I didn’t get a chance to talk to Wittgenstein about this. I got the basic information from Nassim Taleb in his book Fooled by Randomness and decided to write it better than he did because his book, though often insightful, is syntactically quirky and occasionally misses its own point.
If you write a novel, design a gown, or whip up a batch of succotash and wish to get an appraisal of your achievement, you ask a respected expert or a discerning friend, whose opinion will be worth hearing. From anyone else, an opinion is likely to tell you more about the critic, his or her ego ideal and insecurities, than about the quality of your work.
You’ve noticed. So did Ludwig Wittgenstein, or so Taleb reports in referring to this principle as Wittgenstein’s Ruler.
Wittgenstein’s point was that unless you have confidence in your measuring instrument, when you measure a table with the ruler you are also measuring the ruler with the table. The more you distrust the ruler, the less information you are getting about the table and the more information you are getting about the ruler.
This could easily be mistaken for a philosophical principle, but I think it probably came to Wittgenstein when he was an artillery officer in the First World War.
The way you measure with a howitzer, you just shoot off a round in the general direction of the target. Your forward observer notes that the shell explodes a hundred yards or so beyond the target and to its right, so he radios back, “Left two-zero, drop two hundred.” The gun crew cranks in those directions, and the next round lands a little short. Now you’ve bracketed the target. Repeating the process with progressively smaller adjustments, you zero in, then fire all the howitzers at once.
Which is exactly how any great chef would approach succotash. Why anyone would measure a table, I can’t imagine.
Some spectacularly inept (or biased) judging in Olympic gymnastics over the past few days reminds me once again that I never did care for the IOC – or the USOC, for that matter.
Back in the days of Juan Antonio Samaranch (whose reign would later be exposed as a viper’s nest of bribes and other illicit goodies for IOC members), the USOC threatened to sue me for using the word “Olympic” in a historical piece I had written for an advertising client.
After receiving their threatening letter, I wrote to inquire how they presumed to own a three thousand year old word for a three million year old mountain. So they sent me the act passed by the U.S. Congress, ceding the word to them. The IOC, the USOC, and the U.S.Congress – what a trifecta!
I ignored them until they called to say they were planning to file suit against my tiny advertising agency, which at that time had a negative net worth. “Go ahead,” I told the attorney. “We’ll concede the lawsuit, and you’ll own the agency. Then you’ll be $35,000 in debt, and we won’t.” That’s the last we heard from the firm of Citius, Altius and Fortius (I guess). Nothing means more to the IOC than money.
Samaranch insisted on being addressed as “Your Excellency.” He also insisted on chauffer-driven limousines in his travels and on being given the presidential suite in every hotel where he stayed.
Before Samaranch was Lord Kilanin. and before him Avery Brundage, after whom the word “brundage” should surely become a common noun meaning an act of moral hypocrisy. Brundage is the one who – as then-president of the USOC — refused to boycott the 1936 games and then agreed to remove the only two Jews on the American team to avoid offending his Nazi hosts. (That’s how a slot opened up for Jesse Owens.) The following year, the Avery Brundage Company was given the contract to build Nazi Germany’s embassy in America.
He committed many other brundages. He bitterly opposed participation by woman athletes except in ceremonial or decorative roles. And he adamantly refused to restore native American Jim Thorpe’s Olympic medals, supposedly because of a very brief stint Thorpe had put in with a professional baseball team – which of course was not the sport for which he won his medals. But while adopting this sanctimonious posture in defense of amateurism, Brundage accepted the participation of literally thousands of full-time professional athletes from Eastern Bloc countries. Olympic sports were their sole occupation and livelihood.
Compared with these “shamateurs,” Thorpe was simon pure. But Brundage had an old score to settle. At the 1912 Olympics, he had competed in the decathlon and pentathlon and had been soundly beaten by none other than Jim Thorpe.
Though it had been conjectured for centuries, it was not until 1658 that Blaise Pascal was able to prove that four popes beat a straight flush.
(Two hydrogen atoms meet)
“How are you?”
“Not well. I’ve lost my electron.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m positive.”
———-
A Buddhist getting a root canal refuses Novocain.
His goal: transcend dental medication.
Ancient quote retrieval service.
Bobby Kennedy, asked by a reporter to respond to characterizations of him as being ruthless:
“If I find out who is saying I’m ruthless, I will destroy him.”
Steve Alber’s response to our post on John McCain, which is three items down in this column.
Whether or not John McCain has the right to run for president is really a point which, though moot, has already been decided in his favor, but I’m not sure by whom. The composition of his family, his formative years, his residence in Malaysia, etc. so doesn’t matter it’s not even funny.
What does matter is whether or not he supports and defends the Constitution … which you actually have to swear to do before you can get an American passport. I assume McCain has a passport, but he may have misspoken himself when he agreed to that admittedly minor stipulation. (What the passport folks really care about is getting your hundred bucks and making sure both your ears are visible in your passport picture.) Anyway, it’s hard to see how someone can claim to support the Constitution when he says “Amen!” to assholes like Alberto Gonzales who actually claim before a congressional committee that Americans have no right to habeas corpus.
This would be of no consequence if Gonzales were just some Texas yahoo who didn’t happen to be the Attorney General of the United States when he said, basically, “Fuck the Constitution. What George Bush wants is what’s important. At least that’s what Cheney told me to say.”
I’ll bet you if you pushed McCain, he’d also claim that the 10th Amendment trumps the rest of the Constitution, but that’s another issue. One can only hope that with the nonsense of people’s family history out of the way, we may have a civil debate about the issues.
Yeah, right.
Remember privatization?
It was George Bush’s number one priority for his second term – privatization of Social Security. Like the number one priority of his first term – the Iraq war – it was a disastrous idea that would have been disastrously bungled in its corruption-ridden implementation.
Wall Streeters dearly loved the whole concept – no doubt because it was theirs to begin with. And with the help of their lavish political contributions and their lobbyists, Republican congressmen and a few Democrats loved it, too.
Think of it!
Part of the individual’s Social Security account (They really wanted all of it, but this was a good first step) would go into a private investment account, with the promise of earning a higher return.
Billions, eventually trillions, would be funneled through the banks, brokerages, investment banks, mutual funds, and insurance companies – all of whom would scoop up a generous portion for themselves – and into investments that they happened to favor for reasons of their own (which might or might not have anything to do with the comfort and security of your “golden” years).
The economic principle is elementary. They were already getting most of your money. They just wanted the rest of it, that’s all, and they had found a way to cloak that objective in the irreproachable guise of “saving” Social Security and giving Americans a chance to earn more money for their retirement.
Right.
So how would we be doing?
If privatization had been enacted, billions in retirement savings would have gone into securitized subprime mortgages, thence up in smoke. Some would have been invested in giant, fortress-like stocks such as Merrill-Lynch, Citigroup, Wachovia, Fannie Mae, and Freddy Mac – all down by 70% or more – and possibly Countrywide, Bear Stearns, and Indy Mac, which have all but disappeared. Much of the rest would have gone into stocks of companies in the Dow Jones average, which has plummeted 3,000 points since October.
Meantime, much of your money and mine would have been channeled into management fees and transaction fees for the banks and brokerages, and from there into the bonuses of their top executives, who of course would be free to keep their money after you had lost yours.
Even if fired, they could retire in unimaginable luxury.
You couldn’t retire at all.
Another whore’s dream for America from the mighty minds of Wall Street wizards, kept congressmen, captive regulators, and a fun-loving, see-no-evil, see-no-bubbles, what-me-worry? Federal Reserve.
