Nov 022002
 

Back early from his holiday with lots of new stuff. A mid-week post when I wasn’t looking, a lengthy discussion of ethics, and that’s not even counting a mere 843 words about the Microsoft trial. So let’s get to it, boppers:

Stardate: 20021031.2219
Word Count: 1,932
Title: Casino Notes
Impetus: Vegas vacation.
Thesis: No thesis today. He’s on vacation, OK? Give the guy a break.
Then What? Den Beste played a weird sort of strip tease slot machine, and some blackjack, and something called Pai-Gow Poker, and lost $500 all told. Chinese uses the English words for “flush,” “straight” and “joker” instead of trying to invent local equivalents so as not to pollute its language, like, of course, the French. (Actually Icelanders are even worse this way.) He hates cigar smoke.
Technical Digression: A discussion of slot machine technology.
Evaluation: A lot more interesting than I make it sound.

And now we get serious.

Stardate: 20021102.1331
Word Count: 2,370
Title: Ethical Selfishness
Impetus: Nothing immediate.
Thesis: No ethical system supplies all the right answers. Even his favorite, Rule Utilitarianism, is “much too susceptible to rationalization.” (Den Beste means utilitarians decide on their answer first and then invent its justification. Since there’s no such thing as “utile” — a commensurable unit to measure outcomes — this is tempting to do.) But altruism is clearly wrong, which means selfishness is at least sometimes right.
Engineering Analogy: Robustness, the ability of a system to handle a new challenge or a high load and keep running. Ethical systems are wanting in this regard.
Best Quote: “I categorically state that Joe is permitted to prefer his own daughter to any other child, and that it is not wrong for him to care more about Jill’s happiness than he does about starving children in Somalia.”
Evaluation: Den Beste tries to get beyond moral intuition and fails, because he asks too much. He expects an ethical system to work like a computer program: the input is the problem, the algorithm is “the greatest good for the greatest number,” or whatever, the output is the solution. But the problem, the input, can never be given with enough precision to permit this. An ethics is a heuristic and a good one helps us avoid the grosser errors. “Act to maximize your rational self-interest” is excellent moral advice; I think it is right and thus am not an “ethical cynic” in Den Beste’s sense. In the same way I think Den Beste’s “Principle of Selflessness” is wrong, and everything in his article indicates that he does too. “Rational self-interest” will save you from many serious errors; but it will not decide how relatively important your family, your colleagues, your countrymen, and your fellow humans are, and no other ethical tenets will either.

Nov 022002
 

Samizdata posts a fine though by no means complete list of Brit and Americanisms, and the Britishisms are nearly always shorter. Which reminds me* of a poem by Chesterton on the subject:

A Ballad of Abbreviations

The American’s a hustler, for he says so,
  And surely the American must know.
He will prove to you with figures why it pays so,
  Beginning with his boyhood long ago.
When the slow-maturing anecdote is ripest,
  He’ll dictate it like a Board of Trade Report,
And because he has no time to call a typist,
  He calls her a Stenographer for short.

He is never known to loiter or malinger,
  He rushes, for he knows he has ‘a date’;
He is always on the spot and full of ginger,
  Which is why he is invariably late.
When he guesses that it’s getting even later,
  His vocabulary’s vehement and swift,
And he yells for what he calls the Elevator,
  A slang abbreviation for a lift.

Then nothing can be nattier or nicer
  For those who like a light and rapid style,
Than to trifle with the work of Mr. Dreiser
  As it comes along in waggons by the mile.
He had taught us what a swift selective art meant
  By description of his dinners and all that,
And his dwelling, which he says is an Apartment,
  Because he cannot stop to say a flat.

We may whisper of his wild precipitation,
  That its speed is rather longer than a span,
But there really is a definite occasion
  When he does not use the longest word he can.
When he substitutes, I freely make admission,
  One shorter and much easier to spell;
If you ask him what he thinks of Prohibition,
  He may tell you quite succinctly it is Hell.

*Because I was a prissy little pedantic English major who got picked on in high school. Deservedly.