When All IS Said and Dunn is ramping up an underused Category “Tales from an Ordinary Life”.
Your blog host is a raconteur, a teller of tales, not about legendary heroes but about regular joes like him, and you, too, if only you look at life the right way!
Without further ado, it is our pleasure to re-introduce the blog post Category “Tales from an Ordinary Life”.
Its theme: Life Is an Adventure & We’re All Heroes, If We Just Look Hard Enough!
We kicked it off a week ago with the post “Adventures of a White Guy in Chicago’s Third World Football League”. Continuing that, we are now featuring “Paddy Wagons Weren’t Meant for This” which records some further adventures of a White Guy in the Third World League. This will be followed, next week with an account of car break-ins and juvi justice, Chicago-style, which culminates in your host being offered a discreet bribe in open court not 15 feet from the judge, followed by an awkward and unplanned meeting with the perp in the Court’s lavatory.
Demographic note: As many (but not all) of these stories are drawn from my days in Chicago, they reflect the demographics of Hyde Park, one of what were then a mere handful of integrated communities in Chicago. Hyde Park is located smack in the middle of Chicago’s South Side, well-portrayed by Lena Waithe’s highly-recommended drama The Chi, whose second season premiered on Showtime on April 7. So, a lot of my Chicago stories reflect the upbeat but neither risk-free nor frictionless race relations experienced by me, and my homey of that time, Barack Obama. I never met him, but he lived in a 53rd Street development halfway between the condo on 50th Street where I lived before coming to Miami and the co-op on 55th Street my wife and I moved into after leaving the International House grad-student dorm on 59th Street where we met. I claim two degrees of separation from our much-missed 44th.
The good old days: when the only scandals were fake scandals.
A nice, bite-sized background prep or follow-on for my Intro to Political Theory course is available online; and it’s free, if you’re up to a little hack or two. It’s also an introduction to a great newsweekly, which, in your later, more monied years, you may consider as a paid-for news source, to help inoculate yourself against social media and political echo chambers.
From the August 4th issue, and continuing for its next 5 issues The Economist is running weekly 2-page briefs on liberal thinkers and, in the September 8th issue, critics of liberalism.
August 4th: John Stuart Mill.
August 11th: Alexis de Tocqueville.
August 18th: John Maynard Keynes.
August 25th: Schumpeter, Popper and Hayek.
September 1st: Berlin, Rawls and Nozick.
September 8th: Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche.
The Economist has a paywall, so your access will be blocked after a certain number of articles. You might be able to get away with one free article a week. If not, try browsing with FireFox, installing the Add-on Anti-Paywall; that worked when I tried it.
Here’s a link to a page of techie strategies from 2015 for working around paywalls, some of which may still work:
Do the standardized assessments used by bureaucrats accurately portray what they administer, or do they impose the interests and agendas of centralizers on those over whom they seek an augmented authority?
James Scott uses in-depth analysis of Prussian forest management and Napoleonic and Tsarist attempts to reconfigure rural land ownership to demonstrate the tendencies of the administrative bureaucracies under which we all now live.
I graduated from Gables in 2014 and attended Perapateics over the course of a few summers. I also started FairOpportunityProject.org, the platform of resources that Jim shared in a previous post. Since many current high school and college students are following the blog, I just thought it would be cool to share two finance tools I was recently made aware of:
The earlier you start thinking about personal finance, the easier everything will be.
Start saving and investing money early and often.
You don’t need a professional to help you invest.
Open and contribute to a Roth IRA. The deadline for 2018 is April 17, 2019!
Apply for a credit card to start building your credit and getting that sweet cashback.
File your 2017 taxes by April 17, 2018. It’s free and you’ll likely get a tax refund ($$$).
Mint – an all-in-one platform to monitor all of your financial accounts, credit cards, and credit score. I’ve used it to manage my budget each month while at college.
Let’s begin by applying a general rule, Rule II.1 (Exposing Weak Form/Strong Form Equivocation of my Rules for Hypothesis-Free Critical Thinking; go to Rules). For rich or difficult terms needing interpretation, always establish as the end-points of the range of plausible interpretations the weak form and the strong form.
Those of you who took Intro to Political Theory will recognize in this my distinction between sober Rousseau and intoxicated Rousseau, those being simply personifications of the weak form and strong form interpretations.
Weak Form: The experience acquired in trying to ahieve our aspirations changes us and devlops our potential in not always foreseeable ways.
Who could argue with this? This is the incremental way that we amplify our best qualities and restrain our worst. We exist as creatures of formed habits but with the power to gradually and incrementally alter those habits. And, as with any new direction taken, the full prospects of that direction are not apparent until you near your destination.
Sartre’s freedom is the freedom to choose projects, and it’s through those projects, and how we grow in the attempt, that we become who we will be.
Strong Form: There are no fixed limits or powers to human nature.
If this simply means that indivudal and cultural habits can change over time, it is hardly controversial.
But it’s ambiguous.
Our lives exist within a cascading series of limits, those of: 1) physical objects, 2) living organisms, 3) homo sapiens, and 4) language-enabled beings.
Our limits as physical objects are fixed.
Our limits as living organisms are fixed, unless we develop and use the power to re-engineer ourselves as cyborgs (not quite as sci-fi as it used to be).
Our limits as homo sapiens have always been subject to change in the standard Darwinian sense. But now we increasingly have the power to accelerate that process.
Our limits as language-users might show as an inability to escape the truths of mathematics or logic, or the intersubjective calculations of social contract or game theory.
I think that covers the senses in which human nature is and is not fixed. (This reminds me of William James’s dictum “When you meet a (seeming) contradiction, make a distinction”.
So, we can now make sense of the phrase existence precedes essence; it is sensible in the weak form, and true or false in the strong form depending on which of the several limits distinguished above we are referring to.
Finally, the modern and postmodern fixation on the unfixity of both the starting-point of being human (i.e., human nature) and its end-point (ends, purposes, meaning) looks, from a more classical perspective, to be a melodramatic way of saying something well-known to Aristotle , and other ancients: practical judgment (i.e., phronesis or prudence) the art of invention triggered by the novelty of particular circumstances, is crucial to ethical practice.
The Good doesn’t just apply itself; the agent must apply some mental and ethical elbow-grease. Sartre calls this anguish. Modern ethical theories tend to be excessively rule-based, underplaying practical judgment — the kind of thinking that fits general rules to particular realities. Aristotle knew better.
The AI that has played and then beaten the best human masters of chess and then Go, has gone through 3 stages.
First, they were programmed to mimic the best human players using rules and algorithms.
Then, they were trained by having classic games by masters input into them for big data pattern recognition.
Finally, they were just left to work through every random possibility. At first the computers made moves so stupid, you or I would never even consider them. But they quickly “learned” to abandon moves that led to defeat. Ultimately these systems beat the best human players and the earlier AIs, and by wide margins.
My only explanation is that human masters take intuitive shortcuts, never even considering lines of play that look unpromising. But some of these turn out to be hidden gems, and these are discovered by brute force computing, and added to the computer’s arsenal of weapons.
So, now I make a habit of altering my habits in minor ways, just to see if something shakes loose. And a surprising amount of the time, these random variations produce new approaches that are either straight out better, or better in some circumstances, than my old rigid habits.
When All Is Said and Dunn 