My Ideal Philosophy Degree: What Makes a Philosopher?

Every now and then, I've tried to design my ideal philosophy degree. There would be a fair chunk of history, and not just the history of philosophy, but some economic, military, social and scientific history as well. If you don't know anything about seventeenth-century England, you won't get the context of all those debates about duty, obligations and virtue that the moralists had. Under post-modern capitalism those ideas are more or less a joke, but when the King can demand that you put a chunk of your money and people at risk in his latest idea for a war, and it's your duty to do so because he's the King and you swore an oath, then the idea of obligation and duty becomes very meaningful. As well as costly. And of course the debate was conducted in the abstract, because if they had named the issue openly, it would have been treason.

My ideal course would have a lot of history because that was the bit I didn't appreciate and missed when I studied the subject - and perhaps 'studied' implies rather more reading than I did. The students on my course should come away with  a party trick: some obscure - to the general public - school or philosopher that they can impress dinner-party guests and strangers forevermore. And they should have been put in the way of reading as many of the classics as we can expect an undergraduate to read - that's part of the bit where they get an education.

Which leaves the bit where they get an idea about what being a philosopher is about. Most of the people in philosophy departments are teachers and scholars. At some point, they decided they liked the academic life, they could network effectively in it, could work the system and also seemed to be quite good at understanding what Leibniz, or Roger Bacon, or Heidegger or whoever, was going on about. So they became scholars of that thinker. Others find they like a certain branch of the subject and enjoy the compare-and-contrast involved in teaching the thoughts of the creative philosophers. They have jobs in philosophy departments but they aren't necessarily philosophers.

What makes a philosopher is an attitude of informed scepticism, a distrust of authority and all its works and pronouncements, a respect for logical consistency and conceptual coherence (the philosopher's version of having a sense of style), the desire and ability to see the world more clearly than others do, and a desire to understand some part of the world on their own terms - or in the grand manner of Aristotle and Hegel, all of the world. Since the world is more complicated now that it was, and since there are more people and organisations making more self-interested and dubious claims than there ever were, and there are more branches of empirical knowledge and theoretical speculation than ever before, this is a larger task than it used to be, and takes a lot more background knowledge.

One starting point is the ability to identify bogus arguments and all the tricks of informal argument and presentation. Another is to have a guided tour round the follies and promotions (in the evil eighteenth-century sense of the word) of the past - you may rightly suspect a reference to Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds coming, and there it was. A couple of case-studies of the irrational behaviour of authority - the Lille-Reed affair, satanic ritual abuse, recovered memory - wouldn't go amiss, as would a brisk description of street con-tricks and Wall Street Ponzi schemes. I would want my students to feel confident enough to conclude that if, after careful examination and diligent enquiry into whatever it is, it still doesn't make sense, then it's a trick, an illusion, or just plain downright craziness.   

I've always thought that there should be three compulsory courses that run for the first two years: 1) The History of Philosophy and its Worldly Context, 2) Logic, Rhetoric and Epistemology, and 3) Law, Morality and Politics. Now I would add in the second year, 4) The Sceptical Citizen: Data, Statistics and Common Sense. The third year would have two projects: one would be an extended essay on the student's chosen party trick, and the second would be the examination of some recent scam, hype or madness. There are, after all, enough of them.

Downloading Books Is Killing Literature - Or Not

Apparently you can download books now. Illegally, that is. I have to think Amazon knew that would happen, as did all the publishers who agreed to make Kindle and Apple editions of their books. Large companies who foresee a consequence of their decision and still makes that decision desire the consequence. Large companies who don't foresee consequences are just dumb or careless. This isn't true about non-millionaire people and your uncle's bakery, because they can't afford lawyers and programmers and all the other people who could have foreseen or prevented the consequence. The money guys can and it's their job.

Medieval copyists complained that once Gutenberg had set up the type for a book on one of his presses, that was it. No more work for them. I bet they put up quite a fight as well. Which worked out well for them. Every time publishing technology changes, the chances of people getting stuff for free increases.

The music industry has been bitching since forever. If it really cared about free access to music, it would stop 8Tracks, Last FM, You Tube and all the others. It doesn't. They're promotion channels. One day I may buy a Ke$ha CD, because I've been watching her videos on You Tube. Otherwise I wouldn't go near it. I suspect the music industry is doing the same as the tobacco industry, which used to sell masses of cheap cigarettes to fat guys with addresses in Malta and then say it was shocked, shocked! to see those cigarettes on sale in the poorer parts of Italy, all of Romania and all over Africa. If they didn't say that, governments might think they were conspiring to avoid paying taxes. I'm not sure about the music industry's motives, but one day we'll hear something and say.... ahhh, so that's why.

The real question is this: what are you objecting to being downloaded? The data or the story (music, movie, whatever)? Downloading data isn't stealing anything, it's making a copy. The copyright owner may have put restrictions on making it available for copying, but then their case is against the person who made the copy available. That's who the contracts are between. Copying data is not the same as stealing a physical book. Wait until the next sentence before you object.

Stealing a book is stealing a bunch of paper and ink. You deprive someone of the paper and ink, and the reason copying isn't stealing is that you don't deprive the owner of the original of anything. If all you do is copy the file to your hard drive, there's no theft. Wait until the next sentence before you object.

Once I open the file and start reading / listening / watching or using the program - that's when the theft occurs. Because nobody buys a bunch of paper and ink, they buy a story. They don't buy a plastic coaster, they buy music. They don't buy an EXE file, they buy software. It's the use that creates the theft from the author and the publisher. Stealing the book is theft from the retailer. Reading it is theft from the publisher and author.

The catch is this: when you borrow a book from a friend, or when your children read a book on your shelves, that's exactly what they are doing: stealing the story from the author. You aren't stealing the physical book, but you are stealing the story from the publisher and author.

Since no judge in the world, nor any government, is going to pass a law or allow a civil ruling that says a child can't read their parents' books or that friends can't lend each other DVD's, what everyone pretends they get upset about is the medium. Which was kinda acceptable for books and vinyl, but is hard to argue for basically costless data. After all, the whole point of going digital is that it reduces the marginal costs of the medium to almost zero. See how the exact law gets a little tricky to frame? It's very technology-dependent.

However, by now we should have a fair appreciation that putting a Kindle file in your Dropbox public folder for friends and family is the same as lending them the book but putting it on a Google-searchable filestore for anyone anywhere to download is not. If we can define or explain the difference between a real (old-skool) friend and a new-age Facebook non-qualifying friend, that would tie it down a little more.

All we would need is for the media giants to be sensible and accept the difference.

Sunday, I Ran 2.4 Kms Without Getting Breathless

Big deal, I hear you say. You do a "10K" in forty minutes. Then you change into your gym gear for some serious running. But I hadn't been able to run without getting breathless for the last nine weeks or so. Since before Christmas. Nine weeks ago I hopped on the treadmill, set off at 11.6kph for two miles as I had been doing for a while and was gasping, heaving for breath after 800 metres. I had to stop three times even to manage a mile and a half at 9.6kph. It got worse.

Four weeks ago I did something I have never done before and you don't see many people doing at all, which was quitting Clarissa's Tuesday Spin class. I simply lost the will to carry on. One morning scurrying down the back streets of Waterloo to Blackfriars Bridge I very nearly just sat down on the pavement and stopped. My legs didn't want to go on walking. I haven't been spinning since.

I've only started to get my strength back over the last couple of weeks. I couldn't even walk up stairs without suffering loss of breath and heavy aches in my legs. I have never felt that bad. Of course it was a damn virus. Of course I blame the damn offices.

So when I trotted along at 9.6kph Sunday for 2.4kms and didn't feel any strain, it was a sign that I may actually be turning back into a human being again. Instead of this sick thing I was.

Young Adult - Diabolo Cody, Jason Reitman, Charlize Theron

I saw this film about three weeks ago and I still haven't quite sorted it out. I like the director's other movies, and Diabolo Cody is my kind of writer. They made Juno together and that was enough for me. I was a confused by Young Adult, and when I'm confused, I turn to Roger Ebert. I don't always agree with him (especially over the grossly over-rated Synechdoche: New York) but his reviews often help me clarify what I'm thinking.

Charlize Theron plays Mavis, a late-thirties freelance writer of adolescent novels who lives in an high-rise apartment in Minneapolis, drinks too much and her battle prep includes manicures and pedicures. She's divorced, behind on delivering the final novel in the series that's been paying her bills, and suddenly gets a mail from her high-school boyfriend Buddy Slade  announcing the birth of his daughter. Off she goes to the baby shower, or whatever they call it, to bring the boyfriend back with her. 

Would a real-ish Mavis really do those things? Well, here's the painful identification bit. Mavis reminded me of me when I was her age - except I was prettier than Mavis and didn't drink Coca-Cola to get over hangovers. We both had relationships from our youth we held onto as a kind of fantasy, neither of us were happy in our jobs, neither of us were happy where we lived, both of us drank too much, but we hadn't crossed the line. I knew my unresolved crush was married and had children, and living a life more suited to her than any I could provide. Somewhere in the bit of my brain where reality rules, I knew there would be no reviving anything. But very few people have the grasp of reality I have - something I've been told a number of times, as if it's a bad thing - and without that, yes, I would have set off after her. So I accepted Mavis' homecoming both as a plot premise and as an emotional truth.

That connection was totally lost when I was asked to believe she would stick around after meeting the dreadful, gender-shaming betamax that her high school boyfriend has turned into. A man who bottles his wife's breast-pumped baby milk, and who quit drinking out of solidarity with her during the pregnancy? No. Had I actually met my unresolved fantasy, who I'm pretty sure is an exemplary wife and mother, I would have muttered something about having the wrong address and left quickly. The real exemplary mother wasn't the fantasy. So I couldn't buy Mavis not reacting the same way, and I lost the connection.

When she's visiting her parents, Mavis says she thinks she may be an alcoholic. Ebert believes this. I didn't. Alcoholics have a streak of self-pity, even after years in recovery and a good few runs up the Steps. Charlize Theron is just too tough to be a victim. I think Jason Rietman wanted it that way. Because he gets to have her behave as an alcoholic woman with neither judgement nor protective vanity, but without us emotionally believing it - because Charlize Theron's body language just doesn't communicate it. 

Young Adult is about how awful small town life is. Since you're not allowed to say that - unless it's made unreal by being spoken by a teenage girl - this has to be disguised as a Homecoming movie. Homecoming movies are either like Sweet Home Alabama, where the local-girl-made-good-in-the-big-city learns to value her home-town roots and high school boyfriend, or lead up to a Revelatory Climax in which we discover that a) the heroine was a bitch or b) the heroine was molested by her father. There's a Revelatory Climax in this movie, where we discover that the heroine nearly had the boyfriend's child, but it was spontaneously aborted. I didn't buy that as anything but a script fix, so I ignored it. It's just there to confuse us. The real climax is the speech from Collette Wolfe's character Sandra Freehauf to the effect that, yes, the small town life utterly sucks, and will Mavis please take her to the Mini Apple. Mavis says no, but the speech gets her right back on track. "Thanks, I needed that" she says.

That I did identify with. And the bit where she gets out. With a completed novel. The couple of scenes where she writes in diners and fast food joints, and steals lines from the very people who make up her audience? Those I liked, those actually swung. The film ends with her Young Adult novel's character leaving behind high-school and heading into the real world with high hopes and a couple of ego bruises. Is this supposed to be Mavis? Or is it just her book? I think that's another ambiguity to make the story palatable. Because what awaits Mavis isn't pretty: she isn't going to be happy, satisfied or content - except for a few brief moments. You understand I'm speaking from experience here. She's going to spend the next forty years showing up and faking it. Which is no way to end a general-release movie.

And that's the thing with this movie: there's no-one to like and connect with. Because that would engage our sympathies with them and against the other: with the small town, against Mavis; with Mavis, against the small town. For some reason Cody and Reitman wanted us to do neither. Which makes it more real, but for that reason, less satisfying.

What Brainstorming Really Was

There's a fascinating article in The New Yorker  about how valuable being able meet other random smart people is for generating good ideas - that's my take on the description of Building 20. Explains a lot about why no good ideas ever come out of government or institutional British companies (neither smart, nor random nor able to meet).

What I didn't know was that "brainstorming" - the most bogus technique for idea generation ever - was invented, or described, by a Mad Man, Alex Osborn, a partner in the advertising agency B.B.D.O in the 1940's. The notion took off and has been blighting creative effort ever since.

He made the story up. Of course he did. It's what Mad Men do. He couldn't tell his readers the various truths about having good ideas. Who wants to know that good ideas come to you out of nowhere after you've been producing utter rubbish for weeks on end? Or from a random conversation with someone you met on a train, or from a song lyric, which meant something to you because you were soaked in the problem, but nothing to the person sitting next to you, because they weren't? And was he going to tell you what his "brainstorming sessions" really were?

Picture it. A bunch of the guys sitting around, relaxed enough not to be worried about sounding silly, throwing out any old bullshit that occurs to them. What does that sound like? Yep. I missed out the cigarette smoke, the drinks and the leatherette seating. They were in the bar after work, sending up each other's ideas, parodying the clients, making silly and probably obscene remarks about how to use the client's products, and suddenly... the copywriter scribbles something down and vows to use it next morning just as soon as he's had enough aspirin to ease the hangover.

Alex Osborn couldn't describe that. So he re-located it, took away the booze, cleaned up the dialogue and called it "brainstorming". How  else could it have been?

Why I Can Stand On Your Toes If I Want To

A few years ago now, I was walking across a bridge in Amsterdam with my friend. A boat passed underneath, carrying what looked like celebrating medical students. I thought: "it isn't my world any more, it's theirs". 

It took me a while to understand that feeling properly, and some of it isn't pretty.

When I watched those medical students waving their drinks around, what I really felt was that the deserved self-centredness of older folk: you young people can look after the frigging planet now, we have enough on our hands just staying employed, right-weight and fed. You need to have been through the Wasteland Years from forty to sixty (I'm not quite out yet) to understand this: but when you have, you will know that you've paid all the dues you ever needed to.

Twenty years of showing up, standing your ground, fighting for your space and light, dealing with unemployment, finding jobs, gaining and losing relationships, all when the hormonal fires are going out is an endurance test enough. It breaks some people, either financially (divorce, bankruptcy, sustained unemployment), spiritually (too many compromises on the way up the slippery pole or for the sake of the marriage and kids) or physically (just look around you). Of course, for some people it's a wonderful time, but they live somewhere else I've never been.

So when I left the world to those students, I was also reserving the right to be as selfish, or self-interested, as I wanted or needed to be, to get through the remaining time. It's what a lot of older people do.

We get focused on our issues. We don't care about education, because our kids have grown up. We don't care about the planet, because we're not going to be around a lot longer. We do care about pensions and paying bills, because we're shortly to be out of work and faced with maybe twenty years of living. Those pensions and allowances cost younger generations money. Our lives contract as our energy levels decrease and our capacity for finding stuff exciting and rewarding diminishes (except for addicts and nerds, for whom The High from drugs, women, booze, music, movies, solving tough problems and putting one over on the enemy never goes away. This explains me).

My generation will cancel, or cause to be cancelled, the retirement age, because lots of us have worthless pensions wrecked by bouts of unemployment, and we will establish, or cause to be established, a de facto right-to-die based on the current idea of an advance decision. We are going to be short of money, and are threatened with a long and decaying old age of poverty. Not going to be popular with a generation who were used to being fit, present and able to spend.

Pete Townsend wanted to die before he got old because he didn't want to be helpless, compromised, poor, patronised by nurses and social workers, and a nuisance to his children. He's none of those things because the world has changed, and he's a millionaire. I'm none of those things either, and I'm not a millionaire. I still want to die before I get old, and can't find paying work.

And in the meantime, I've paid my dues and I don't owe anybody anything except good manners, settling my debts,  and a day's work for a day's pay, which are the courtesies of everyday life. It's just that now, you have to be more thoughtful to me than I do to you, because I'm the old guy with grey hair.

And if you're not, I'm going to stand on your toes.

First Thoughts On Insight Analysis

Look at this year's job title and it says something about "Insight Analyst". If you've never run across one of those, it's not surprising: they only roam in companies with huge, and I mean millions and even billions of records, databases of customer data. It's what used to be called "desk research" but with mainframe computers: the buzz-name is "big data".

The insight agencies - such as Dunhumby, Tesco's in-house analyst - like to claim the value of their contributions. What they contribute is usually tweaks to the exact mix of coupons sent to a more refined mailing list. Given the costs of direct mail, that may be worth doing. Google and Facebook are basically selling their insight technology: they are offering the world's best targeted advertising. Tesco, Sainsburys and other supermarkets with loyaly cards can tie purchases to people, and banks can look at your current account transactions. Hint: if you want to hide your patterns of consumption from financial services companies, pay by cash. 

As ever, I like to contrast Amazon with the The Bank. Amazon use an insight approach when they make suggestions based on "people who bought this also bought these". It works well with genres - a textbook on Galois Theory, post-rock music, romantic novels or cookbooks - and it may work with accessories for bigger-ticket items, but outside well-defined genres, where customer volumes are small, it can get bizarre. With volume comes consistency and reliability, but also blandness: large numbers of people who bought Katy Perry also bought Ke$ha. I'd never have guessed. A mathematics publisher won't need telling that people  who bought Hartshorne also bought Hatcher, and Mumford's Red Book, but it's only news to outsiders. Which is exactly who it's aimed at: consumers like you and me who are browsing. I think the Amazon algorithms are fine, and the occasional bizarre suggestions just confirm I'm in a minority. What makes Amazon so effective aren't clever algorithms - though that helps. Amazon's real advantage is that it controls its data: you tell it what you bought, using the references that it supplies. Retailers do the same with bar codes. 

Not so much in retail banking. Retail bankers and their IT people aren't as aware of the advantages of standards as their counterparts in telecoms. As a result, a bank can identify the method of payment, but not what it was for. Reliably. That £254.32 you give to Sainsburys each month? We don't know if it's for food, a loan repayment, savings, a credit card payment or whatever else. Banking developed in the days when retailers generally did one thing - except the Co-op and Woolworth, and everyone paid them with cash. The industry never recognised a need for standards in transaction description.

As a result, when I took over a report that claimed to tell us how many of our customers were taking loans with other lenders, I found more ambiguities and estimates than had been advertised. And I can't resolve them. Nor can a room full of analysts, because we don't have the data. Big Brother may be watching you, but his glasses are steamed up, and he doesn't know what he's looking at half the time. (Are you convinced by those grainy CCTV photos they show on the news? Not me.) 

Messy data in, sloppy conclusions out. I discovered recently that people were using an earlier an even messier version of this data to calibrate pricing models. I have no shares in The Bank for  reason.

Insight analysis isn't management information, which is itself a step down from financial reporting. As long as the segment my analysis tells me should be large and spread over the country doesn't turn out to consist of two hundred people in Guernsey, I'm okay. Does it matter if it's really 4.5m people instead of 2.5m or 6.5m? As long as we start small with the ability to scale up quickly? The point is to spot a genuine segment, and it may not even be that. The point is to produce a product or service that makes money and people come back to buy. Does it really matter how precise the process is? Hell, I'd be happy if I designed the product for one group of poeple who ignored it completely but it was taken up by another group to the volumes we were hoping for. The onyl issue there is that I may not be able to repeat the fluke.

But if the success is big enough, I don't need to.