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 Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Highlights from OCON: Day 4

By Diana Hsieh @ 11:59 PM

Here are highlights from the Ayn Rand Institute's summer conference (a.k.a. OCON), Day Four:

Lin Zinser on "Health-Care Activism: Saving the Life Savers," Class 3 of 3:
  • Lin discussed three broad topics today: coalitions, tactics, and politics and intellectual activism.

  • Many self-described advocates of free markets, politicians and advocates, are not genuine defenders of free markets at all. They are in favor of all kinds of regulations and entitlements. At best, they wish to reduce some regulations and limit some entitlements. By clearly advocating for fully free markets, FIRM has made clear what a free market in medicine really means.

  • Lin offered six points for effective intellectual activism at the end of the lecture:

    1. Do what you are comfortable with.
    2. Have clearly stated goals with measurable deadlines.
    3. Use moral arguments and communicate at the appropriate level.
    4. Get on a mailing list -- create your own or join OActivists -- for editing, moral support, and alerts.
    5. Develop credibility and expertise by studying the issues and stating your views in a well-reasoned manner.
    6. If you have a desire to change a group's fundamental mission or platform, investigate the group and attend meetings. There may be a group where you could use moral philosophical arguments to formulate or change the policy for the entire group
Tara Smith on "The Menace of Pragmatism"
  • Tara Smith delivered yet another fantastic lecture, particularly noteworthy for her passion on the subject.

  • Smith began with as clear a description of pragmatism as possible: the concept rather fuzzy by its very nature, by the design of its advocates. She identified four features of pragmatism as a common method of thought (as opposed to a system of philosophy):

    1. Range-of-the-moment thinking
    2. Refusal or inability to think in principle
    3. Resistance to identifying things by their fundamental nature
    4. All options are kept open in decision-making

  • Smith then sketched the pervasive influence of pragmatism in the culture. (That was compelling but depressing.)

  • Next, Smith discussed the appeal and error of pragmatism. Pragmatism is particularly dangerous, Smith argued, because it sells itself as reasonable, rational, and practical. Yet in fact, pragmatism rejects reality, it rejects rationality, and it rejects practicality. It does so by rejecting long-range, conceptual, principled thought, i.e. the basic means of human survival.

  • Finally, Smith offered some suggestions for combating pragmatism in others and in oneself. Here are her suggestions, in brief:
    1. Identity it. Call it when you see it, not just to yourself and others. Show that it's not practical.
    2. Police the meaning of words. Don't let yourself be spun by the labels of others that reinforce pragmatism. Don't allow them to claim the mantle of being rational or practical. Don't allow the term "reasonable" to be a fuzzy sort-of kind of non-rationality.
    3. Defend rational idealism. Stock up instances of idealism to show that they are practical. Also, don't allow false idealism to go unchallenged.
    4. Don't give up. Remind yourself of what's at stake: to surrender to pragmatism is to surrender to the rule of irrationality.

  • To combat pragmatism in ourselves:
    1. Beware the pull of the present. The present can seem like the most important consideration. It takes deliberate effort to think long-range.
    2. Beware of the pull of the seemingly practical. Understand the practical necessity of rational principles. Adherence to principles is always the most practical, even if not always easy or convenient.
    3. Distinguish legitimate from illegitimate compromise. Be honest in your decision-making. Probe your own doubts. Listen for potential rationalization. Persevere in sorting through difficult cases. Go back to fundamentals, remind yourself of basic principles.
    4. Know thyself, and know thyself better. Identify your own vulnerabilities and blind-spots. Know what helps keep you on principle.
    5. Read and re-read Ayn Rand's works.

  • My notes posted here only scratch the surface of this excellent lecture. I highly recommend buying it whenever it becomes available from the Ayn Rand Bookstore.
Pat Corvini: "Two, Three, Four, and All That: The Sequel," Class 3 of 3:
  • Unfortunately, Pat Corvini was a bit rushed in her last lecture. So I'm clear on her view of generation of the irrational numbers, but I'm still a bit murky on the problems with the postulational method. (I can see the big picture, but not enough of the details. However, from what I do understand, the problems with attempting to generate irrational numbers via the postulational method seem hugely insurmountable.) I hope to review my notes with Paul sometime tomorrow.
Debi Ghate and Tom Bowden: "How to Be an Agent of Cultural Change"
  • A nice presentation of some of the basic steps a person can take to contribute to positive cultural change. Most of it was familiar ground to me, but I did take good notes. I'll be posting those to OActivists tomorrow.
Leonard Peikoff: "Q&A":
  • I didn't take many notes on this Q&A, so I don't have much of substance to say about it. However, Dr. Peikoff was in fine form. He was as intellectually sharp as ever, plus in a delightfully friendly and benevolent mood. He was particularly generous in answering my question about privacy lies -- or rather in explaining why he couldn't answer my question because he really couldn't say under what conditions lies to protect privacy might be legitimate because it depends too much on the particulars of the situation at hand.

  • Also, he reported that his book is going very well, that he's written a full draft o the whole text, and that he expects to be finished by the end of 2010 at the very latest.
OBloggers:
  • The informal get-together for Objectivist bloggers (a.k.a. OBloggers) was all kinds of fun. I'll have to arrange a similar event in advance next year rather than at the last minute.
Now it's finally time for bed! I'm beat!

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 Comments

Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 9:01:09 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: Mike Hardy
E-mail: hardy(at)math.umn.edu

Since a more traditional way of using hyphens is one of my religious passions, Diana, can I possibly talk you into writing "range-of-the-moment thinking"?

Newspaper and magazine editors and, I think, editors at publishing houses that publish novels still follow the older conventions, so no one should find them particularly jarring. At some point I'm going to have to write a propaganda piece on this point to paste into forums like this one where the issue comes up.

Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 9:20:07 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog

Mike -- I do normally use hyphens for phrases like "range-of-the-moment." (In all likelihood, I probably don't always use them correctly; I should look up the relevant rule. However, I'm in favor of the proper usage in principle.)

The reason that I didn't in this case was because I was copying and pasting directly from the notes that I took at the lecture. During the lecture, I made a self-conscious decision to ignore those hyphens as they'd just slow down my typing.

In any case, problem corrected.

Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 21:43:59 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/

I can comment on this issue of hyphenation, as a professional copy editor who has to deal with it regularly in scientific and scholarly material.

The general principle is that hyphens are used to avoid ambiguity as to what word is modifying what other word. If this cannot be in doubt, then hyphens are not needed and should be omitted.

To illustrate: There's an old joking question, "Is 'anal retentive' hyphenated?" (the point of the joke being that only someone with the obsession with trivial details that Freud attributed to the anal retentive personality would care, making the question self-referential). Well, the correct answer is "Yes, if it's being used as a modifier, but no, if it's being used as an independent noun phrase." That is, "You're a classic anal retentive," but "Your anal-retentive attitudes drive me up the wall." In the latter case, the word "anal" modifies the word "retentive," and the entire phrase modifies the noun "attitudes," and the hyphens makes this clear; without it, the reading would be that "anal" and "retentive" are two seperate modifiers of "attitudes," and thus two independent traits (as in "big black dog"). But in the former case, there is no noun following "anal retentive," and therefore no ambiguity. Similarly, "This is the state of the art," but "We use state-of-the-art equipment."

In scientific and scholarly writing, such series of modifiers are very common, and the need to avoid ambiguity is great.

There are some secondary points to be considered:

When an adverb ending in -ly modifies an adjective, which modifies a noun, it's clear that the adverb could not direct modify the noun, and therefore no ambiguity is possible and no hyphen is ever needed.

When a prefix that cannot stand on its own precedes a phrase, and applies to the phrase as a whole, it cannot be closed up to the first word, which would imply that it applied only to the first word; instead it's hyphenated to the first word, and the whole phrase is hyphenated. Thus, "He's too non-anal-retentive to be a good copy editor."

(No endorsement of psychoanalytic theories of personality is intended by this example, and no denigration of the character traits involved. But I've found it highly memorable for most people, and I hope it will be for you.)

Friday, July 4, 2008 at 22:37:13 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Andrew Baker
E-mail: smoke_owner(at)mac.com

Would some one not revealing that he is seriously ill be lying to protect privacy? I can think of one real example of that happening, Freddie Mercury didn't publicly reveal he had AIDS until the day before he died. A surface examination such an occurrence seems to be moral.

Saturday, July 5, 2008 at 16:05:35 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: Mike Hardy
E-mail: hardy(at)math.umn.edu

I am curious about Pat Corvini's work but afraid I may be bitterly disappointed if I shell out $75 (or whatever it was) for each lecture and find her work to consist of brilliantly done expository accounts of what everyone (except non-mathematicians) already knows. Circumstantial evidence makes me suspect that would happen: I google her name and find comments praising her, of which this was typical: someone said he was quite impressed with her idea for a way of looking at negative numbers, including her idea of using debits and credits to represent respectively negative and positive numbers. The guy actually used the possessive pronoun: "her" idea. As if it were a novel thing rather than what everyone has always known. One person whose comment I found on the internet said she did a superb job of explaining "epsilons and deltas", that 19th century idea that is sometimes presented in freshman calculus courses, and that many in the audience thought it was a new idea that she'd come up with. (19th century is very modern for a topic presented in a first-year calculus course; most of what's done in first-year calculus is 17th-century stuff.)

It is an unfortunate fact that conceptual foundations of things like positive and negative numbers, and many other concepts taught in math courses, are simply not taught in courses where those concepts are introduced. Instead students are taught only formal rules for dealing with positive and negative numbers and many other things. In public schools that's often the only thing the teachers can teach because it's all they know. In universities such teaching would be considered remedial teaching addressed to students who won't appreciate it because their only reason for being in the euphemistically named "college algebra" course is that they need it to graduate. Hence those who do a good job teaching such things to audiences that actually are curious about them may be perceived as brilliant, and maybe even justly so, but audiences who don't know things like that already are likely to be unable to judge which aspects of what they're learning are the original work of their teacher. Hence comments praising "her" idea of looking at positive and negative numbers in that way. (By one account, which I think may even be true, negative numbers were introduced by late-medieval Italian accounts precisely for the purpose of representing debits. I'm not sure if that's true, but to think it's Pat Corvini's original idea would be hogwash.)

So would there be any way to borrow any of the videos? I tried to get one of them by interlibrary loan, but it seems there's no library that has it.

Monday, July 7, 2008 at 9:49:43 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: Dana H.

Pat Corvini in no way claims that the idea of positive numbers as credits and negative numbers as debits is her own! That would be preposterous. I took her course this year, and she uses this simply as one illustration to contrast integers to natural numbers and explain what gives rise to the need for them. Remember that she's lecturing to a general audience, not a bunch of mathematicians, so she needs to concretize what she's talking about.

I only have time for a brief comment on her general approach. Instead of asking, "What can we derive from these arbitrary postulates that we have stipulated?", she starts by asking, "What in reality gives rise to the need for the concept X?", where X is the natural numbers, integers, real numbers, infinity, etc. In other words, she focuses on the "what" as more fundamental than the "how."

She is doing some fantastic work on the foundations of mathematics, which people with limited understanding of math and/or Objectivist epistemology might not fully appreciate. So please do not take random comments on the internet (including my own, since I have provided few details) as indicative of the quality of her work.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008 at 13:27:45 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: Gilliatt

Dr. Corvini does not describe integers as "debits and credits". That is merely one application of integers to which she refers as an example. She introduces integers in the context of counting entities when there are "opposing" or "canceling" effects or objects involved: credits/debits, liabilities/assets, forward/backward, plus/minus electric charge, etc. This is not necessarily new, either, but as Dana H. commented, what is new is the focus on the "what" (the referents of the concept). Corvini is able to use the Objectivist theory of concepts to provide numbers with this content for the first time. In her analysis of the postulational method, this content is vital. For example, mathematicians use the postulational method to "construct" the integers from the counting numbers, but Corvini points out that counting numbers and integers do not refer to or measure the same kind of thing, and that this postulational method is unnecessary and invalid. (It's valid to say, "There are 29 people in the room right now [counting numbers]," but it is invalid to say, "There are +29 people in the room right now [integers]," because the counting of the number of people present is not the kind of counting that admits of opposing or canceling effects.)

Tuesday, July 8, 2008 at 13:33:31 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: Gilliatt

And I should point out that in her 2005 course, "Achilles, the Tortoise, and the Objectivity of Mathematics", she likewise doesn't just explain "epsilons and deltas" for the non-mathematician. I don't recall that she ever even used that terminology. Again, what she was doing was providing content and resolving conceptual errors in the treatment of the concept of infinity. "Epsilons and deltas" aren't new, but her grounding of the concepts involved is.

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