Daybook 9.

Society.

When people say “man is a social animal” I think: yes, we love having people around us to do our fetching and carrying. And when I hear “humans are naturally cooperative” I think: yes, our servants are very cooperative. Certainly human beings have done so very well because they have worked cooperatively. The efficiencies you get from a division of labour are massive. But the most efficient form of cooperative organisation is tyranny and slavery. (Masters often say about their rebellious slaves: “oh they’re being very uncooperative today!”.) Because the tyrants demand complete obedience which eliminates the inefficiencies caused by the unreliability of individuals and by their tendency to bicker with each other rather than getting on with what they are doing.

Relationships.

People who want friends often seek out others who have similar interests. But I think that a successful human relationship is made by a shared interest in each other rather than a shared interest in other things. And that shared interest in each other should be a disinterested (which doesn’t mean uninterested) and dispassionate (which doesn’t mean passionless!) one: it doesn’t require you to have a liking for each other. (As long as you don’t detest each other, that’s sufficient.) Certainly I’d rather be understood than liked.

Learning.

The more you know the harder it is to learn new things. Because every time you learn something new you have to check it against all the things you already know to make sure the new thing is consistent with all the already known things. So the more you already know the more things there are that you have to check the new thing against.

The power of writing.

I remember when, at school aged about 11, I suddenly realised how amazing writing was. As part of a lesson I wrote down some instructions about how to make a paper aeroplane. I wrote them as clearly as I could. And then I thought: someone might pick this up 200 years from now (long after the art of paper aeroplane making had been forgotten) and, in effect, I will have told them something. - In the following years there were two other related things that struck me. First, how carefully thinking about something (where the careful thinking includes writing it down) can get you closer to the truth than just making your mind up quickly. Second, how you should avoid half understanding something. You should try to understand things properly or not at all.

Not helping.

Writing things down both does and does not help my memory. If I write things down to remember them that means I will remember more things but it makes my memory worse. Because I’m using it less. (I am assuming here that having something in writing can reasonably be called having “remembered” it.) Similarly using a calculator makes me better at getting answers to arithmetical questions. But it makes me worse at doing arithmetic. We could generalise these examples: in general helping someone to do something will make them worse (or, at the very least, will not make them any better) at doing the thing that you’re helping them with. If someone says: “I will help you carry this” and they carry it for me then I think: “if you keep doing that you won’t be helping me to carry things because I will, over time, become less able to carry things”.

Signs.

To save energy I used to close the valve of the central heating radiator in my room when I left to go out. So that when the central heating came on in my absence it wouldn’t unnecessarily heat up my room. But the problem with this was that you can’t see just by looking at the valve whether or not it is shut. It didn’t look any different if it was open or closed. So I made a little sign using a piece of card on a bit of string and hung it on the wall above the radiator. On one side of the card it said ‘on’ and on the other side ‘off’. I would set this to show the valve state each time I adjusted it. Does this make sense?

Sex.

Culturally it has often been (and maybe still is) the case that it is acceptable (if not encouraged) for men to engage in pre-marital sex. But, at the same time, it is not acceptable for women to do likewise. This, obviously, creates enormous problems! Who are the men going to do all this pre-marital sex with?

Mark.

People want to be someone. Someone of some importance. (But they rarely manage this. “I could have been a contender” they say to themselves “instead of a bum which is what I am”.) They want to make a mark in the world. But why? The mark you make in the world isn’t any more (or it’s only marginally more) permanent than you are.

King Lear.

The story of King Lear makes no sense. What’s the backstory? Have Goneril and Regan been as nice as pie up to now? If not then why would he split the kingdom between them? And if they have then why have they suddenly turned nasty?

The Truth.

When I hear someone say “I’m entitled to my own opinion” I think: “No! you’re entitled to the truth.”

Sample suicide notes.

1. “Life is for the living.”

2. “Follow me.”

3. “Done because we are too menny.”

Self-reliance.

What’s so good about doing everything for yourself? Imagine I did that, up to and including building my own car even. So what? It seems a rather unfriendly to do. Like it’s saying to everyone else all the time: “I don’t need you!”.

Essential.

Food is more essential than healthcare. (You might survive a long time without healthcare but you won’t survive long without food.) But the food business is private whereas (often and certainly here in the UK) healthcare is a nationalised government run activity. Nationalised for the sake of ensuring it’s accessibility to everyone.

Equality.

If everyone you knew was working and you were offered the same salary for not working would you accept?

Doing good.

I could spend £100 on myself or I could give it to someone in the world who is starving and for them it would be the difference between life and death. This is a powerful thought but what is its significance exactly? Does it somehow demonstrate that I should give that £100 of mine to the starving person? And continue giving money to other starving people using whatever money I have until either I have no money left or until there are no starving people left.

Education.

Hamilton College NY State used to have on their website: “A national leader in teaching students to write effectively, learn from each other and think for themselves.” That’s rhetoric (writing and communicating effectively), grammar (essential for writing and learning from (understanding) others) and logic (thinking). Which is the medieval trivium. OK I admit that comparison is a little bit tenuous. But in more detail it would be as follows.

Grammar: understanding the code (language) which is used to express thoughts into words, needed for reading and writing.

Rhetoric: how to communicate what you think to other people, how to say what you mean (which isn’t as easy as it sounds), how to be articulate and communicate effectively.

Logic: how to think about things clearly, and not be confused by them.

Adult.

I was born middle-aged. For example I don’t remember ever being, as a child, in the least bit interested in children’s games.

Traffic casualties.

The road and traffic system is very useful but an almost inevitable byproduct is the fatalities due to accidents. Even in a very safe country like the UK about 30 people on average per week were killed (year 2015). This is 1,732 in the whole year. But if there was one single incident that year that killed 1,732 people at one time that would be headline news. Or: what if there was some food product that killed 30 people per week. Would it be banned? Note that the point here is that the deaths aren’t deliberate. They are just a side effect of the good thing. If you’ve got fast moving vehicles it’s bound to happen that they will hit each other now and then. - The question here is why are road traffic fatalities accepted? (Where this is not a rhetorical question.)

Real people.

At school I was taught about English Literature and it seemed like I was learning about the psychology of fictional characters. It was like we were talking about fictional people as if they were real. Which struck me as being a very strange thing to do. We would ask: “well, why did Mr Darcy do that?”. As if he was a real person. But he’s not! - Once I was at a supermarket checkout and the two till operators were chatting about what some character from a TV soap had been doing. “They’re not real you know!” I exclaimed. They looked at me. If they had been wearing glasses it would have been over the top of them.

Creation.

In the beginning God created the world. But this isn’t really saying much though, is it? The exact process is not described. Was the creation an instance of the operation of the laws of nature? But then that’s not God doing any creating, it’s just the operation of the laws of nature. And if creation is not an operation of the laws of nature then what is it? Something miraculous outside the laws of nature. Which is just God saying “let there be X” and X appears. But what is that? What process is there between saying and creation? ... The other thing is that people say: “God created everything in the world”. But that’s not true. That tree outside my house grew by natural processes, it wasn’t created. It was the outcome of a natural process not any act of creation. The response to this is: “but God created the process”. Even if that’s true it’s still false to say he created the tree.

Bird brains.

I’ve seen those videos of crows displaying intelligent behaviour. But that’s not surprising. After all, birds build nests which is very sophisticated behaviour. I couldn’t build a nest of the sort that birds make.

Words.

Does it matter that word pronunciation rules are inconsistent? For example in the word ‘sign’ we don’t pronounce the letter ‘g’ but in ‘signal’ we do. I don’t think this matters because we don’t read words via the letters. We read words as a whole. We could even have each word as a unique symbol having no consistency with any other word and that would be fine. So the word for cat would look nothing like the word for cats.

Scientists.

What is the motivation of professional scientists? It can’t be curiosity because they, as individuals, could satisfy that by just reading about all the stuff we, collectively, already know so far. They wouldn’t need to find out anything new themselves. Which is what they want to do. What is the motivation for that?

The technology of money.

Who owns all the money in circulation? I don’t mean the value of it. I mean the materials. It’s owned by the government. They run the paper money system. But the credit and debit card system, which is an alternative to paper money, is a private business. Whoever owns that charges people to use it. End consumers don’t notice these charges because they are paid by sellers (retailers, “merchants”). But the paper money system is free of charge. Maybe the card system should be nationalised.

Originality.

Artists own their works but do they also own the style in which they create their works? Where this latter is as much unique to them as any particular work. What if someone composed a symphony in the style of Beethoven? Which, if it had been by Beethoven, would have been the best of his symphonies? Does it matter that someone else composed it? It would probably be ignored. Because for a work to be recognised as good it has to be original as well as good. This doesn’t matter to the listener but it matters to the admiration we give to the composer. - Also it’s as if that style belongs to Beethoven. Composing a symphony using that style would be stealing that style from him and so would be as bad as if you stole a passage from one of his symphonies and made out like that you composed it! - What if it had all been different and styles were shared. So that you had good composers but they all composed in any style they liked. They didn’t own their style. Wagner could have written a symphony like the ones that Brahms wrote. And then Brahms could have written a Wagnerian opera. - Suppose some writer wrote a novel but used the same plot and basic ideas of a novel already written by someone else. The word plagiarism would totally apply to this. But it would be open, the writer would say that that’s what they have done. But then what if their version was better. It’s possible that Hollywood remakes a foreign film and that the remake is better. Also: this is what what pop song ‘cover versions’ are. They often improve on the original, so much that the original is forgotten. For example “All Along The Watchtower”. You could say that Jimi Hendrix is just completing the work started by Bob Dylan. If it was classical music it might be Bob Dylan composed the piece and then hired Jimi Hendrix to orchestrate it.

Representative democracy.

Who are our representatives representing us TO? The government? But our representatives elected the government! - Also: why do we need the opportunity (via an election) to change our representatives every five years. Surely the only thing we might want to change is the government. And we can do that through our existing representatives.

You.

What if you had been born elsewhere and raised by different parents? But this question makes no sense. It wouldn’t have been you.

Shops.

These seem inefficient to me. Big buildings with people (staff) waiting for shoppers to come and buy stuff. But shoppers might not come. Then the waiting people are just wasting time sitting around waiting when you could be doing something more productive. And when people do come to get something. Why didn’t we just send it to them. Why did it need to sit and wait here in the shop first? In general there must be some better method of distributing goods. The general point here is that we need a process to get stuff to people. Why does that process need to involve the stage of that stuff sitting in a shop for a while?

The devil.

Is he a good person? Because he punishes bad people.

Brush.

Imagine you drop some tiny things onto a flat surface. Some sesame seeds or something even smaller. And the surface is not smooth but slightly rough and pitted so that some of the seeds are lodged. How are you going to get the seeds back? If it had been a perfectly smooth surface you could have used your hand to scoop the seeds into a particular area. The ideal tool is a brush. Like a paintbrush would be fine. What is it about a brush that makes it a good instrument to use. Maybe it’s the flexibility of the bristles. In general it’s a much overlooked invention.

Animals.

Do animals get angry and experience any of the sorts of emotions that humans do? I mean quite sophisticated emotions such as envy and boredom.

The level of discourse.

People will talk about politics and they will say things like: “Margaret Thatcher destroyed British manufacturing” or “Membership of the EU is bad for Britain”. But statements like this need to be described in more detail. How and why did MT destroy manufacturing? And how exactly is the EU bad? These remarks need to be backed up with details but most people seem to be satisfied with just repeating the basic statements.

Not entirely obvious.

It doesn’t take twice as long to make a meal for two people as it does to make it for one. This is the concept of “economy of scale”. It’s obvious but also slightly non-obvious. Those are the most interesting sorts of truths. I wish I knew all of them!

Seeing.

Say I show you film of man walking down a road. And then I ask: “what do you see?”. You will say that you see a man walking down a road. You won’t say you see images projected onto a screen. But that is what you are seeing. I mean really.

Hard work.

The result of hard work is not a reward for that hard work. Just its consequence. Like crops from the field. Or some manufactured product.

Eternal rest.

Jack: “So do you like your new house? Are are you settled in yet?”

Mary: “I’ll be settled when I’m dead.”

Confused.

If somebody says ‘lighter’ when they mean ‘less dense’. I think: are they just careless with words or have they not understood the difference between weight and density? Maybe being careless with words is causing them to not understand.

Remember.

The word ‘remember’ is used to mean both the act of retaining something in the memory and the act of recalling it from there. Even though these two things are opposites.

Driven.

Some people describe themselves as ‘driven’. As in: highly motivated. Is that good? Isn’t it better to be driving than to be driven?

Easy.

I don’t think I’d like an easy life. The ideal life would be one that has many difficulties all of which I eventually resolve. The worst life scenarios are not having any difficulties at all or having difficulties which I am unable to resolve.

Missing.

Often people say “there’s something missing from my life but I don’t know what it is”. And I imagine this is like if they came home to find that one of the knick-knacks from off their mantelpiece is missing. They know something is missing but, because they can’t remember exactly what was on there then they don’t know what is missing.

Belonging.

People don’t want to be just “a small cog in a big machine”. But, at the same time, they want to be part of something, to have a “sense of belonging”. These attitudes are contradictory. But there’s nothing wrong with being a cog in a machine as long as the machine works well and treats you well. - The simplest way of having a sense of belonging is to just literally belong to somebody, to be their slave. Is that OK if you are treated well? - Another way of getting to a sense of belonging is to have some people outside your group who don’t belong and to then adopt some sort of a negative attitude to them. This will increase your sense of belonging to the group you are in simply by a process of contrast.

Buyer and seller.

The two basic relations in economics are employer-employee and buyer-seller. The first is what everyone talks about but surely the latter is more important. It takes priority because it includes the former: an employer is buying something off an employee, namely their time and effort.

Fuel consumption.

On adverts for cars fuel consumption gets stated as miles per gallon. And then the metric version is stated as litres per 100km. But, to be consistent, this should be km per litre!

The best.

Wanting to be the best seems a rather vain thing to want to be. Also rather arbitrary. (If everybody was average at something then it wouldn’t be very difficult to be the best.)

You often hear a parent say: “I want the best for my children”. But (especially these days) there’s plenty that falls short of the best which is great and more than enough.

[12 August 2017]