Archive for May, 2012

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Guess about Gauss

Posted May 31, 2012 By John C Wright

Okay. Here is the anecdote that John C Wright, innumerate, found in MEN OF MATHEMATICS:

here’s a popular story that Gauss, mathematician extraordinaire, had a lazy teacher. The so-called educator wanted to keep the kids busy so he could take a nap; he asked the class to add the numbers 1 to 100.

Gauss approached with his answer: 5050. So soon? The teacher suspected a cheat, but no. Manual addition was for suckers, and Gauss found a formula to sidestep the problem:

Sum from 1 to n = {n(n+1)}/2

Sum from 1 to 100 = {100(100+1)}/2 = (50)(101) = 5050

Shamelessly stealing the anecdote from real life, and assuming my hero could figure out the same trick, here is the way I describe it in my book:

Menelaus had simply folded the number line in half in his mind, noticed that every one of the fifty pairs added up to one hundred one, and multiplied one hundred one by fifty.

But a reader said

Found mistake in sum 1-100. I’m probably the 5050′th person to mention that. The correct answer is 101×50 not 101×50 – 50.

So … is he simply wrong here? From the balance of his comments, I don’t have much faith in the gentleman’s reading comprehension, but I also know I am the worst student of mathematics the human race has ever produced, so I’d like a second opinion.

Some kind reader set me straight, please.

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On Imperfect Knowledge

Posted May 30, 2012 By John C Wright

Sean M. Brooks writes and asks:

In debates or discussions with other online friends, I’ve been told that “opinions” cannot be wrong, false, mistaken, erroneous, etc. My reaction was to argue this did not make sense. It could be my opinion that 2 + 2 = 5 or that Hitler was a noble, wise, saintly, and holy man. Are these “opinions” truly not wrong or false?

One person did concede an opinion can be factually wrong while still arguing opinions cannot be wrong. This did not make sense to me–and I rejected it as self contradictory.

If this interests you, do you have any comments to make? Am I wrong to say opinions can be erroneous or false? Am I missing something?

The short answer is that you are right and they are wrong, because if no opinions can be false or mistaken, then my opinion that some or all opinions can be false and mistaken cannot be false nor mistaken.

The long answer is more subtle: it depends on the meaning of the word “opinion”.

The longest and best answer requires a few paragraphs on the nature of human knowledge, and requires we draw some distinctions.
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My Balticon Schedule

Posted May 25, 2012 By John C Wright

The Balticon 46 hotel is Marriott’s Hunt Valley Inn, 245 Shawan Road, Hunt Valley, Maryland 21031 USA [north of Baltimore off of I-83] (Phone: 410-785-7000)

This is my schedule for Balticon this weekend, in case you need an autograph, or suffer the inexplicable need to hear my humble yet insufferable pontificating (or better yet, moderating) on choice topics of interest to fanboys, or, as we call ourselves, Homo Futurus (even though the official Linnaean classification is Homo Geeco Livsinmoms Basementicus).

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Mistake Time!

Posted May 24, 2012 By John C Wright

If you have read Count to A Trillion and noticed any mistakes, including math errors, please let me know or post them here. I am trying to correct them for the paperback.

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An Interesting Corner of Comicbook History

Posted May 24, 2012 By John C Wright

This letter was published in #3 of The Forever People by Jack Kirby concerning issue #1. I thought you would be interested in the comment, the style, and the sender.

Dear Editor:

Just to add a few words to the already awesome mound of praise (one might term it a “mountain of judgment,” had one a way with clever nomenclature) surely deluging you, my compliments on the first issue of Jack Kirby’s The Forever People. In recent memory only Deadman, Enemy Ace and Bat Lash seem to match this strip for innovation and success. Which probably means — if we are use as yardstick, the commercial failures of these high-water marks of quality continuity — The Forever People is too good for the average comic audience.

Its power and inventiveness display the Kirby charisma at its peak. Every panel is a stunner. Potentially, it appears to be the richest vein of story material National has unearthed in years. One hopes Kirby will be given total free rein, that he will be allowed to ride his dreams wherever they take him, for the journey is a special one, and we get visionaries like Kirby only once in a generation, if we’re terribly lucky. To constrain him, force him to fetter himself with the rules and rags of previous comics experience, would be to dull the edge of his imagination.

After the many false starts of National efforts in the past five years, at last it seems you’ve struck the main route. That it should be Kirby — at the top of his form — that worked point-scout, is not surprising. He has long been master of the form, and in The Forever People, it seems he’s found his metier.

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The Usefulness of Hate

Posted May 22, 2012 By John C Wright

Hate may not be useful for anything but corrupting the soul. Despite what hatred itself seems to advocate for itself, it does not actually lend strength or energy or conviction or moral probity to one’s cause, and, like the itch that promises relief if you scratch it, it betrays its promise and merely aggravates itself when indulged.

But the usefulness of accusing one’s opposition of hate, of pretending he is moved by the darkest and most despicable of motives, that is useful to the point where no other weapon is needed in the arsenal, no other arrow in the quiver, no other argument on the lips, no other though in the head. It is a tool of infinite utility and zero cost. Like the catalytic Philosopher’s Stone of myth, as an excuse, accusing the opposition of hatred creates infinite riches and is never consumed nor grows less.

Consider that if the opposition’s motive is the darkest and most shameful of motives, hate, that nothing he says with his lips has any meaning. For we all know that like the flattery of the infatuated, the obloquy of the hater is merely an expression of inner passion, words without reason. A man in hate, like a man in love, will say anything.

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Close Encounter of the Unseen Kind

Posted May 19, 2012 By John C Wright

This is the single most odd thing that has ever happened to me. I got this letter in my inbox just now:


Thought you might find this amusing. I had the good fortune of attending a talk by Marc Barnes, the Bad Catholic, held at a local restaurant. My friends and I got there early to get good seats (which we did), and I had brought a copy of Orphans of Chaos with me to kill time before the talk began. It was still sitting on my table when Marc began talking, and in the middle of his introduction he spotted it, leaned over to look at it more closely, and broke off on a tangent: “John C. Wright is a great author! You all should look him up, he recently converted to Catholicism and blogs apologetics. My teacher brought him in to talk at my scifi writing class and he was like this huuuuuge tall dude and he brought a sword with him! It was a cane sword and he swung it around and my teacher was looking like ‘Ohmygosh I’m gonna get fired for this o.O’. Can I see that book, no, wait, after the talk…”

For those of you who do not recognize the name, Marc Barnes (not to be confused with Marc C. DuQuesne) is the bad Catholic of BAD CATHOLIC, one of the wittiest and most well spoken young men who takes up the pen in defense of the faith. This precocious prodigy is but a tender eighteen summers of age, but he writes with the wisdom of Nestor.

He was in the same room with me, and I did not even know he lived on the same continent with me! I am flabbergasted that he did not walk up and offer to sign an autograph for me. He should know I am a fan.

I had a brush with fame and never knew it. I might have actually spoken to him and not known it!

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A Glimmer of Reason in the Age of Unreason

Posted May 18, 2012 By John C Wright

Some of my faith in humanity is restored when a Leftist has the humanity to confess that certain moral rules are objective. The mere act of condemning in one’s own party the self same sin condemned when committed by the other party confesses a faith in the objectivity of morals, hence the objectivity of reason.

Allow me to quote an enemy of my Church, but who, in this regard, is an ally, Thomas Paine, from his work (with unselfconscious irony) named AGE OF REASON:

It is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Mr Paine is, of course, mistaken, for he misnames mere self-consistency fidelity; whereas fidelity is faithfulness or loyalty to the truth. One must have self-consistency as a necessary precondition for loyalty to the truth, but this lesser precondition is not the whole of the thing. Mr. Paine makes the classic blunder, nay, the defining blunder of our current age, rightly called the Age of Unreason, since to depart from loyalty to truth is the same as to affirm that there is no truth, which is the same as to affirm that reason is vain, impotent, arbitrary.

Nevertheless, integrity to even mistaken principles is needed before  any reasoning, hence any human nature, can be sought in a man, or fulfilled.

It is perhaps for this reason that the Son of Man in the Book of the Apocalypse announces so sternly to the Laodiceans “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.  So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.” The indifference of which He speaks is the lack of principles. Myself, I have more respect for a self-consistent atheist who hates my Church and all her works because he hates on principle a thing he rejects as evil, than I have for a bland modern nihilist agnostic who rejects the notion that anything is evil, and merely mouths a mealymouthed approval for all things spiritual. Burning hate can become blazing love when conversion strikes: bland nothingness can be made into nothing.

Likewise I have respect for integrity even for causes of which I do not approve, because an enemy faithful to his flag is something to admire, even in a foe.

How much more respect do I have for a foe who in this case is an ally against anyone, Left or Right, who defaces the Constitution, or would substitute a Cult of Leader-worship for a Rule of Law!

The Leftist is this case is Glenn Greenwald, whose ire I applaud first because as an America is he is right to be wroth with the insolently unconstitutional evils being perpetrated, and second as a Leftist he is right to be wroth with his party for the betrayal of their high-sounding principles.

A core plank in the Democratic critique of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties assault was the notion that the President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist – even including eavesdropping on their communications or detaining them without due process. But President Obama has not only done the same thing, but has gone much farther than mere eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even to kill citizens without due process. As Bush’s own CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden said this week about the Awlaki assassination: “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on him but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that something?” That is indeed “something,” as is the fact that Bush’s mere due-process-free eavesdropping on and detention of American citizens caused such liberal outrage, while Obama’s due-process-free execution of them has not. Beyond that, Obama has used drones to kill Muslim children and innocent adults by the hundreds. He has refused to disclose his legal arguments for why he can do this or to justify the attacks in any way. He has even had rescuers and funeral mourners deliberately targeted. As Hayden said: ”Right now, there isn’t a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel.” But that is all perfectly fine with most American liberals now that their Party’s Leader is doing it

Here is Mr Greenwald’s article: http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/repulsive_progressive_hypocrisy/

hat tip to Mark Shea: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2012/05/stop-the-hhs-mandate.html

Myself, I have always been a warhawk, if not a Crusader, but for the love of Christ, let us not lose our souls during this holy Crusade, nor stoop to barbaric means, nor even unlawful. We fight with the Omnipotent on our side against barbarian darkness who embrace the naked evil called Jihad. Do you think gentle Jesus smiles on those who send a retarded child equipped with an explosive vest into a crowd of women and children? What need have we for panicked and extraordinary measures? Our lawful weapons will suffice.The war is spiritual, not physical, psychological, not conventional. We have means enough, if we but avail ourselves.

If even so extreme a war-zealot as I am disgusted by the excesses of both administrations, Bush and Obama, in the prosecution of this war, something surely must be wrong.

 

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When I went to go talk at Franciscan University

Posted May 16, 2012 By John C Wright

… I did not realize that it was the last time that prestigious institution would be allowed to offer insurance to its faculty.

http://www.lifenews.com/2012/05/15/obama-mandate-forces-catholic-college-to-drop-insurance/

The world is attempting, and with nearly unopposed success, to drive all religion, especially Christians, and most especially Catholics, out of the public square. Our Elite Masters have been willing, in times past, to allow Christians to do the works of charity, care for the poor, see to the sick, educate the ignorant, free the slave.

But no longer.Charities not willing to help freed slaves have free abortions are defunded; institutions not willing to fund and celebrate aborticides, sterilization, contraception are being forced to give up their conscience and their rights of conscience or else give up their insurance.

It is not that these who are in need will have their needs filled by that secular church we call the State — that they will suffer does not come into the calculus of the compassionate and reality-based community. They want to smite their fathers, and we are a convenient stand-in. That is why the Church is being driven away.

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If any of you who like Science Fiction books

Posted May 12, 2012 By John C Wright

Or any books for that matter, want to help the publishing industry from being bureaucrated to death, you may read the following letter, and send comments to the Department of Justice:

http://aardvarknow.us/2012/05/09/letter-to-the-department-of-justice/

Anti-trust laws are anti-just. If you set your price even with your competitors, that is price fixing; if above, that is evidence of monopoly due to market dominance; if below, that is evidence of predatory pricing.

Anti Trust Law was the Progressive Movement first, greatest, and most utterly illogical victory in legislation coming back to bite us.

 

 

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I cannot believe we are still having this discussion

Posted May 11, 2012 By John C Wright

Note: I had thought this topic long dead, as the title indicates. Since someone brought it up again, I reprint my previous thought on the subject, not seeing the need to add or subtract any words.

A reader who, on other topics, I deem worthy of respect, has ventured the following comment in regards the Iraqi war:

“When we invaded, freeing the Iraqi people was not anywhere near the top of the list of reasons given to the American public. Only after a succession of the original rationals turned out to be hogwash, did the administration start using the “promote democracy” argument.”

The implication here seems to be (I am not sure I get his point) that since the “promote democracy” argument was not argued vehemently at first, therefore the democracy in Iraq does not count as really “real”. He is intellectually aware of it, in some distant, numb way, but that is not where the spotlight of his reason and passion are focused: the spotlight is on Bush and Cheney, whom he regards as sinister figures, and he says these public figures were obviously not sincere in their desire to go to war for the right reasons, so we must not trust them now. Freeing people doesn’t “count” unless your motives were too pure to be slandered from the get-go. Or something. Actually, I don’t understand his point at all. So let us put that to one side for now.

If I did not have respect for this man, I would simply call him a liar. As it is, I will argue as if his recollection of the event leading up to the war are valid, and therefore he need only be told the facts of the matter to correct him.

He makes one statement of fact which can be proved wrong beyond a shadow of a doubt and to a moral certainty. The original rationale for the war is the same now as it has always been.

Since someone else has done the work for me, I will simply post his line of argument in full, saving my comment for the end.

Note particularly item 7, the argument to end the brutal repression of the Iraqi people; which is not only not at the bottom of the list, it is the second item after item 6, the argument of a threat from weapons of mass destruction.

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What’s Wrong with the World?

Posted May 8, 2012 By John C Wright

Contents

————————————————————————

Part I — Introduction

Do not suppose, you Greeks, that my separation from your customs is unreasonable and unthinking; for I found in them nothing that is holy or acceptable to God. For the very compositions of your poets are monuments of madness and intemperance.

And I say nothing of the masculine character of Minerva, nor of the feminine nature of Bacchus, nor of the fornicating disposition of Venus. Read to Jupiter, you Greeks, the law against parricides, and the penalty of adultery, and the ignominy of pederasty.

Why are you, being a Greek, indignant at your son when he imitates Jupiter, and rises against you and defrauds you of your own wife? Why do you count him your enemy, and yet worship one that is like him? And why do you blame your wife for living in unchastity, and yet honour Venus with shrines?

—Discourse to the Greeks of St. Justin Martyr

It has long been a puzzle to me, a puzzle indeed I recall pondering all my life, why the era into which I was born happens to be so singularly illogical, hypocritical, ignorant, un-virtuous, barbaric, craven, ugly, foolish and confused.

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My Instinct is to say the Morality is not Instinctive

Posted May 8, 2012 By John C Wright

Part of an ongoing conversation:

wrf3 writes

“I hold to the rules of logic … because without them communication with others is impossible, and because they are required for coherence with the natural world. In other words, if I want my bridges to keep standing, there are certain mathematical forms that I must follow. If I want to talk to you, there are also certain forms that I must follow.”

Very good: do you also want to be honest with me when you talk to me? Do you want me to be honest to you? Do you want to be honest to yourself in your own thinking when you use the rule of logic on logical propositions, or when communicating, or when building bridges? Because you could of course choose to deceive yourself, use rhetoric rather than logic, communicate lies and nonsense, and let the bridges fall.

My question specifically is about this conversation. Do you want me to be honest with you when we discuss this matter, to tell the truth, not to play rhetorical tricks or change the subject, and not to pretend I have won the debate if I lost it?

If so, what it is you are wanting when you want that?

I submit that what you are wanting is that I adhere to a moral standard we both tacitly acknowledge as having authority over us. Since I did not make it up and neither did you, and I never agreed to it and neither did you, the common sense conclusion is that it is not manmade. Since this rule applies no matter what the laws of physics are, it is not a rule deduced from any empirical perception, any more than the rules of logic or math.

“We generally think it is wrong to break one’s word because that is uncooperative behavior and we, as a species, realize that our biology works better when we cooperate…”

So, if I were a Martian, or a ghost, or a robot, or some other creature with a slightly different or very different biology, would it be morally right for me to break my word in that circumstance?

What makes you think the biological origins are inventing something rather than perceiving something? My eye is a biological organ, but it perceives light, it does not create light.

“You’ve taken a biological fact and enshrined it in mysticism, because you don’t understand the underlying mechanism.”

My theory about the origins of the perception of the moral order of the universe has not the slightest hint mysticism to it. Puh-lease.

But, even granting your argument about the biological origins of morality, what makes you think that cheating at chessgames is not a Darwinian survival trait?

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What’s Wrong With The World Part XXII—Conclusion—The Mother of Reason

Posted May 7, 2012 By John C Wright

Conclusion—The Mother of Reason

If Reason herself, armed like a goddess with the lightning and Medusa-headed hoplon of the chaste Minerva, cannot smite nor deflect nor defeat the Cthulhian indignity, ugliness, insanity and inanity of the modern rebellion against life, liberty, nature, and reason what, then, is to be done?

If, as every Christian man since the First Century has believed, we live in the Last Days, and that mere months or moments separate us from the Second Coming, the only thing to be done is to carry on through the remaining fragment of time with the cheerful stoicism expected of saints and martyrs.

In such a case, the only thing to do is to await in joyful hope for the Deus ex Machina and then the curtain to be lowered on the stage of the tragic drama called Earthly history, so that we may join in the comical cast party held immediately after, shake hands with the Playwright, and gaze in wide-eyed, childlike wonder that the actors playing Hamlet and Laertes are not only not dead, but are the best of friends.

However, the cheerful stoicism with which Christian actors on the stage of the tragedy of Earthly history are expected to carry out our parts also includes that it is not our part to abandon the Earth to the foetid, chthonic and mephitic gargoyles of modernity: our part indeed is to drive them back into their sewers, holes and caves.

Joyous Christian stoicism requires hope and good cheer that gloomy pagan stoicism does not require. When all worldly evidence conspires to announce that the Age of Reason, so brilliantly begun, has ended with the Age of Unreason is upon us; Reason herself, her torch extinguished, sees no hope. But Christians do not limit their hope to worldly things, no more than the conquered peoples in Vichy France or Quisling Norway put their hopes in the Nazi occupier. There is something beyond Reason that supports her, and gives Reason her authority and power.

In my youth, I thought a return of the exiled philosophers would bring light to the darkened world; but I despaired, because if all lamps of thought and learning are smashed, and the Vestal fires of ancient tradition quenched, whence comes the fire to light to candle again?

The despair that in my youth clouded my wit was born of the simple error of cause and effect.

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The Law of Nature — parable of the poor sport

Posted May 7, 2012 By John C Wright

Part of an ongoing conversation:

wrf3  writes:

“Now, it seems to me you’re equivocating on what “Natural Law” means. On the one hand, you say that “Natural Law” is how men behave. If “Natural Law” were purely descriptive then I’d have no problem with this aspect of its use. But “Natural Law” is also used in a prescriptive manner and it is with this usage that there’s a problem.”

No, not at all. I did not use ‘natural law’ to mean a description of how men act. That is the discipline properly called history. I used ‘natural law’ to mean the moral order.

This is the way CS Lewis and writers in the West since the times of the Greeks has used the phrase. It does not refer to an empirical description of anything that can be perceived by the senses.

Let me ask you this. You yourself are aware of a moral order of some sort in the universe, because without such an awareness, you could not disapprove of illogical thinking or self deception or shoddy thinking. In other words, if there is no duty to be reasonable, to be fair, or to be honest, then there is no way you could disapprove OR EVEN IMAGINE DISAPPROVING of someone who was deceiving himself in his thinking. To chide someone for a breach of duty implies a belief that the duty exists.

Your argument, such as it is, is merely a verbal confusion. You are treating the word ‘nature’ to mean ‘empirical nature.’ But I direct your attention to your own loyalty to the duty to be honest, the duty not to deceive oneself. This duty has no mass, nor length, nor duration, nor candlepower, nor temperature, nor moles of substance, nor current. Hence it is not a physical thing. It is not perceived by the senses nor discovered any possible combination of sense impressions by induction nor deduction. Whence comes it?

The reason why I cannot answer your question is that I do not accept the unspoken premise that the word ‘nature’ is confined to material and empirical reality. Were that so, there could be no discussion of morality.

You mention in passing a test or rule to see if something is a moral imperative: you say that you and I both agree on it. But we are not legislators of the nature of reality. Morality is not a game like Chess.

If you and I sit down at the Chessboard we can agree that no one will be allowed to castle for this game, or that the bishops will start adjacent to the rooks, and knights adjacent to the King and Queen. We would be playing a variation of Chess, or Displacement Chess, but the rules would be binding on the two of us for the duration of the game, since that is what we agreed.

But suppose I found myself in a bad tactical position, and in order to improve my position, I castled my king. You could make two complaints against me: first, you could say that I had broken the rules of the variation of Chess to which we had agreed. Second, you could say that I had broken my word.

The first complaint, perhaps, I could answer like Hobbes, and say that the rules of Chess are arbitrary, and that I have as much authority to change them as any sovereign. But what of the second complaint? That men ought not to break their word is a moral primary known to all men above the age of reason. It is intuitive and undeniable knowledge. Even those who argue against it tacitly acknowledge it.

It is not, indeed it cannot be, an arbitrary rule enacted by the two of us binding on us only for so long we give our word to obey it, for if it were such a rule, no rules could ever bind anyone, since no one could be trusted to keep his word, including that particular form of keeping one’s word involved in agreeing to obey a rule during a game called sportsmanship.

If so, you and I, merely by tacitly agreeing to have an honest conversation on the topic we presently discuss, are ourselves evidence that a moral order, called ‘the natural law’, exists; and our knowledge of its existence is metaphysical rather than physical.

For this reason, your minor premise that the physical and empirical world must display a end goal in order for there to be a moral order in the world of ideas and ideals is a premise whose sense I do not see.

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