The Modern Utilitarians

In philosophy this year we learned about utilitarianism, which is essentially the idea that every action is good if it is in the interest of producing the greatest amount of pleasure, or happiness, for the greatest number of people. Of course, this was an extremely difficult task, and as John Stuart Mill, a later utilitarian pointed out, it is difficult to tell because there are different types of pleasure or happiness for different people. Following on that problem, one of the main reasons that it has been generally disregarded as a philosophy is that its tenants are essentially impossible to propagate. Who can tell what produces the greatest amount of pleasure, or happiness, is for the greatest number of people?

Well, up until recently, the answer was nobody. But now that we are beginning to understand more about the brain, and can do very intricate brain-imaging surveys, we may literally be able to tell which activities and which emotions contribute to the greatest amount of pleasure and happiness for the average person. We could determine, based on the average life span, and the average amount of this activation expected to occur during a day, on average how much pleasure and happiness individuals will experience during their lifetimes. We could then intricately calculate the value, perhaps in terms of happiness but especially in terms of pleasure, of each individual's life. Eventually, we may even be able to figure out each decision that we make based on whether or not it was for the greatest good of society.

Now, I'm not saying that we should do this. I'm just saying that it could form the background for a sick science-fiction novel. You heard it here first.

The role of techno in our lives

It's no secret that I love techno and really any electronica music in general, but I have often had trouble explaining to non-believers exactly why it is, to quote my brother, "so money."

That is to say, I had trouble explaining why until last night. That's when I had the realization that if classical music is the Thinking Man's music, then techno is the Thinking Man Who Also Wants To Party's music. The beautiful thing about classical music is that it is sort of in the background, leaving you able to think your own thoughts and generally do your own thing while it is on. Techno, for much of the song, functions in the same way, allowing you to think on your own while it chimes away in the background. But while much classical music is always in this prepubescent state, techno merely begins as such, as a prelude to something bigger, to something greater.

And when it finally reaches the zenith, the breakdown, all you can think about doing is having a party. You've been tricked into relaxing during the beginning of the song, making the moment when it changes that much more palpable.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that you don't have to listen to or appreciate techno. If you enjoy just thinking, you should probably listen to less obtrusive music, and if all you ever want to do is party, then there's probably music for you too. But if you, like me, enjoy both thinking and partying, then turn the radio station to 92.7 the next time you're driving around. Just be careful not to swerve into oncoming lanes once you get the urge to dance.

Life without cell phones

People always talk about how the internet has such an impact on our lives--and it undoubtedly has. The problem is that the invention has had such an impact that it's very difficult to imagine life without the internet. Businesses would be changed so much--it's not only that things would go slower, it's also that certain, major parts of my life would simply not exist. 

But cell phones are a different story. I can imagine life without cell phones and other mobile devices. And let me tell you, it is a terrible, terrible existence. At college, parties would be smaller and things would never be coordinated as easily. Without cell phones, parents have more reason to be worried about their kids, kids have less freedom, and if something bad does happen when the kid is separated from the parent, it's harder to deal with the situation. 

 My friend Austin and I went to the MOMA in New York a few days ago, and both sort of wanted to go our own ways and check it out on our own. Without cell phones? Would have been complicated and probably not worth the risk. But with cell phones it was an absolute non-issue. So for anybody who thinks that I don't count my blessings often enough--you're wrong. I think about the blessing of mobile communication all the time.

A few quick links

I've pretty much become obsessed with Amazon over the past couple of days because my friend Ben made the top 100 yesterday with his book, which I haven't read yet but I'm sure will be fantastic. Congrats Ben!

But while I was looking around Amazon I also saw this list, describing the top Harry Potter reading towns in America per capita. I was proud to see that my very own Mill Valley was one of the tops on this list, at #36. Frankly, I'm surprised that we weren't higher, considering that practically everybody I know has read Harry Potter. Maybe its a matter of correlation versus causation, because I would never consciously hang out with somebody that had denied themselves the pleasure of reading these books.

So, if you're in Mill Valley, buy Harry Potter online and boost our rating on the list. And no matter where you are, check out Ben's book, if only to find out more about one of my best friends and how he thinks.

Is there any true altruism?

Historically, there have been two camps in this debate. One says that there is absolutely such a thing as true altruism, and it is possible to give to others at your own expense. The other says that all altruism is based on the selfish desires of making yourself look good or feeling more at peace about your other less-than-altruistic actions. Both sides have somewhat strong arguments and there is no reason why the argument wouldn't continue into perpetuity.

But I am going to spice up the argument a little bit and toss a third candidate into the fray: pure laziness. I don't know what else to do with them and seemingly all of my classes are changing the textbook next semester, so I have decided to donate my textbooks to apparently needy people in Africa. While I suppose that they might need the books more than I do, my real reason for doing so is that I am too lazy to send them across the country to California. I would argue that more altruism stems from laziness than one would otherwise presume. I call this theory the "Procrastination from Econ Theory." If you'd like, leave a comment and let me know if you agree with it or not. I am more serious about this than you'd probably assume.

Warriors at a glance

Yes, we lost tonight, and yes, Bill Simmons was right in his prediction of the Jazz in 5. But let us not forget that the Warriors are still one of the youngest teams in the league, and losing in the second round of the playoffs is quite impressive, especially considering that about a month ago I was wondering whether or not we would even make the playoffs. Our trip to the second round is undeniably a good development. If we can improve our free throw shooting over the off-season, re-sign Matt Barnes, and Biedrens and Ellis continue to develop, I see no reason why we couldn't be even more competitive next season.

I compare the Warriors today to the adolescent bear. As a cub, he bides his time, content to suffer minor defeats and cherishes every minor victory while he is still growing and learning his place in his society. As he gets older, he starts to show potential for greatness, but he still is held back by a quick temper and an undeserved feeling of entitlement. We are the adolescent bear, feeling that we deserve calls from the refs instead of earning our respect. But soon, we will break out, grow into an adult bear, and show the world what we can do. But that will have to wait for next season. For now, we hibernate, and grow stronger.

You can do anything, but you can't do everything

When I was younger, teachers would sometimes reminded us not to answer questions to tests in a way that they coined the "shotgun method," which is just writing down everything you can think of relevant to the question and hoping that somewhere in there is the right answer. Apparently, this was nefarious and teachers weren't going to get pushed around by a bunch of little kids screaming, "but look! I have the answer right there!"

Aside from the obvious flashback fear it gives me to think of prepubescent kids being told about how a shotgun works, the whole phenomenon frustrates me to this very day. Whose to say that there is only one right answer? Clearly, if an answer contradicts itself it isn't as good, but an answer that approaches all side of the issue should be valued, perhaps valued even above the conventional one-sided approach.

Anyway, I've come to like the idea so much that I've decided to adopt it as my new approach to thinking about stuff. The shotgun approach. Chuck Klosterman once talked in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs about how he believed in everything. I don't agree with him completely, but there's definitely something appealing about that; something so appealing that it just might be worth society considering you a hypocrite. Many of us have been told our whole lives that we can do anything. I've taken that to heart, and I still do. But implicit in that advice that you can do anything is the slightly condescending warning that you can't do everything.

But why not? So what if I don't study enough for the test to know exactly what the supposed "correct" answer is? It might be easier for a teacher to grade, but there's no reason we have to continue to impose those restrictions on ourselves once we leave school. What's wrong with the shotgun approach to life?

Entourage

Everybody likes HBO's Entourage. It's a big hit here at Vassar, and just about everybody that's seen it regards it as a "good" show. But here's the thing: nobody knows why.

I too also really had no idea why I liked it, until last night, at the end of a very long day, when I heard Mims' hit "This is Why I'm Hot." One of the most famous lines is his lyric, "I don't even need to rap//I could sell a mill saying nothing on the track." That's when I realized that people like Entourage because it is the television equivalent of a cocky rapper.

Think about it. From the very first show, the show took it as granted that Vince was pretty much a massive star. Sure, he might not have busted out yet with the highest grossing film of all-time, Aquaman, but he was already successful and famous. But in reality, nobody knew who Adrian Grenier (the guy that plays Vince) was. He certainly didn't have enough cash to support a whole entourage with such a lavish lifestyle, and he certainly didn't have enough money to live in such a sweet crib. But the show pretended that he did anyways, and everybody bought it.

The same thing goes for Mims before he busted out with, "This is Why I'm Hot," which hit #1 on the iTunes most downloaded list and was once famously played 40+ times one night at one of our basketball parties. Before he recorded the song, Mims wasn't shit. Maybe he was big with his friends because he had signed on with a record label, but he certainly wasn't big enough to justify rapping that he could sell a mill without saying anything on the track. Claiming that you are big before you really are is probably the most intriguing rapping paradigm because while it's possible that they will one day make it big, they were not big when they first said it. You're betting that you will become successful. If you succeed, you'll be even more revered because you somehow knew that you would. But if you fail, you'll lose all credibility whatsoever because now are you not only not popular, but none of your songs even make sense.

Entourage went the same direction with their TV show, claiming that they were really big and just exploring the problems that an entourage would endure once they had reached that point. And here's the kicker, which explains why both of them do it: people love to hear that other people are making it. As much as America loves the underdog, what we really love to see is people having success, basking in it, and just generally living it up. We don't really care about the irony of Mims saying that he was hot before he really was, what we care about is the fact that he is hot now, he knows it, and he's loving every minute of it. Vince and his entourage are attractive for the same reasons.

This is not to say that you and I gullible for falling for the ploy, America. In fact, you could aruge that our tastes are simply now more refined. All entertainers have at least a touch of cockiness to them. Perhaps it's just that in our never-ending search for legitimacy and transparency, we're starting to like the ones who admit it.

Solve this problem quickly, using your basic instincts

A baseball bat and a ball combined cost 1 dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

####

You should give your answer before you have time to read this sentence, and if you already have read it, you have completely ruined everything and and you are an absolute waste to society.

ANYWAY, if you did answer the question quickly, like I did today when it was posed to me, and apparently like 55% of Harvard grads did as well, you probably answered incorrectly. You probably said that the ball costs 10 cents. But this is not an algebra question. The issue the question raises is whether we can ever really trust our own reasoning. If we make simple computational errors like this all the time, which we probably do, then how can we be so sure that any conclusions we come to are ever objectively right?

Third Eye Blind explains existentialism

Wikipedia tells us that the San Francisco based-band got its name because lead singer Stephan Jenkins had just read a book about the metaphysical idea of a third mind's eye, and the rest of the band apparently agreed that the name didn't suck. But this has nothing to do with why their music helps me to understand a relatively obscure philosophical form of thought. Nor does my understanding have anything to do with Stephan Jenkins at all, who by all accounts is a loud-mouthed prick. Instead, it has to do with turning 16, getting my license, and having to commute to the city every day. 

 I think that we can all agree that we don't really have much choice over what kind of music that we listen to until we start to drive. When you're in the house, you either listen to the kind of music that the rest of family listens to, or the opposite of the kind of music the rest of your family listens to. This applies in all situations with some generational gaps; for example, if your parents listened to The Rolling Stones, our generations logical equivalent would be Nirvana, The Eagles probably correlate with Fall Out Boy, and Marvin Gaye probably leads to Jay-Z. Then again, if you choose to react against the music the rest of your family listens to, that could potentially lead to the awkward situation where the mom that grew up listening to The Beach Boys walks in to her son's room while he's blasting the Wu Tang Clan's "Gravel Pit." 

 But the thing is, all of this changes once you turn 16 and start to drive. Suddenly you technically have control over the radio, you have control over the volume, and you have control over what CD is blaring at any specific moment. Which brings us back to existentialism, which is (grossly simplified) the idea that we control each of our own universes and as such ought to take accountability for our actions. The classic example that is posed to explain the theory is that anybody who worked for the Nazis in WWII made a choice to do so, despite what kind of pressures they may have been facing to take part. But we all know that it would be unfair to apply this theory to anybody too young, because they have been proportionally influenced by their parents. 

So, what better cut off date than when you turn 16 and start to drive? Your parents might not like it, but when you get behind the steering wheel and put the pedal to the medal, you can go wherever you want. And listen to whatever kind of shitty music you'd like to. And when I was 16 I started to listen to Third Eye Blind heavily. For the longest time, I rationalized my liking of the band whenever anyone questioned me by saying that my brother stored all of their CDs in the car anyway or that I was obligated to support them since they hail from San Francisco. But when I heard two months ago that they were coming to Poughkeepsie for a show, I faced the theoretically existential but very real dilemma of whether I was obligated to drop everything and go see them. Does listening to their stuff for such a long time mandate that I am a fan, or can I just right it off to mere circumstance that I ended up hearing so much of their music? Do you blame everyone that participated in the Holocaust, or just those with a certain degree of autonomy? 

Sitting at the Chance Theater last Wednesday, with its overpriced drinks but surprisingly clean bathrooms, I realized that it doesn't really matter, and I realized that it really matters a lot. It doesn't matter why I was there because I was there anyway, but it matters why I was there a lot because I would have to explain to everybody why I went. Which, in a way, is a lot like Third Eye Blind's music: if you really listen, it's not that deep, but if you don't expect anything and just listen, it's really deep. So, best of luck to Third Eye Blind as they continue on their tour across the country. I hope they bust out again in 2007 with their fourth album. They are from San Francisco, after all.

The Warriors in the Playoffs?

I've been both a basketball and a Bay Area sports fan my whole life. That's why it has always been so sad for me to deal with the perpetually downtrodden Warriors, a team that for as long as I can remember have been absolutely terrible. And when I say terrible, I mean terrible. The team hasn't made the playoffs in thirteen years, and considering that more than half of the teams make the playoffs each year, that number appears to be borderline statistically impossible. Yet I've watched year after year as we've overpaid slow and overrated players (Adonal Foyle, Troy Murphy, Mike Dunleavy... the list continues) to go out and lose ballgames.

Finally, this year they seem to have gotten their act together to a certain extent. They traded two of the slowest players in the league and got back some youth and excitement from the Pacers. We've rattled off 15 out of 20 games, and if we win tonight, we're in the playoffs for the first time ever. It's hard not to get excited. But I've been let down by anybody in life, it's been the Warriors, and with every national media source seemingly handing them the playoff spot, I'm not exactly overzealous with confidence. If the Clippers win and we lose tonight, they have the tiebreaker over us, so they'll get into the playoffs instead.

That said, I believe in the Warriors. It's been too long, and now it's our time. Give 'em hell, boys. You've got supporters all across the country.

Andy's tips on how to make a paper look longer than it really is

One of the reasons that it's weird for me to do a blog is because I have nothing really that this blog is "about." But the problem with this criticism is that I want to blog, and I don't really have an area of expertise, so my only real option is to write about a lot of random stuff. But if there were to be something that I could definitively claim expertize on, making papers for school seem longer than they really are would be it. So, on the eve of just writing two long papers for school, I'm inspired to share my knowledge. I've split it up into three sections for your viewing convenience, a beginner level (middle school), an intermediate level (high school), and an advanced level (college). The key to remember is that this post is not about trying to cheat or gain an edge over your fellow student, it's about beating the system against an archaic rule (page minimums), and generally bringing down the man.

Beginner:

- One of the most obvious tricks is to change the font. If you want to be obvious about it you can go with Century Gothic or Arial Bold, but the classy move is to change it to Palatino Linotype. It makes the characters a little bit longer vertically without making it look comically large. Some teachers even think it looks better. What they don't know won't hurt them, right?

- Make the margins smaller. Not much too to it here. Once you get out of middle school, teachers will start checking for this kind of stuff, but when you're this young, everything still thinks you're innocent. Please, I haven't been innocent since the first grade when I used to cheat in kickball.

- Use tons of quotes, and if you can, include block quotes where you make the margins smaller. Once you get to the intermediate level teachers will start telling you that you need to "analyze the text" and other liberal bullshit like that. For now, take advantage of the fact that people are just happy to see that you've done the reading.

Intermediate:

- If the beginner method was to make the margins narrower, then the intermediate method is to make the pages shorter. Primarily this should be done at the bottom, because the way that word documents auto-format the paragraphs is always weird and it is easy to claim innocence if your page is a little too short. This is in the intermediate section, however, because it requires slightly more tact.

- Once you've reached the intermediate level, you've probably already begin to understand the beauty that is Google images. What you probably haven't realized is how these images can be your best friends in papers. Simply add a map of Paris in your paper about the French Revolution, or a picture of a typical 18th century bachelor in your essay on Pride and Prejudice, text wrap it, and you're good to go. Whoever said that a picture is worth a thousand words was a wise man indeed.

Advanced:

- Make the periods bigger. The teacher can tell by this point if you make the font size of most of the paper much larger, but just by making the periods font size 16 or 18, you can increase the length of the paper (by making the length between lines longer), and no one will be the wiser.

- People seem to have an idea that you can only put footnotes on history research papers. But who made up that rule? Footnote words from urbandictionary.com in your english papers, some existential thinker in your philosophy papers, and Keynesian thought in your econ papers. Not only does the footnote lengthen the line it's on, it also adds the descriptive line at the bottom of the page, and the useful black line separating your text from your footnote descriptions. This is why endnotes are for dorks and footnotes are for the cool kids.

All these tips are legit, tried and true. If any teacher calls you on one of them, good. Calmly explain to them that page minimums are a joke and that most geniuses weren't understand as children anyway. If possible, swipe the evidence from their clutches and run like hell. Happy lengthening!

Farming in the Snow

I've been doing field work this semester at the Vassar Farm this semester because I wanted to a) get my hands a little bit dirty, b) be outside more often, and c) see what it is like to work at a farm. Of course, all three of those desires have backfired because my hands have gotten a lot dirty, I've subsequently realized that I could have just as easily gone outside to throw a frisbee, and discovered that I not only would get to see what it is like to work at a farm, but I would actually have to do the work.

Luckily, I've been sort of enjoying it in an ironic "I deserve this" self-masticating kind-of way, and that's something. This Thursday was a prime example, when we were measuring out the fields and pounding stakes into the ground. Suddenly, white specks began to fall from the ground. Some of them hit me on my sweatshirt, and I had to push them off. It became apparent that they weren't going to stop falling anytime soon, and I wondered what we were going to do about it. Would we seek refuge somewhere? "It's snowing, Andy, in case you haven't noticed," Asher, the guy I was working with, finally remarked. I guess people don't stop being hungry when it's cold out. And that was when I found that it's much easier to count your blessings when they are staring you in the face.

Lee Yearly's lecture on the Toaist idea of useless wandering

Lee Yearly, professor at Stanford University and teacher of my current philosophy professor, was the philosophy department's main speaker this year. Flushed with curiosity, I attended. Some random thoughts from his presentation:

1) The best orators all seem to all include tons of stories when they talk. I think we all love stories because they are such a good way of showing ideas without having to explicitly explain them. I want to make a point to learn more stories. I think that the practice has been looked down upon because it may not the best way to construct a persuasive argument, but there is lots of upside to telling a short story.

2) One of his main points was that society seems to have a way of using up "useful" people, and that we all seem to have a good idea of the use of being useful, but we don't have a very good idea of the use of the useless. I don't really understand the idea, but at the time I found it quite profound, because his prime example was pre-medicine students taking organic chemistry for the sole purpose of becoming a doctor in the future, even though they hated the class. Everyone always enjoys a good pre-med joke. Stupid pre-med students.

3) One point that did resonate with me was that we shouldn't take things in the present so seriously, because we have no way of knowing whether or not they will be "good" or "bad" in the long run. That point sort of reminded me of a refrigerator magnet I once saw that said something along the lines of, "Things will work out okay in the end. If they aren't okay, then it's not the end." As was the motto of our junior year basketball team, "indeed."

I still don't love philosophy, but if it's growing on me it's because it really has a way of getting you to think. I mean, the use of the useless? That's ridiculous. But somehow, if you start to think about these things for way longer than you should, they start to grow on you. And it's pretty money.