Tuesday, June 25, 2002 Headed West By Diana Hsieh @ 9:36 PM I'm off to Los Angeles tomorrow morning for The Objectivist Center's advanced seminar. After three delightful days of discussing papers, including my own, Paul will be joining me for a week of the regular summer seminar. So I probably won't be blogging very much over the next ten days. But I promise to give a full report when I return. Have good time without me! Link / Noodles / Trackback Plagiarizers, Beware! By Diana Hsieh @ 4:23 PM Since 1997 or so, I've been Nathaniel Branden's webmaster. As a result, I get some strange e-mail. People looking to me for deep psychological insight or details into Nathaniel's personal life. But these not-so-cleverly disguised attempts to get me to do homework are always the best: Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 07:20:33 +0100 (BST) From: syazana shamshuddin <double_s_girl@yahoo.com> To: diana(at)nathanielbranden.com 1. Nanthaniel Branden (1986), a humanistic psychologist, asserts that self esteem and self-respect come from a willingness to face reality and deal with the world as it is, rather than to deny reality and to live in our fantasy of how things could be. What do you think of his position? What do you think might be other sources of self-esteem? Sheesh, is this transparent or what? I particularly enjoyed the misspelling of Nathaniel. I actually searched around on Google for about 15 minutes to see if I could find any further information, so that I could rat out "syazana shamshuddin" to whoever gave the assignment. But no such luck. Plagiarizers, be warned! I will hunt you down! Well, um, at least I'll try... :-/ Link / Noodles / Trackback Sony Speak By Diana Hsieh @ 11:24 AM The Plantronics analog microphone headset for my recently acquired Sony digital voice recorder just arrived. Gauging by a first test, it seems to make a huge difference in the quality of Dragon NaturallySpeaking's transcription from the DVR. Here was my first test, with corrections of errors in brackets: This is the test of the new analog microphone from Plantronics. I'm not sure how well this will work I might need additional training in Dragon NaturallySpeaking before this set up [setup] with the digital was [voice] recorder and microphone works adequately So only two errors! That's much better than what I was getting without the microphone headset. Those transcriptions were way, way off. However, all is not rosy here in the land of transcription. Yesterday I discovered that my Sony DVR has exactly the same problem as my Sony Clie, namely that my computer (running Win2000) will not read any memory stick in the usual fashion. My computer shows the memory stick (either in the Clie or in the DVR) as a drive, but it will not read that drive. It complains that the drive is not formatted, which is a bald-faced lie. With the Clie, I managed to transfer data between the computer and the memory stick using a handy little program called BlueSync, which syncs my memory stick during a HotSync. So now, in order to transfer my voice recordings from the DVR to the computer for transcription, I have to move the memory card to the Clie and then HotSync. This is rather inconvenient, but at least that works. And I am particularly delighted to know that Dragon NaturallySpeaking's transcription from the DVR with the new microphone works wonders! And by the way, this is another blog entry written with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Link / Noodles / Trackback Islamic Honesty By Diana Hsieh @ 8:39 AM A while back Andrew Sullivan pointed me towards this provacative quote found in an interview with Ehud Barak regarding Arafat and the Palestinian leadership: They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie...creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is permissible. There is no such thing as "the truth." Clearly, Arafat is a lying sack of murderous shit. But does Arab or Islamic culture in general place less value on honesty and truth than does western culture? Based on the seemingly endless stream of absurd lies coming from that region, I suspect so. (Not that I think that Westerners hold truth and honesty in high enough regard, but that is another story.) And no, that's not racism, it's just not cultural relativism either. One likely side effect of a culture of dishonesty with others is that it promotes a culture of self-deception. The fact that others frequently lie allows for a convenient escape hatch for any unpleasant facts that come your way, namely "Oh, they must be lying." For example, when Osama bin Laden claimed credit for the bombing in the videotape, there was a great outcry from the Arab world that he didn't do it. That denial makes sense, in a twisted sort of way. If your leaders lie to you all the time, then you definitely shouldn't believe anything bad that they say. But, to be rational and honest and objective, you shouldn't believe anything good they say either. Here's a related tidbit: According to anthropologists from and studying Iran, Iranians tend to say "No problem" to request for favors, even when they have no intention of performing such favors. It is generally considered rude to outright refuse someone. That seems to me to be a serious perversion of manners to me! Link / Noodles / Trackback Monday, June 24, 2002 Silence and Death By Diana Hsieh @ 9:11 PM Do you think that Ann Landers was a wonderful person? Think again! This loving bit by her niece says it all: You slipped away. You swore your daughter and staff to secrecy. Nobody was to know. Your wish was to be remembered as vital and indestructible by your public and your family -- and you will be. As you directed, there will be no funeral, no memorial, and your ashes will be quietly scattered over your beloved Lake Michigan. A fine plan, but how are the people you left behind to deal with the grief you have left in your wake? What sort of callous person dies in deliberate silence like this? People don't have funerals for their own benefit. They're dead. What the living does has no effect on them any longer! Funerals are for the benefit of the living, for the people who are left behind, for the people with holes in their hearts, for the people who can gain some comfort and solace by grieving with others. To forbid others this comfort when it makes no difference to you is perhaps the cruelest thing you can do to those allegedly loved ones. To keep a serious illness secret until death is certainly more justifiable, as it allows a person to live to their fullest until their dying day. It is not a choice that I would make, but it is a legitimate and moral choice. However, such concealment means that the death comes as a terrible shock to others. And so secrecy before death makes a funeral after death so much more important in the grief process for those left behind. So to demand secrecy before death and silence afterwards is cruel indeed. People generally condemn such behavior as "selfish." But Ann Landers, and people who do such things, usually aren't benefiting themselves in such action. As I mentioned, it makes no difference to dead Ann Landers whether people tend to her lifeless body this way or that way. What such allegedly "selfish" people all are is unthinking. They are not conscious of what they are doing. Or they are deliberately evil. Whichever one of these Ann Landers was, I still say "good riddance!" Such people should not be doling out advice. Link / Noodles / Trackback Speaking Naturally with Dragons By Diana Hsieh @ 2:37 PM Dear Paul, This is the first thing that I am writing using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. It is working fairly well although making a number of mistakes. There are ways to fix that of which I am not yet aware. Overall it is pretty cool and I'm looking forward to learning how to use it to write blog entries, philosophy lectures, and philosophy papers with it. Sadly, this is a pretty dorky letter. But it's hard to think of things to say when using this software for the first time. I am pretty impressed with the microphone, it seems to be working rather well. And the software is pretty cool too. If it makes a mistake, I can give it verbal commands to correct its errors. It even gives me a menu of possible alternatives, like a spell checker. There are all manner of features that I'll need to learn to get this to work properly. I am currently watching Fox News, waiting for Ed Hudgins to be interviewed by Neil Cavuto. It's cool to see TOC getting this sort of exposure. I suppose that I will post this silly letter on my blog. But if I'm going to do that I'd better tell people what I've actually bought. I bought a high-end Sony digital voice recorder, one that uses a memory stick and came bundled with Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 6 (ICD-MS515VTP). I also bought a USB digital headset from Plantronics. I have also purchased other headset, an analog one from Plantronics, to be used with the digital voice recorder that will arrive tomorrow. For the benefit of people other than Paul: So why did I buy this stuff? Well first of all, I do have problems with carpal tunnel. Since I spend so much time at my desk everyday, I am looking forward to relaxing back in my chair, far from my keyboard, while I write. Second, I often find that I have interesting philosophical thoughts while I'm out and about, far from my computer, particularly while I'm listening to be taped lectures. I often carry a crummy digital recorder to record such thoughts, then translate them back at my computer. But that seemed rather inefficient. Third, I was fascinated with the suggestion of one user of Dragon NaturallySpeaking that his writing was better, more friendly, more conversational, less dry, less academic, thanks to using voice recognition software. So far, I'm pretty impressed. At the moment it is taking me more time to speak this than it would for me to type it. But I'm sure my speed will increase. I'm not much of a gadget freak, but this is pretty cool. Your dearest woo, Diana Link / Noodles / Trackback Flo Control By Diana Hsieh @ 11:37 AM Given how good the kitties have gotten at catching small creatures, I might need one of these someday. Link / Noodles / Trackback Sunday, June 23, 2002 Eeeeerie Fortune By Diana Hsieh @ 11:54 PM Wow, this fortune teller really hit the nail on the head! Unfortunately, I was the nail. Link / Noodles / Trackback OPAR, Schmopar By Diana Hsieh @ 11:38 PM Someday, I'm going to write a detailed critique of Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. When I first read the book, it seemed okay, but perhaps a bit confused in places. But it seems that whenever I return to get Peikoff's perspective on a particular subject, I am sorely disappointed. His discussion of free will, for example, makes little sense devoid of the usual context of the necessity of thinking to human survival. As a result, Peikoff's discussion leaves the distinct impression that there is a duty to think. But the worst example I have encountered so far is his discussion of the virtue of honesty. In that section, Peikoff repeatedly conflates the consequences of dishonesty with oneself with the consequences of honesty with others. As a result, his arguments for honesty with others are hopelessly weak. He's not helped by the fact that his only major example concerns the big lie of a fraud, rather than the small "white" lies that normal people are inclined to tell. Even worse, at the end of the section, he magically invents, without explanation or justification, a privacy exception for the virtue of honesty. He writes: There are men other than criminals or dictators to whom it is moral to lie. For example, lying is necessary and proper in certain cases to protect one's privacy from snoopers. An analysis covering such detail belongs, however, in a treatise on ethics. There is not and has never been such a privacy exception to the virtue of honesty in the Objectivist ethics! (Yes, yes, Objectivism is an open system. But it is not open to arbitrary inventions like the above.) Honesty, like all the other virtues, is contextually absolute (the context being voluntary, non-coerced relationships). In Nathaniel Branden's Basic Principles of Objectivism conducted under Rand, such lies for the sake of privacy are specifically condemned as immoral and unnecessary. In Peikoff's Philosophy of Objectivism lectures, conducted under Rand and upon which OPAR was based, no mention of any sort of exception for privacy is made. (I should mention that I've checked the relevant lecture, but not all the possible Q&A sessions.) Personally, I think that Peikoff was rationalizing Ayn Rand's own lies about her affair with Nathaniel Branden. How grossly un-objective of him! Link / Noodles / Trackback Memento By Diana Hsieh @ 7:59 AM Paul and I watched Memento last night. Wow! I'm definitely looking forward to rewatching it. Here are a few non-spoiling comments: The backwards progression in time was perfect for this plot. All the mystery resided in the influence of the past, not in any future events. The plot was amazingly tightly wound. Most movies are cluttered with extraneous scenes, pointless little bits of time fillers. Those same movies usually also omit elements essential to a good movie. But in Memento, every moment is essential to the plot. Nothing is expendable. Nothing is extraneous. I have been reading and enjoying Ayn Rand's Romantic Manifesto these past few days. So towards the end of the movie, I began wondering if the movie was entirely naturalistic. After all, Leonard seems driven by his past, most of which he cannot remember or comprehend. But the end of the movie proved me gloriously wrong. Leonard's own conscious and deliberate choice, combined with his virtues, created his future. I love this quote from Leonard, said in the beginning of the movie: "My wife deserves vengeance. Doesn't make any difference whether I know about it. Just because there are things I don't remember doesn't make my actions meaningless. The world doesn't disappear when you close your eyes, does it?" That statement has a rather different meaning at the end, no? Here's a final funny thought: In the first five minutes of the movie, I thought to myself, "Man, this guy needs a blog!" Link / Noodles / Trackback

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