Daybook 11.

Private detective.

I think I will hire a detective. There’s some guy I need to have followed. He’s up to something I’m sure of it, but I don’t know exactly what. He spends many many hours working on something, hunched over it at his desk, but I don’t know what. And he goes about visiting places trying to get to something. But what? I will hire a detective to find out what this guy is up to. And the detective will ask me who this person is. And I will say: me.

The Scottish National Party.

The name of a party normally tells you something about where it stands on the political spectrum, left wing or right wing or liberal or conservative. That sort of thing. But the name ‘Scottish National Party’ tells you nothing. And it’s not as if ‘National Party’ might have some sort of generic meaning we can rely on, some meaning that is just true of any ‘National Party’. Because the SNP and the BNP are very different parties! The SNP is not like the BNP at all. … But then all this means there is no party like the SNP in England. I mean a party with the kind of policies that it has. Someone in England might want the SNP to be the government of England but they can’t vote for the SNP to do that!

Hungers.

The unsatisfied hunger for food cannot persist, eventually it will cause you to die. But the unsatisfied hunger for other things is not fatal. Other hungers and longings. You have to put up with those until something else kills you first.

Character.

You don’t decide what kinds of things you like. For example if you like football you didn’t decide that. And neither do you decide what you are like, what your personality is. You can change it by choice, but it is not easy.

Funny.

Mary was eating a savoury snack she had purchased from a stall raising funds for the Earthquake victims. “This is really nice” she said and Jack said: “well, at least something good has come from that Earthquake!”. Is that a tasteless remark? I can kind of see how someone might think it is. But it isn’t offensive in the sense of saying or implying something negative about someone. I agree that jokes that do that are offensive. For example jokes about Irishmen doing stupid things which suggest that all Irishmen are stupid. But a joke can be about some thing without saying something negative about that thing. Jokes where there is a (as it turns out, false) suggestion that it is saying something negative add to the tension and improve the joke experience. The only thing that Jack’s joke about the Earthquake food was being negative about was either the person eating the snack. Or Jack, the teller of the joke. — Like the way, for example, if someone says “no I’ve not been to Dewsbury, I don’t like Jews”. — Imagine a joke starting: “An Irishman, a black man, and a dog went into a bar.” This is being negative about that particular old style of joke. — A joke I once made was: in a conversation about how people had met their partners, an Asian woman said that she had met her husband at a wedding and I said: “Was it YOUR wedding?”. (I had been waiting years for the opportunity to make this joke.) I don’t know if this fits what I have said so far though. Was I being negative about Asians?

Election numbers (boring technical) 2015.

After the 2015 UK election people said “the Conservatives got back in”. And I said to them, no not “back in” because that would suggest that they were “in” in the first place but they weren’t. What was previously “in” was a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. What happened in 2015 was that the Conservatives “got in”, not “got back in”. - This outcome was bad because the previous (coalition) government was based (in 2010) on 59.1% of the votes (36.1% for the Conservatives and 23% for the Liberal Democrats) but this new (Conservative) government was based (in 2015) on only 36.8% of the votes. This being just the votes of the people who voted Conservative. This is a relevant comparison even though (I know) that it’s not comparing like for like. Because the 36.8% all said they wanted the Conservatives to be the government but none of the 59.1% said they wanted the Coalition to be the government. With the Conservative government of 2015 then each of the 36.8% of the voters got 100% of what they wanted. The question is, with the Coalition government of 2010 what percentage of what each of the 59.1% of the voters wanted did they get? Not 100%. — Did anybody vote Conservative in 2015 based on the performance of the (non-Conservative) Coalition government for the past five years? If they did then they were (at least a little bit) confused.

Election numbers (boring technical) 2017.

The election outcome was widely described in terms like this: “Theresa May is responsible for this election disaster. She took the electorate for granted.” (Daily Telegraph). But surely it wasn’t a disaster because she achieved a 5.5 percentage point increase (see results HERE) on her party’s showing at the previous election of 2015. When David Cameron won in 2015 he only got a 0.8 point increase over the previous result. Saying things like Theresa May “took the electorate for granted” makes it sound like that she (complacently) assumed the electorate would support her but then they didn’t. And/or that she failed to get any significant increase in support. But neither of these things are true. (Also, note that the 42.4% of the vote that Theresa May got is exactly the same as that got by Margaret Thatcher in her landslide victory of 1983.) The 2017 results weren’t a failure. In the same way that if the LibDems had persuaded all their supporters to move to marginal constituencies and then won a higher number of seats (or certainly a number of seats reflecting their national vote share) then this shouldn’t be called a victory for them. So Theresa May was successful at getting 5.5 points worth of votes more than her predecessor. The only thing that she failed to do was to make it that those votes were of a particular sort. The sort that result in a higher number of seats. ‘Votes’ and ‘votes that win seats’ aren’t the same thing. For example a party might get a massive increase in vote share but if all those votes are only in seats that they already held then this isn’t going to result in an increase in the number of seats they have.

Election numbers (boring technical) 1951.

In this election the Labour Party got almost 14 million votes (13,948,385)

(Thinking in terms of absolute number rather than percentages.)

This is within 0.36% of 14 million.

The only other times that any party has got this kind of number is:

1992 Conservatives got 14,093,007 (within 0.67%).

And 2019 Conservatives got 13,966,454 (within 0.24%).

You would have thought that it would happen more given the increase in population since 1951.

The odd thing is that in 1951 the Labour Party didn’t win the election. The Conservatives, who got less votes, won!

The Simpsons.

About 400 years from now people will talk about the TV show ‘The Simpsons’ the way we talk about Shakespeare now. Both of these work on lots of different levels. Small children watch ‘The Simpsons’ for the bright colours. And arty snobs watch it for its references to ‘Citizen Kane’ and for other such in-jokes. But it is very much of its time and so the people who will be talking about it 400 years will be wasting their time and effort the same way that the people who talk about Shakespeare are doing now.

Politics of education.

Should education be free? Yes, in the same way that parents should provide their children with food for free. It would be odd if the didn’t wouldn’t it? But how much food and how much education and of what sort?

Acting.

Do actors really get angry when they are acting angry. Or are they just pretending to be angry. I know some actors use a method where they pretend to themselves that they are in some situation where they actually really did get angry. Once they do this pretending then they really feel angry. But this does not work if they need to act like they are having some feeling that they have never had before. If the method is: “imagine some time you were in a situation similar to the one that the character you are playing is in”. Then this would not work if you were playing, for example, Macbeth. No actor will have murdered a king at some point in the past.

Illusion

People say things like “the self is an illusion”. What does that mean? Who or what would be the subject of such an illusion?

Substance.

What if there was some food and its taste sends you into paroxysms of a delightful ecstasy. But after the first mouthful, nothing. After the first mouthful it tastes of nothing or it is even slightly distasteful and you don’t desire it at all. You have to wait about a day before it once again gives you pleasure. Some things are like this. And for good reasons.

Mental effort.

Sometimes I think there’s no point trying to read books that say clever difficult to understand things. It seems as if the effort required to understand these things is only slightly less than the effort required to arrive at those things by thinking it out for myself. So I might as well do the latter. (I should just do some experiments and thinking and arrive at Newton’s Laws myself instead of trying to read the ‘Principia’.)

Self-conscious.

Mary: You’re very self-conscious! What are you so self-conscious about?

Jack: About myself.

Opinions.

I think people in general are very reticent about their opinions. When those opinions are not fashionable or not ‘politically correct’. For example people are a lot more racist than they are prepared to admit. Or they might have a lot of ‘common sense’ sorts of opinions like that most unemployed people are just lazy. I think people should be more open with their crazy opinions. So that they can then be corrected! Also, if they are not open about their opinions then the only people who will be open are the ones who strongly hold those opinions. Who are ‘extremist’ about those opinions. Which then gives the false impression that all people who hold that opinion hold it in an extreme way.

Moods.

What if your mood was voluntary. And you could set it the way you can set the position of your arm. You could decide to be happy or grumpy or angry and then you would be. Immediately.

Not clever.

I’m clever enough to realise how stupid I am but not clever enough to do something about it. This is the undesirable middle ground! It would be better if I was so stupid that I didn’t know how stupid I was. Or if I was clever enough to be able to do something about it.

Satire.

Is satire just mocking exaggeration? If some politician has a big nose then a satirist will do a cartoon of them with a nose larger than their head. Is that it? Or if some politician has made a bad decision about the economy then a satirist might portray them as making a decision so bad that the entire economy collapses. This is funny I suppose. But at the same time it is dangerous if it affects the opinion of people about the competence of this politician. It might give people a false opinion. In which case satire is like propaganda. Because it is causing people to believe things by non-rational processes.

Nothing.

In terms of outcome 99% of everything is often the the same as 100% of nothing. If a river is 100 metres wide then 10 bridges which are 90 metres each is not the same as 9 bridges which are 100 metres each. Even though in both cases you have 900 metres of bridge.

Misogyny

I am such a misogynist! There’s only one thing I hate more than women. And that’s men.

Fight.

Jack and Mary found some money and they both said: I saw it first. They had a fight which went on for a while. At the end Mary won and she said to Jack: it’s OK you have the money. I won the fight. I won the fight so I’ll let you have the money, that’s fair.

Over-prioritising.

Sometimes you should just do things in order. If you always prioritised then non-essential stuff would never get done.

Light.

We see objects, never light. Light itself is invisible. Even when you see ‘rays of light’ in the sky you are just seeing streams of (dust) particles being lit up by the sunlight. The other thing is: when you turn off a light source (like an electric bulb) in a room where does the light go? The light that had thus far been put into the room by the light source. Shouldn’t it just stay there? And then the inside of the room would stay permanently illuminated. Is the answer: because it gets very quickly absorbed into the walls of the room? But what if I made the room of perfectly reflective surfaces?

Shouting.

When you’re fed up and annoyed by uncooperative and annoying people. What if you just shouted (like Alice) “you’re all just a pack of cards”. Would that sort them out? They would just flutter away.

Saying things.

In some particular cultures (like this one here) if you buy flowers for somebody then that means something. Suppose Mary likes flowers and Jack wants to buy her some flowers. He can’t do that. Giving flowers says something even though he doesn’t want to say the thing that it says.

Awesome.

Imagine Jack was a homeless alcoholic freezing to death on the streets of some uncaring city. Maybe because he is an utterly useless and pathetic wretch who has screwed up everything in his short and futile life. In a rare moment of lucidity he might reflect on the situation and suddenly feel a sense of awe at the sheer amazing spectacle of the disaster that is his (so called) life. Then he would feel privileged to be experiencing something so incredible.

Leaders.

The electorate want (need) a leader who is better than them. More intelligent and effective. But, in a democracy, when some leader is different in this way then the electorate say that this leader is “out of touch” with the common people. “He doesn’t even know how much a loaf of bread costs” they grumble. There’s no pleasing some people.

Sacrifices.

In the old days people used to sacrifice animals to the gods. And now we explain this by saying that those people believed this would them from the gods’ anger. But that makes these people from the past sound too rational. Like they sat there and thought it out. It makes it sound like they applied reasoning but they didn’t do it very well. So, one of them said: “hey guys, I’m really fed up with all this gods’ anger, does anybody have any ideas about how we can deal with it?” and then somebody else came up with the suggestion of sacrificing animals. Maybe did some randomised trials. - But I think it’s more just that they didn’t apply reasoning at all. They just did it. Or they applied some process other than reasoning that we can’t understand.

Ancient texts.

We have lots of writings from 4th century BC Athens. All the philosophers: Plato and Aristotle and suchlike. But we don’t have anything else much from anywhere else for the same period. Which is odd. Didn’t anybody else have anything to say which was worth writing down? Were the Greeks (mostly Athenians) the only ones who thought about anything at all? Certainly that wasn’t the only place of significance at the time. And sure OK we’ve got a few texts from China and India. But what about Persia, Egypt? … Similarly we have the Four Gospels from the 1st century AD. But nothing much contemporary with them. So, what’s the context of these gospels? What other sorts of writings were read by the people who were reading them? Without having the answers to these questions it’s hard to appreciate the gospels properly.

Faith.

What’s the word for someone who fails to keep their promises. Not ‘unfaithful’ because that has another meaning altogether. The only word I can think of is ‘faithless’ . But that doesn’t sound quite right either!

Confidence.

Being confident is an admirable trait but it is a rather unspecific one. Confident about what? A person could easily affect an air of confidence even though they had no idea what they were doing.

(Of course I would never do such a thing myself because it would create a false impression of who I am. And I consider myself obliged to make my ineptness clear immediately to everyone and to not conceal it in any way. As I’m sure I’ve said elsewhere: I’ve got about as much confidence as a sack of wet kittens.)

What’s so great about someone who confidently, firmly believes (and volubly asserts) they can do X regardless of whether they can. Surely the only thing that matters is whether or not they can do X. What somebody says about their abilities is irrelevant. It is redundant.

In the olden days expressing unshakeable, but unwarranted, confidence in your abilities (even if you did have such abilities) would have been called boastful and anybody doing so would have been called a braggart.

Confident people are “self-assertive”. They believe in a positive view of things. But I’d rather that people assert the truth rather than their self.

Business.

What is a good ‘businessman’ (or woman)? It’s something that’s more than being good at what you do. You might be talented at making ceramic pots. But to have a successful ceramic pot business is something more than that.

Dead Serious.

Mary: The problem with you Jack is that you’re so dead serious all the time. You need to lighten up.

Jack: I can’t do that! If I’m dead serious now and I stopped being serious, then I’d just be dead.

Other people.

Is it possible to imagine what it’s like to be someone else? You can imagine what it’s like to inhabit the spaces they do. And even to imagine doing everyday things (washing, cooking) the way they do them. But to know what it’s like to be them you would need to feel the same things and think the same things, have the same thought patterns. But how can you do that? If they believe something you don’t then you can’t choose to believe that. You can’t deliberately make the mistake that you think they are making when they believe something that is (to you) wrong.

Having and not having.

Being not bothered by not having something you want becomes easier the less possible it is that you could have the thing you want. For example I don’t feel disappointed about the fact that I can’t run 100 metres in 10 seconds. Because the possibility of that (given my feeble physique) is so low in any case. But in a society that emphasises individual effort and says that anything is possible if you try hard enough then being bothered by not having becomes more prevalent.

For example, if an individual gets told a lot that they would be wealthy if you only they just put the effort in. Then the individual might worry and feel bad about not having become wealthy. If you were somewhere that made it impossible for someone like you to become wealthy (say if you were a peasant in a feudal economy for example) then you wouldn’t worry about whether or not you’d done enough to try to become rich.

Cumulative.

Every time I hear of some awful extreme incident such as murder, I think to myself: what about all the many similar incidents which were not reported because they were not as serious as the ones that were reported. And there will be many more less serious unreported incidents than more serious reported ones. So imagine a city where there were 20 horrible murders in a particular year. It’s not possible that there were no other violent offences during that period. For each of those 20 horrible murder cases there must be many cases of attempted horrible murder and successful not so horrible murders and other sorts of things. The awfulness of all the lesser offences added up (assuming that awfulness is something you can add up) will be more than the awfulness of the few more serious cases.

The same.

Imagine a place where everybody was roughly equally wealthy. And where this wealth was sufficient to give them a comfortable life. Then why would anybody in this place want to be more wealthy? Suppose the rules prevented people becoming more wealthy. But then some people said: I want (the freedom) to be more wealthy so let’s change the rules. They will say that the rules are wrongly limiting their freedom to be wealthy. But what would this desire to be more wealthy be? It’s not the desire to escape poverty. Because, like I said, everyone in this place is comfortably wealthy. So this desire will be like the desire to have some shiny toy. In general the desire to be wealthy is rather vulgar when you think about it. And the desire to be wealthy for the sake of being wealthier than other people is particularly vulgar.

Taste.

If you tell someone that you don’t like something they do like. Literature or music or food. Then their reaction is sometimes to be affronted by that. As if you had contradicted them. Or accused them of being mistaken. So then they feel the need to claim that it is you who are somehow mistaken. Even though this is a nonsense. So if I say: “no I don’t like Michael Jackson’s music” they will say: “what do you mean you don’t like Michael Jackson, he was the greatest pop artist of his time!”.

Children.

In some societies women are (were) not given any sort of education. But the men in these societies still expected women to bring up children. So that means those men thought it was fine for their children, in their formative years, to interact only with stupid people. But those children would be better served if brought up by cleverer people. Maybe the men are just underestimating the importance of the childhood years. But it is a common enough saying isn’t it, the one that goes: “give me a boy up to the age of 7 and I will give you the man.”

Prejudice.

I think smoking is cool, and people who smoke look cool. All the gestures involved make people look glamorous. The way they hold their fingers. At the same time I know smoking is stupid and disgusting and harmful. Me thinking it is cool is like some kind of delusion. But where did I get this from? It’s crazy! Must have been from watching all those old movies with Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis smoking. (A related delusion is that a builder who smokes a pipe seems to me more reliable and trustworthy than one who smokes cigarettes. Again I don’t know where this came from.) At least I am aware that I am suffering from this delusion. I wonder how many delusions I am labouring under that I am NOT aware of.

Feelings.

There are very many feelings we experience more than just the ones we have specific words for. Like, say, anger and love. But we are less aware of these feelings for which we have no words. It’s rather like the (alleged) way where some people have more words for snow than we do. And so are more aware of those other sorts of snow than we are who have only three or four words for different sorts of snow. — There are some sensations which don’t have a name but should have because we have them often enough. It’s not easy to give examples precisely because these sensations are nameless. But let me see if I can come up with an example. How about that feeling you have when you do something well. I don’t mean something really amazing like if you save the world from being destroyed by an asteroid. Just something ordinary like when you make a nice cake. I don’t think it would be right to call this feeling ‘pride’. That is too serious. No, it’s something else. — Is it possible that you experience a sensation and not know what it is. Normally you know. If you feel angry you can say “I feel angry” or if you feel dizzy you say “I feel dizzy” and if you feel excited you say “I feel excited”. But what if you had a feeling and you couldn’t work out what it was. You might think to yourself: is this sensation envy or is it disgust? But it couldn’t be something wildly different. You wouldn’t say: is this sensation envy or is it the taste of coffee? — What if it turned out that two different sensations you experienced were actually the same. But you don’t notice this. (In the same way that a word can have two different meanings.) I think anxiety and excitement might be like this. 

The verdict.

A little while ago I was trying to find out whether or not a defendant in a criminal trial has the right to a detailed explanation of how the verdict about their guilt was arrived at. I did an internet search on: “does a defendant in a criminal trial have the right to a detailed explanation of how the verdict was arrived at”. But this didn’t get me anywhere really. - All I know is that at the trial the defendant gets told ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’. But I can imagine that they might want to know the actual process of reasoning by which that conclusion was arrived at. If they were going to appeal against a guilty verdict then faulty reasoning behind the decision would be a grounds for appeal. Or what if there were some fact that might (on the face of it) have been used to establish that the claimant was not guilty. For example some evidence that purported to show the defendant wasn’t at the scene of the crime. But, despite this, they were still found guilty. Then the defendant would need to know why this evidence was discounted.

Touch typing.

I learnt to touch type once. (OK it might not be exact touch typing the way professionals do it but I can type without looking at the keyboard which is what I mean.) It was a great help being able to touch type. My typing speed increased massively. And, until I learnt it, I didn’t know how much of a help it would be. Now I see people typing with two fingers looking down at the keyboard and I find myself recommending touch typing to them as if I was selling it to them. But they just ignore me. This is partly because, as I am sure I have related elsewhere many times, I am a very ignorable person. But mainly it is because people don’t take a very conscientious attitude to their work. Sorry to be so critical but it’s true! They are happy to do their job in whatever sloppy fashion they were told when they started doing it. But in all the jobs I have ever had I was always thinking: how can I do this better? I often wish I had people telling me about ways in which I could do things better. I am always thinking that I am probably missing something obvious.

Supply and demand.

People want to “buy cheap” (the prices of goods and services they are buying) and, at the same time, they want to “sell dear” (their wage). But they don’t realise that their wage is just another price. When they force prices down by buying the cheapest then producers that pay their employees a decent wage will go out of business and so wages will fall. This might well include the wages of these people who started the whole thing by insisting on buying cheap all the time. And then they complain that their wages are so low!

Contempt.

Sometimes I think that artists feel a certain contempt for their audiences. Or at the very least a (justifiable) sense of superiority. Artists think about their audience: “you lot are so pathetic you need me for your amusement!” Some stand-up comedians make this contempt part of their act.

Otherness.

Sometimes when I am talking to someone I think: I wonder what it’s like to be you having this conversation with me. That must be really odd. I try to imagine me sitting there in front of me. Having to put up with my monstrous visage for one thing.

Disease.

What is a disease state? When someone has an illness (like influenza for example) what constitutes that state. And how does the ‘disease causing’ organism, the virus or bacteria, cause that disease? It can’t just be by that organism just being there because the body is full of plenty of bacteria that aren’t causing anything like a disease state. What’s the difference between the ones that cause a disease state and the ones that do not.

Political books.

This is where some politician gives their views on the world. Like Barack Obama’s “Audacity of Hope”. But the only people who read these are the people who agree with the content anyway. Or who are very much inclined to do so. So what’s the purpose of such books? I doubt they persuade anybody!

Instructions.

On a leaflet for some medicine it will say: take pills with food. But it never explains exactly why. Or how much it would matter if you didn’t do that, if you didn’t take them with food. It might not matter that much. Similarly: when you tell someone how to do something you should explain it with context. So they know what they are doing. So if someone has a problem with their computer don’t just say press this and then click on that. Tell them what they are doing when they are pressing this or clicking that. They will remember it better. Because things that make sense stay in the memory longer. Just following a sequence of pressings and clicks doesn’t make sense as much as when you know what the significance of those pressings and clicks is. - Then, if the same problem recurs later they will be able to deal with it themselves.

Salt.

People add salt to food. Does that mean people like the flavour of salt? No, because then eating salt on its own would be a thing. No it’s because salt increases any food’s own flavours. Somehow.

The Ancients.

The obsession that Western European culture has had with the ancient Greeks and Romans is odd. (Especially in places such as Britain and Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries.) Firstly, because Western Europe is a Christian society and the Greeks were thoroughly pagan. Secondly, because, yes OK the ancients produced some good stuff, but, let’s face it, they weren’t that good, not really. A lot (by which I mean every single word) of what Plato and Aristotle wrote is just rubbish. And they didn’t invent the computer, did they?

Detective fiction.

Sherlock Holmes was right about detective fiction when he expressed disapproval of Watson fictionalising his cases. Holmes would have preferred the cases to be just described factually. Here are the facts of the case. And based on these facts here’s the solution of who did it. And here’s how the deduction was made. End of ‘story’.

William James’ bear.

Professor James says that it is not the case that we run away from the scary bear because we feel fear. Rather it’s the other way around: we feel fear because we run away. That makes no sense!

‘Business-like.’

This term doesn’t necessarily mean capitalist. You could be a ‘business-like’ communist who runs a State owned factory in an efficient way.

Sounds.

Sometimes I think: from now on I will communicate with expressive noises only. They are sufficient. I don’t need a whole language. I can say “doh!” for annoyance with myself. Or “meh!” for indifference. And “pfff!” for casual disdain, “euch!” for exasperation and “huh!” for pleasant surprise. Apart from these there’s nothing else worth communicating anyway.

Argument.

Mary: All our conversations turn into arguments.

Jack: No they don’t!

Mary: Yes they do!

Jack: No they don’t!!

Mary: Look, I’m not going to argue with you about it.

Jack: Yes you are!

Mary: No I’m not!

Christians.

If Christians want to get other people to also become Christians then they should just explain how they got to them being Christians in the first place. Just describe the thought processes that got them to be a believer. Then they would be like leading someone who is lost in a dark forest.

Promises.

You can’t promise to keep your promises.

Loveless.

People complain about being trapped in a loveless marriage. In the olden days that was just a normal marriage.

The answers.

People (you know the ones I mean, don’t make me spell it out) say disparagingly about science that it doesn’t have all the answers. As if that’s what scientists say! As if scientists go about the place saying: “Listen to us, we’ve got all the answers about everything! So there!” No they don’t say that. And science doesn’t have all the answers. For example science has got no answer to these questions: “where did I put my keys?” and “what time is the next train to Manchester?”. Of course the people who DO say that they have got all the answers are the religionists. Often they will say that all knowledge is contained in the Bible or the Koran or whatever. But I’ve looked and I can’t find in either of those two books where it says what time the next train to Manchester is. And now I’m going to be late!

Working.

If I am working on something and I want to get it done then sometimes I will persist and so neglect other things I ought to be doing. To stop this happening I could say: I will work on this until 3pm and no longer. The problem then is that I might not work it at with the full effort I could be doing. Because what I’m doing is hard work and I start dawdling knowing that when it gets to 3pm I can stop. Which is stupid I know! If instead I had stuck with saying that I was going to continue until it’s done that’s better. The basic problem here is motivation to effort. I sometimes wonder how long it takes me to do an hour’s work. It’s usually more than an hour!

Basic mental skills.

Education should be about affective skills to do with emotions as well as being about formal skills such as maths and thinking. (Maybe even “instead of” rather than “as well as”.)

The main formal skills then would probably be things like how to do mental arithmetic, how to say what you mean (be articulate), how to remember things.

The main affective skills would probably be things like ‘will-power’. This is something like how to be self-disciplined enough to do things even though you don’t want to do them right now. Note that by this I don’t mean being able to motivate yourself. I think I mean being able to do it despite lacking motivation. And yet at the same time not do it in a grudging kind of way.

Other useful skills:

How to not let small things upset you. And maybe also how to feel empathy with other people. (I mean this latter for its usefulness rather than for moral reasons.)

Being able (I don’t know if this counts as affective or not) to think long term vs short term. This is the opposite of that thing where you fail to do X because it makes your life more difficult in the short term even though in the long term it will make your life a lot easier.

Realising that every bit matters, so don’t even throw a bit of litter thinking “It’s just one bit”. Because all those bits add up.

Morals.

You can’t teach morality. Imagine Jack asks Mary: “where did I put my keys?”. And she gave the answer: “in the cutlery drawer”. Then Jack has learnt something. As shown by him getting the keys from the drawer. But what if Jack had asked Mary: “is abortion morally acceptable?” and she gave the answer: “no, it’s not”. Then Jack hasn’t learnt anything. He wouldn’t say: “now I know”. Maybe my point here is that the latter answer isn’t checkable. But the answer about the keys is checkable by going and looking in the cutlery drawer. Another thing is that people used to say (I don’t know if they still do): “my parents taught me the difference between right and wrong”. And I think: how did they do that? These parents probably claimed to do it via slapping their children round the head when they did the things called ‘wrong’. But I’m not sure that counts as teaching. Even if it does it only means that the children learnt that the difference between right and wrong is that wrong things are the ones you might get slapped for doing.

Memory.

Suppose I am thinking about something. And it is there in my mind. This thing I am thinking of. And then I wonder: what if it never left my mind? In general how do thoughts leave my mind? What if I just stayed thinking about it forever. This is a stupid question because it treats ‘my mind’ as if it was some sort of space or container. In general all attempts to understand the mind by analogies are misleading. For example if we say that the long term memory is like a filing cabinet. Sure, in some respects it is. In others it isn’t. Like when I put a name to a face I don’t trawl through a load of pictures in my mind with names next to each picture. Which is what I would do with a filing cabinet!

Love.

Suppose Jack says: “I love my dog”. That means two things. First, that he gets pleasure and enjoyment from his dog: from patting it on the head and looking at going to fetch sticks that he throws and and listening to its stupid yapping. Second, it means that he gives it love in the sense that he cares for it. He feeds it and keeps it clean and would look after it if it got ill. It seems odd that one word covers two very different things. Both getting and giving.

Reason and emotion.

What would a perfectly rational, emotionless person be like? Is it even possible? We imagine it to be possible and the Mr Spock character from Star Trek is meant to be an example. I don’t think it is possible. You need emotions to motivate yourself to do something. For example scientists (hard headed, rational scientists) are motivated by a desire for knowledge. You can’t just be logical and rational and that’s it. If somebody was perfectly without emotions they wouldn’t desire anything. They would just sit there and waste away. Sometimes we say about someone: “they are behaving irrationally”. But most of the time that doesn’t make any sense. So suppose Mary is eating an apple and I ask: “is she behaving rationally or irrationally?”.

Sentences.

What can you do with sentences? (1) Saying (The door is open.) (2) Asking (Is the door open?). (3) Commanding (Open the door.) Is that it? Anything else? Yes there’s lots! Like if Jack says to me “I will be at the library at 3pm”. That seems like he is “saying” but it’s more than that. He’s making a promise. Because if, instead, Mary had said to me “Jack will be at the library at 3pm” that would be different. That wouldn’t be a promise, it would just be a prediction. - And promising is just one example of things you can do. You can: insult, disagree, complain.

Contribution.

As the world becomes more technological it becomes more dependent on the cleverness of a few people. Like the ones who know what semiconductors are. Then there is an increasing proportion of the population who will feel as if they haven’t made sufficient contribution to the world. (Or who should feel this even if they don’t.) In the past almost everyone could contribute towards growing food, making clothes and building houses. The skills required to do these things were pretty basic. And that’s all people had: food, clothes and a house. But now we have cars and computers and phones. Most people have got nothing to do with the production of these things and wouldn’t understand the first thing about it.

The strong and the weak.

Powerful people are often the most dependent on others. The king of a country (and other such folks who spend their time bossing people about and telling them what to do) is usually incapable of anything by which he might earn a living if he had to. His powerfulness consists only in being able to get other people to do things for him. He can get a baker to bake bread for him. But he wouldn’t be able to bake bread himself. So the baker has the real power: the power to bake bread. So this means that powerful people need ‘weak’ people to exploit. But the weak don’t need powerful people. If there was a massive disaster then the baker would survive and the king would die.

Email.

The convention for email exchanges is for them to be in reverse order. It would have been better if responses had accumulated at the bottom of the page in a more natural way. The software would open the message at the bottom of the page of course. It’s too late to change this now I guess. Although with things like WhatsApp, which is ‘email chat’ the order is the right way round.

The answers.

Somebody might say they can answer all my questions. But then give wrong answers. A wrong answer is still an answer?

Talking.
I want to talk to people with different opinions and understand their point of view. Not because I think they might be right. I have no doubt that they are wrong but in their wrongness there might be some fragments of rightness that I can add to the rightness that I have so far gathered together.

Enough.

Mary: If you wave your hands in the air enough a lion will appear.

Jack: I don’t think so! Look, I’m waving my hands in the air now and no lion.

Mary: Oh, that’s just because you’re not waving enough.

Jack: How do you know that I’m not waving enough?

Mary: Because a lion hasn’t appeared yet.

Jack: Hmmm. So what you’re saying is that if I wave my hands in the air long enough for a lion to appear then a lion will appear. This is like that time you said to me that I’m not a Buddhist only because I haven’t looked into and thought about it enough.

Fair trial.

Judge: I find you not guilty of all charges.

Defendant: What a relief! How did you decide that by the way?

Judge: I tossed a coin.

Defendant: What! That’s not justice. I demand a fair trial.

How to make friends.

People say: if you want to make friends then just chat to neighbours and people at work. I am resistant to this idea and then I think: am I being too dismissive? Am I just being too timid? But then I think: that’s one of those ideas that sounds good in theory but in practice is a bit stupid. For one thing it involves contriving situations in which I talk to those people. Which makes me look needy and desperate straight away. … Also it’s not something that happens really. It might happen in movies but not in real life. A bit like in movies you might get a scene where a single man dithers about whether to go and talk to a woman sitting at a bar. But in real life you never get single females sat at bars by themselves. Why would they be doing that?

Clumsiness.

For example sometimes this will happen. I will pick something up like a cup. To take it from one place to another. While I am picking it up I am looking at it, of course. But as soon as I have picked it up I will immediately look away at where I am going and then proceed to go to the where I am taking the cup to. Kind of like ignoring that I am holding this cup. The fact that there might be other things in the way of the cup I am holding is something I will not deal with. So I might smash the cup against a cupboard edge that’s in the way. This kind of carelessness is actually a symptom of a broader carelessness. Which might be a sort of not caring.

Ice cream.

Suppose it was a hot day and Jack was sat in the sun. He fancies some ice cream but can’t be bothered to get up and buy one from the shop which is about 50 metres away. But Jack is stinking rich so he grabs the attention of Mary, a passerby, and he says to her: “hey, go into that shop and buy me an ice cream and bring it to me and I’ll give you £20 just for doing that”. She might agree. But she might not on the basis that she would feel affronted by this suggestion. It would be like Jack was treating her like his slave.

Rolling.

A very thin disc will stay upright when rolling along a flat surface. But if it is not rolling then it won’t stay upright. What difference does the rolling make?

Ordinary Life.

When I go to somebody else’s house it’s the little details that attract my attention: the decor (wallpaper, flooring), the furniture, the mantelpiece knick-knacks. All these are the most interesting. Sometimes I think I could spend all day listening in to the mundane daydreaming of people going about their daily lives. Like the Angels in Wim Wenders’ movie ‘Wings of Desire’. I like the opening credits of ‘Philadelphia’ which consists of a montage of shots of people in shops and on the streets.

Marxism.

I can imagine someone thinking that maybe Marxism is a capitalist conspiracy. Because, while being the intellectual bulwark in the opposition to capitalism, at the same time it often comes across as a comical parody of an intellectual political position. With its ridiculously incomprehensible abstruse theory and terminology. And the infighting amongst its adherents on tiny details of doctrine. If the opponents of a group benefit from that group looking silly then maybe the capitalists have got something to do with the whole thing.

Writing.

One of the hard things about writing is to give some kind of unity to all the things you want to say. So I write about some subject and I can state the things I want to say separately and individually. But I need to show how they all fit in with each other. How they relate to each other. I often think it would be simpler to just not try to do this. Leave the pieces as they are and let the reader put them together. With due apologies to the reader of course for forcing them into this co-authorship task.

Judgement.

A patriot says they love their country. That’s fair enough I suppose. But they shouldn’t say that they think their country “is the best in the world”. Which is what they have a habit of doing. They can’t really make that assertion until they have lived in all the other countries on the planet. Or at the very least done some serious research about them. Similarly: when a film gets an award for being “best film of the year”. What that really means is that it’s the best film out of all the films that the judges saw. Not the best one out of all the films that got produced that year. - Also: people are always saying that their parents were great. How come no-one ever says their parents were just OK. Or that they were a bit rubbish. I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of parents must be like this.

Music drama.

How is opera possible? It’s music and drama together. But how can you integrate the two when they are so different? Just considering them on their own, you wouldn’t think to put them together would you? They don’t really go together. For a long time in opera the music wasn’t concurrent with the drama. The drama stopped for some music. Namely: an aria. Then the drama resumed. What you really want is the music and the drama to be concurrent. But how would that work? Would we have the actors singing the lines that they would normally have spoken as part of the drama? Would they sing a conversation? But song texts aren’t usually dramatic conversations. Or you could leave them to speak the lines and just have continuous music in the background. The way you have in films.

Motion pictures.

Conversations in movies hold up the action. It’s a movie (a ‘motion’ picture) and so every scene should have something happening in it, something moving on the screen. But when the scene is a conversation the characters are often just standing (or sitting) there talking. The ideal movie would never have a scene which consists of stationary people just talking to each other. This shouldn’t be too difficult. The moving around doesn’t have to be anything special. You could have the characters walking along while they are doing their talking. Or just don’t depict the characters. Have something else on the screen and the conversation would be in the soundtrack only. The other thing is that static conversations are pretty much always shot in the same way. Camera pointing over the shoulder of the person not talking at the person who is talking.

The reader writer relationship.

How much effort is it acceptable for the writer to expect you, the reader, to make in the reading of what they have written? For example if an author writes a novel and describes something in chapter 53 that they first mentioned in chapter 8. For example some character gets their hat knocked off in both chapters. And the fact that it happens twice is somehow significant. Is the author right in expecting you to have remembered what happened in chapter 8 when you get to chapter 53? — Some people talk about a novel they have read (or movie they have seen) and they manage talk about it in great detail. They must have read the novel so many times to be able to talk about it like that. Which is what you should do I suppose. If you have read a novel only once then you may as well not have read it at all! For all that you will be able to recall of it! And as well as reading it a number of times I guess you also need to sit and think about it, about the plot, the characters. Who did what and when. The way you have to if you are reading detective fiction. But really you should read all novels like that.

Pain.

Is an intermittent pain worse than a pain that is there all the time? If it is there all the time you can almost forget about it. But if it comes and goes it becomes more noticeable. Also what is worse: a pain or an itch?

Domestic logistics.

Even something as mundane as this needs to be thought about and have attention paid to it. If you eat cereal that comes in a carton then you have to make a decision about when to buy more. You can’t wait until the carton is finished, that’s too late! Suppose you decide that you will buy a new carton when the first one gets down to being only half full. But then that makes a mess of your storage layout. Because for some of the time you will have two cartons on your shelf: one full and one half full. And then, after you have finished the half full one, you will have just one carton on your shelf. And a gap next to it. But you won’t be able to use that gap for something else. Because soon you will be getting a new carton! So I think the best way is to always have two cartons. And when one finishes then buy another one.

Self-awareness.

Sudden realisation. For example suppose you are somebody who often corrects other people’s grammatical errors. But you don’t know you’re doing it. You’re not aware that that’s something you do. Then you finally realise. Maybe somebody politely draws attention to this habit of yours. And you think: yes I do do that! Then you have to ask: but why do I do it? Especially in cases where the grammar doesn’t matter? You delve down into yourself a little. And you realise that there’s this some bit of nastiness in you.

Similarly: people who are oafish louts. When they see an oafish lout of a character mocked on TV (like Homer Simpson) do they recognise themselves and think: “hey, they’re mocking me!”. Or are they too oafish to make this leap of identification?

More generally: Do nasty people know that they are? (And they just don’t care.) Or do they think they’re nice?

I find it difficult to relate to people with no self-awareness. I like people to be self-reflective. Not in the mopey self-obsessive teenage sense. And certainly not in the sense of ‘self-conscious’, which is something that maybe too much self-awareness can lead to.

Complicated.

Computers are really complicated. Both hardware and software. Often there will be a tiny thing not working. Or something that you don’t understand. And you have to trawl through endless internet opinions to find out what’s going on. And sometimes the problem will just resolve itself.

The spirit and the letter of the law.

Muslim religionists have a rule that females should dress modestly. I assume this is to prevent attracting attention to themselves in a rather vulgar and casual way. You might not agree with this but you can see the logic of such a rule. But then I sometimes see Islamic females covered up according to this rule. And at the same time they will be caked in garish face make-up and will be wearing clothing which (while correctly covering them up) will be very tight and figure revealing. And I think: they have kind of missed the point!

The edge.

Sometimes I feel like I am trying to write down things that are just outside the edge of my comprehension. Where the reason why they are outside the edge is not because they are difficult to understand but because they are subtle and nebulous things. (Neither is it the case that these things are of any great importance. No. They are mostly things that I write on this blog.) The phenomena is rather like the ‘tip of the tongue’ feeling when you almost know the word you want but you can’t quite get to it.

Protest.

Sometimes people protest too much and I think they are being disingenuous. I mean when they say: “I don’t judge people by their race at all. I see everyone the same” or “I like women for their personalities”. I think: come off it mate, you don’t really mean that.

Useful.

Mary arrived in a new town and she wanted to make herself useful. “Tell me what to do!” she said but the town government said: we can’t tell you what to do because that would be an infringement of your liberty. They didn’t help Mary to be useful. “Helping people is bad, it makes them reliant on others. We want you to be self-reliant not dependant on others, look after yourself”. So she found something to do but there were other people already doing that. She ended up in a fight with them insisting that she was better at doing the job than them. She soon learnt that fighting about this kind of thing was the way things got done in this town. She thought to herself: “If I hired someone to look after my house. For example. Then I would tell them what to do.”

Train.

On a train the ticket checks are not very rigorous. Suppose one day Jack is working as the ticket checking person. He starts at one end and works his way to the other end. And it happens that he has got halfway down the train doing this when the train stops and Mary gets on way back in some part of the train that Jack has already checked. How is he going to check her ticket? Let’s suppose that once he gets to the end of the train in the direction he was heading, that then he comes back to do another pass. But then he can’t just check everyone’s ticket again just so that he can include new people. That would be annoying for the people who have already had their tickets checked. The only way it would work is if he had memorised the faces of all the people whose tickets he has already checked. This will make people with unusual faces very self-conscious.

Movie.

Do you ever think, just as you go about your everyday life: “if this was a movie what would happen next?”. So if you are having a meal in a restaurant. You think that maybe the couple at a nearby table will have an argument and one of them will storm out. — By the way that’s one of those ‘things that only happens in movies’. In particular it happens after they have ordered but before the food has arrived. And whenever I see it I think: that’s not fair on the restaurant because they will be halfway through getting the meal ready!

Once I was walking past a phone booth and it was ringing and I answered it. That’s the kind of thing that happens in movies. Another time I was sat alone in a cafe and a young woman on a neighbouring table was having difficulty opening a bottle and I went over and opened it for her. Neither of these two things had the outcomes they would have done in a movie.

Reason and language.

When I talk I like to be quite clear and logical about what I am saying. Sometimes when I am talking people get annoyed that I’m being so very logical. They complain saying that I am being too picky. And they may be right about that. But on the other hand language is essentially rational. Given that it has a grammar and such like. And the main purpose of language is to say something.

Listening.

Some people don’t like listening to others telling about their problems. I like listening as long as the person telling me about their problem is doing it properly and thoroughly. They need to explain it in detail and let me ask lots of (possibly impertinent) questions.

Pleasure.

Pursuing your own pleasure. As an activity. This is somewhat frowned upon. Which is an odd attitude to have really.

Success.

All materially successful people have got there by treating some other people badly.

Male and female.

I know that men choose their partners based on looks. But do they also choose their (male) friends on the same basis?

[Compiled 16 December 2018]