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.
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.
Globalization of Onomatopoeia
“Whereas Albanian dogs apparently go ‘ham ham’ rather than ‘woof woof’ and Hungarian pigs go ‘rof rof rof,’ not ‘oink oink,’ there are few language communities in the world that do not represent the sound of laughter with some variant on ‘ha ha’ or ‘hee hee.’
– Mary Beard in the New York Review
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A Tzipi Move Up the Ladder
“The Israeli prime minister’s declaration clears the way for rivals to form a new government. Several Kadima ministers, including the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, have already thrown themselves into the succession battle.”
– news item
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
A Welsh (or Scottish or American) actuary can tell you how many people are going to die over the next ten years. A Sicilian actuary can tell you how many people are going to die and who they are.
– CNBC interview
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This Just In
(Recent headlines. They’re all real, but on the scans we got by e-mail, we couldn’t make out most of the newspapers’ names.)
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Volunteers Search for
Old Civil War Planes
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Army Vehicle Disappears
An Australian army vehicle worth $74,000 has gone missing after being painted with camouflage. Police are seeking public help…
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Caskets Found as Workers
Demolish Mausoleum
subhead: ‘We had no idea anyone was buried there’
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Utah Poison Control Center Reminds
Everyone Not to Take Poison
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Statistics show that teen
pregnancy drops off
significantly after age 25
Dock Howard provides a much-needed perspective on the lost art of spelling. Chided for misspellings on a Facebook post, Dock replied:
“Spelling on the Internet is like punching a mime. There is no wrong way to do it.”
Next up at The New Yorker …
