Because LiveJournal has again broken its support for OpenID, I am again locked-out of reading Friends-only entries.

This time, instead of struggling to find a work-around (while the LJ support team does nothing but collect information which will be ignored by the LJ programmers, and then eventually expresses regrets at the lack of action), I am simply done with it. I won't be reading LJ entries.

I won't even bother with the more public entries at LiveJournal. If there's something that my LJ Friends want me to read, then it will have to be written elsewhere.

I am presently undecided as to whether I'm willing to enable LiveJournal to the extent of allowing it to continue to access my RSS feed. If you find that entries from this 'blog stop appearing on your Friends pages, then you might check as to whether that's simply because the 'blog has become quiescent, or because I've blocked the LJ server.

[Addendum (2013:02/06): I am informed that LiveJournal's alleged feed of this 'blog hasn't delivered any of the entries from this year anyway, so the question of whether to permit it to do so might perhaps be put aside.]

Without some basis in fact — without at least a basis in the recognized structure of reality on some general level — fiction would instead be gibberish. And most fiction involves considerable factual elements — it describes a familiar world and may even involve passing reference to specific, familiar, real-life persons. Some fiction makes more than passing reference.

Satire normally involves more literal truth than does ordinary fiction. because some element of the real-world is a target,[1] perhaps for purposes of commentary or perhaps merely as an opportunity for absurdity.

Harlan Ellison has sometimes asserted that he might be called a paid liar. He does, after all, state things as if they were true that he knows to be false. But his fiction doesn't quite fit the ordinary notion of lying. Under this notion, to lie is to make a statement which one knows to be false, and to make it with intent to deceive. Ellison makes false statements, but presumably expects his readers to identify the fiction as such, and hence not to be deceived. Backing-up, the key is not merely that the false statement is presented in just any way as if true, but in a manner that one might hope and expect to be presuasive. Even if we should insist that any statement that one knows to be false would constitute a lie, clearly there is an important difference between willfully false statements which are hoped to mislead and those which are expected to be treated as falsehoods.

Sometimes the author of fiction relies upon immediate context to indicate the work as fiction — the work is wrapped (as by the label novel). In other cases, the content is sufficiently at odds with expectations that it would not be believed by anyone with at least an ordinary degree of rationality.

Satire — genuine satire — reveals its fictional content, as distinct from its factual content, in that the fictional component is presented to amuse by violating established expectations, while the non-fictional component does not itself seem an attempt to be funny.

Unfortunately, this convention, like many social institutions, is not consciously discerned by most of those who rely upon it, and that lack of awareness creätes an opportunity to use ostensible satire as a vehicle for deception. If one insinuates false-yet-unamusing assertions within a work, these may be taken as part of the factual component by a large share of the audience. If someone should protest that false statements are being presented as fact, that someone can be dismissed as ignoring that the work be satirical. (This dismissal will be more effective if the work also has falsehoods that few would take seriously.) Few people will be positioned to respond that genuine satire does not present deliberate falsehood as fact is presented. And so purported satire becomes a vehicle for deliberately false statements made with the intent to deceive. Lying is labelled satire, and ordinary defenses fail against it.

The use of ostensible satire to lie has been very popular since the rise of the Baby Boom Generation. But it's not as if one can give a public lecture on how to lie in this manner without undermining the device. In consequence, a lot of people are using it to lie without quite understanding how and why it works; others, more oblivious, have concluded that all these falsehoods really have been amusing, and imagine that when they too string-together falsehoods, these must likewise be amusing.

Yester-day and to-day, there was a fiasco on the American political left. First, Roger Simon made what seems an attempt to satirize the circumstances of Paul Ryan. The attempt was perhaps sincere, but it's hard to find much funny in it. And it was taken to be mostly factual by some of Simon's own tribe, including various prominent members. Tobin Harshaw is blaming this confusion on the literalism of Americans, but the primary cause is not so much literalism as it is the degeneration of the concept of satire.

(Of course, I expect those on the left who believed Simon's claims to attempt to excuse themselves by claiming that the political right has become so absurd that it is practically impossible to tell fact from fiction.)

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[1] The real thing satirized may be a story or idea of something that is itself unreal; but, without some real referent (such as a story or idea), one does not have satire.

Yester-day or this morning, I encountered yet another instance of argumentation over what Keynes really meant in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. I don't plan to labor here what I believe that Keynes intended to say; rather I want to draw attention to something about many of these arguments over the meaning or intention of some works.

When I consider the meaning or intention of the works of people who in turn attempt to interpret something else, I regard my interpretation of their interpretation as concerned with thought as such; I am thinking about how someone is or was thinking; my interpretation might be informed by my own understanding of the subject about which they thought, but the interpretation is of their thought.

It's good to know what any one of these people intended to say; it's good to know what they actually did say (whether intended or not); but it's almost always more desirable to have best approximations of the truth about which they ostensibly spoke than to have best approximations of the claims that they intended to make. It is a fortunate error when someone gets closer to the truth about the underlying subject by misinterpretting the work of someone who was mistaken about that subject. And, if one simply doesn't know which interpretation to make, but finds the truth amongst the possibilities, then there isn't even a positive misinterpretation.

It's different when one is attempting to interpret words which themselves impose rules, as in the cases of legislation, of formalized games, or of works of fiction. In those cases, the words creäte the relevant reälity.

Some people believe in prophets. By prophet I do not mean simply a forecaster, but a person through whom G_d (or something like G_d) speaks (perhaps about the future, but perhaps not). Amongst ostensible prophets I would count those believed to have a direct knowledge of external reälity, unmediated by the senses. Unsurprisingly, I do not believe in prophecy.

But, if one does believe in prophecy, then it makes sense to concern oneself with its meaning as-if resolving its meaning were the same thing as getting a best approximation of the underlying subject — because, indeed, prophecy would be just that best approximation. Of course, I take exception to the presumption that this-or-that work were holy scripture; but I take rather greater exception to an unacknowledged presumption to such effect.

And that brings me to what is so wrong with so many of the arguments about what Keynes really meant: Too many of the participants are perfectly sure that, whatever he really intended, it must have been right, and that it is for this reason that we must discover what he intended. One sees even more of this sort of thinking in debates about what Marx really meant. And I've seen basically the same thing in discussions about what Ayn Rand really meant. These three (and various others) are unacknowledgedly being treated as prophets. As far as I'm concerned, in such cases discussion has run off the rails.

Now, there are those who would insist that Marx, by way of dialectical reasoning, or Rand, by way of thorough-going objectivist epistemology, could apprehend things so very clearly that we should just take for granted that, indeed, whatever they said must be right. But those propositions each would strike me as highly dubious even if I didn't already possess what I regard as counter-proofs. (Certainly there would seem to be a claim of personal infallibility or a fallible claim on the part of whomever were testifying to the infallibility of Marx or of Rand.) And I've not encountered even that much of an argument for treating Keynes as if he were a prophet. (I have seen his economic intuïtion championed by reference to his having made a fortune investing in stocks, but I wasn't much persuaded by this argument even before I learned that, earlier, he had faced financial ruin through such investments, and been rescued by his father.)

On Sunday, 27 May, I received a pair of e.mail messages announcing formal acceptance for publication of my paper on indecision, and I ceased being braced for rejection. From 15 June, Elsevier had a version for sale on-line (first the uncorrected proof, then the corrected proof, now the version found in the journal). The issue itself (J Math Econ v48 #4) was made available on-line on 3 August. (I assume that the print copies will be received by subscribers soon.)

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Reader may recall that, not very long ago, I was reading A Budget of Paradoxes by Augustus de Morgan, and that when de Morgan used the term paradox he did not use in in the sense of an apparent truth which seems to fly in the face of reason, but in the older sense of a tenet opposed to received opinion. De Morgan was especially concerned with cases of heterodoxy to which no credibility would be ascribed by the established mainstream.

Some paradoxes would later move from heterodoxy to orthodoxy, as when the Earth came to be viewed as closely approximated by a sphere, and with no particular claim to being the center of the universe. But most paradoxes are unreasonable, and have little chance of ever becoming orthodoxy.

I began reading de Morgan's Budget largely because I have at least a passing interest in cranky ideas. But reading it at the time that I did was not conducive to my mental health.

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Under ideal circumstances, one would not use a weight of opinion — whether the opinion were popular or that of experts — to approximate most sorts of truth. But circumstances are seldom ideal, and social norms are often less than optimal whatever the circumstances. When confronted with work that is heterodox about foundational matters, the vast majority of people judge work to be crackpot if it is not treated with respect by some ostensibly relevant population.

In cases where respect is used as the measure of authority, there can be a problem of whose respect is itself taken to have some authority; often a layering obtains. The topology of that layering can be conceptualized in at least three ways, but the point is that the layers run from those considered to have little authority beyond that to declare who has more authority, to those who are considered to actually do the most respected research, with respected popularizers usually in one of the layers in-between. In such structures, absurdities can obtain, such as presumptions that popularizers have themselves done important research, or that the more famous authorities are the better authorities.

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As I was reading de Morgan's book, my paper was waiting for a response from the seventh journal to which it had been offered. The first rejection had been preëmptory; no reason was given for it, though there was some assurance that this need not be taken as indicating that the paper were incompetent or unimportant. The next three rejections (2nd, 3rd, 4th) were less worrisome, as they seemed to be about the paper being too specialized, and two of them made a point of suggesting what the editor or reviewer thought to be more suitable journals. But then came the awful experience of my paper being held by Theory and Decision for more than a year-and-a half, with editor Mohammed Abdellaoui refusing to communicate with me about what the Hell were happening. And this was followed by a perverse rejection at the next journal from a reviewer with a conflict of interest. Six rejections[1] might not seem like a lot, but there really aren't that many academically respected journals which might have published my paper (especially as I vowed never again to submit anything to a Springer journal); I was running-out of possibilities.

I didn't produce my work with my reputation in mind, and I wouldn't see damage to my reputation as the worst consequence of my work being rejected; but de Morgan's book drew my attention to the grim fact that my work, which is heterodox and foundational, was in danger of being classified as crackpot, and I along with it.

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Crackpots, finding their work dismissed, often vent about the injustice of that rejection. That venting is taken by some as confirmation that the crackpots are crackpots. It's not; it's a natural reäction to a rejection that is perceived to be unjust, whether the perception is correct or not. The psychological effect can be profoundly injurious; crackpots may collapse or snap, but so may people who were perfectly reasonable in their heterodoxy. (Society will be inclined to see a collapse or break as confirmation that the person were a crackpot, until and unless the ostensible authorities reverse themselves, at which point the person may be seen as a martyr.)

---

As things went from bad to worse for my paper, I dealt with how I felt by compartmentalization and dissociation. When the paper was first given conditional acceptance, my reäction was not one of happiness nor of relief; rather, with some greater prospect that the paper would be published, the structure of compartmentalization came largely undone, and I felt traumatized.

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Meanwhile, some other things in my life were going or just-plain went wrong, at least one of which I'll note in some later entry. In any case, the recent quietude of this 'blog hasn't been because I'd lost interest in it, but because properly to continue the 'blog this entry was needed, and I've not been in a good frame-of-mind to write it.

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[1] Actually five rejections joined with the behavior of Abdellaoui, which was something far worse than a rejection.

The conditions for the acceptance of my paper on indecision were revealed to me in early April. Apparently the intention had been to provide them in mid-March, when I was informed of the conditional acceptance, but there'd been a bit of confusion.

Some of the conditions imposed were pretty strong. With the exception of one change,[1] I actively disliked every one of them. I thought that some of them sought reasonable objectives but would bring more cost than benefit; I thought that others were simply wrong-headed.

However, I made or attempted to make all of the changes except for three sorts. I figured that the editor would support me when it came to two of those remaining three sorts, as one would have formatted the references very differently from the journal's own standard (with which the reviewer was apparently unfamiliar) and the other would have dropped-in a proposition that would in fact have been perfectly superfluous in my paper (though an important axiom in most theories of probability).

I was, however, very concerned about the effect of my refusing to make one of the changes against which I dug-in. That change was suggested or demanded (it was not clear which) by the reviewer in order to simplify the presentation by simplifying the structure. Unfortunately, it would also have torn the work from part of its empirical foundations. I genuinely felt that it would be better not to have the paper published than to make the change, yet I was not sure that my intransigence would be properly understood. But I was afforded an opportunity to explain myself on this point (and on every other), and apparently my explanation was accepted.

Yester-day, I was told that the changes that I made had sufficiently addressed the reviewer's original concerns, and that the paper would be accepted conditional upon my modifying the acknowledgments (to be less specific as to what the acknowledged parties had done) and upon my removing the dedication (which the editor or reviewer suggested replacing with an acknowledgment of support). I have made those changes.

I also fixed a broken cross-reference that I had spotted. And I replaced one symbol with another. In order to effect one sort of change that the reviewer had wanted, I had introduced an explicit symbol for binary paralysis. [Erratum (2013:04/25): (Well, actually, for the union of binary paralysis with identity.)] Specifically, I used U+224e (≎) I had adopted this particular character because nothing better occurred to me quickly, and I didn't want to grind to a halt over a d_mn'd symbol. (How dreadful to be paralyzed in the choice of a symbol for paralysis!) But I wasn't comfortable with it. I felt that the reader would have trouble remembering what it meant as it occurred here-and-there, that it was too suggestive of an equality, and that it would be awkward to write by hand. I eventually decided that what I wanted was a π (for παράλυσις)[2] centrally superscripted over a dash.

Anyway, there is some small chance that my effecting this change of symbols will cause me difficulty with the editor, but I believe that the paper is effectively accepted now. I don't know how long it might be before the paper is actually published.

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[1] I had inserted a foot-note specifically to preëmpt a repeat of an inappropriate criticism delivered by the reviewer at the previous journal. I was planning to request, upon acceptance of the paper, that the foot-note be removed. In the event, the latest reviewer insisted that the foot-note be removed.

[2] The Latin p is too readily associated with preference, and indeed P was once very common for the binary relation of strict preference or that of weak preference.

I'm engaged in a fight with a corporation[1] in which I note its agents practice two, somewhat intertangled behaviors which are common to large or corporate enterprises, but which should be opposed whenever encountered.

The first of these is for the agent of the enterprise to confuse his or her rôle. For example: I gave agents of this corporation the same information repeatedly in the course of one phone call. In a later phone call, I told another agent that I'd given that information to you repeatedly, to which the agent replied, as if I were delusional, that she had never spoken with me before. This might be read as deliberate or incompetent misunderstanding of the word you (which of course must serve as a plural as well as a singular[2]), but it fits another pattern, in which the agent speaks as representative when it suits his or her immediate purpose, but instead as just an individual when that immediate purpose changes, and in which the agent doesn't announce changes in the entity for whom he or she speaks. I immediately told the agent in this case that, since she was representing the corporation in the conversation, you are the corporation, and that since I'd repeatedly given the information to the corporation, I had repeatedly given it to you.

The second behavior is to confuse endogenous policy with necessity, to represent the association as unable to do something simply because they have made a deliberate habit of not doing it. Actually, one sees people in general, in or out of a corporate frame-work, doing attempting this confusion. But the misrepresentation is more likely to be effective in the context of a formal, multi-personal institution, and the word policy is more likely to be invoked as if it represents something endogenous and fixed. (Does one often hear a neighbor insist that keeping his dog out of one's garden would be against policy?) And the misrepresentation is even more effective when the agent of the institution confuses the issue of whether he or she is speaking for the corporation or for his- or herself. Speaking for myself, I don't let an individual or association pretend that its chosen policy is not a choice, and I don't let the agents of an association off the hook of being its representatives when they try to claim that something cannot be done because it is against policy.

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[1] Sprint Nextel Corporation.

[2] In standard English. And I'm not about to adopt y'all or youse or even you guys to humor a corporate agent.

On 16 March, I queried the journal to which I most recently submitted my paper on operationalizing the difference between indifference and indecision. To-day, I received informal e.mail from the editor letting me know

The paper is accepted, pending some (substantial) revisions. You’ll be getting the formal material from the journal soon.

I dread the thought of subtantial revisions, but it's to be presumed that I can live with the changes demanded. The state of things appears to be excellent.

I recently finished reading A Budget of Paradoxes (1872) by Augustus de Morgan.

Now-a-days, we are most likely to encounter the word paradox as referring to apparent truth that seems to fly in the face of reason, but its original sense, not so radical, was of a tenet opposed to received opinion. De Morgan uses it more specifically for such tenets when they go beyond mere heterodoxy. Subscribers to paradox are those typically viewed as crackpot, though de Morgan occasionally takes pains to explain that, in some cases, the paradoxical pot is quite sound, and it is the orthodox pot that will not hold water. None-the-less, most of the paradoxers, as he calls them, proceed on an unsound basis (and he sometimes rhetorically loses sight of the exceptions).

A recurring topic in his book is attempt at quadrature of the circle. Most of us have heard of squaring the circle, though far fewer know to just what it refers.

I guess that most students are now taught to think about geometry in terms of Cartesian coördinates,[1] but there's an approach, called constructive, which concerns itself with what might be accomplished using nothing but a stylus, drawing surface, straight-edge, and compass. The equipment is assumed to be perfect: the stylus to have infinitesimal width; the surface to be perfectly planar, the straight-edge to be perfectly linear, and the pivot of the compass to stay exactly where placed. The user is assumed able to place the pivot of the compass exactly at any marked point and to open it to any other marked point; likewise, the user is assumed to be able to place the straight-edge exactly touching any one or two marked points. A marked point may be randomly placed, or constructed as the intersection of a line with a line, of an arc with an arc, or of an arc with a line. A line may be constructed by drawing along the straight-edge. An arc may be constructed by placing the compass on a marked point, opening it to touch another marked point, and then turning it. (Conceptually, these processes can be generalized into n dimensions.)

A classic problem of constructive geometry was to construct a square whose area was equal to that of a given circle. Now, if you think about it, you'll reälize that this problem is equivalent to arriving at the value of π; with a little more thought, you might see that to construct this square in a finite number of steps would be equivalent to finding a rational value for π. So, assuming that one is restricted to a finite number of steps, the problem is insoluable. It was shown to be so in the middle of the 18th Century, when it was demonstrated that π were irrational.

The demonstration not-with-standing, people continued to try to square the circle into de Morgan's day, and some of them fought in print with de Morgan. (One of them, a successful merchant, was able to self-publish repeatedly.) De Morgan tended to deal with them the way that I often deal with people who are not merely wrong but are arguing foolishly — he critiqued the argument as such, rather than attempting to walk them through a proper argument to some conclusion. I think that he did so for a number of reasons. First, bad argumentation is a deeper problem that mistaken conclusions, and de Morgan had greater concern to attack the former than the latter, in a manner that exhibited the defects to his readers. Second, some of these would-be squarers of the circle had been furnished with proper argumentation, but had just plowed-on, without attending to it. (Indeed, de Morgan notes that most paradoxers will not bother to familiarize themselves with the arguments for the systems that they seek to overthrow, let alone master those arguments.) Third, the standard proof that π is not rational is tedious to mount, and tedious to read.

But de Morgan, towards justifying attending as much as he does specifically to those who would square the circle, expresses a concern that they might gain a foothold within the social structure that allowed them to demand positions amongst the learnèd, and that they might thus undermine the advancement of useful knowledge.[2] And, with this concern in-mind, I wonder why I didn't, to my recollection, encounter de Morgan once mentioning that constructive quadrature of the circle would take an infinite number of operations; he certainly didn't emphasize this point. It seems to me that the vast majority of would-be squarers of the circle (and trisectors of the angle) simply don't see how many steps it would take; that their intuïtion fails them exactly there. And their intuïtion is an essential aspect of the problem; a large part of why the typical paradoxer will not expend the effort to learn the orthodox system is that he or she is convinced that his or her intuïtion has found a way around any need to do so. But sometimes a lynch-pin in the intuïtion may be pulled, causing the machine to be arrested, and the paradoxer to pause. Granted that this may not be as potentially edifying to the audience, but if one has real fear of the effects of paradoxers on scientific pursuit, then it is perhaps best to reduce their number by a low-cost conversion.

De Morgan's concern for the effect of these géomètres manqués might seem odd these days, though I presume that it was quite sincere. I've not even heard of an attempt in my life-time actually to square the circle[3] (though I'm sure that some could be found). I think that attempts have gone out of fashion for two reasons. First, a greater share of the population is exposed to the idea that π is irrational almost as soon as its very existence is reported to them. Second, technology, founded upon science, has got notably further along, and largely by using and thereby vindicating the mathematical notions that de Morgan was so concerned to protect because of their importance. To insist now that π is, say 3 1/8, as did some of the would-be circle-squarers of de Morgan's day, would be to insist that so much of what we do use is unusable.

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[1] Cartesian coördinates are named for René Descartes (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) because they were invented by Nicole Oresme (c 1320 – 11 July 1382).

[2] Somewhat similarly, many people to-day are concerned that paradoxers not be allowed to influence palæobiology, climatology, or economics. But, whereäs de Morgan proposed to keep the foolish paradoxers of his day in-check by exhibiting the problems with their modes of reasoning, most of those concerned to protect to-day's orthodoxies in alleged science want to do so by methods of ostensibly wise censorship that in-practice excludes views for being unorthodox rather than for being genuinely unreasonable. When jurists and journalists propose to operationalize the definition of science with the formula that science is what scientists do — ie that science may be identified by the activity of those acknowledged by some social class to be scientists — actual science is being displaced by orthodoxy as such.

[3] Trisection of the angle is another matter. As a university undergraduate, I had a roommate who believed that one of his high-school classmates had worked-out how to do it.

On 24 December, the Stratfor computer site was learned to be hacked; e.mail, e.mail addresses, and credit-card information were stolen. Initially, Anonymous couldn't agree within itself whether its members were responsible, but the deniers fell silent.

The credit-card information was used to make charitable donations, which subsequently had to be returned (at a net loss) by the charities. Those whose e.mail addresses were stolen had them publicly dumped (and thus made available to spammers), and were subjected to hoax mailings by Anonymous.

And we were told that the e.mail itself would be released, so that the world could see that Stratfor were really a malevolent force, which revelation would ostensibly justify the hacking.

After seven weeks, the e.mail that was supposed to expose the wickedness of Stratfor has not been released. There's more than one possible explanation. Perhaps the responsible members of Anonymous have obscure but compelling reasons to release the information all-at-once, and to organize it before doing so. Perhaps these members have been found and whisked-off to secret internment camps, along with anyone who might have reported their disappearances. Or perhaps the e.mail would reveal no more than that Stratfor communicates off-the-record with sources, some of whom could (reasonably or otherwise) be regarded as villains, and perhaps other members of Anonymous noted that almost any reporting and news-analysis service does the same thing, so that Anonymous would appear to subvert freedom of the press.

(I kinda favor that third explanation. Like many members of the Occupation Movement — who also like to claim the prerogatives but duck the responsibilities of association, and to wear Guy Fawkes masks and fantasize about being Vs — many members of Anonymous seem inclined to try to silence those whose views they find greatly disagreeable, but only so long as these members aren't made to recognize that they're engaged in censorship. [Up-Date (2012:02/27): It has now been announced that the e.mail is being released in coöperation with WikiLeaks.])

But, whatever may be the reason, the e.mail has not been released, and that failure or delay is itself a news story — which story you've not read in the Times (of London, of New York, or of Los Angeles) nor heard from the major broadcasters. Possibly that's because they're such lack-wits that it hasn't occurred to any of them that there's a story here. I rather suspect, however, that it's because they're scared. A group such as Anonymous could take-down pretty much any of these news services just as they did Stratfor.

Secondly, I mourn to think that when the New Zealander picks up his old copy of this book, and reads it by the associations of his own day, he may, in spite of the many assurances I have received that my Athenæum Budget was amusing, feel me to be as heavy as I feel James Gregory and Sanders.[1] But he will see that I knew what was coming, which Gregory did not.

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[1] These two (principally Gregory) composed a bit of heavy jocosity, published pseudonymously in 1672. The Budget began as a series in a weekly, Athenæum; the assembled collection was published posthumously in 1872.

I don't know how New Zealanders reäct; but, in 2012, I don't find the jocosity of the Budget the least bit heavy. I laugh aloud at some passages and am at least amused by a larger share. However, I admit that much of the content seems to me a tedious enumeration.