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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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A quick burst of theory
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The Pursuit of Wisdom February 9, 2025
The word ‘wisdom’ has acquired a lot of unnecessary baggage
Too high falutin’, too old-fashioned, too subjective. But really it just boils down to ‘sound judgement’. Now if you are thinking ‘Oh, is that all?’ then think again. That is the one thing most people are incapable of.
* Are there wise plumbers? No, there are good and bad plumbers.
* Are there wise philosophers? No, there are good and bad philosophers.
* There are plumbers who are wise but a good plumber is one who is well-trained, meticulous and cheap.
* There are philosophers who are wise but a good philosopher is one who is well-trained, original and useful.
Wisdom is not a job requirement. It is available to anyone who wants it but it is not necessary for a long, productive and happy life. So not many seek it. If you do, listen up.
Let us take a recent event for which you have the same amount of information as everyone else.
| Elon Musk waving his arms around. |
You have to use ‘sound judgment’ to decide whether he was making a Nazi salute or not. These are your options:
1. He didn’t mean to do so. Since it would be vastly to Mr Musk’s demerits and had no obvious advantage for him, it was an accident arising from his well-known brio.
2. He meant it. It was some kind of coded (or indeed overt) signal to his followers and sympathisers. Or he sort of half-meant it, or it became one as a gesture of derision or combativeness to his critics. Something.
3. I don’t know.
Which of these would be an example of ‘sound judgement’?
We can speedily dispense with (3). People can acquire the reputation for wisdom by appearing to be judicious in situations where ‘the full facts’ are not known but this is not applicable here since only an opinion is being sought. Anyone who said, ‘I don’t know’ is either chickening out or, more likely, not wishing to court unpopularity with whomsoever they are speaking.
(1) is clearly a fully rational position and would constitute ‘sound judgement’ though that does not make it true.
(2) is less likely (in my judgement) but still within the parameters of ‘sound judgement’ to make (in my judgement). So where does the ‘wisdom/unwisdom’ come in?
| It is the attitude you adopt to people who are (2) if you are (1) or (1) if you are (2). |
If an air of hostility is somewhere in your thoughts, it indicates you are bringing something to the table outside the parameters of the question. You are either of a generally anti-Musk cast of mind or a generally pro-Musk one. This in itself is not necessarily unwise but if it generates emotion when a simple technical issue involving Musk is before you then
It is immaterial that in fact there is a very great correlation between adopting (1) and being pro-Musk or adopting (2) and being anti-Musk. That is their problem, they cannot help themselves, hostility would not be appropriate. Some degree of forbearance, even sympathy, is called for on your part in order to demonstrate wisdom.
You will have noted that I myself am firmly in the (1) camp. But the difference is that I have forbearance, even sympathy, for you all.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I have been musing on something I mentioned the other day. I had sent my own musing on the fate of the Thames Basin to an in-law once removed who was a professional geologist. To which he replied
| Suggested reading: Wikipedia entries on Ancestral Thames and London Clay et seq. Knowledge is power Regards |
It is true we have had 'issues' in the past but they were of the sort where I might have anticipated either no reply or a noncommittal reply. This reply sounds more like passive aggression.
But it is not. It is something of general interest to an applied epistemologist because we will all find ourselves in this position sooner or later:
* You are not an expert but you are in possession of a thesis (whether it is your own or not) that is 'expert' in the sense of bearing the hallmarks of familiarity with the subject, but is not drawn from a standard textbook.
* You send it to, as it were, a bona fide expert for his expert comment.
* How does the expert view this? He knows you are not an expert but that should not affect the issue since, for all he knows, you have acquired it from an expert.
* But even if he knows it is your own non-expert thesis (which was the case in this instance) he is being called upon to provide an expert opinion.
* The critical question then becomes why he did not. Experts normally quite like expatiating in their area of expertise so the presumption is that he can't fault it.
* But for obvious reasons cannot say this. Or perhaps better, cannot think this.
/cont
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Hatty and I frequently find ourselves in this position. Mostly her, on Facebook or Twitter. The sequence goes like this
1. Somebody claiming expertise posts up something, usually of quite small importance, in a public forum.
2. We state an objection, making sure it is done in a way that demonstrates we have at least familiarised ourselves thoroughly with whatever it is.
2A This in itself is highly, highly unusual. We are not talking about political argy-bargy or conspiracy theories or anything of that nature, but specialist groups chewing the fat. Dissent is simply absent apart from the most delicate of correction about some mis-statement of fact.
3. The original poster has to respond. This is of huge importance because it cuts out careful ignoral. He has been challenged in public, wearing his expert's hat.
4. That response follows a stereotyped pattern. The first is always an assumption that we haven't quite 'grasped the truth'. Some kind of teacher/student relationship is proffered of the kind
| Suggested reading: Wikipedia entries on Ancestral Thames and London Clay et seq. |
Though in the friendliest terms. It is the absence of dissent that makes this inevitable. Consider how much dissent the average academic gets from his students.
/more
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Remember, experts live in a world of absolute uniformity. They were taught the authorised version, they teach the authorised version, they do not come into professional contact with any other version. Hence, should they do so, they know they are not dealing with an expert. The more the dissident knows about the subject the better the evidence the poor chap has got some bee in his bonnet.
From our point of view, there is no point in arguing the toss, expert to expert. It would be like a cat talking to a queen about mice. The queen might pet the cat, she might shoo it away but she is not going to discuss mice with it. Or anything else.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This has an AE principle and turned out to be relevant to Brian's new theory.
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Your Thought For The Day February 10, 2025
Take a long list of things — say, the telephone directory — and decide if there is any significance attached to the position of any one entry. For example, your own entry. I’m sure there isn’t. There certainly isn’t in the case of Harper, Michael.
| But what about the very first and the very last on the list? Surely they will be significant in some way. |
The first one, AAAA Minicabs, is there for a reason but it is not a significant one. I personally would not use their services, the cheeky mares. The last one, Zygote Yakus, has a small significance in that he or she will almost certainly be someone at variance to the population as a whole. Cultures do not put well-used letters at the end of their alphabets.
Nor are there ZZZZ Minicabs. Though there might be if I decide to start one. I think they missed a trick there.
| All in all, telephone directories are not great sources for generating significant ponderances from long lists. But... |
* Take the list of solid objects in your local solar system, whichever one you live in.
* Sort them into size, largest to smallest.
* Is there any significance to the position of any of them?
For instance in my solar system, Charon — a moon of Pluto — is twentieth on the list and is also the most distant solid object I can observe.
| Two claims to fame. Surely that’s significant? |
Of course not. There is nothing significant about being number twenty on the list. Nor am I significant — anyone in my solar system with a different vantage point might have a different ‘most distant observable solid body’. In any case Charon isn’t always ‘most distant’ even for me. Sometimes that will be Pluto itself and sometimes it will be a moon of Neptune because Pluto’s orbit occasionally wanders inside Neptune’s.
| What about the last entry on the list? I didn’t choose that. |
But since neither I nor anyone else knows which one that is one can only wish it well and move on. To the largest one. Which is earth. The very one I live on! Goodness me, that’s a turn up for the books. Who’s second? That would be Venus. A very rum place. Who got the bronze medal? Mars, another space oddity.
What is significant about all this? Nobody even notices, that’s what’s significant. So the field is clear for you to step up to the mark. But hurry, there will be something else for you to ponder tomorrow.
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Grant
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All three are next to each other?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I can't remember! But, yes, this would be enough. Also isn't there an asteroid belt outside Mars i.e. a huge number of solid objects? But I don't know how you would fit this in.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This is an interesting one, not from a theory point of view, but because I was trying to slip a bit of SLOP past them when they weren't looking.
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Greenland: this is the way it is February 11, 2025
The Law of the Sea is clear(ish) on the subject.
A23a is an iceberg that has just broken away from Antarctica. It is about twice the size of Greater London. After spending many years aground in a shallow part of the south Atlantic it is now floating free in a vaguely northern direction.
The Russians had an occasionally-manned research facility on A23a but they have now removed all equipment and personnel. Nobody can own an iceberg. Nobody can own any part of Antarctica, thanks to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, though twelve countries maintain claims of sorts to parts of it.
| The Arctic has a similar, though less ratified, status. |
Although there is no Arctica in the way there is an Antarctica, international law is presumptively the same for both. Greenland is an iceberg that has run aground in a shallow part of the north Atlantic ocean. The weight of ice has pushed up the seafloor so that a perimeter of ocean bottom is now above sea level. As the Greenland iceberg melts this collar of temporary land will gradually sink below sea level and will eventually
| revert to being an ordinary part of the sea floor. |
But meanwhile this temporarily raised ‘land’ has been occupied by several thousand Inuits as well as others, including Danes, who assert sovereignty over the whole iceberg. Although this claim has not been formally contested by any other country — or by the Inuits — this is largely because nobody has felt the need. Economically, Greenland has proved more of an encumbrance than a benefit for Denmark, though a certain amount of prestige attaches.
Whether the Danes (or the Inuits) have more than squatters right may be moot, but there is nothing in law to prevent any other nation from using the iceberg for any purpose whatsoever with or without permission of any current claimant. (This is aside from any political problems they might present.)
| Unless otherwise forbidden by international law. |
It remains to be tested what those prohibitions are. Current Antarctic law is that military use is strictly forbidden but the situation in the Arctic is more nuanced. Both Russia and the USA have established a certain amount of latitude when it comes to the free passage of nuclear submarines and quasi-military ice-breakers but no permanent institutions have been established apart from early warning systems which, it could be argued, are best seen as anti-military.
| Can Trump go for it? Yes, in law and with circumspection. |
The USA has made formal commitments to Denmark in the past but these are political more than legal. Subject to change. The politics though may be prohibitive. Denmark is a member of the EU, so cannot be ridden roughshod over without a certain amount of calculation.
Denmark is also a member of NATO and could, in theory, evoke Article 5: an attack on one, is an attack on all. It is doubtful if the Americans will rush to defend them against the Americans. Though I suppose if they did, the Americans would win either way and isn’t that the Trump philosophy?
| It doesn’t matter how much you lose so long as you win. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I think this led to the mind/brain discussion on the AEL
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The world is divided into two sorts February 13, 2025
1. Those who never make a joke in their entire lives
2. Those who make jokes compulsively.
I should explain that making jokes is not to be confused with telling jokes. I should also explain that this piece isn’t going to be about jokes primarily. But creativity in general. I should explain that ‘creativity’ is not to be confused with ‘doing stuff’.
Everyone here can write, for example. Everything they write is created mint fresh by them and them alone, but they are not necessarily being creative. They are just 'doing stuff'.
‘Just’ being my word. Successful writers are not, generally speaking, creative. They are just very good at doing stuff. Creative people tend to be unsuccessful unless they are also good at doing stuff, which they almost never are. God should strike twice already.
Here’s an example. I sat down at my computer this morning fully primed with coffee, vape and a lively mind. I was just about to start when I realised I wasn’t wearing my glasses and couldn’t see anything on the screen. What did I do? A non-creative would have got his glasses (or her glasses, though not in this case but passim).
I thought of a joke instead, prompted by the situation:
| “I walked out on stage acutely aware that I’d forgotten something. I patted my inside pocket to make sure it wasn’t my speech. Clothes!” |
Now that’s quite funny but it’s so obvious it’s probably an old joke. A thousand stand-ups step onto a thousand stages every minute of every day. At least a thousand of them could have thought that one up.
Already you are vaguely thinking you’ve heard it before. That is called Old Hat Syndrome. Whenever the human brain hears something new it either adds it to an existing synaptic chain as ‘information’ or, if it can’t find a suitable synapse, it assumes it is already on a synapse but put there so long ago it has forgotten which.
General Memory as we insiders call it.
The brain knows perfectly well this is untrue but it is necessary. It can’t start instituting searches in and, if necessary, the re-organisation of its own wiring every time it recognises something is new but does not fall into the just new data category. Instead it goes into cognitive dissonance mode — the Old Hat trick in this case.
There is no need to tell the brain’s owner any of this. He thinks he’s Mr Bang Uptodate, always on the lookout for what’s new in the world. Takes a pride in it as a matter of fact.
No need to tell him he is actually a prisoner of all that tripe he acquired when he was an adolescent. Ignorance is bliss when you’re yoked to a human being.
The laugh is to allow the brain to cover its tracks.
Actually that last sentence represents a new idea so I’d better pack this up before my brain starts running riot. I told you it was going to be about jokes: I’ve just earned twenty pence for a major contribution to world thought.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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An applied epistemologist at work
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You are the chief antiquities buyer for your country Feb 23, 2025
You have been offered a gospel book purportedly from the English Dark Ages
and it is available for ten million pounds. What do you do?
As it will be proudly displayed as the centrepiece of the Anglo-Saxon collection at your national museum, you snap it up, no question about it. One question, obviously.
Is it genuine?
Here’s the thing. Early gospel books are so rare, so delicate, so valuable, so vital to our understanding of history, you will not be allowed to undertake any scientific tests on it. Even non-destructive ones.
For some reason.
No worries. You can call on the foremost experts in the country, all of whom will be ready, willing and able to pass judgement on it. If even one of them comes up with an adverse finding you won’t be touching it.
With a bargepole.
'The text is exactly right for the period.'
'The calligraphy is exactly right for the period.'
'The materials are exactly right for the period.'
'The provenance is profuse.'
'We’re unanimous. Ten million pounds is cheap at the price.'
'Margaret, would you bring in the cheque book.'
'Shouldn’t we ask Mick Harper first? It’s an awful lot of public money.'
'Oh, all right, I suppose so. Though I wouldn’t exactly call him an expert.'
'He’s an applied epistemologist.'
'Like I said. What sort of thing do you think I should ask him?'
1. If experts know exactly what to look for in order to evaluate an artefact’s authenticity, forgers know exactly what to produce.
2. Experts do not judge artefacts’ authenticity for a living. They examine, read about, write and lecture on purportedly authentic ones for a living. Forgers forge artefacts for a living.
3. A provenance that relies on much later copies of possibly spurious contemporary documents for the first five hundred years and is totally absent for the next five hundred years, is worthless.
4. A leather and parchment gospel book that has, according to that provenance, spent
(i) two hundred years in a stone coffin with the decomposing body of St Cuthbert on Lindisfarne, an offshore islet in the North Sea then
(ii) a hundred years in a wooden box with the body of St Cuthbert on a cart being trundled the length and breadth of northern England being harassed by Danes then
(iii) a hundred years in the box with the body in a church that later became Durham Cathedral (patron saint, St Cuthbert) then
(iv) a hundred years being given to pilgrims visiting Durham Cathedral so, for a fee, they could wear it in a bag round their necks as they wander around, one of whom walked off with it then
(v) five hundred years lost without trace somewhere in Italy then
(vi) two hundred years as a relic in a Jesuit college in Lancashire is not
(vii) going to exist when the Jesuits at cash-strapped Stoneyhurst College, Clitheroe, Lancs give the British Library a bell and say, “Psst, wanna buy an early medieval gospel book? To you, squire, ten million sovs.” Unless
(viii) the British Library is staffed by people who would buy the Brooklyn Bridge if they were told it was an old book because
(xi) it isn’t their own money so what diff? Au contraire
(x) it is British taxpayers’ money and when it comes to anything Anglo-Saxon the British are total twats.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This is the last AE-related story I posted on Medium. Rather suitably.
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The nub of it all March 10, 2025
How do you stop believing one thing and start believing another?
Being sentient creatures we are supposed to do this all the time. The ability to learn from stimuli in the external world in order to change what we think marks us out from the beasts, stuck with their combination of instinctive and copied behaviour.
| Don’t you adam-and-eve it. You are pure animal. Your beliefs are still the same ones authority figures imparted to you on your journey from toddler to late adolescence. |
* You may have honed these assumptions.
* You may have expanded them, modernised them, reformed them to within an inch of their sorry lives.
* You may, in a few cases, have flipped them over to their mirror state.
* But they are manifestly the same beliefs you hold right now and
* You regard them as being self-evidently true or as near as human ingenuity can make them
* So you have no reason to change them.
It is irrelevant whether you accept any of this because it is a matter of brain chemistry, and you and I share a knowledge of brain chemistry. The simple fact is
| your brain is not designed by nature to change your mind. Not about anything major. |
Your brain is designed to cope with the manifold situations you face in life, as they arise. Which requires a complex brain working at or near peak efficiency and that would not be the case while your brain was
| busy replacing a major synapse because the owner of the brain wishes to stop believing something and to start believing something else. |
Because changing a major synapse inevitably requires
| tests being carried out on all connecting synapses to see whether they still fit with the new one. |
Given the cause-and-effect connectedness of knowledge, some of them definitely won’t. It wouldn’t be very major if they did. Which means
| your brain remaining distracted while new connecting synapses are forged. |
Given the nature of networks, all these new synapses will have to be tested for compatibility with their links too, meaning
| your brain will be virtually useless for an indefinite period while it inspects and if necessary replaces more and more synapses |
as the changes — or the decisions not to change them — cascade through all the relevant parts of your cortex. Given the structure of the human brain, this leads to you
| dropping down dead because so much of your brain will be busy testing, discarding and replacing cortex circuitry, it won’t have anything left over to keep your autonomic body functions going. |
Do you want that? Do you really, really want to drop down dead? Probably not. So if you’ve got an ounce of common sense, you’ll stick with what you’ve got and be thankful for it. But one thing. Just as a favour to me.
| Could you please stop pretending you’re anything more than an unthinking twat who mouths twatty things you picked up when you were a twatty adolescent? |
You can pretend you’re all grown up to one another. You’ve got to breed and stuff, I understand all that. Just don’t bend my ear because
| I’ve been on a course that makes it possible to change your mind without general paralysis of the brain. |
So it is absolutely certain, whatever your beliefs happen to be, mine will be diametrically opposed to yours over a whole range of issues. No, wait. That would mean you believing something you didn’t believe before, wouldn’t it?
| Bugger. Back to the drawing board. | |
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