Wittgenstein’s Ruler
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.
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You’d measure a table to find out it’s dimensions.
Comment by Andy — August 23, 2008 @ 10:26 am
Oh. Well, there’s that. I’ve also known people to measure a table to see it would fit into an alcove. But if it’s so tight you have to measure it, then once it’s in the alcove it can no longer serve as a table. it becomes a Wittgenstein desk,
Comment by Al — August 23, 2008 @ 6:15 pm
After you’ve bracketed it, any sensible target would move, thus requiring more bracketing. The question becomes: Will you run out of shells or melt your barrel before the target stops moving? And why did you want to shoot an insensible target anyway? It seems you’re not as interested in hitting the target as you are in hitting the people inside the target. So if the people in the target note that they’ve been bracketed, they’re going to get the hell out of there, thus forcing you to waste ammunition destroying something that’s harmless … like a farmhouse or a pet store. And what about the pets? Why kill them? They haven’t done a thing to hurt you. So there.
Comment by Steve Alber — August 25, 2008 @ 9:00 am
Spoilsport! That’s easy for you to say — the pets haven’t done a thing to hurt you — because they shit on everybody else’s lawn, not yours. Hillary said she would blow them to smithereens, which can then swim around in your aquarium. Today I’m sure the bracketing of artillery is computerized through pilotless aircraft, satellites and GPS, with the results automatically plugged into the gunnery, so lthe whole process might take a minute. It used to take longer — but not long enough for a whole encampment of smithereens to pull up stakes and dart whence and thence. War is hell, but so is peace.
Comment by Al — August 25, 2008 @ 2:30 pm