I've previously touched on the matter of there being markèdly differing notions all associated with the word probability. Various attempts have been made by various writers to catalogue and to coördinate these notions; this will be one of my own attempts.

[an attempt to discuss conceptions of probability]

I don't know that 'Net-neutrality were, in fact, a good thing; but, even on the assumption that it were, state action is not the proper way to promote it.

'Net-neutrality can be promoted by how people do business with ISPs. At one end, subscribers can consistently migrate towards those ISPs who deviate least from neutrality. At the other end, website owners can impede access by ISPs that do not practice an acceptable degree of neutrality.

In fact, Google and Facebook could effectively impose neutrality by announcing that, in one year, they would begin blocking access by providers who did not make pledges, renewed annually but each extending for ten years, to practice 'Net-neutrality. It might, however, require state inaction for these heavy-hitters to make such a demand. Specifically, Congress might need to clear a path in anti-trust law to allow such a policy.

I idly wondered what had happened to Dennis4President.com, the domain that had been used by the 2008 Presidential campaign of Dennis Kucinich.

Well, Dennis4President.com now seems to be a Japanese site for men seeking to engage in 援助交際 and for women seeking to engage in 逆援助交際, which amount to the hiring of escorts, though the payment may be in the form of goods or of services, rather than cash.

(The Kucinich campaign shut-down their site some time on or after 23 April 2008; and allowed their registration to lapse on 18 July 2008. The 援助交際 site was up by 11 September 2008.)

I'm not sure why someone should think Dennis4President.com to be a particularly good domain name for this enterprise. But, hey, sometimes all that we Westerners can do is shrug and say Japan.

I started reading Rethinking the Western Understanding of the Self by Ulrich Steinvorth, and in its first chapter came upon this passage

As subjects we desire satisfaction of our desires; as selves we strive for the enactment of reason and free will.

(Underscore mine.) It is not auspicious to find a claim of this sort early in the work.

To say that something desires the satisfaction of its individual desires is no more than to say that it desires what it desires; nothing fails to do this, as things without desire present us with the trivial case of a null set.

The pursuit of satisfaction of each individual desire does not logically entail global satiation of desires (bliss) unless those desires are themselves somehow bounded. It's not clear what Steinvorth means by desire (a point that I will labor), but let's assume that he means something along the lines of uncontemplated cravings and the things that are craved, as for sensual pleasures or for hoards of material goods. I don't see that they're naturally bounded. I don't see that most people make a presumption, one way or another, about whether such cravings are bounded. The impulse to bound them by attaining ἀπάθεια or nirvana seems far from universal to me (and anyway is probably not an expression of what Steinvorth calls subject, but of what he calls self).

It's evident that he wants to distinguish desire as a verb from one more generally meaning to have a directed psychological impulse, and as a noun from one more generally meaning objective; but nowhere prior has Steinvorth given a definition of desire, as noun or as verb; the remainder of the chapter and use of the index indicate that he's not going to do it at all. I see declarations such as X desires the satisfaction of X's desires as the unconscious attempt to fill the need for a definition with a logically unassailable tautology. (Simply say X desires and the need for definition is more apparent.) The problem is that the latter cannot do the work of the former, and the tautology is vacuous.

It's further evident from the first chapter that Steinvorth wants to distinguish happiness from a noun simply meaning an emotional sense of attaining or of having attained one's objectives; and to distinguish utility from a noun simply meaning usefulness. One can tell that he means to equate or approximate what he means by happiness with what he means by utility. But nowhere in the first chapter does he actually provide more positive definitions. He does insist that if we consider such things as the glory of suffering to be a form of happiness then the idea of happiness becomes inflated and loses its meaning, but I want to know what meaning it would lose. Again using the index, it doesn't seem that he bothered with providing any of these definitions anywhere else in the book.

Time is measured by sequences of changes. Classic examples of sequences that have been used are beats of the heart, apparent positions of the sun and of the moon, and the solstices. In theory, any sequence might be used.

When one measure of time is gauged against another, it is ultimately a matter of counting how many changes of each sort occur. When the rate of some different changes seems to be constant relative to those by which time has been measured, if these different changes occur in greater number then it may be decided to substitute these changes as the primary measure of time, and thus have a finer-grained measure.

Speeds and frequencies are not normally recognized as conversion factors for measures of time against each other, but that is exactly what they are. In the case of speeds generally, the changes are quantifications (of physical position, perhaps). In the more specific case of frequencies, one has a sequence of changes that are attainment of — or departure from — what is regarded as a recurring state; a count of these attainments or departures might be quantified as a pure number.

To say that some changes take place at a constant rate over time is simply to say that there is an invariant correspondence between the number of the changes by which we measure time and the number of the changes whose rate is being measured.

Such constancy occurs trivially when the changes that are used to measure time are measured against time — they're just being measured against themselves. If time is measured by appearances of the sun above the horizon, then the conversion factor for the frequency with which the sun appears above the horizon is necessarily 1. If we use these appearances to meaure the frequency with which the heart beats, that frequency will almost certainly be inconstant; but if we use heart-beats as our measure of time, then their frequency will necessarily be 1 (and the frequency with which the sun appears will almost certainly be inconstant).

If someone should ask about using the average rate at which the heart beats as the measure of time, then he or she is implicitly presuming something other than heart-beats in measuring them, or their average frequency will necessarily be 1. Any comfort in imagining that the reference changes are being averaged is a comfort in confusion.

Someone else will insist that it is obvious that the rate at which any reference-heart beats is objectively inconstant, but it is no such thing. Rather, the convenience for the formulation of descriptions of the world around us of some measures is so limited, and that of others so pronounced as to make it seem that some are closer to objective constancy than are others.

If the measure of time were in terms of Scott's heart-beats, then his mood would figure into descriptions of the universe (the rest of the world would be slower when Scott were excited), and we'd need his pulse whenever we timed things (in particular, all other changes would happen infinitely fast after Scott died). These characteristics make Scott's heart-beats grossly inconvenient for everyone excepting, perhaps, Scott.

What one wants of measures of time are accessibility, for them to result in manageable descriptions of rest of the world, and for them to not to deviate intolerably from our subjective experiences of time. There is a certain amount of rivalry at least between the first two desiderata. Those measurements that are most easily made don't correspond to the simplest descriptions of the rest of the world. But some measurements of time result in many fairly simple descriptions (some of those descriptions are even of other rates as constants) that appear perfectly accurate. It is the latter sort of measurement that is mostly likely to be taken as objective, but if the measurements that supported the simplest statements of physical laws made a very poor fit for subjective experiences of time, then these measurements would not widely be accepted (even by scientists) as measurements of time at all, objective or otherwise!

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We're often told that the speed of light (in vacuo) is constant. Many people wonder why this constancy is so; others whether it is so. But what is actually meant by the assertion itself that the speed of light be constant is that the changes in the position of light maintain a fixed ratio with the changes by which we have chosen to measure time. In effect, those (such as Einstein) who said that this speed were constant were declaring that we ought to measure time in a manner that made the speed of light constant. And the reason that we ought to measure it thus was because accurate descriptions of the behavior of things of interest would be as simple as possible (or, at the least, as simple as possible without resulting in a measure unrecognizable as time).

The real question is not of why or whether the speed of light is constant; the real question is of why treating it thus simplifies accurate descriptions. And the basic answer is because light and stuff very much like it do a lot. One whoozit affects another by way of that stuff.

Of course, that basic answer shouldn't satisfy anyone with more than passing curiosity. My point is just that the idea that the speed of light is constant doesn't represent a mystery of the sort that many people take it to be.

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This entry was primarily motivated by my desire to get the point about the constancy of the speed of light off my chest, but the more general part of it actually has application to questions of method in economics.

When I was in the graduate programme at UCSD, there was a student who wanted to do some sort of econometric work where the changes by which time were measured would be transactions, rather than ticks of an ordinary clock — he called this alternate measure market time. (I don't know whether he arrived at the concept or at this term on his own, but he didn't cite a prior source.) Sadly, his initial presentation was a disaster; when he attempted to explain this idea to the professors who were to judge his work, he came across to them and to most of the rest of the audience as incoherent. I might well have been the only other person in the room who really understood what he was trying to say. (I had for some while been thinking skeptically about the propensity of economists to use the physicists' t.)

Afterwards, I sat down with him and tried to explain to him what he had to communicate; but he seemed not to listen to me as he insisted that the response of the professors were unfair. And, the next time that he gave a presentation on the idea, he essentially repeated his previous performance.

It is at least plausible to me that a major part of the reason that he could not communicate what he was proposing to do was that he had only a vague intuïtion about the nature of measures of time and about distinctions amongst them.

I would note that the particular measure of time that he suggested is certainly not the one for economists to use in all or even most cases, and that it has never been one that had distinctively useful application to a problem that I've investigated.

Occasionally, I am confronted with the question of the nature of economics.

A great many people believe that they know what economics is. Many of these people have inferred a definition for economics from references in the popular media and from politicians to the economy, and from popular media presentations of or about various people labelled economist. Some people have taken one or two courses in high school or in college about something called economics, and have presumed that whatever definitions were given in their textbooks were uncontroversial.

Well, the fact is that the popular media do no better job in representing economics than they do in representing those subjects with which you (my reader) have a real familiarity. High school economics textbooks are often disasters written by people who aren't economists. First-year college textbooks often over-simplify things. And when a respected economist attempts to define economics, while his definition may be embraced by a great many other respected economists, it will be challenged by still other respected economists! (I'll define what I here mean by economist below. If you must have a definition right now, then take it to mean one who has received a degree or appointment by which he or she has been so labelled!)

Tromping where angels fear to tread, I am going to tell you how I define economics.

Economics is a cluster of studies. The studies that I have in mind concern these questions:

They are clustered because significant theories (propositional structures) hold that these studies have important inter-relationships.

(And now I'll define economist to mean someone who engages in more than casual study of any one or more of these areas.)

Someone may come along and show some serious flaw in my definition. But, on the expectation that it works, I'm going to discuss it.

There's a whole bunch of things not explicitly mentioned in my definition that lay-people associate with economics. That's because those things are particular cases of more general concepts. For example, households, firms, industries, bourses, and nations are each sorts of communities. There are economists whose studies concern social orders in which all of these communities exist, but the presumption of such a social order is not intrinsic to economics. Business administrators may find economics useful, but they also may find mathematics useful. Neither is simply a hand-maiden of business studies.

Not everyone who has attempted or attempts scientific or scholarly consideration of these questions accepts the existence of the inter-relationships described by the aforementioned theories. In some cases, they may subscribe to theories which accept significant inter-relationship, but on some very different theoretical basis. In some cases, researchers may claim that, where other theories see a bilateral causality, there is just a one-way causality. For example, these economists may insist that, while prices inform individual decisions, those prices are formed without regard to individual decisions.

Further, even economists who accept that these studies are all importantly inter-related don't necessarily spend much-if-any effort studying in all areas. Indeed, some may confine themselves to just one area. For example, every one of the living economists who is widely known to lay-people is a macroeconomist, which is to say that he or she is concerned with the behavior of aggregates such as prices levels, employment rates, and GDP. But, as a share of economists more generally, macroeconomists are a tiny minority. Most economists don't like macroeconomics. It is signally ignorant to ask a typical economist what the stock-market is going to do most days, because that's outside of his or her area of concern.

You surely noticed that the first row of question were non-normative, while the second row were corresponding normative questions. Some economists would insist that there is very little to be said normatively. On the other hand, often of normative theory of a sort is used to approximate non-normative theory, as when it is assumed that individuals have complete, transitive, and acyclical preferences.

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For what it's worth, the words economy and economics comes to us from the Greek stems ὀικ-, referring to the household, and νομ-, referring to the law or to custom (with the -ic- from the adjectival suffix -ικ-). Greek ὀικονομ[ικ]- referred to management of the household and of its resources.

Transliterated into Latin, ὀικονομ[ικ]- became oeconom[ic]- and entered English thus. Somewhere along the line, the initial o fell silent.

In English, œconomy referred to resource management, typically at the the level of the household, that was wise, frugal, or perhaps tight-fisted, or to a savings realized by such management (a definition that still has some currency to-day); and œconomist to a manager who was wise, frugal, or tight-fisted. Conceptualizing a political community as household, the term political œconomy began to be used in reference to the sorts of management in which political authorities might engage. (German has a very similar term, Nationalökonomie.)

The initial o began to fall away from œconom-; and, in part because of the currency of political [o]economy, [o]economist became increasingly dissociated from thoughts of households or of other work-a-day management, and more concerned with a sort of philosophical or scientific study (though not, as it happens, before The Economist got its name).

Eventually, peculiar association of economics with the literal household was so forgotten that, when a term was wanted with the original sense, the philologically redundant home economics was adopted, with only quiet laughter off in the distance.

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A few people now-a-days call themselves oeconomist, spelled in that archaic manner, as a way of asserting that they are or seek to be wise practical managers of resources. That's not, however, why I label myself thus.

Although my published work doesn't look simply modernistic but in fact hyper-modernistic, I'm sympathetic to much of the criticism of modernism in economics; I think that we need to reconsider some of the work done before the era of modernism. My œ is a way of saying that there's something deliberately old-fashioned to my thinking.

Yester-day evening, I was using a publicly accessible WLAN to connect with the Internet. I found my access to this 'blog blocked by a Norton-branded product, which declared the 'blog to be pornographic.

Erotica really hasn't figured large in this 'blog. You can find the relevant entries with the tag erotica. I think that the two or three entries that caused Norton to damn this thing are specifically my entry of 2 July 2009, my entry of 26 March 2010, and perhaps my entry of 30 June 2010; the entry of 30 January 2011 may have weighed against me as well.

Of these, the entry of 2 July 2009 is the one that most likely set-off alarms. It contains an overtly erotic image (by Carolyn Weltman), and has a key-word of cunnilinctus.[1] Do a Google image-search using that key-word, and a link to that entry is currently the second returned. And, because of a couple of the other key-words in that entry, other images are also found, including one by Karel Šimůnek than many would regard as pornographic.

In the '50s, the drawings by Joe Shuster in the entry of 30 June 2011 would have been regarded as pornographic, though now the word pornography would typically be regarded as too strong. (Actually, a hundred years ago, many would have insisted that the picture in my entry of 2 February 2011 were pornographic, while now-a-days it could appear in a children's book without fuss.) Still, the text in that entry contains the term sado-masochistic and there are pictures, and Norton's classification was probably mediated with weak AI; indeed, once other flags were thrown, the appearance of the word dominatrix in a follow-up entry may have been seen as further PoP.

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Most WLANs that filter do so by way of a DNS table. When a browser seeks content located in terms of a URI or of a URL, and that specification includes a domain name, the domain name is converted to an IP number by way of a DNS table. By censoring the table that is used, the WLAN can block domains.

Some people subvert this censorship by way of a proxy server, which is no more than some site that will act as an intermediary; fetching content from the blocked domain. The obvious problem here is that the proxy may be identified and blocked as well.

A better subversion is to use a different table than whatever is being supplied by the WLAN. In particular, one may configure one's system to use DNS tables provided by Google, or perhaps by some other third party. But be alert that using an alternative DNS table may not be a good idea in other contexts. (For example, when using a subscription ISP that places quotas on content for most sites, but with exceptions.)

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[1]The words cunnilinctus and cunnilingus are synonymous in English and in some other languages; but in Latin cunnilinctus referred to the act, while cunnilingus referred to a performer of that act. The latter word acquired its more recent meaning as a result of incompetent posturing (something that has figured more than once in attempts to borrow foreign terms and phrases). Efforts to clean-up this particular mess have repeatedly failed, but I avoid participating in it, by using the word that is both proper English and proper Latin. Hence my use of the less common term.

The term ambiguity is often applied to matters that are in fact not at all ambiguous. Sometimes the mis-application is simple carelessness, but in one application it is hard not to see a more active perversion.

Characters (fictional or actual) who are called morally ambiguous almost never are. Instead, the label is most often applied to characters of two sorts.

One sort is morally compromised. Those characters are not all bad; they may even be mostly good; but they are discernibly not all good. The person labelling them as morally ambiguous typically very much seems to be trying for special pleading if a sort on behalf of the character or of the moral short-comings exhibited by the character.

The other sort exhibits a combination of characteristics, some of which the audience will find attractive but some of which the person applying the label finds disagreeable, without his or her being able to make a sound case (or seemingly sound case) against those traits. By labelling the character as morally ambiguous, the labeller is insinuating doubt without reasoned foundation. Challenged, he or she will likely deny having issued a condemnation of the characteristics against which he is directing that doubt.

In application to situations, the term moral ambiguity is more likely to be legitimately applied than in application to characters. But calling a situation morally ambiguous is also often an attempt to introduce by back door a special plea for bad behavior.

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(One of the papers on which I am presently working, and the paper of that lot that is likely to end-up the least mathematical, compares and contrasts some decision-theoretic states that are often mistaken one for another. One sort of these states entails ambiguity. So I have been thinking about real and specious ambiguity more generally.)

In 1980, I had two or three brief encounters with David Koch.

Yes, that David Koch — David Hamilton Koch, younger of the much maligned Koch brothers.

Koch was on the Libertarian Party ticket as the Vice-Presidential candidate. He was there because his candidacy precluded any statutory limit on how much he might donate to the campaign.[1]

One of these encounters was at a meet-and-greet sort of event for Candidate Koch, in Columbus, Ohio. The last was on the main campus of the Ohio State University, where he delivered a speech and then took questions from the audience. There might have been one other encounter that I've forgot. In any case, at the last encounter, he and his entourage got rather angry with me.

In 1980, the brothers Koch were not the bogey-men of the political left that they have become to-day. Their father, Fred C. Koch had been on the radar of those who lay awake at night in the '50s and in the '60s, fearful of what was then called the radical right. Fred Chase Koch, a founding member of the John Birch Society, was a wealthy and vociferous advocate of a view that United States policy, domestic and foreign, was largely driven by a Communist conspiracy, and he very much tended to reaction against change, rather than to seeing any of the social and political developments of the 20th Century as genuine advances. But Fred C. Koch, and people like him, were largely forgotten by 1980. Moreover, Charles and David had gone down a libertarian path, making them seem less threatening. Those in the libertarian movement were aware of the Kochs largely because they supplied much of the funding for the Cato Institute.[2] The business world was aware of the Kochs because the company that their father had founded was amongst the world's largest of those whose stock was not offered to the public. And that was about it.

At the meet-and-greet event, David Koch came across both as quite likable and, well, as a bit of a dork — somewhat socially awkwardly. And, no, I didn't get him angry by later calling him a dork. He and others got angry in response to a different assertion, framed as a question.

During the question-and-answer part of Mr Koch's appearance at Ohio State, someone asked him if he'd be up for another run in 1984. His reply was to the effect that he was really enjoying the present effort, and would be positively inclined to being on the ticket again. This response, which I took to be perfectly sincere, made me cringe. And so I raised my hand. I don't remember my exact words — it has, after all, been more than 32 years — but they were to this effect:

It was incredibly generous of you to agree to be on the ticket for this election, and to give as much of your money as you have; but don't you fear that, if you run again in 1984, you will be seen as having bought the party?

Koch, who gave some sort of dismissal (again, I don't remember exactly what), was visibly angry. There were grumblings from other parts of the room. Later, I was told that people (who never confronted me) had expressed their dismay at what I'd said, as if I'd insulted Koch. Which is, of course, not what I'd done. What I'd done was to warn him of how his efforts would be construed.

Well, David Koch didn't run again in 1984. Not because he took my warning to heart, but because the Libertarian Party Presidential campaign of 1980 was largely a waste of the money and effort that he and others had expended; it received far fewer votes than promised.[3] But he and Charles didn't stop contributing to political causes. And the claim has been made that they have bought those organizations and individuals to whom the Koch's have provided funding. The Kochs have been demonized, and the demonization has been used to depict those causes as villainous devices. Any rational calculation of the results of a contribution by the Kochs must account for this effect. And so, in spite of the fact that David Koch didn't run again in 1984, events have illustrated, in specific application to David Koch, the dynamic that underlay the point that I made in 1980.

Except for an episode of crusading against the prostitution of children, I withdrew from political activism in 1981. And, as an economist, I'd rather wrestle with abiding questions of fundamental theory than involve myself in the research of policy think-tanks. So I doubt that I'll ever meet Mr Koch again. And it's unlikely that, after more than 32 years, Mr Koch even remembers that moment. But, if I did talk with him again, I'd be tempted to say I told you so, … you dork!

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[1] Campaign finance laws run smack into First Amendment protections of freedom of expression. A right to freedom of expression is no more or less than a right to use one's resources without constraints in response to the expressive content (as such) of the use. Lawyerly distinctions have been drawn amongst the ways that one might use resources to convey the political ideas that one supports, but these are always going to be logically incoherent. And, in the case of the law in 1980 (as still to-day), the absurdity of claiming that there were no infringement in limiting spending of one's own money on one's own campaign was too palpable for such censorship to be imposed.

[2] The Cato Institute is often characterized as itself libertarian, but the word libertarian is best reserved for a more thorough-going (classical) liberalism than that practiced by the Institute.

[3] The mainstream media did what it could to under-mine that campaign, first attempting to displace the LP with Barry Commoner and then, when that didn't take, actively recruiting John Anderson to run as the third candidate. Those who managed the LP campaign had banked pretty much everything on the expectation that the only Presidential candidates on all state ballots would be President Carter, Ronald Reagan, and the Libertarian, Ed Clark. There was no planning for the inevitability that the rules would be waived in order to get Anderson on nearly all state ballots. And the Libertarian message had been muddled to make it more appealing to moderates, and stayed muddled even after Anderson was positioned to take those votes.