We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
The "post" road meant a mail road. It now has different names as it travels through different towns, but locals call it "the Boston Post Road" or "the Post Road" still. Its original name was The King's Highway. That old road, based on an Indian trail. has been part of my life, on and off, forever. In fact, when I was a kid, the old trolley tracks still stuck through the asphalt creating a bike challenge.
Image of the Boston Post Rd in the late 1600s in Pelham, NY, from this site.
I would highly recommend it for students before they take any neuoscience-related courses in school. Our learning theory here is that it's best to learn all you can about a topic before you take a course in it. That way, you will at least be oriented. Sometimes, the whole expensive course might end up being redundant.
Do you ever play Mexican Train Dominoes? A good game, quite absorbing. We learned to play it in Mexico last year. More fun than watching TV. Uncle's Games sells Mexican Train Domino sets.
This game is said to be the most popular Domino game these days. Rules here (which sound more complicated than it is to play). It's a good alternative to Chess and Scrabble when you don't feel like over-taxing your brain, and 4 or 5 can play.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's The Calling of Matthew (1600)
The notoriously brawling artist brought a new look to European late Renaissance art, and is viewed as a bridge between Mannerism and Baroque. He was a rock star artist in his time.
"What a coinkydinky. I was just about to call you."
Synchronicity, Serendipity, Seriality, and Simulpathity. It's a fun topic, but I can't tell for sure whether Dr. Beitman is writing tongue-in-cheek or in all seriousness. Or perhaps he's a Jungian, in which case all bets are off.
I know people who say "There are no coincidences." Count me an agnostic on the topic.
One interesting aspect of modern life in the Western World is the pathologizing, or "diseaseifying," of moral and character failures. Putting such failures into the disease category is a popular conceit for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the way it seems to let people off the hook. The victim thing.
But while even AA may make use of the disease metaphor, if you go to a meeting you will hear far more about character flaws than about disease. They are not into disease excuses for problem behavior.
Despite the addiction meme, ordinary people still term those who eat more than they need "pigs," people who buy too much stuff "self-indulgent," people who habitually drink too much "drunks," and people with uncontained sexual efforts as "lechers" or as "nymphomaniacs" or "hos". Ordinary language reflects the common sense moral disapprobation of ungoverned behavior.
To say that they "lack a self-governing function" is the disease model, a defect model, but to use it requires turning a verb idea into a noun idea, by reification. The better form is "They do not govern themselves," or, better yet, "They do not exert themselves to govern themselves." The disease/defect model does not do justice to all of the people who must struggle mightily to resist all of the temptations that life offers.
Pajamas has a piece up about sex "addiction," Sex Addiction 101 - PJM's advice columnist on the Chinese food syndrome of loveless sex: no sooner satisfied, than feeling empty again.
While the article makes the obvious point that people seek pleasure and often seek to replace distress with simple pleasures, it entirely overlooks the moral, spiritual, and character dimensions of lechery as if it were a "chemical imbalance" instead of plain old-fashioned rotten, socially-inappropriate behavior. Sinful too, if anybody believes in sin anymore.
While it seems true that habitual pleasures change the brain a little, so does habitual self-control. Self-control offers many rewards, but few rewards of the instant, animal sort. There are good habits and bad habits. I don't know whether it is a sociological fact, but it seems as if the debauchery and bad habits, once the domains of the very rich and powerful and of the poor, have become democratized and, in the process, excused to some extent (eg the Oval Office BJs).
People I talk to with bad or unrestrained behaviors of all sorts tend to despise themselves for it, and view putting their behavior into a disease category as a condescension. Unless they are guilt-free sociopaths, they know that their behavior is self-indulgent and immoral. People can quit these things, with help and sometimes without help, if they want to or need to, but it means giving up a lot of instant gratification in exchange for, one hopes, better life results and less self-contempt.
Both cities' rent control laws began as emergencies to meet temporary housing crunches (you always need a "crisis" to create an opportunity for government control). Then your "emergency" action becomes permanent due to its newly-created constituency. That is how Leviathan grows.
If rent control were eliminated in NYC today, in short time there would be tons of new middle class rental housing built; supply up, prices down. The moral issue, though, is that these controls do constitute a form of government theft from the owners.
...there may be a perception in many key areas of contemporary life—law, business, politics, among others—that expecting honesty on a regular basis is a naïve and foolish attitude, a “loser’s” way of operating. Such a perception is practically a mandate for personal dishonesty and a concession to interpersonal distrust. When we no longer assume that those who communicate with us are at least trying to tell the truth, we give up on them as trustworthy persons and deal with them only in a strictly instrumental manner. The bounds of mutual moral obligation dissolve, and the laws of the jungle reemerge.
Our serious problem today is not simply that many people routinely tell lies. As I have noted, people have departed from the truth for one reason or another all throughout human history. The problem now is that we seem to be reaching a dysfunctional tipping point in which an essential commitment to truthfulness no longer seems to be assumed in our society. If this is indeed the case, the danger is that the bonds of trust important in any society, and essential for a free and democratic one, will dissolve so that the kinds of discourse required to self-govern will become impossible.
I have no way of discerning whether there is anything new here. What I do know is that it is generally a good rule of thumb to let people prove their integrity, rather than assuming that they have any. I have been burned by people enough times to cure me of my optimistic naivete.
Dishonesty and concealment, despite whatever mass culture may do, continues to appall me whether in myself or in others.
Ho-Ho-Kus is one of New Jersey's fine little towns (Pop 4000). We attended an elegant birthday party in one of the private dining rooms at the cozy olde Inn yesterday.
Lubel is a nut (see his other Youtubes. I know a nerdy guy from Long Island who reminds me of him, who has always gotten lots of girls into bed not from his looks or achievements but from plain cheerful confidence and an optimistic, animal openness about his desires):
"Bullshit" is the title of a well-known 1986 essay by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, now expanded into a short book.
Two of Frankfurt's main points seem to be that, 1, the bullshitter is more motivated to create an impression of himself rather than to communicate substantial true material and 2. bullshit may be more insidious than lying. From a review of the book here:
...bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
Besides being a very bright fellow, his life as an academic gives him unique experience with the world of bullshit. We are all bullshitters, to some extent, but some make a career of it.
Frankfurt's original 6-page essay can be read here. One quote:
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
I am just finishing it. One hell of a tale - and I do mean hell. The xenophobia and racism of the Japanese is well-known, but the book will give one a harrowing picture of it.
Mentioned to my father-in-law that I was reading it, and he told me he saw Zamperini run in Madison Square Garden. We young'uns don't realize that Track and Field used to be perhaps the most popular sport in America.
Pic is Louie Zamperini carrying the Olympic Torch in 1984.
Modern-Day Prohibition - The eternal temptation to ban things that give people pleasure. Stier begins:
The new Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary Prohibition is a five-and-a-half-hour missed opportunity to demonstrate why bans on substances are doomed from the start. Fortunately, for those who want to understand the irresistible lure of all types of prohibitions, there is Christopher Snowdon’sThe Art of Suppression: Pleasure, Panic and Prohibition Since 1800. Although Snowdon’s comprehensive history will never reach as many people as the PBS series, The Art of Suppression makes the case that Burns seems to go out of his way to avoid: that prohibition of products that people desire, whether alcohol a century ago or Ecstasy today, is bound to fail miserably.
The world is full of cranks and zealots who want to make you do whatever they think they should do. From my standpoint, I tend to want people to make up their own minds, and if they want to spend their lives half-stoned on heroin or pot, or fat from ice-cream and pastries, so be it. It's their life and their body.
The list of things of which I disapprove is long, but the list of things I would chose to apply power to prohibit is very short. Murder and theft, for starters.
Another movie comment from the weekend, this time the new Tinker Tailor. I don't advise seeing it.
Not because it is poorly-done, but because it is impossible to depict the plot and the subplots of this complex Cold War counterespionage story in 2 hours. Had I not read the book, and seen the BBC miniseries several times, I would not have understood this film at all.
The gold standard for Tinker Tailor is the 6 hour miniseries with Alec Guiness as Smiley. It's one of the best things ever produced for TV. Ever. Even so, following the plot is difficult if you haven't read Le Carre's book first.
Reagan's end of the Cold War was a great loss for fiction.
Charles Murray on Belmont Vs. Fishtown, about social class in America and the Founding Virtues: marriage, industriousness, honesty, religiousness.
It's a major essay. One quote:
...if you live in an affluent suburb, an upscale neighborhood of a large city, or in a college town, you do not need to read (David) Brooks to know what I’m talking about. You live in that culture. But it is also possible (depending on the circumstances in which you grew up) that you are no longer familiar with what everywhere else in America is like. The problem is not the lifestyle of the members of America’s new upper class, which in many ways is attractive, but the degree to which the new upper class has become sealed off from the rest of America.
Sometimes the isolation is geographic as well as cultural. In major cities and their surrounding areas, those top-ranked zip codes in which the members of the new upper class live are surrounded by other top-ranked zip codes that form elite clusters consisting of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, creating large bubbles within which life can go on without reference to anywhere outside the bubble. Even when the geographic isolation is not extreme, the differences in culture often are...
Study the whole thing. It rings true to me. Even in a small town where we know all sorts of people, we tend to hang out with people who play tennis and golf, own guns, read lots of books, discuss Plato, Marx, Freud, Adam Smith and Hayek, go to church, have gardens, and love opera. Otherwise, what is there to talk about except the weather? It's not defined by financial status, but rather by common interests and, sometimes but certainly not always, similar backgrounds and similar world-views (but excluding political views, generally, untiil one is clear about where one's companions are coming from).
We posted on The Art of Choosing a little while ago. It got me to thinking about one of my favorite topics, the choices of life goals.
There tends to be a political assumption that everybody is most motivated by material and financial goals, but it just is not true for many people unless they are in dire straights. Sad to say, many are these days.
However, in normal times, normal people choose their goals, and construct their plans to achieve them for all sorts of reasons: religious, following a passion, "life style" reasons, security, wanting to "make a difference," following a calling, etc. So, while most people could always use more money, that cannot be assumed to be what most people base their choices on. Just ask a toll-collector on the Mass Pike, or a Mass. State Representative why he/she picked the job.
... one reason that people differ in their incomes is that some people care more about having a high income than others. To put it in geekspeak, preferences over pecuniary goods (say, consumption) and nonpecuniary goods (say, leisure) are heterogeneous.
The heterogeneity is the point. We make compromises, don't we, between our practical goals and our emotional goals in the endless pursuit of life satisfaction? However, most people do not have a career-related passion, in which case money and material often become our culture's default choice. I am fortunate in having a spouse with two absorbing passions: doing deals and playing sports. The former frees me up to pursue my less-lucrative academic work and charitable interests, and the latter keeps him out of trouble (except for orthopedic trouble).
If your preference is to work hard and long, with rewards potentially commensurate with effort but with plenty of risk too, I suggest starting a business.
One fine fact about life is that we can change our goals as we grow.
Several months ago, I stumbled onto a baseball article which intrigued me. In probably the best example of how an exchange of product and services doesn't have to have a winner and a loser, Major League Baseball witnessed a trade in 2009 that ultimately benefited every team involved. What is particularly odd about this trade is that there were more than two teams involved.
Three teams executed a trade which, over time, involved a fourth team. The three involved were Detroit, the New York Yankees, and Arizona. A player involved in the original trade passed through 4 more trades before landing with the St. Louis Cardinals. Essentially, this turned out to be a trade which allowed 4 teams to improve enough to reach the playoffs. Sure, it took 2 years, but at least everyone benefited.
As the saying goes, one person's trash is another person's treasure. It is sometimes assumed that there has to be a winner and a loser involved in every trade. But the networked nature of exchange can lead to net gains for all involved. In an example of Metcalfe's Law, 4 teams showed how markets can benefit everyone, even in baseball where there are usually winners and losers.
The problem -- or at least the change -- is that we humans cannot understand systems even as complex as that of a simple cell. It's not that were awaiting some elegant theory that will snap all the details into place. The theory is well established already: Cellular systems consist of a set of detailed interactions that can be thought of as signals and responses. But those interactions surpass in quantity and complexity the human brains ability to comprehend them. The science of such systems requires computers to store all the details and to see how they interact. Systems biologists build computer models that replicate in software what happens when the millions of pieces interact. It's a bit like predicting the weather, but with far more dependency on particular events and fewer general principles.
Models this complex -- whether of cellular biology, the weather, the economy, even highway traffic -- often fail us, because the world is more complex than our models can capture. But sometimes they can predict accurately how the system will behave. At their most complex these are sciences of emergence and complexity, studying properties of systems that cannot be seen by looking only at the parts, and cannot be well predicted except by looking at what happens.
The college pupette has been exploring the Viet Nam hinterlands, and spent a couple of days in a northern fishing village with Vietnamese friends. The young people in the villages had never seen Americans. The pupette, enjoying all of the spicey local dishes of course, managed to pick up a nice strong case of food poisoning and emailed me a medically-detailed report of that. TMI.
She's feeling a little better, now. She's a good, hearty and brave traveller. We taught her that. She'll go anywhere and do anything, doesn't mind getting lost, doesn't mind being on her own, and isn't afraid of getting sick - as long as it's all cheap. She's been almost everywhere already, without us parents - out West, Europe, etc. (All of my kids are like that. Their Mom was adventurous like that too in youth, hitchhiking all around Europe, Turkey, and the Middle East with a backpack. Now, her Mom prefers a bit more comfort in travel but still has the vigorous Go Go Hi Ho attitude to life which is a blessing for me.)
What normal college kid would want to sit at home with the old folks during winter break? Not one of them. At least ski with friends, or go somewhere fun and exciting on the cheap. Mine have never stayed at home, comfortable as it may be here at ye olde cozy Yankee cabin homestead by the fire. We preach, and try to make an example of, adventure and accumulating experience and experiences - the good ones and the bad ones. Learn more from the bad ones. As my "Oystersmiling" pupette says, "The world beckons." The world is her oyster. What a fine attitude.
Pupette was laughing in her email about spending a day in a "Commie medical clinic" next to a jolly Aussie couple with the same affliction. Aussies - always jolly, always at least half-drunk, never worrying about anything. She reports that the docs and nurses were wonderful and kind, and that she absorbed 7 bags of IV normal saline which brought her back to life. Seven bags? Sheesh. I call that "low on oil."
She's back in Saigon now, and posted a few more of her pics. The Americans in the pics are her cute self, and her pal who is working in Saigon. Excuse me - I mean Ho Chi Minh City.
Photo is a bag of Normal Saline. AKA salt water - human fluid is the same thing as sea-water, and not by accident. Nurses inject a bag of it into themselves when they have hangovers at work, or so I have heard...
My Doc, a fine fellow, a med school Prof, a solo practitioner, and a non-golfer, is getting frustrated with the direction of medical practice these days and, along with that, feels a little frustrated with his patients too. He has too many of them, but just wants to be an old-time doc and friend to his patients instead of an Obamacare industrial doc on an assemby line.
She Who Must Be Obeyed forces me to get a "physical" every three years or so, just to annoy me. A gallon of blood, a total body scan, stress test, colonoscopy, fully poked and prodded, finger up the butt, etc. Costs a fortune. Doc also insists on a half-hour interview about how my life is going, Diet, happiness quotient, work, friendships, exercise, sex life, how are the kids, future plans, fun and recreation. Thinks he's a shrink, and likes to talk to people about their lives, while I would rather leave my body off for a check-up like leaving the car at the shop.
Actually, I think he's a very fine, caring Doc who happens to hold the strange, idolatrous and heathen belief that health is life's priority. (Plumbers feel the same way about your plumbing, don't they?) He does a good job at never appearing to be in a hurry, so I feel lucky to have him in case I develop a problem. We all will, sooner or later. Eventually, it will be a fatal problem. We can all count on that.
I put it all off as long as I can because I am allergic to doctors, much as I respect them. Anyway, last week he told me that, for my age and build, he wanted me to achieve a 36" waist. He also said, in all care and kindness, something like "If you don't want to follow my advice, I invite you find another doctor." Almost that, anyway. He was also rough about my cigar pleasure, but figured that 2/day was OK with him. Maybe 3. When I pressed him, he confessed to a few per week himself.
My question is always "What good is one's health if you don't have a fun, stimulating, adventurous, satisfying, and somewhat decadent life?"
And I am not even Medicare age. He opted out of Medicare a couple of years ago. He says Medicare reimbursements cannot cover his staff's wages as a solo guy. What it means is that he'll still take on Medicare-age patients, but they will have to pay him themselves from their piggy-banks. If truly poverty-stricken, he'll offer a break but no freebies. He doesn't "take" any insurances either.
He also told me that, when he decided to opt out, Medicare patients comprised 30% of his practice population, consumed 90% of his time, and comprised 25% of his income. He figures he donates a day per week at a teaching clinic, and that that is enough charity for him. How many people donate 20% of their work time and income to charity?
Like most doctors these days, he prefers not to bother with people who do not want to take decent care of themselves. The price you pay to have him available to you if you get in trouble is the occasional exam and sanctimonious health lecture. For me, every few years, stretched out as long as possible.
We were fortunate to see a rare performance of Puccini's one-act comedy Gianni Schicci ("Johnny Skicci") by the Chelsea Opera a year or so ago.
The vocal highlight of the opera is the famous aria O mio babbino caro, sung by the little manipulator Lauretta to her dad. "Daddy dearest, I'll have to die if you won't let me go out with Rinuccio anymore."
The trick of it is to sound like you really want to twist Dad's heartstrings. If you can sing like these ladies to your Dad, I'm sure he'll let you do whatever you want. Here's the bake-off:
When is enough pleasure and instant gratification enough?
Oh, maybe never, I hear my readers thinking.
I put the word "addiction" in quotes because I am not referring to physiological addictions such as to narcotics or alcohol, but to the pop culture use of the word, as applied to chocolate, food, sex, money, power, buying, etc. The casual use of the term, of course, refers to the difficulty in stopping the behavior when it doesn't make sense.
Some people are studying the brain to try to understand satiety. Some, interested in overweight, are studying foods. I think they are barking up the wrong tree (Yankees might not realize that that is a reference to coon hunting with coon hounds).
I believe that most of these "addictions" are more subcultural and psychological than physiological. Returning to the topic of food, the well-respected scientific journal Elle points this out in Satisfaction Guaranteed:
As a child, were you encouraged to clean your plate and then go back for seconds? If so, you probably didn’t grow up in France, where children are taught to savor the feeling of longing, or envie, for their next course (just think of the cheese!). Our differing notions of satisfaction were examined in a 2006 study of 133 Parisians and 145 Chicagoans published in the journal Obesity. While the French paid attention to an internal cue, the feeling of fullness, the Windy City-ers relied on the external: when their plate was empty; when their companion had finished eating; or when—quelle horreur!—the credits started to roll on the TV show they were watching.
Many Americans ignore the body’s subtler signals of hunger and fullness, hearing only the clanging gong at each end of the pendulum—Starving! Stuffed!—and rarely pausing to enjoy the much more pleasant midpoint: Ahhh, satisfied.
Some subcultures believe in big eating, some in savoring, some in minimalist eating, and, for some, food is just not a central part of life at all - Northern Europeans, for example. I was raised, for example, to learn that a lady always eats slowly, and never finishes the food on her plate. Not in public, anyway. It's not considered ladylike.
Seems like everybody I run into has already read this book: 
Another movie comment from the weekend, this time the new 
Three teams executed a trade which, over time, involved a fourth team. The three involved were Detroit, the New York Yankees, and Arizona. A player involved in the original trade passed through 4 more trades before landing with the St. Louis Cardinals. Essentially, this turned out to be a trade which allowed 4 teams to improve enough to reach the playoffs. Sure, it took 2 years, but at least everyone benefited. 
The college pupette has been exploring the Viet Nam hinterlands, and spent a couple of days in a northern fishing village with Vietnamese friends. The young people in the villages had never seen Americans. The pupette, enjoying all of the spicey local dishes of course, managed to pick up a nice strong case of food poisoning and emailed me a medically-detailed report of that. TMI. 
My Doc, a fine fellow, a med school Prof, a solo practitioner, and a non-golfer, is getting frustrated with the direction of medical practice these days and, along with that, feels a little frustrated with his patients too. He has too many of them, but just wants to be an old-time doc and friend to his patients instead of an Obamacare industrial doc on an assemby line.
When is enough pleasure and instant gratification enough?