. They not only entertain one another, passing the time deliberating and disputing, more importantly, they entertain me! It’s a win-win-win-win situation.

P.S. They rarely manage to use them all up, even on a 14 hour drive.

The American Conversation Problem: Three Proposals

October 06, 2018

Tonight over dinner, my family was pondering the fact that, like most families, we lie inside an ideological bubble, shut off from understanding the points of view of many Americans. We have not engaged much with people who live in different parts of the country, or differ from us with respect to ethnicity, socio-economic status, or religion. Or what about Americans who face (or don’t face) various disabilities that we don’t (or do) face? And my children were alarmed to learn that conversations of this kind online often do not go well.

Call this, “the American Conversation problem”: how can we get better at talking civilly to people who are very different from ourselves, and whose points of view we are thereby likely to caricature?

We came up with three proposals.

(1) Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Arguments App

This is an app that would anonymously pair demographically different people for a brief argument about some political issue of their choice. Think of it: you are waiting for the bus, and instead of staring at the sky or scrolling through twitter you could have a one on one, no holds barred, rapid fire dispute with someone who belongs to a group you don’t usually get to talk to—no observers to show off in front of; no smalltalk needed; no time- commitment on either side. There will also be a procedure to report incivility, e.g. curse words and insults, to encourage a measure of decorum. The originator of this idea has agreed for me to reproduce it here on the condition that I make clear that emojis are forbidden.

(2) America Fairs

They would be held in public places (parks, etc.) across America—in cities, suburbs, towns, and farms—and they would consist of fifty booths, one for each state. The booths would be labeled “Meet A Muslim”, “Meet a Jew”, “Meet a Conservative”, “Meet an Atheist”, “Meet a Gay Person”, “Meet a Gun Owner”, “Meet a Latino”, “Meet A disabled Person”, “Meet a Rich Person”, “Meet a Transgender Person”, and so on.

You would spend five or ten minutes with the person or family in each booth, just chatting and eating tasty food provided by the Fair. There would be only one rule: talking about the issue itself (Islam, atheism, conservatism, etc.) would be forbidden. The whole point of America Fairs would be to learn about the person apart from their being an x—to see, first-hand, the humanity—the jobs, the jokes, the love of sports and music, the children’s birthday parties, the lives--that they share with you.

(3) Billy Goats

Billy Goats are paid online forum participants who maintain a discipline of well-researched, courteous conversation. The hope is to take advantage of the behavior propagation effect of online trolls in order to push online discourse in a more productive direction. Online conversations tend to be difficult to escape, psychologically, and significantly influenced by game-theoretic principles of behavior. If someone engages in demeaning speech in order to embarrass an interlocutor, the interlocutor tends to return in kind. The result is that bad conversational behavior generally escalates until it consumes the conversation entirely. And not only are these sorts of exchanges hard to put down, but they draw in observers, who themselves have a hard time leaving, even once the conversation has broken down. Trolls, even in small numbers, can “nudge” an online community into counter-productive behavior.

The same social and psychological principles should make it possible to use trained conversationalists to deliberately nudge online communities into more positive behavior. While positive conversational behavior lacks the escalating effect of abuse, this will, hopefully, be counterbalanced by the appearance of authority given to those who behave themselves with some poise. These trained conversationalists are the “Billy Goats.” Initially, the Billy Goat project would be a test of the effectiveness of this strategy.

Who is a Billy Goat?

A Billy Goat would be paid according to the time spent in conversation in an online community. Their participation in the project would depend on their ability to speak with courtesy, fairness, and honesty, but they would not be required to possess any special education or background. They would not be full-time employees: the idea is an employment system similar to the Uber driver, who works at their own discretion. Billy Goats would be monitored for their behavior in online conversations, and in particular, they would be required resist any escalation of hostile or abusive rhetoric. Billy Goats may be directed toward particular communities depending on their background, and may be directed in groups so as to be more effective. For example, public conversations between two Billy Goats will be encouraged as a way to begin setting an example. Billy Goats will focus their attention on communities in which there is strong public participation (such as Reddit or Twitter) but not communities centered on technical subjects (so, not math stack exchange) or communities in which substantive conversations are impossible (such as Youtube).

Who Monitors the Billy Goats?

Billy Goat conversations will be monitored by a subset of participants authorized to suspend other participants for their behavior. Their job will be to strictly enforce standards of civility. The hope is that the easy money available to Billy Goats for their participation in a generally pleasurable activity will incentivize obedience to these standards.

How will the effectiveness of Billy Goats be measured?

Online communities in which Billy Goats have been active will be monitored alongside comparable “control” communities in which no Billy Goats have been active. Monitors will be blind, and will quantify the proportion of productive conversation to abusive conversation. If these tests fail to show any positive effect of Billy Goat participation, the program will be modified or discontinued.

*****

If you are an enterprising do-gooder or an eccentric billionaire and you would like to realize one of these ideas you should feel free to do so: the Callard/Brooks family hereby declares them public domain. (But see above re: no emojis condition.)

Are Leaders Altruists?

September 28, 2018

“Therefore, you will see the land only from a distance; you will not enter the land I am giving to the people of Israel.” (Deuteronomy 32:52)

Moses doesn’t get to enjoy the happiness he creates for his people. This is a fact about leaders more generally. Plato comments that citizens in a good city “would fight in order not to rule”; for they would understand that a ruler “doesn’t by nature seek his own advantage but that of his subject. And everyone, knowing this, would rather be benefited by others than take the trouble to benefit them.” Leaders are altruists.

In fact, I will defend an even stronger claim—leaders are the only systematic altruists—as well as one I take to follow from it—leaders must be unemotional, detatched, and rational. You might think I mean that leaders must resist or ignore emotion. Instead, I mean that leaders must learn to operate without the emotional bonds that govern most human relationships, because of the asymmetrical and distant—altruistic—nature of the relationship they are in.

Let’s begin by considering various claimants to the title of “altruist.” When you love someone in the context of a close personal relationship, you want them to be happy. But to call such a desire “altruistic” would betray an overly individualistic conception of happiness. At least in the typical case, they love you back, and this reciprocal emotional structure endows the relationship with its own, designated garden of happiness to tend. Inside the garden there can be private jokes, shared memories, joint projects and hobbies, etc. Your lives are intertwined.

This is true not only of romantic love or friendship, but also for love of more asymmetrical kinds, such as in a parent/child relationship. The child’s love for the parent—which often times takes the form of a certain neediness and dependence—is the other side of the coin, the first side of which is the parent’s concern. This double-sidedness is reflected in the characteristic forms of emotional tension that, in being (to some extent) reciprocally acknowledged, bind the relationship together.

Contrast such intimate love with the range of positive attitudes—those of solidarity, or fandom, or respect—we have towards, e.g., fellow-citizens, co-workers, or famous people. These connections are typically weaker and less action-guiding than those present in intimate relationships; we might say not that we love such people but that we wish them well. It is also true of such-well wishing that (the acknowledgement of) reciprocation is a less central feature of the attitude.

Well-wishing can give rise to altruism: neighborliness might lead you help someone carry their bags, or you might donate to a charity from a feeling of beneficence towards humankind. But altruism is not the systematic relationin which we stand to non-intimates, most of whom we never benefit at all. To wish someone well is not necessarily to stand in an altruistic relation to them, because well-wishers needn’t be practically engaged with those to whom they wish well. The sports fan cheering at his TV has no causal effect on the outcome of the game.

At first glance, leaders might resemble well-wishers—leadership does not allow for intimate contact, and it is characteristically unidirectional. Nor does the leader participate in her peoples’ happiness in the way in which my husband participates in mine. For she will typically not even know, of a given member of her people, whether he is happy; nor will he know whether she is. They live separate lives.

However, in other important respects the leader’s attitude is more like that of love, proper. First, there is the fact that being a leader forms a central part of her practical identity—her sense of who she is, and what her life is about—which makes ‘leader,’ as a term of identification, closer to ‘mother’ or ‘friend’ and farther from ‘co-worker’ or ‘fellow-citizen’ or ‘fan.’ Second, and relatedly, her attitude towards her people is a guiding practical force in her life. The leader will often spend much of her time and energy engaged with the work of leading—she may end up devoting her whole life to it.

If altruism is defined as a pursuit of the good of others that is not at one and the same time a pursuit of one’s own private good, then leadership is systematic altruism. Leaders are, in the most literal sense of the phrase, public servants. There are, consequently, important limitations on what my leader, by contrast with my intimate partner, is capable of giving me. I might say to my husband, or my son, or my friend, “you make me happy.” I would never say this to my leader, even in a case where she has performed great acts of benefaction for my sake. For suppose that she has secured peace in my community, set up libraries and museums and concert halls, and created previously unavailable employment opportunities for people like me. I would owe her a lot, in respect of happiness, but it would not be true that, by doing any of those things, she made me happy.

What she did was, first, take away obstacles which, if they were present, would make it difficult for me to be happy, and second, provide me with some of the means necessary for engaging in the activities that make me happy. A leader is someone who makes herself extremely useful to people. She is a master-craftsman of instrumental value. But happiness is of intrinsic value, and someone cannot provide it to you—except by sharingit with you, which is to say, by being happy together with you, or being a sourceof happiness for you—for instance when you take joy in their existence. The links between people that make such shared happiness possible are precisely the intimate emotional connections characteristic of intimate personal relationships.

The good leader will, of course, derive happiness from her own success at the activity of benefaction, and in this way her happiness isn’tfully independent of that of her people. Nonetheless, this relation of causal dependency is quite different from the shared happiness characteristic of intimate love. It makes my leader happy to see me flourishing, but nonetheless I did not make her happy. We do not have that kind of relationship. She made herself happy, by helping me.

Leadership is love without emotional bonds, and this means that leaders must excel at non-emotionally dependent forms of benefaction[1]. The best leader I know has this to say about what makes a person good at leading: “In a crisis situation, I am a very good manager. I see all of the possibilities long before others do, the same with across-the-table meetings or bargaining situations.” Most people are inclined--especially, but not exclusively, in crisis situations-- to use their emotions to shape their approach to the available options. This is, of course, precisely because emotions are generally useful guides, especially when there is not much time to think. What allows the leader to operate without such guidance?

Aristotle’s answer is that there exists an ability to conceptualize the good of others that does not rely on the emotional connection that, in fact, cannot exist in the context of leadership. The leader is able to reason, rather than feel her way to conclusions about what might be good for people. Such a person has an intellectual grasp on the human good in both abstract and concrete terms: “in conduct our task is to start from what is good for each and make what is without qualification good good for each.” (MetaphysicsZ3, 1029b) This back-and-forth movement from what each person needs and what is, per se, good, is precisely the rational process Aristotle calls ‘deliberation.’ The leader is excellent at deliberating, which is to say hat she is able to engage in reasoning without the guidance usually provided by emotional coloration.

Must a great leader also be charismatic? Sometimes. For instance:

(i) A democratically elected leader often has to make her case to the people, and often this is most efficiently be done by having them love her.

(ii) A leader must inspire and motivate her subordinates, this often calls for charisma.

Charisma is the power to make people love you in a unidirectional, non-happiness-sharing, non-intimate way—it is the complement to the leader’s non-intimate love for her people. I think we should be prepared to say that the leader has real love for her people; and that, if she is charismatic, her people have real love for her as well. But it is important to see that even if the people do love the leader, this love is conceptually independent of the leader’s love for them. Thus the situation is quite different from the love that friends or spouses or parents and children or siblings have for one another. There is no shared garden between leader and people. In biblical terms: the leader never enters the promised land. Even when their love for one another is reciprocated, it is essentially unrequited.

Here are some questions about leadership raised by the above discussion:

(1) Does the essential non-mutuality of concern between leaders and their people help us understand why the institution of leadership is so open to corruption?

(2) Would we be better off with a political arrangement in which the degree of charisma called for in a leader were lessened?

(3) Insofar as leaders are altruists, leadership is a form of self-sacrifice. When does it make sense to sacrifice oneself in this way?

My Fashion Philosophy

August 29, 2018

The overarching principle is to dress like the giant kindergartener I in fact am. But this is easier said than done. Here are ten rules that help me live up to that ideal:

(1) Maximize number of colors in outfit. Unless dressing in all one color, which is also great. Or in two colors alternating. Or all one color punctuated by another contrasting color somewhere in there. Actually the possibilities for greatness here are unlimited.

(2) Hairy legs on mammals are not gross, even though people will stare at them. It is good to cultivate indifference to this.

(3) On the other hand, some regulation by discomfort is ok. For example, I will not expose my belly button in public. Taylor Swift and I on the same page here.

(4) Heels are gorgeous but impractical. What if I need to run away? I content myself with admiring them on others.

(5) Makeup feels like wearing another face on my face, so I keep my face “unclothed.” But I have a natural advantage: glasses.

(6) Fitted clothing looks better on me than I tend to think it does. True of most women, we tend to judge by wrong standards.

(7) Layers worn under dresses—leggings or tights, turtlenecks, socks—great for upping color quotient. Also, it’s sometimes possible to wear two dresses on top of each other for double awesomeness.

(8) Pattern clash is fun to inflict on people, it is free attention. More generally: always be more interesting than my clothes, and keep the bar high by wearing really interesting clothes.

(9) Synthetic fabrics overheat me and wool is itchy and belts/tight waistbands give me stomachaches so I usually avoid those things. Comfort and fashion can coexist.

(10) Always compliment fabulous outfits when I see them in the wild, even if just a stranger passing in the street. People do not find this creepy they love it.

Reciprocally Unrequited Love

July 07, 2018

If I love you, but you do not love me, then my love for you is unrequited. Suppose you come to love me. Does it follow that my love for you becomes requited? Not necessarily. There is more to requitedness than reciprocation, since I may not know that you have come to love me. If you keep it to yourself, your love of me makes no mark on my first-personal experience. And this situation might be symmetrical: it could be that you came to love me in total ignorance of the fact that I loved you. For it could be that I, too, am good at keeping the signs of my love to myself. In this case, each of us loves the other but it seems that in some sense we do not love each other. For instance we might both pine miserably for one another in the manner characteristic of unrequited lovers.

In the case I’ve just described, our mutual ignorance is an accident. Our love happens to be both reciprocal and unrequited. It could become requited if we were informed about one other’s mental lives. Perhaps we are both too cowardly to reveal ourselves, but a mutual friend could orchestrate a scenario in which we are both forced to put our cards on the table. Accidentally unrequited love is the stuff of romantic comedy. My topic is closer to tragedy, as I seek to describe the case in which, despite reciprocation, the lovers cannot come to love one another.

I will say, of such love, that it is not merely reciprocal and unrequited, but reciprocally unrequited. If our love is reciprocally unrequited, then no chance event, no well-meaning third party, no external intervention can dissolve the wall between us. When accidentally unrequited love becomes requited, that is like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. In the case of reciprocally unrequited love, that would be like a caterpillar becoming the number four, or a cup of coffee.

My claim, then, is that there could be a structural problem innate to both A’s love of B and B’s love of A that stands in the way of A and B coming to love one another. What could this problem be? Instead of explaining it to you, I would like to show it to you.

Ingmar Bergman’s movie Winter Light presents us with a few hours in the life of Tomas and Marta. Tomas is a widowed pastor who has been going through the motions of religious leadership while questioning his own faith. Marta is an atheistic substitute teacher who was involved in a relationship with Tomas until he broke things off with her. Tomas is coming down with a cold, and, more generally, evidently unable to manage his bodily and material needs.

Though afflicted with many physical maladies herself, Marta says she can “bear my suffering without complaint” if only she can find some meaning in a life of devotion. She begs Tomas to “take me and use me. I have only one wish: to be allowed to live for someone else.” This would give a “purpose to my suffering.” Yet her attempts to nurse Tomas throughout the movie are met with coldness and disgust. Tomas says to Marta, “I’m tired of your loving care. Your fussing. Your good advice.”

What torments Tomas above all is “the silence of God”: God’s failure to speak. This has led Tomas into an agony of questioning God’s existence. Like Jesus, Tomas asks God, “Why have you forsaken me?” One thing keeps Tomas alive in the face of this despair: “I’m not afraid to die, and there was no reason for me to hang on. But I did. Not for my own sake, but to be of some use.” In the final scene, Tomas leads a service at which Marta is the only congregant. Tomas wants God to speak to Marta through him—to gift her the religious comfort he can no longer access himself. But Marta disparages his religious views as “obscure and neurotic; cruelly overwrought with emotion, primitive.” She admits, “… I pay no attention to them. Sometimes I even despise them.” She scorns Tomas’ spiritual assistance, as he her physical assistance.

Each wants to sacrifice themselves for the well-being of the other: their love is reciprocated, yet unrequited. Each loves the other, but they do not love one another. Marta acknowledges that despite all her overtures and attentions to Tomas, “what I lack entirely is a capacity to show you my love.” What is the source of the opacity and shared loneliness in which these two people are locked? I propose that it is their idea of being of use to one another. Both Marta and Tomas would like “to be allowed to live for someone else,” specifically, for one another. This wish constitutes unrequitable love—to see why, let’s take a brief field trip into Aristotle’s ethics.

Aristotle explains why chains of practical reasoning cannot go on forever: “we do not choose everything for the sake of something else, for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, and our desire would be empty and vain.” (NE 1.2) You might put on your shoes in order to walk out the door in order to get on the bus in order to… but you must anticipate this chain stopping somewhere in order for even the first step—the putting on of the shoes—to make sense. Call the stopping point, “happiness.” “Happiness,” thus understood, is nothing more than a label for whatever it is that could serve as a limit to chains of practical reasoning. (It is important not to confuse this for a substantive answer to the question of what happiness amounts to—a point we will come back to.)

There is no reason in principle why I couldn’t act for the sake of your happiness. Your happiness could serve as the limit to my actions. So, for instance, if you tell me what you need in order to be happy, I can provide it, and, if it really does make you happy, my desires and actions would not be empty or in vain. But notice that a problem arises if you are doing the very same thing I am. The infinity of a circle is no less infinite than the infinity of a neverending chain. If I am acting (exclusively) for your happiness, and you are acting (exclusively) for mine, then our chain of practical reasoning lacks a limit.

Bergman represents this problem by having Tomas and Marta assist one another in precisely the dimension the other cannot appreciate. It is not an accident that Tomas is directed to the spiritual needs Marta cannot acknowledge, and Marta is focused on the physical needs Tomas scorns as beneath his notice. Given that all they really want and need is to help one another, they cannot help but misunderstand one another. It is only insofar as Tomas refuses to see that Marta’s deepest need is helping him that he can move forward with the project of “helping” her. They are necessarily be blind to each other’s deepest yearning, despite the fact that it couldn’t be more reciprocated. Indeed, it is the very reciprocality of their love that underwrites its unrequitedness—this is why I say their love is not merely reciprocal and unrequited, but reciprocally unrequited.

If we want to understand what lesson we are supposed to draw from all this, we need to think about why Tomas and Marta are driven into this sort of love in the first place. Bergman represents each of them as taking refuge in love. Tomas sees the service he does in being the voice of God as the only alternative to the suicidal condition of trying to hear the (silent) voice of God. Marta at one point accuses God, “you never give me a task worthy of my strength. Give my life meaning and I’ll be your obedient slave.” Both avoid a certain first personal inquiry—an inquiry into one’s own relation with God, or one’s own purpose. They’ve deferred the problem of the meaning of their own lives onto someone else. The problem is that that they picked the person who was deploying the same strategy!

Everyone can use “happiness” in the way Aristotle does in NE I.2, namely as a label for whatever stops the regress. The difficulty lies in producing one’s own substantive answer to the question of what will make one happy. When one uses another to evade this difficulty, one’s love for that person is not accidentally unrequited but necessarily so. This evasive strategy is not, of course, limited to cases of romantic love; it is one many of us deploy, much of the time. We all seek to be helpful, useful, needed. It is a relief to defer to the happiness of others, and of course it is not always wrong to seek this relief. What makes Tomas’ and Marta’s love it so problematic is that it is reciprocal and totalizing—for both of them, the other’s good represents the only good they have in view. We are not always in this predicament when we are trying to be of use. But it is a good danger to be aware of, and not only in the romantic arena. For when we refuse to confront the problem of what happiness is for us, we create a vacuum into which restless, anxious, empty desires rush—not only our own but also those of our partners in evasion.

Socratic Humility

July 03, 2018

Philosophers aren’t the only ones who love wisdom. Everyone, philosopher or not, loves her own wisdom: the wisdom she has or takes herself to have. What distinguishes the philosopher is loving the wisdom she doesn’t have. Philosophy is, therefore, a form of humility: being aware that you lack what is of supreme importance. There may be no human being who exemplified this form of humility more perfectly than Socrates. It is no coincidence therefore, that he is considered the first philosopher within the Western canon.

Socrates did not write philosophy—he simply went around talking to people. But these conversations were so transformative that the second philosopher, Plato, devoted his life to writing dialogues that represent Socrates in conversation. Few, if any, of these dialogues are likely to be transcripts of actual conversations, but Plato clearly had the goal of giving the reader a sense of what the actual Socrates was like. He wanted the world to remember Socrates. Generations after Socrates’ death, warring philosophical schools such as the Stoics and the Skeptics each appropriated Socrates as figurehead. Though they disagreed on just about every point of doctrine, they were clear that in order to count themselves as philosophers they had to somehow be working in the tradition of Socrates.

What is it about Socrates that made him into a symbol for the whole institution of philosophy? Consider the fact that, when the oracle at Delphi proclaims Socrates wisest of men, he tries to prove it wrong:

“I went to one of those reputed wise, thinking that there, if anywhere, I could refute the oracle and say to it: “This man is wiser than I, but you said I was.” Then, when I examined this man— there is no need for me to tell you his name, he was one of our public men—my experience was something like this: I thought that he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not. I then tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but that he was not. As a result he came to dislike me, and so did many of the bystanders. So I withdrew and thought to myself: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.” (Apology21cd)

If Socrates’ trademark claim is this protestation of ignorance, his trademark activity is the one also described in this passage: refuting people. These are the conversations we find in Plato’s texts. How are the claim and the activity related? Socrates denies that his motivations are altruistic: he says he is not a teacher (Apology33a), and insists that he is himself the primary beneficiary of the conversations he initiates (Charmides166d). This adds to the mystery: what is Socrates getting out of showing people that they don’t know what they take themselves to know? What’s his angle?

Over and over again, Socrates approaches people who are remarkable for their lack of Socratic humility—which is to say, for the fact that they feel confident in their own knowledge of what is just, or pious, or brave, or moderate. You might have supposed that Socrates, whose claim to fame is his awareness of his own ignorance, would treat these self-proclaimed “wise men” (Sophists) with contempt, hostility or indifference. But he doesn’t. The most remarkable feature of Socrates’ approach is his punctilious politeness and sincere enthusiasm. The conversation usually begins with Socrates asking his interlocutor, “Since you think you know, can you tell me, what is courage (or wisdom or piety or justice…).” Over and over again, it turns out that they think they can, but they can’t. Socrates’ hope springs eternal: when walking towards the courtroom to be tried (and eventually put to death) for his philosophical activity, he is delighted to encounter the self-important priest Euthyphro, who will, surely, be able to say what piety is. (Spoiler: he’s not.) Socrates never gave up.

Socrates seemed to think that the people around him could help him acquire the knowledge he so desperately wanted—even though they were handicapped by the illusion that they already knew it. Indeed, I believe that their ill-grounded confidence was precisely what drew Socrates to them. If you think you know something, you will be ready to speak on the topic in question. You will hold forth, spout theories, make claims. And that, combined with Socrates’ relentless questioning, is a recipe for actually acquiring the knowledge you had previously deluded yourself into thinking you already had.

Here is how it goes: Socrates asks you what courage is, and you say, for instance, that it is endurance. He wonders whether you think that people who are foolishly willing to endure great risks are courageous. What do you say? Perhaps you think they are. Socrates follows up by asking whether you think courage is a virtue, a good thing. Yes, you do. So it is something you would want for yourself and your children. Yes. Would you want your children to foolishly subject themselves to danger…? Probably not. Perhaps you should have said that foolish endurance is not courage. So you think courage is wise endurance? Yes. What about this case: “if a man were to show endurance in spending his money wisely, knowing that by spending it he would get more, would you call this man courageous?” (Laches 192e) Probably not. Which means both of your pathways are blocked. You do not have a way forward. You are in what Socrates’ interlocutors called “aporia”, a state of confusion in which there is nowhere for you to go.

Suppose the conversation goes no further than this—suppose, as is typical for Socrates’ interlocutors, that you storm off in a huff at this point. Where does that leave you, and where does that leave Socrates? Let’s start with you. You might be in a worse mood than you were when you encountered Socrates, but he hasn’t harmed you. In fact, you are better off than you were: you’ve learned that courage isn’t as easy to define as you initially thought it was. Being improved isn’t always pleasant. Second, Socrates has learned something. Courage seems to involve something like endurance or holding fast, but it cannot straightforwardly be identified with such a state—not even when we add some other ingredients to the state, such as wisdom. Before this conversation, Socrates didn’t know what courage was. Now his ignorance can take a more specific shape: he doesn’t know what the connection between courage and endurance is. He still knows that he doesn’t know what courage is, but his knowledge of his own ignorance has been improved, precisifed.

It’s one thing to say, “I don’t know anything.” That thought comes cheap. One can wonder, “Who really and truly knows anything?...” in a way that is dismissive, uninquisitive, detached. It can be a way of saying, “knowledge is unattainable, so why even try?” Socratic humility is more expensive and more committal than that. He sought to map the terrain of his ignorance, to plot its mountains and its rivers, to learn to navigate it. That, I think, is why he speaks of knowledge of his own ignorance. He wanted to know exactly what it was he didn’t know about courage. Now there’s a paradox here—because you might think that in order to know with perfect precision everything you don’t know about something you would have to actually know how things stand with the thing in question.

Socrates saw this as the light at the end of the tunnel: at the endpoint of knowledge of one’s own ignorance one emerges into the light of knowledge. But he didn’t think that there was, for him, any road to knowledge except through the dark passageways of acknowledged ignorance. Socrates’ instinct was to try to see how he could avoid taking any claim to be knowledge, and the limit of this process will be the time when he runs into a claim or set of claims that he simply cannot call into question. (2000 years later, Decartes borrowed this ‘method of doubt’—along with many other ideas.) Likewise, he didn’t think there was, for you, any road to knowledge except through the psychological suffering of repeatedly being proven wrong. These two routes to knowedge—Socrates’ and yours—are not the same, but they are complementary.

Socrates was an unusual person. Consider his response to the oracle. Most people who are proclaimed wise by a trusted authority don’t have the impulse to disprove that authority. Instead, they bask in the glory of the assessment of themselves that they have spend their whole lives longing to hear. Most people steer conversations into areas where they have expertise; they struggle to admit error; they have a background confidence that they have a firm grip on the basics. They are happy to think of other people—people who have different political or religious views, or got a different kind of education, or live in a different part of the world—as ignorant and clueless. They are eager to claim the status of knowledge for everything they themselves think.

But Socrates did not take this difference as grounds to despise or dismiss this group, Most People (hoi polloi). He saw, instead, that he and Most People were a match made in heaven. Most People put forward claims, and Socrates refutes them. Most People see the need to possess truths. Socrates saw the danger of acquiring falsehoods. Most People feel full of rich insights and brilliant thoughts. Socrates saw himself as bereft of all of that. Without the help of Most People, Socrates wouldn’t have anything to think about. Socrates’ neediness did not escape Socrates’ own notice. In the Theaetetus, he describes himself as a kind of midwife—barren of knowledge himself, but engaged in ‘delivering’ the wisdom-babies of Most People.

Socrates saw the pursuit of knowledge as a collaborative project involving two very different roles. There’s you or I or some other representative of Most People, who comes forward and makes a bold claim. Then there’s Socrates, or one of his contemporary descendants, who questions and interrogates and distinguishes and calls for clarification. Together, they make progress. Together, they avoid the twin perils of thinking that nothing is knowable and thinking that they know things they don’t really know. Socrates discovered a way for two people to share the work of thinking, each compensating for the other’s failings. The one who needs to know and the one who needs to avoid the illusion of knowledge keep each other honest. He is the first philosopher not because of his sophisticated theories—he died ignorant—nor because of his influential writings—he didn’t produce any—but because, by simply refuting the people around him, he discovered a way for human beings to work towards knowledge by working together.

Comments

Doug Bonar

An interesting thought. I had never thought of Socrates as being humble. It has been a long time since I read Plato though so I may be getting him wrong.

Whether Socrates was really humble (almost a wise-fool) and honestly asking others to please share their wisdom with him so he can understand, I think that is not what is commonly meant by the Socratic Method. Rather than being a way to share the load of thinking, these days it seems to have come to mean a way of a teacher guiding the thought of a student by repeatedly asking questions and critiquing the answers. The assumption seems to have become that the student will not ever get a good answer, but the format will also save the teacher from ever having to answer the question and be exposed in his ignorance.

So, a point for Socrates in puncturing the egos of self-important “experts”. But a point against him in that his method can be used by those same “experts” to maintain their status as long as they are willing to say, “It’s difficult.”

Agnes

I learned this firsthand when a student in one of the first courses I taught complained in a course evaluation about the fact that I sometimes ask questions to which I expect a particular answer. Good point, and thank you anonymous student! I have tried to stop doing that. I have found that if I ask only questions where I am genuinely curious about the answer, I get much better answers.

AP

There is a little or nothing said about Socratic irony. But I do like very much this read of Socrates.

Agnes

Stay tuned!

Daniel Silveyra

Wonderful piece, thanks!

In my mind, the piece places Socrates as responsible for one of the building blocks of the scientific method; a community of researchers who attempt to refute competing theories to hone in on the correct one. Through their emphasis in correct modes of reasoning, Socrates / Plato also contributed a process by which theories could be checked for internal consistency; all they were missing was the process by which they could be checked for external validity (empirical verification).

Agnes

Exactly my thought, yes.

Progress in Philosophy

May 25, 2018

In a recent post on his blog Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen talks about whether there has been progress in philosophy. Tyler approaches this question by describing some ways other fields have taken on philosophical problems, approaches or insights. One might still wonder: what have philosophers done for philosophy itself? This question is related to another: why do we (still) read old books of philosophy? In what follows, I try to answer these questions, and also to consider what the demand for progress reveals about the relationship between philosophers and non-philosophers.

***

Academic disciplines regularly export technologies, ideas and practices outside the ivory tower, or to other parts of it. Tyler’s list consists mostly of what I would classify as (sometimes second- or third-hand) philosophical exports. I don’t deny the value or the philosophical character of any of those items, but I do deny the implication that philosophy should be judged by what gets exported from it—any more than physics or mathematics should be assessed in this mercenary and extrinsic way. Learning, knowing—these are some of the greatest goods human beings can hope to attain. They do not serve. Other things serve them.

If we are to evaluate philosophy from the inside, which is to say, to gauge its progress as a form of learning or knowledge in its own right, we must acknowledge that philosophy, as it is currently practiced, is not in the business of building consensus. In this respect, it differs from many academic disciplines. It also differs from earlier incarnations of itself: think of Plato’s Academy, or Zeno and the Stoa, or German idealism or the Vienna Circle. Think of Aquinas and Augustine and all the great religious philosophers who are philosophizing strictly within Christianity. Think of Maimonides’ commitment to reconciling the Rabbinical teachings with Aristotle. Each of these philosophers lived inside a philosophical world of a particular character, within which progress was possible because of the practice of handing down teachings. My philosophical colleagues and I don’t do that. We don’t expect our students to progress within the framework we set down for them.

Though I think all of those philosophers are worth reading—more on that below—I believe the turn away from schools, teachings and doctrines is itself one of the great instances of philosophical progress. (And also, incidentally, one of philosophy’s most valuable exports.) But it has the consequence of eliminating the “we” featured in Tyler’s (1)-(16). Anything which is such that we can say, “we now know it” is likely to be an export, or to lie at the intersection of philosophy and some other field (e.g. mathematical logic). In philosophy proper—which is to say, that by reference to which the progress of philosophy ought to be judged—there is nothing “we” think. Some of us believe there are true contradictions. Some of us believe that possible worlds are real. Some of us believe that, because we can’t create our characters, and our characters determine how we act, we can’t ever be morally responsible for anything we do. We are a motley crew.

Instead of gauging progress by asking what “we” philosophers agree about, one should ask whether someone who wants to do philosophy is in a better position to do so today than she would’ve been 10 or 100 or 1000 years ago? The answer is: certainly. Here are two very different reasons why:

(1) If she is a she, she wouldn’t have been able to do it at all until fairly recently. (This is also true of many—most—“he”s.)

(2) There are many great philosophical arguments and ideas available for her to engage with. She has better interlocutors to think with than people did 10 or 100 or 1000 years ago: later philosophers always have the advantage. The more we respond to one another, the better materials we hand down to our descendants for thinking with. For example, nowadays if you want to go ahead and assert, in a philosophical context, that there aren’t any true contradictions or that what didn’t but could’ve happened is unreal, or that you are sometimes morally responsible for some of the things you do, there are philosophers who have made it hard for you to do that. Graham Priest and David Lewis and Galen Strawson have, respectively, raised the cost of saying what you’re reflexively inclined to say. They’ve made you work for it—made you think for it.

Priest, Lewis and Strawson offer the person who is willing to do this work a decrease in the entropy in their original claim, which now has to be more specific and determinate. What one had before encountering them was, one now sees, nothing more than a way of vaguely gesturing at the idea in question. Engaging with them introduces order into one’s thinking as to what exactly is meant by claiming, e.g. that one is morally responsible. If someone is willing to do the work, she can have thoughts about these common sense, intuitive claims that are better than anyone could’ve had 10 or 100 or 1000 years ago. What greater gift one possibly ask for?

But if philosophical thinking is getting better and better—more precise, truthful, articulate, deep—why should we still read Aristotle or Maimonides? The reason we need to do the history of philosophy is precisely that philosophy has made massive amounts of progress in Tyler’s sense of the word: it has filtered into, shaped and organized commonsense, ordinary thought. Indeed, it constitutes much of that thought. Recently a historian of philosophy named Wolfgang Mann wrote a book called The Discovery of Things. He argues, just as the title of his book suggests, that Aristotle discovered things. It’s a bookabout the distinction between subject and predicate in Aristotle’s Categories—between what is and how it is. You may not have realized this but: someone had to come up with that! Many of the things that seem obvious to you—that human beings have basic rights, that knowledge requires justification, that modus ponens is a valid syllogistic form, that the world is filled with things—people had to come up with those ideas. And the people who came up with them were philosophers.

So you are pretty much constantly thinking thoughts that, in one way or another, you inherited from philosophers. You don’t see it, because philosophical exports are the kinds of thing that, once you internalize them, just seem like the way things are. So the reason to read Aristotle isn’t (just) that he’s a great philosopher, but that he’s colonized large parts of your mind. Not everyone is interested in learning about the history of philosophy. But if you are the kind of person who is not happy about having delegated some of your most fundamental thinking to other people; if you want to go back and retrace those steps to make sure you are on board; if you want to take full ownership of your own mind, well, in that case the history of philosophy might be for you.

Up until this point I have not raised any doubts about the spirit of the question Tyler and I are answering. In view of certain features of the framing of the question, I feel must end by addressing a less charitable interpretation of the questioner’s motivations. You will recall that he asks us,

“You know this old debate: why are we still reading Plato? Haven’t they figured out free will yet? Will they ever? Don’t the philosophers obsess too much over very old texts?”

We don’t demand progress in the fields of fashion or literature, because these things please us. Philosophy, by contrast, is bitter, and we want to know what good it will do us, and when, finally, it will be over. It is not pleasant to be told that maybe you don’t know who you are, or how to treat your friends, or how to be happy. It’s not pleasant to have it pointed out to you that maybe nothing you have ever done matters, or that, for all you know, there is nothing out there at all.

So one way to hear the questioner is as asking:

“When will philosophy finally go away? When will they stop raising questions about whether my own will is free, or saying that I can’t tell whether I’m leading my life or it’s leading me? When will they stop telling me that I need to read this or that book in order to be fully human? When will they leave me alone?”

The answer is: never.

It is not the point of philosophy to end philosophy, to ‘solve’ the deep questions so that people can stop thinking about them. It is the point of people to think about these questions, and the job of philosophers to rub their faces in that fact. Of all of philosophy’s achievements, perhaps the greatest one is just sticking around in the face of the fact that, from day one, anyone who has plumbed the depths of our ambitions has either joined us or … tried to silence, stop or kill us. This is an “old debate” indeed.

The first philosopher was once asked this question:

“Tell me, Socrates, are we to take you as being in earnest now, or joking? For if you are in earnest, and these things you’re saying are really true, won’t this human life of ours be turned upside down, and won’t everything we do evidently be the opposite of what we should do?”

Philosophers today remain the children of Socrates, and we are in earnest.

Comments

Richard

I only occasionally peek in on Tyler and finding pieces like this is exactly why I do so. Cogent, convincing and civil — more please!

thanks

Kent Guida

Thank you. Excellent piece, hope it gets wide readership. One quibble: your argument would be more effective if you avoided the term ‘history of philosophy.” History of philosophy is the history of thought without any actual thinking, and it’s largely a waste of time, while reading old philosophers is the opposite. Reading Aristotle is doing philosophy, not doing history. If you think of him as history, you have already killed him. No one should read “history of philosophy,” everyone should read old philosophers. You already know all this, of course. It’s merely a rhetorical suggestion.

Turing Test

I love philosophy (especially the philosophy of law, or “jurisprudence”), but this statement in Callard’s essay is pure nonsense:

“But if philosophical thinking is getting better and better—more precise, truthful, articulate, deep—why should we still read Aristotle or Maimonides? The reason we need to do the history of philosophy is precisely that philosophy has made massive amounts of progress in Tyler’s sense of the word: it has filtered into, shaped and organized commonsense, ordinary thought.”

First, if philosophy has made progress, there is no reason the read the old masters like Aristotle or Aquinas. Instead, we read the old masters precisely because of the eternal (and unresolved) questions they originally posed. In short, we read them precisely because we have made so little, if any, progress in philosophy.

(Note: if we define philosophy as the posing of important questions, then I am certainly willing to say we have made progress.)

Secondly, the quote above presumes the conclusion that she is supposed to be trying to prove.

KO

“...that knowledge requires justification, that modus ponens is a valid syllogistic form, that the world is filled with things—people had to come up with those ideas. And the people who came up with them were philosophers. ”

Human languages around the world naturally evolved with most of these ideas hard wired into their grammar and semantics. Her argument here maybe holds if you consider any hunter-gatherer-thinker a philosopher, but the discussion is really about specialists of philosophy. If she’s not arguing that specialist philosophers where truly the first people ever, in all of history think, to think of these ideas, then isn’t she just giving the same old philosophy improves critical thinking/spreads logic to the masses argument?

AH

Whether academic philosophy has made progress is important. It is not important because we question whether teachers of philosophy should exist. It matters because we (including philanthropists, governments, and young people making career decisions) must ask: why allocate scarce resources that we possess as a society to additional philosophical research?

Intelligent people do not ask, “when will (most) philosophers go away?,” because they find the clever philosopher’s questions unsettling to their senses of security and knowledge, as Callard seems to imply. Intelligent people ask, “when will (most) philosophers go away---to work in a field or an institution that has some higher probability of creating social value*.”

[1] Perhaps this is not true of leading on a small scale, where one can get to know and have intimate relationships with all of one’s people; that is a mixed case of leadership and interpersonal love.

{1} Solo book club is a thing I made up in response to this article by Ross Douthat. Basically, I live tweet the reading of a novel. Here is the twitter thread. This is the book:

{2} All of this advice has been empirically tested. The results were inconclusive, and n was small in the first place; you could hardly ask for more by way of a certification of badness.

{3} Vary pronoun as needed.