Lovely article. I sympathize with Leavis's anger. I recognize the image of the smug technocrat, someone whose confidence in his conceptual scheme is so great that its ontology, its quantifications and operationalizations, come to supplant experience itself. That's not to say I have a particularly positive feeling towards the humanities, as Leavis represents plenty of what is worst about them. He doesn't seem to actually represent wisdom or humility in the face of the open-endedness of life. He presents as a gatekeeper of an elite club privy to special truths, who lashes out nastily at a perceived threat to his clergy's social cachet.
I think his anger was just a wounded ego. He reduces his argument to an ad-hominem and sleight of hand mostly.
His basic concepts are almost supernatural in nature and require a subjective feeling to get it and his reaction is probably more due to a threat to the power of his station.
I sympathize to an extent with Leavis's anger, but also with Snow's reaction. As you note, Leavis represents bad aspects of the humanities as much as Snow, in Leavis's view, represents bad aspects of science (or perhaps "scientism" would be a better word). Neither of them, to me, comes off looking very good after this exchange.
> Leavis represents plenty of what is worst about them
As in 'Leavis promptly informed his audience that Snow "is as intellectually undistinguished as it is possible to be’, an ‘intellectual nullity", and ‘portentously ignorant’. This must be an example of what Wikipedia reports from one critic 'the passionate advocate degenerated into the hectoring bigot.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._R._Leavis
You proved that definable implies nameable, and also unnameable implies undefinable. Obviously true. However, the idea of undefinable real numbers closely resembles a modern version of the paradox. No surjective function exists from definitions to real numbers.
Really, the blurb about "seems impossible to verify this by giving positive instances" contains the tension between constructive math and non-constructive math. Does an unnameable (and undefinable) thing actually exist? If a tree falls in a forest, but no one can hear it, does it make a sound?
> No surjective function exists from definitions to real numbers.
I'm not really up on maths so this is possibly a stupid question, but can't any real number be written as an ASCII string, which is basically an integer number, so there is a direct mapping there?
Or is it because the ASCII number wouldn't be in order that makes the difference?
Or is it that you can't write that mapping as a mathematical function perhaps?
It's because most real numbers are uncomputable. That means, most of the time, the only way to check that two numbers (i.e. names) are the same is to spend infinite time looking at all their infinite digits.
The problem with such sleight of hand counterargument is that you haven't even defined what "a thing" is nor "all things" are in this world. And such discussions will just come back to set theory, ZFC, axiom of choice and real numbers.
That isn't a problem with the counterargument, because the "paradox" as-stated also uses the word "thing".
For that matter, the paradox is self-resolving. By labeling the entities it is concerned with as "unnameable things", it has named them. As a collection, entities not otherwise named can be simply referred to as "Bhartrhari's things".
Philosophy students tend to be understandably insecure about the value and prestige of their field, and study often ends up indirectly training students to defend philosophy. Impressive-sounding pontificating, problematizing, cranking out arguments and fallacies and refutations, deploying jargon and historical references. There's a whole toolkit used to dazzle, bewilder, and cow the untrained. Not to mention outright self-promotion, like Chalmers in this article: oh yeah these companies totally desperately need more philosophy graduates!
It's great preparation for law school, as a commenter has already pointed out, since skill in one game carries over to the other. The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious, and I think one can reasonably argue that philosophical training does more harm than good by inculcating bizarre/narrow/counterproductive intellectual habits/commitments/bugaboos. But philosophers have tricked themselves into places where they really have no business being, like hospital ethics panels. Cool for these guys though, it seems harmless.
> The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious
I wouldnt go that far. I think your clutching at straws a little bit. Its a real stretch from philosohers are insecure to they are useless. This is the sort of thing confident ignorance gets you, when you dont know how philophy impacts mpdern life so you assume it doesnt because you think you know everything
The experts on hospital ethics panels are trained internally by medical schools, which are like little universities inside universities. There has not been philosophical access for about thirty years.
You have a great build up for an argument but why this conclusion?
At some point who should be doing ethics? Lawyers? Computer scientists? (I'm not asking ironically, who really is well placed to make population level and extremely though questions like balancing the protection of the few against a global important health interest/gain?)
Presumably, a reasonably repræsentative cross section of society. So my cop out answer is "all of them, plus the stay at home mother, the farmer, and the lumberjack"
Frasier, at a free sample station: I do thank you, but I'm afraid I'm rather particular about the provenance of my shellfish. To subject a scampi to the radiation of a microwave is not cooking, madam, it's an execution! My god, Niles, is that a '98 Chateau Latour in your cart?
Niles: I've already secured six cases! They're over there, just between the Kirkland Signature Leaf Blowers and the 5 pound bags of "Kickin' Queso Jalapeño Poppers"!
I've become a Costco person in recent years. At least in my perception, inflation has affected grocery stores unevenly:
Whole Foods: eye-bogglingly expensive (and no, I don't think it always was)
Wegmans: substantially more expensive than a few years ago, and a noticeable decline in produce quality
Trader Joes: incredible value on many prepared foods, but not the best source for staples like rice or paper products.
Costco is not inflation-proof by any means but they have pretty much 0 margins and they're reliably the best value on just about whatever they sell. The selection can be limited in some ways compared to a supermarket, and they can be a bad place to be health conscious (as it can be hard to resist massive containers of ultra cheap and delicious treats of various kinds) or to try to try to be an ethical consumer (and please spare me the HN cynical line on this, I get it, I have no real agency and I'm pathetically guilt-ridden): I've read bad things about their meat sourcing, they rarely have coffee with bona fides like fair trade or shade grown, I see controversial products like bird's nest soup, etc.
My local Costco carries the fair trade artisanal coffee brand that is roasted in my city, just in a 3 pound bag of beans instead of a 1 pound bag of beans like at the bougie grocery store. I can understand not wanting the Kirkland brand coffee, but that is far from the only coffee brand for sale at Costco. I am a coffee snob of the highest order and I buy my beans at Costco.
That's true, but mostly due to simple logistical constraints, more exoticly prepared beans generally don't keep as well on the shelf and need to be used shortly after roasting. I do a pour over in a Chemex every morning and use the beans I buy at Costco which are a locally medium-roasted, but not specially prepared. For more exotic stuff I get them directly from a local roaster in smaller quantities to be used within a week.
It's probably very store specific. If you know the Market Basket in Somerville, MA, it's got a legendary produce section. I've been to locations in NH with crap.
IMO H-Mart is the safest bet in the Boston area for high quality produce (outside of farmers markets, natch)
We play with a base point being a dime or a quarter. Note also that the function from fan to points is subject to house rules, it's not always p(f) = 2^f (I've seen rules for example that start to "level off" the payout at higher fan values).
I'd add the note that the whole strategy of mahjong really only gets interesting when you play repeated hands (a full game has at least 16 hands, with each player acting as the dealer once per prevailing wind) and when you're gambling (or otherwise tracking points). Most house rules also enforce a minimum fan value for a winning hand, banning the "chicken hand" which wins but scores no points. We play with a 2 fan minimum. If you just play for mahjong (i.e. a a hand that "wins" the round regardless of score), the game is a pretty uninteresting game of luck, and you're not incentivized to gun for the higher scoring hands.
Yes. Many people set a limit on the maximum payout as doubling goes up very fast. A 8-fan win is $1280 payout, from each player. People usually limit the max to be 9 fan.
This is the rational response to this "financialization" of brands, and it leads to high-quality goods being chased out of the market entirely (see "The Market for Lemons"), except for ultra-expensive niche brands
It’s not getting much attention because the UAE is allied with the US against Iran. If you listen to their mouthpieces on the news you’re going to hear nothing but glowing praise for the US attacks on Iran and statements about the Iranian campaign against civilian targets in the UAE. I don’t think the US government has much stomach to go against the UAE. And it’s a sad commentary on what the people who control the executive and the legislative are about that they speak about Sudan not at all.
I appreciate your feedback and understand your criticism. I'll be sure to add more detail in future analyses. My main goal was to draw attention to this matter.
I almost commented before realizing I hadn't RTFA and deleting my draft in shame.
Having read it, how are UAE and the Saudis opposing each other in this proxy war while being nearly joined at the hip in their actual neighborhood? Your article was informative and I learned from reading it but this whole dynamic still makes zero sense to me. They don't talk? Maybe it makes zero sense to anyone.
Note that node-fetch will silently ignore any overrides to "forbidden" request headers like Host, since it's designed for parity with fetch behavior in the browser. This caused a minor debugging headache for me once.
