Mike Hardy

Ellen ___ Those who think that Objectivism encourages this attitude are hereby sentenced to dea... oops .... I meant .... Well, it sometimes happens that people have learned everything they know about a certain subject from one writer whose writes about it passionately and excitingly. It's not only Ayn Rand. Some of you have heard me say that the same thing applies to the physicist Edwn Jaynes' writings on probability theory. He wrote brilliantly and makes important fundamental points, and often misunderstands those who disagree with him, and invents his own terminology at variance from what is conventional. And some physicists have learned all they know about probability theory from his writings. They're just like Randroids (and by "Randroids" I _do_not_ mean well-read advocates of Ayn Rand's philosophy, even if they are passionate supporters of it). Should we say that Jaynes encourages this attitude, or just that it naturally arises under those circumstances? -- Mike Hardy

[ ..... ] Consider a primative tribe: life is difficult; existing from day to day needs attention. Worrying about whether there really are gods or not, whether one's ethos is the best or not...it needed some pretty advanced development of material security before people had time for this. But meanwhile, they did have human minds and thus a need for an ethical guide. An ancestor-verified belief system came in useful. ___ (Ellipsis mine.) In math courses the instructor often wants the students to learn a "suffiicient reason" to believe (e.g.) the quadratic formula, but the students, if they dislike math and are taking a compulsory course, DEMAND DOGMA INSTEAD and can be angry if they get sufficient reasons instead of dogma. Somehow this observation should fit into this tipic; I'll let others dicede specifically how. Ellen, I'm docking you one point for spelling; last I checked it was "primitive". (Wait ... maybe Charles Darwin held that it should be "primative" .....? Philosophy is so difficult...) -- Mike Hardy

Ellen is not in the mood: I'll look. I __did__ see that Debbie Clark "got graphic" in another post in that thread. -- Mike Hardy

"Seemed" is an important word here, i.e. it was a cultural atmosphere rather than explicit philosophical statement. (I just remembered something I heard Murray Rothbard say, and I met him only twice and briefly: he said Ayn Rand thought you shouldn't be allowed to have sex until you invent a new kind of aluminum.) You mean male homosexuality? I don't recall her ever having been reported as commenting on lesbianism either with distaste or otherwise. Ellen ___ No, I meant lesbianism, i.e. female homosexuality. I see John Enright's already cited the relevant scripture where she mentioned lesbianism. -- Mike Hardy

Ellen, if you ever see that article, could you notify me? I just checked out PARC via interlibrary loan, and they're letting me have it for only eight days. I've read some of the journal stuff near the end, portraying the lead-up to the breakup. If shows NB treating AR very badly, deceptively. It shows AR being far more patient with him than most people would ever be. All exactly what one would expect given BB's and NB's own accounts of the matter. It also says NB was a power-luster, and that's consistent with his own book _Judgement_Day_, which says he liked to keep NBI students fearful of him. People who remember the NBI days say they were terrified of being classed as a "social metaphysician". No great surprises here, but it's interesting to see AR's journal entries. So far I've read only a small portion of the early part on BB's biography. It says BB wrote that AR "never once" did thus-and-so and two pages later gushing about how beatifully AR did thus and so, and alternating back and forth between those two positions. Clearly that would make BB's biography contradictory, but would it make it dishonest? I'd have expected a dishonest person to at least _try_ to lie consistently. Could it be that Valliant, as a ruthless prosecutor, is being just as hard on BB as on her former husband for the purpose of provoking her into further indicting him by defending herself? -- Mike Hardy

Ah, pardner, you have to be initiated into the mysteries of the Old West to know how to hornswaggle. A bit of internet book larnin' is no substitute. Annie Oakley Ellen ___ Gee ... I thought maybe you'd direct us to a XXX-rated web site or two. -- Mike Hardy

L.N., could you explain to your less experienced co-subscribers just how hornswaggling is done? Then maybe the rest of us can try it and see if it works for us too. -- Mike Hardy

In SOME ways I am a person who very much "dwells in memories", but not in memories of having formerly not understood something, or of mistakes I've overcome. Hardly a day goes by when vivid memories of things about the house I lived in at age 3 do not appear to me unexpectedly, along with something about how I felt on some occasion at that time, but I don't remember my former phone numbers or the fact that I had a cold four months ago, etc. If Ayn Rand's understanding of who Nathaniel Branden was in 1960 got altered in 1968, and she then remembered him in 1960 according to her new understanding, I can to a somewhat substantial extent identify with that. -- Mike Hardy

Many people here know Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales. For those who don't: He ran a moderated objectivist discussion list in the early '90s. Kirez Korgan used the mailing list to start a later set of lists, whose communities branched out after those lists finally closed down. News item: Time magazine of May 8th, 2006, lists him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. -- Mike Hardy

Only the finished published product in mathematics is essentially deductive. One publishes theorems and proofs and accompanying discussions. _Concept_formation_ in mathematics is inductive. How does one arrive at a suspicion that a particular method might work or a particular proposition might be true, before one sets to work trying to prove it? That's not deductive. -- Mike Hardy

Geez. Maybe we should get Roland Pericles to post here, if he ever returns from Communicado. I wonder if he gets paid royal tease for his books? -- Mike Hardy Right, I supopse. Meanwhile, I supopse that Larry ought to learn to take my advice ___ (etc.)

Thank you. I was able to find it via google; I should have done that first, I supopse.

> It is purpose that created us, purpose that connects > us, purpose that pulls us, that guides us, that drives > us, it is purpose that defines us, purpose that binds us." An anonymous person added this to the article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purpose but did not say WHO is being quoted! Can someone tell us? Thanks. -- Mike Hardy

Well, a lot of math seminars and math colloquia depend heavily on very precise definitions of words, and yet mathematicians rarely read papers verbatim in such talks. Style appropriate for reading and style appropriate for speaking are often (not always) completely different. Philosophers read papers at million words per hour. I've attended maybe fifteen philosophy colloquia, and hundreds of seminars and colloquia in math. My impression is that philsophers talk too fast. (But what do I know?) -- Mike Hardy

Ellen mischievously interjected: Once upon a time a philosophy professor gave a talk to a statistics colloquium at NCSU when my wife was a graduate student there. A UNC math professor who attended commented afterwards (and I concur) that philosophers talk extremely fast in such lectures, in contrast with mathematicians, who are far more leisurely. In philosophy talks they read their talks verbatim from prepared scripts. Mathematicians sometimes write on blackboards, sometimes have transparencies, sometimes use PowerPoint or the like, but hardly ever have verbatim scripts. Apparently biologists use slides instead of transparencies. Mathematicians using transparencies often call them "slides". OK, Ellen, since you claimed to be entertained by my account of how I first became aware of Stephen Pinker when he and I both attended the MIT applied math colloquium, here's another one: A month or two ago I attended a "public lecture" (one of those talks for a broad public outside of one's field) in Minneapolis by a mathematician, on the use of mathematics to detect art forgeries and such. During the question period I notice that Garrison Keillor was in the audience (not that I'd never seen him on campus before, but he was the speaker on the other occasions). -- Mike Hardy

Well, a "communicant" of a church is one who normally receives communion there. Let's see, following up on my usage note from yesterday: "The jury will deliberAYT tomorrow." "The crime was quite deliberIT." "He alternAYTes between believing in free will and ..." "There are 12 jurors and one alternIT." I think a couple of dozen words follow this pattern. Things like this make you realize what a hodge-podge of a language English is. -- Mike Hardy

Usage note: Just as "alternate" is pronounced to rhyme with "eight" when used as a verb and with "it" (sort of...) when used as a noun or an adjective, so also with a number of other words ending in "-ate", including "excommunicate". One who is excommunicated ("...cate..." rhymes with "ate") is an "excommunicate" ("...cate..." rhymes more-or-less with "it"). -- Mike Hardy

... and what I was taught in second grade, and I suspect is Catholic dogma, is that Lucifer was originally the leader of the angels, remaining so until he turned against God. -- Mike Hardy

There are stories that Satan's original name was "Lucifer," the bright one, (loosely) the child of light, and that he was God's first and originally best-loved son -- thus Jesus' older brother. I find those stories' parallels to the history of the O'ist world interesting. For a fascinating psychological analysis of God, and of Satan's role in inducing God to grow toward greater awarenes (God keeps forgetting to consult his omniscience, but Satan provides nudges), I recommend Jung's Answer to Job. Ellen ___ When I was a wee lad, I was read stories about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Paradise (NOT the "Garden of Eden"), in which Eve was approached by Lucifer and invited to eat the forbidden fruit. That Lucifer was "the devil" -- the leader of the forces of evil throughout the cosmos -- was what I grew up with and it was not until I was quite elderly -- about 10 or 11 years old -- that I became aware of that other name "Satan", which has always remained a bit foreign to me. -- Mike Hardy

Even though it is commonplace to say that most educated people do not know that there is such a field as mathematics even though they've taken courses in high school and college called mathematics this and mathematics that, etc., some manifestations of that phenomenon still come as a shock to me. Just recently someone not only expressed surprise at hearing a theorem in mathematics called "elegant" (is that not so commonplace as to qualify as virtually a cliche?), but acted as if his ignorance of that usage was a substantial objection to it, and as if someone's using that word for such a thing implied there was something wrong with them. -- Mike

I'm inclined to say a computer program does not exist at all from the computer's perspective, precisely because the computer has no perspective. A program exists from the programmer's perspective. You may well be right that there are different senses of the word "information" involved, but I don't have a definition ready. -- Mike

Maybe, but not this year. -- Mike Hardy

I don't understand. How is computer software "immaterial"? Ellen ___ The same reason money is immaterial, or Homer's Oddysey is immaterial. It's information. It is communicated through a material means, but as the means changes, the information does not. -- Mike Hardy

Roland might say that won mussed keep a breast of the times.