A Mid-Year Resolution

It is certainly good advice to try to avoid becoming dispirited for no good reason. So I have made a mid-year resolution to stop (most of the time) reading the appended comments on political articles I read on  the web. It has gotten too depressing.   The usual thread will contain  some combination of meanness, vulgarity, bigotry, parroting of prefab talking points,  grossly faulty  reasoning, moronic unintended hyperbole, blind dogmatism, or writing poor and ungrammatical enough to earn a bad grade on a fourth grade composition (in the old days of course), and occasionally  all of them.  There sometimes are interesting, thoughtful, and well-reasoned posts on these threads, but I find too few to make up for wading through the rest.

I hope the people leaving comments are not a representative sample of politically interested adults in the country, just as I always hoped the nitwits on man-in-the-street  comic segments on TV shows who could not tell whose picture is on the five dollar bill or remember who was president three years ago were not selected randomly. I don’t know if that is a forlorn hope. I do know the writers  are in one  way representative of the diversity of opinion in the country. I’ve read  garbage from leftists, conservatives,  communists, neo-confederates,  race hustlers, feminists, America haters, flag wavers, ordinary  religious zealots, green religious zealots,  fascists, socialists, Democrats, Republicans,  conspiracy mongers, and plain old  nuts of indeterminate ideology.

I’m (mainly) quitting because I’ve done it enough. I suggest that others do the same only after reading enough of the stuff at a variety of sites  to understand what is passing for discourse in many  places these days.  That is useful information.  

Mathematics Is About the World by Robert Knapp

The question of whether and  how mathematics connects with reality is an  important one which has occupied the attention of philosophers intermittently since the time of the pre-Socratics.   In his book Mathematics Is about the World, mathematician Robert Knapp attempts to answer it.

Along the way he makes some good points, particularly in his criticism. He is right that the “official” view of mathematics as an exercise in the formal analysis of undefined objects and  relationships  according to various lists of postulates and having no necessary connection to real things is  both intellectually faulty and operationally dishonest (the latter because mathematicians usually do not really  believe it).  He is right that the answer is not a return to some Pythagorean or Platonic notions of numbers as a higher or determinative sort of reality above the real world.   He is right  that the fact mathematics can be used to understand and predict things and events is not a lucky accident.  The sections on context determining needed, required, or possible precision are interesting as are some of his thoughts on Euclid and Greek mathematics. 

His solution to the main question is to tie mathematics to reality on the basis of objectivist epistemology,   in particular  on Rand’s theory of concepts and their formation. The book goes through a hypothetical development of mathematical ideas in geometry, analysis, algebra and other areas in terms of the integration/measurement omission process of that theory. The work is extensive  and well thought out, but I believe it is a case of someone using the wrong  tool. There are simpler, more thorough and  to the point, and to me better and more convincing ways to establish and describe  the connection between mathematical ideas and reality.  

However, it is surely worthwhile to stimulate people to think about the question and to look at  the standard  answers from the textbooks critically.  To the extent it would do that, the book might  be worth reading whether or not the reader had an interest in objectivist epistemology.  But it is not a book I would recommend to someone wanting to get started thinking about its main topic.

Avoid the United Way, if You Can

It has been many years since I donated to the United Way. I have not done so since the last time an employer pressured me into it.  I think other people should avoid it as well.

In the first place a person’s contribution goes into a big pot from which other people who have earlier selected a set of beneficiaries will then select what fraction of the total each beneficiary gets. Most people who donate to charities have some groups or causes  they prefer over others (and perhaps some they actively dislike and would never choose to support).  When they give money to the United Way, they lose the opportunity to act on those preferences with their donation.  

Then there is the structure of the United Way’s campaigns and the behavior of its campaigners. By focusing on and working through employers,  the United Way makes improper pressuring  of employees likely and probably inevitable, and as the saying goes, this is a feature, not a bug.  Long ago when I worked as a programmer at a local bank,  employees dreaded the beginning of United Way season and its attendant shakedowns.  The bank’s president saw one hundred percent participation by its employees in the United Way as a matter of prestige in the local ruling circles and pretty much demanded it. He also wanted to see a certain amount of total donations and gave each department quotas.  I generally gave the least I could get away with until I became lead on a programming team after which I might donate enough to get my boss  to leave the people reporting to me alone. In those days (and perhaps still) there was a big deal made of giving one’s “fair share” as defined as one percent of one’s annual income. Since the quotas were less than that, most people did not do it. As well as I can remember from what others told me, some of  the main exceptions were up and coming brownnosers  among the  would be executives and some low paid  keypunch operators, maintenance people, clerks and so on (many of whose incomes would have qualified them as recipients of help from some of the agencies on the United Way’s list) who were afraid for their jobs.

A few years later my brother had the bad luck to be lent by his employer to the United Way.  In one of the meetings he attended,  it came up that a local business was refusing to solicit its employees for the United Way. The response from  one of the United Way’s executives was to announce that he would find out which local bank had that businessman’s loans and arrange for it to help him change his mind. I don’t know if this sort of thing still goes on in my town or other places, but given the structure of the thing, I would think that is the way to bet.

There are far better ways to generous than donating to the United Way.  I hope those who have a free choice use  them and those being pressured fork over as little as they can get away with.