• your responses to a previous, poetic draft of this paper;
  

• to believe that his social position, and the information impacting him about others’ social positions, can never be “arbitrary,” --
• to ignore what he's learning about physics, biology, evolution, psychology, sociology, and path-dependant accounts of history—because all of these bottom-up accounts are ruled, from the top down, by Morality, --
• to ACT! as though beneath the descriptive meanings he's so adept at finding, there lie latent normative meanings, for the very purpose of finding which, his parents gave him his smarts.

• Parents face a dilemma -- their control over our choices must eventually end -- such that the rational response is to train a child to seem rather than to be.

• • and since their surveillance must eventually end too, conforming our actions, while still surveillable, towards choosing the visible trappings of what they think is best for us (call it "language control").

• just as it's easier for a surgeon to do good for organs but bad for the patient (cf effect of cheap MRIs ( 1 and 2 / my dad's mafioso stroke patient, "I knew something was wrong when I couldn't pull the trigger);
• or easy for lawyer to do well for the client but bad for society.

-- JosephMacias - 11 Apr 2008 [I removed your first paragraph, which was about a phrase I've since deleted -AG]

I rarely understand what you write, Andrew, probably because I am not 'listening' at the same frequency as you are speaking or because I am just watching when you do speak. That being said, when you write as lucidly as the prose of this essay, you really demonstrate your ability to be good. And instructive. I do not mean this to be an arrogant or condescending comment, if it comes out so. Indeed, that is precisely the opposite effect that I intend it. From the above, you have a good mind, and I wish I could 'read' it more often, in every sense of that verb.

-- JesseCreed - 11 Apr 2008

Jesse
Thank you for admitting when you don't understand what I write: It's the best form of constructive criticism -- it's my sin not to make himself understood. Your saying it by itself give the words some meaning.

-- AndrewGradman - 11 Apr 2008

It is so refreshing to hear your voice come through in your papers. Your most successful moments are those when you speak from your experience and build from there.

There may be some obvious dangers where distinctions are limited to Christian/Jew (everyone else fits where?) or when speaking on Eben's intent or thought process (unless you feel it was clear). However, given the context of this paper and having read the first draft, I think you take this risk knowingly. Since your paper is ready for grading, I'll save any constructive comments for the revision process.

-- MiaWhite - 13 Apr 2008

Hey Mia,

I appreciate your comments. You're absolutely right: I risk of offending people, by distinguishing "my Jewishness" from "others' Christianity," and ignoring everything else. But, because that distinction is central to my essay, I'd like to defend it -- and lay out guidelines for how people can help me improve it:

1. Eben once said that he regards "Judaeo-Christian" as a deceptive combination; and of course he regards himself as Jewish, not Christian. Thus I chose this distinction because [I think] it instructs him to identify with me. Its unfortunate side effect is to tell non-Jews not to identify with me; but, as you noted, it's impossible for me to speak to everyone in every place: This part speaks better to Jews, worse to others; perhaps, as you said, better to Eben than it did to you.
2. Later I tried to identify with members of all non-secular faiths, when I said, "In a pluralist society, where Jew and Christian coexist, I need to appeal to common authorities, secular ones."
3. Finally -- given that the insult to non-Jews was inevitable -- I tried to limit it by means of a cheap trick -- saying that I distinguished Jew vs. Christian as "ideal types." i.e.: Although the characteristics I assign "Christianity" and "Judaism" don't align with how most people use the words, I hoped to shift the reader's attention onto what I was assigning these labels to: i.e., two world-views that are different and each meaningful.
   • "Insofar as" (get your gun) I'm discussing the world-views and not their labels, then the question, "What common English labels already closely approximate that distinction?" becomes distracting, and even counterproductive ...
     • (If I thought such labels existed, then I wouldn't have bothered with my own inquiry; I'd just do a full-text search of a descriptivist dictionary (i.e. read a thesaurus). And we could delegate all social research to the writers of descriptivist dictionaries ... but only because that would force them to define "lexicographer" as "everyone in society" -- and then the meanings of words would be whatever I could get people to accept, and I'd be well advised to do my own research after all ...)
     • That was a joke.
   • However, I acknowledge that my using the phrase "ideal type" was a cheap trick -- because as far as I can tell, it just means this:
     • Normal language permits the reader to take into account how people other than me use a word;
     • Ideal types instruct her to understand in a word, only what I say it means.
       The latter instructs you where to stop
       -- such that "Christian v. Jewish" forgiveness = "Christian" vs. "Jewish" forgiveness.
   I know I risk ridiculousness in asserting my right to make up the definitions of words -- as when I told my friend yesterday that "Reality can get in the way of good thinking." But I actually want to define the "good writer" in precisely those terms: as one who is as able to successfully make up the definitions of words;-- or, viewed in terms of what he thinks he's doing, able to figure out exactly which terms he ought to make ideal types, and which terms he ought not to;-- or, viewed in terms of social cues, able to signal precisely when, and how, he's using ideal types, and when he's using regular terms.

I need to find a way to balance 1, 2, and 3 within the essay, because they're each important, but they work at cross-purposes.
I would appreciate feedback on how I can do that. -- AndrewGradman - 13 Apr 2008

• Given the dilemmas that parents face -- that their control over our choices must eventually end -- the rational response is to train a son to seem rather than to be.
  • parents first train us to seek things verifiably (called "language acquisition");
  • and since their surveillance of us must eventually end too, they conform our visible choices, while still surveillable, towards the visible trappings of what they think is best for us.

Of course your Jewish boy head prefers finding descriptive truths rather than normative truths; your father taught you to be this way, to make you a good boy, because it made him a good surgeon. But fathers, though perhaps moral authorities, cannot be their sons' moral authorities. If moral authority came from Rabbis, men who studied Torah, you who live in a secular era must look those who study Truth, to reveal NEW ETHICS, not ossify the old.

Media Rerum

• to believe that his social position, and the information impacting me about others’ social positions, can never be “arbitrary,” --
• to ignore what he's learning about physics, biology, evolution, psychology, sociology, and path-dependant accounts of history—because all of these bottom-up accounts are ruled, from the top down, by Morality.
• to ACT! as though beneath the descriptive meanings I’m so adept at finding, there lie latent normative meanings, for the very purpose of finding which, his parents gave him these cursed smarts.

And yet, for all that blessed perceptiveness, I've never ever seen a single one of these meanings. And that's my curse -- to be apathetic towards things that should make a mensch indignant.

• I hesitate before making Holocaust jokes, not because they make me uncomfortable, but they make others uncomfortable, and those people then attack me. What do they have, that I lack, that's making them indignant?
• When I deferred my admission to Columbia Law School for a year—and worked for the American Jewish Committee -- looking to learn what issues I should be concerned about -- I emerged a year later with a list, but I couldn't care less whether I ever checked anything off that list. Even today, I still have no idea what order I'm to go about crossing things off. The only indignity I feel is against myself.

I presented Eben the phenotype of the son of Jewish parents, who wanted me to do good and to do well, but who also wanted proof that I would do good and do well.

• Given the dilemmas that parents face, the rational response is to train a son to seem rather than to be.
• Given that their control over our choices must eventually end,
  • parents first train us to seek things verifiably (call that "language acquisition");
  • and since their surveillance of us must eventually end too, they conform our visible choices, while still surveillable, towards the trappings of doing well and good.

Of course, your Jewish boy head prefers finding descriptive truths rather than normative truths; your father taught you to be this way, to make you a good boy, because it made him a good surgeon. But fathers, though perhaps moral authorities, cannot be their sons' moral authorities. Moral authority comes from Rabbis, persons who study Torah. Which in a secular era, means, those whose purpose in studying truth, is to reveal NEW ETHICS, not ossify the old.

• to believe that my social position, and the information impacting me about others’ social positions, can never be “arbitrary,” --
• to ignore what I'm learning about physics, biology, evolution, psychology, sociology, and path-dependant accounts of history—because all of these bottom-up accounts are ruled, from the top down, by Morality.
• to ACT! as though beneath the descriptive meanings I’m so adept at finding, there lie latent normative meanings, for the very purpose of finding which, my father and mother gave me these cursed smarts.

-- JosephMacias - 11 Apr 2008

I guess this is the lesson I learned:

• One must in some way already be relevant to his readers (e.g. shared election / public "father surgeon" story) before his writing can portray him in a way that they consider relevant ...
• ...just as you need some data (from an election or a poll), before you can craft a message to your voters.
  • --> thus the "Senate Election" was a POLL, telling me that my Second Paper sucked.

Starting my Search for Gaps in the Graph-Paper Grid

I'll do both. But society's perspective being the contrapositive of mine, I'll seem to it to be doing the contrapositive of what it expects of me -- taking it "with certitude, but also socially". That is to say: I can be proud of my loss -- I can treat it (why not?) as resounding evidence of a genius misunderstood, tangible proof of how far out front I am -- as long as, good God, I also take it socially: I must remember, that society measures Truth by observing the persons who claim that it's meaningful to themselves (such that the election shook a theory of how I’m understood), which means I must act as though I regard that Jamesian Truth as meaningful to me -- as though I'll be morally condemned for forgetting that critique of useless knowledge -- as though I remembered, at the last minute, that "Wisdom is a curse, when wisdom does nothing for the man who has it" -- which everyone knows, but also forgets, when he's the object of his own inquiry.

The referendum on my Senate Statement was analogous to this community's judgment of the last draft of this paper. And so I'll write the history of both that draft and my Senate campaign: " Each failed, because I failed, to find a thesis in my personal narrative." And because my social web has whispered that it wants to hear that thesis, I'll share that too.

History and Evidence of a coordinate

• I'm proud of my loss, which is resounding evidence that my genius is still misunderstood -- tangible proof of just how far ahead of my peers I am ...

• • ...and acting as though that were true -- as though I would deserve moral condemnation for not acting on his critique of useless knowledge -- acting as though "Wisdom is a curse, when wisdom does nothing for the man who has it (once I knew this well but I forgot)," as Teiresias never got Oedipus to understand.

This second draft of my Second paper interprets today's referendum as analogous to this community's negative responses to my first draft of this paper. It writes a revisionist history of my first draft, as well as of my Senate campaign: "It failed because it failed to find a thesis in my personal narrative." And because my social web has whispered that it wants to hear that thesis, I'll tell it too.

The narrative starts with me going to Eben’s office late last semester, to ask him to let me transfer into his class. He asked me why I wanted to be a lawyer, and I told him; and he responded, “Clearly your father’s a surgeon: you were taught to view warm human bodies as cold inhuman flesh. You do not belong in my class; you and I will not get along; I do not want you in my class"; and I said something and here I am. The narrative starts with me going to Eben’s office late last semester, to ask him to let me transfer into his class. He asked me why I wanted to be a lawyer, and I told him; and he responded, “Clearly your father’s a surgeon: you were taught to view warm human bodies as cold inhuman flesh. You do not belong in my class; you and I will not get along; I do not want you in my class"; and I said something, and here I am. Before I trust you to understand the things I said immediately before and after Eben's comment about my father (who, as is now legendary, is in fact a surgeon), you need to know what came before that meeting, by which I mean, my life up to that point. I've always regarded myself both blessed and cursed to be among those who are well-educated and highly perceptive. We are both blessed and cursed, you and I, in that we cannot disprove what Voltaire meant only ironically -- that “to understand all is to forgive all" -- for, the more we learn about the Actors that harm us, the harder it is to identify the Actors against whom we want to be morally indignant. Which is great, if you’re trying to be a good Christian ... But I’m Jewish.
Before I trust you to understand the things I said immediately before and after his comment about my father (who, as is now legendary, is in fact a surgeon), you need to know what came before that meeting, by which I mean, my life up to that point. I've always regarded myself both blessed and cursed to be among those who are well-educated and highly perceptive. We are both blessed and cursed, you and I, in that we cannot disprove what Voltaire meant only ironically -- that “to understand all is to forgive all" -- for, the more we learn about the things that harm us, the harder it is to identify an Actor against whom to be morally indignant. Which is great, if you’re trying to be a good Christian ... But I’m Jewish. It's a blunt stereotype, but is what I mean: It's a blunt stereotype, but is what I mean by "being Jewish": To be commanded -- * As a Jew, I’m commanded to act like one who believes that beneath the descriptive meanings I’m so adept at finding lie latent normative meanings, for the very purpose of finding which my father and mother gave me these cursed smarts. * to act like one who believes that beneath the descriptive meanings I’m so adept at finding lie latent normative meanings, for the very purpose of finding which my father and mother gave me these cursed smarts. * I'm commanded to believe that my social position, and the information impacting me about others’ social positions, can never be “arbitrary,” -- * to believe that my social position, and the information impacting me about others’ social positions, can never be “arbitrary,” -- * to believe that no matter what I learn about physics, biology, evolution, psychology, sociology, and path-dependant accounts of history—that all of these bottom-up accounts are ruled, from the top down, by morality. * to ignore what I'm learning about physics, biology, evolution, psychology, sociology, and path-dependant accounts of history—because all of these bottom-up accounts are ruled, from the top down, by Morality.

And yet, for all my blessed perceptiveness, I'd never seen a single one of these meanings. What a curse! to be apathetic towards things that should make a mensch indignant. To hesitate to make Holocaust jokes, not because they make me uncomfortable, but because when they make others uncomfortable, those people criticize me. When I deferred my admission to Columbia Law School for a year—and worked for the American Jewish Committee, explaining that I was looking to learn what issues I should be concerned about as a lawyer—I emerged a year later with a list, but I still couldn’t care less whether I ever checked anything off that list. For all my blessed perceptiveness, I'd never seen a single one of these meanings. What a curse! to be apathetic towards things that should make a mensch indignant. To hesitate to make Holocaust jokes, not because they make me uncomfortable, but because when they make others uncomfortable, those people criticize me. When I deferred my admission to Columbia Law School for a year—and worked for the American Jewish Committee, explaining that I was looking to learn what issues I should be concerned about as a lawyer—I emerged a year later with a list, but I still couldn’t care less whether I ever checked anything off that list.

Answering that question has something to do with this: Which figure is Plato, and why? I'm not trying to be cryptic. My father surprised me by sending me this print for my birthday. I've lost sleep looking at it. What the hell is David getting at? To me the answer has a lot to do with what Peter Drucker said about marketing. Which is why I'd like to get a Ph.D. in marketing. I'm not trying to be cryptic or trivial. My father surprised me by sending me this print for my birthday. I've lost sleep looking at it. What the hell is David getting at?

• • --> thus the "Senate Election" was a POLL, urging me to change the message in my Second Paper.

• but I'll also take it socially:
  • Remembering what William James wanted us to know: that the measure of Truth is the number of persons who act as though it’s meaningful to themselves (such that my election loss was an experiment, challenging a hypothesis about how I’m perceived);

Before I trust you to understand the things I said immediately before and after Eben's comment about my father (who, as is now legendary, is in fact a surgeon), you need to know what came before that meeting, by which I mean, my life up to that point. I've always regarded myself both blessed and cursed to be among those who are well-educated and highly perceptive. We are both blessed and cursed, you and I, in that we cannot disprove what Voltaire meant only ironically -- that “to understand all is to forgive all" -- for, the more we learn about the Actors that harm us, the harder it is to identify the Actors against whom we want to be morally indignant. Which is great, if you’re trying to be a good Christian ... But I’m Jewish.
It's a blunt stereotype, but is what I mean by "being Jewish": To be commanded --

• to act like one who believes that beneath the descriptive meanings I’m so adept at finding lie latent normative meanings, for the very purpose of finding which my father and mother gave me these cursed smarts.
• to believe that my social position, and the information impacting me about others’ social positions, can never be “arbitrary,” --
• to ignore what I'm learning about physics, biology, evolution, psychology, sociology, and path-dependant accounts of history—because all of these bottom-up accounts are ruled, from the top down, by Morality.

And yet, for all my blessed perceptiveness, I'd never seen a single one of these meanings. What a curse! to be apathetic towards things that should make a mensch indignant. To hesitate to make Holocaust jokes, not because they make me uncomfortable, but because when they make others uncomfortable, those people criticize me. When I deferred my admission to Columbia Law School for a year—and worked for the American Jewish Committee, explaining that I was looking to learn what issues I should be concerned about as a lawyer—I emerged a year later with a list, but I still couldn’t care less whether I ever checked anything off that list.

• or easy for a lawyer to do well for the client but bad for society;

Eben understood, and so he forgave -- If by "forgiveness" we understand, Jewish forgiveness, the forgiveness of Maimonides, "charity by stealth:" he indicted that story to my face. MY STORY: He attacked my story, not me. He attacked my background, my assumptions, my history, my sociology -- EVERYTHING EXCEPT ME. Only that kind of indictment could crack open my precocious Jewish-boy graph-paper brain-cage and tell me what to do.

And this is what I heard: it’s easier for your Jewish-boy head to find descriptive truths rather than normative truths; your father taught you to be this way, in order to make you a good boy, as it made him a good surgeon. But fathers, though perhaps moral authorities, cannot be their sons' moral authorities. Moral authority comes from Rabbis, persons who study Torah. Which in a secular era, means, persons whose purpose in studying truth, is reveal NEW ETHICS, not ossify the old._

Christian or Jew: if we are secular, we must look to Socrates. We must look to him, and forgive his mild pedophilia, because he was the first, the Big Bang, of secular ethicists. But we have too little time, and too few words remaining, in this century, and in this month of the semester, and in this paper, for me to tell you what sort of Republic I plan to derive for my life— too little time for me to explain how my response to Eben got me into this class. You'll have to ask me in person, what I mean by personally deriving a personal "Republic."

Answering that question has something to do with this: Which figure is Plato, and why? I'm not trying to be cryptic. My father surprised me by sending me this print for my birthday. I've lost sleep looking at it. What the hell is David getting at? To me the answer has a lot to do with what Peter Drucker said about marketing. Which is why I'd like to get a Ph.D. in marketing.

-- RyanMcDevitt - 30 Mar 2008

Hi Ryan,
I respect the honesty of your comments. I only added your signature to the end. Last night, at about 7:50 Greenwich Mean Time, I woke up to loud voices in the hallway; had I known that you were commenting on my paper at that moment, I would have knocked on your door and asked to hear your opinions on my paper in person.

I'm glad you consider my paper "monumentally and pathetically self-serving." It means that I've finally generated both a "narrative" and a "thesis" -- a "personal essay" that's also an "essay." It means we can finally start asking the important questions that constitute revision: how can I IMPROVE the relationship between the "persona" and the "environment" that I chose for him.

Every anecdote in a personal essay ought to pursue a common thesis, i.e. ought to advocate a self-consistent and self-reinforcing character construct. So I'm disappointed with myself, to learn that I portrayed myself as "self-serving" only in those paragraphs that describe my response to the election results. The election is just one facet of people's perceptions of me; my classmates don't act in different "capacities" when they're voting for the student senate, commenting on the Wiki, or speaking to me (or not) in the hallway. So if I seem self-serving and arrogant in one paragraph, I ought to seem self-serving and arrogant throughout.

Now, I'm not sure whether you'd accept that characterization of me. First you said that what caused you (and by analogy, much of the class) to not vote for me, was specifically my flippant Candidate Statement; but in the very next sentence you said that the "arrogance" in that Statement validated my apparently "arrogant" behavior elsewhere -- e.g. how I listed the phonetic pronunciation of my name on Lawnet. (I guess some dialects or tongues would read "YOR MAA-je-stee" as "Your Majesty," though I've never heard anyone pronounce it that way.)

Whether or not you'd articulate it, you do seem to appreciate, that people judge and act as whole personas, not segmented functions. In this paper, for example, the same persona that "arrogantly" explained why I didn't win a senate seat, also explained how Eben's class is causing me to reconsider why I came to law school. My paper will be a success when my readers, faced by the contradiction between "arrogance" suggested by certain statements and lack of arrogance in others, choose the latter characterization as "true", and treat the former as "ironic."

I don't know how the mechanism works, but I feel that you should have sensed that I neither have, nor CLAIM, insight into what features of my persona influenced the election. I think you made a mistake -- I don't know why you took, out of context, my decision to portray myself with "certitude", with "pride in my genius," when there was an ESSENTIAL second step, "behaving socially." That word sets out technique I use in the rest of the paper, for explaining how Eben's class is affecting my path through law school: I use an empirical-sociological rather a subjective-psychological account. I think that I make it very clear, and I've always made it clear, in everything I write, that I don't give any credibility to "subjective" characterizations or evaluations of intentions. I think that's the bulwark that, in a contradiction, makes ironic any of my putative attempts to explicitly characterize my psychology, e.g. as arrogant.

The "empirical-sociological" language I speak contains no verb "decide" -- only "obey." That's why I did not try to translate the social experiment (as William James might call the election) into a hypothesis that we BOTH found meaningful. One who shares his hypothesis and method AFTER gathering the data, obliges us to accuse him of writing the method to fit the data to the hypothesis.

• where HYPOTHESIS means "My data will NOT say [ZERO], i.e. NOT say [NOT Q]
• METHOD means "I define ZERO as X, i.e. as [biased data from the following poll] ...;"
• [Q] is an interesting/meaningful statement) ...

Instead, we will say that I heard a command that I refused to obey, consisting in the following social fact: some of my classmates ask me to like myself less than I currently do." I can't obey that command -- but nor can I command THEM to like me more than THEY currently do. So I changed the subject, sort of: I kept talking about myself, but I analogized the (binary) critique of my Candidate Statement to this community's (nuanced) critique of *my previous Second Paper . By interpreting my previous Second Paper in light of those nuanced critiques (classmates commented on my previous drafts, I incorporated their reactions, their reactions were different, etc. ...), I was able to construct a persona that both I and my classmates could recognize.

You explained the outcome of the election, the "experiment," in terms of the reasons YOU didn't vote for me -- some phenotype of me that you regard as both "monumentally and pathetically self-serving", and "arrogant." (How altruistic of you to remove "pathetically" from "self-serving", in a later revision.) But I don't see what makes you, or me, or any one person, competent to explain why I was the one candidate out of sixteen not to win.

• It's natural for us all to assume that there existed a social concept of me pre-existing the election;
• the hazard is for persons to conceive of the election as MEASURING, inter alia, that social fact.
  • However, it actually CREATED some new social fact, i.e. those persons' willingness to analogize its "data" to past phenomena.
    • But WHICH past phenomena?? The election never claimed to measure my social identity; and yet that's exactly the social fact that gets created in its aftermath
    • i.e.: the answer held by the public as to "How well we think the experiment measuring Andrew's social traits (e.g. his "arrogance," etc) was controlled" becomes a function of "What values certain advocates want the public to validate, and how badly they want the public to validate it."

In other words, you're competent to comment on why you didn't vote for me. That's fine, I'm humble enough to hear it. Instead, you made a serious misstep, by likening my "arrogance" to a "monumentally and pathetically self-serving" portion of my paper. I regard that as an ad hominem. In an earlier draft of this response, I tried to turn the tables on you. It would have been more mature of me to simply assert that in the context of my own paper, where the power relationship is asymmetric, (search for "In the context of my own paper") I have a special immunity against public, personal attacks. Instead, I'll paraphrase my previous comeback as an empirical-sociological claim: attempts to use the Wiki for psychoanalysis at 7:50 Greenwich Mean Time are poorly calculated to be credible.

-- AndrewGradman - 30 Mar 2008

While I have no idea what you're referring to about loud voices in the night, since I was home alone last night and reading your paper because I couldn't sleep, I do agree that 3:30 am after the Dean's Cup is not the ideal time to offer comments. It is exactly because I, and I assume others, don't know you that well that it matters what your candidate statement says. I don't have an opinion on your "public persona," and you are certainly among the majority in approaching the election facetiously. I only wanted to point out that it's most likely that and that alone which cost you. I find this paper very interesting and exceptionally well written otherwise; I wanted to comment only with regard to the one aspect on which I have commented. It looks like you're moving toward asking for more specific comments; I will be happy to offer them. (EDIT) Now that I've seen your completed response, I'll finish my thoughts. I like the way you've framed your use of the election in your paper in your comment above; perhaps I did have it out of context. I have not claimed to be competent to explain the outcome of the election; I have explained my thoughts on it and speculated as to others'. I'm perfectly aware that I could be wrong, which is why I was at least somewhat careful to qualify my speculation as such. More to the point, my response to the election part of the paper as "self-serving" is with regard to its revisionism. You denigrate as a "popularity contest" an election, which you would have us believe you took part in seriously, now that you've lost it, without taking any responsibility for, or even acknowledging, the fact that your public platform was quite literally a joke. As a factual matter, by the way, you're actually not the only listed candidate who was not elected--a write-in candidate was elected, so it ended up being 15 of 17. Finally, with regard to your effort to undercut my comments by implying I made them while drunk or some such, there is an adage that comes to mind: "when you don't have the law on your side, use the facts. When you don't have either the law or the facts on your side, pound the podium. And when that doesn't work, use personal attacks." I do some of my best thinking at night and it does not do your point any justice to make unwarranted implications about me instead of actually confronting my comments. If you'd rather not consider them, fine, disregard them. You're an excellent writer, and, as I said, this is a fascinating essay; the use of the senate thing reads as revisionist or intellectually dishonest and undermines the strong remainder the paper.

• First, I'm proud of my loss, which is resounding evidence that my genius is still misunderstood -- tangible proof of just how far ahead of my peers I am ...
• and then I’ll take it socially:
  • first remembering what William James wanted us to know: that the measure of a Truth is the number of persons who act as though it’s meaningful to themselves (such that my election loss was an experiment, challenging a hypothesis about how I’m perceived);
  • and second, acting as though one deserves moral condemnation for not acting on William James's critique of useless knowledge -- i.e. I recognize that "Wisdom is a curse, when wisdom does nothing for the man who has it (once I knew this well but I forgot)" -- as Teiresias failed to get Oedipus to understand.

• or the ease with which a lawyer can do well for the client but bad for society.

• it's a referendum on how much voters liked, and/or trusted for a job, the entire persona attempted by the Candidate statement
• = it's a referendum on the candidate's entire public persona, not just his Statement
  

One shouldn't start gathering data until he has convinced his AUDIENCE that he's properly associated [a hypothesis and a method], i.e. [properly associated "X" and "ZERO"], given that

• • HYPOTHESIS means "My data will NOT say ZERO, i.e. NOT say that [Q] is not true" and
    
  • METHOD means "I define ZERO as X, i.e. certain data from the following poll ..."
    
    • [where [Q] is an interesting/meaningful statement]
If you share your hypothesis and method with us after gathering the data, you oblige us to accuse you of writing the method to fit the data to the hypothesis.

-- RyanMcDevitt - 30 Mar 2008

You're right to notice that my paper is self-serving, but I'm surprised that you limit your observation to the "extent" to which I comment my senate loss. A paper "about the Senate election" has to be a paper about how people view me, because any election has to be:

• a referendum on the candidate's entire public persona, not just his Statement
• a referendum on how much individuals liked, and/or trusted for a job, the entire persona attempted by the Candidate statement
  

I think this is what you were doing when you mentioned that I list the phonetic pronunciation of my name, on Lawnet,

* HYPOTHESIS means "My data will NOT say ZERO, i.e. NOT say that Q is not true" and * METHOD means "I define ZERO as X, i.e. certain data from the following poll ..."

It doesn't matter that you've defined them in your mind, or that you plan to share them with us after collecting your data. Given that OUR mandate as fellow-scientists is to disprove your conclusions with zeal , we are obliged to zealously exploit any lack of [proof that you wrote hypothesis and method before gathering data]. If you share your hypothesis and method after gathering the data, you oblige us to accuse you of writing the method to fit the data to the hypothesis.

Eben's grading style is just an exemplary demonstration of how scientists should undertake that mandate. I also witnessed this, growing up in a family of engineers, at the dinner table. Thankfully I was not the target. -- AndrewGradman? - 30 Mar 2008

• Thus, I'm proud of my loss, which is resounding evidence that my genius is still misunderstood -- tangible proof of just how far ahead of my peers I am ...

• • first remembering what William James wanted me to know: that the measure of a Truth is the number of persons who act as though it’s meaningful to themselves (such that my election loss was an experiment, challenging my hypothesis about how I’m perceived);
  • and second, acting as though this social disproof were a moral condemnation of my not acting on William James's wisdom about useless knowledge -- i.e. recognizing that "Wisdom is a curse, when wisdom does nothing for the man who has it (once I knew this well but I forgot)," as Teiresias failed to get Oedipus to act like he believed.

So you can understand why, between Eben’s asking why I wanted to be a lawyer, and his telling me that I ought rather to be a surgeon, I said this: “Because I hate myself, and I want power.” I presented the phenotype of the son of Jewish parents, who wanted me to do good and to do well, but who also wanted proof that I would do good and do well. Given the dilemmas that parents face, the rational response is to train a son to seem rather than to be. Given that their control over our choices must eventually end, parents first train us to seek, whatever we seek, verifiably; that's called "language acquisition;" and since their surveillance of us must eventually end too, they conform our visible choices, while still surveillable, towards the trappings of doing well and good.

• But the tool of seeming is much better calibrated to identify doing well than doing good --
• just as it's easier for a surgeon to do good for organs but bad for the patient (cf effect of cheap MRIs ( 1 and 2 ; my dad's mafioso stroke patient, "I knew something was wrong when I couldn't pull the trigger);

1. Background on this paper

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2. Freud on Socrates

The "Big Bang" Theory of Western Civilization

• • Young Sigmund: Socrates, why are you attracted to young boys?
  • Socrates: The truth is just the opposite -- I'm satisfying my desires with precisely those people that I find UNATTRACTIVE!
  • Sigmund: Why?
  • Socrates: ... so that I can be SURE that what attracted me to them, was not their great beauty, but their great sense of justice. I'm controlling a variable.
  • Sigmund: Which variable?
  • Socrates: Here's the truth: I'm controlling beauty, in order to figure out justice. Girls are Beautiful and Boys are Just; therefore, justice is a function of the boy I happen to be having a ... dialogue with.
  • Sigmund: Is that a dialogue in your pocket, Socrates?
  • Socrates: Yes, I got it last night while thinking about the Muse. We could read it together, if you'd like ...
  • Sigmund: Help, help! Socrates is corrupting the youth of Athens!

-- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008

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3. Hippocrates on harming

Surgeon : body :: "first do no harm" : organs :::: lawyer : society :: "first do no harm" : bodies

-- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008

Perhaps a definition of what you mean by "harm" when referring to the law would be helpful? -- SandorMarton - 05 Apr 2008

1. Let medicine lead the way.

• My dad once accepted a mafioso stroke patient who explained, "I knew I had a problem when I wasn't able to pull the trigger."
• Medicine, like litigation, wastes resources. Society can neither cap the costs on health nor on justice, until it knows (ha!), "What's too much to spend?" for example, cheap MRIs create incidentalomas -- making people "likely sick" faster than it's allowing us to heal them.

-- AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008

I agree that no system can perfectly define "forest". But on a "observable behavior" level, that is exactly what systems do. Do you want to reject this feature of human intellect (defining categories and contextual levels)? Is it even possible for a human to not instinctively make these distinctions?

-- TheodoreSmith - 05 Apr 2008 [paraphrased by AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008]

Ted, I agree, this dilemma is real, I couldn't "reject" it. I mention it in my response to Jesse in the next section.-- AndrewGradman - 06 Apr 2008

4. Rousseau on legal realism

Rousseau’s lawmaker = every perceived artifact

-- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008

Is your premise, that all objects of perception are bound by conceptual forms, which we created and use as the context in which they can be perceived? If so, I don't think "law is the voice," but simply one of the voices (and probably not a very powerful one at that).

Also, along with what Sandor mentioned in 3, I think that your dichotomies (good vs. bad) may not be helpful, and may distract from your central point.

-- TheodoreSmith - 05 Apr 2008 [paraphrased by AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008]

You're right, law is one voice among many; but not everyone passes judgment on (perpetuates) attempted revolutions.

As I responded to Sandor: given that the law, like medicine and science, gets implemented in binary (i.e. plaintiffs ask questions, and courts say "Yes" or "No" / patients present symptoms, and doctors say "intervene/don't" --> teaching citizens when to become "plaintiffs," and humans when to become "patients"), I think that "good"/"bad" is as useful as any other dichotomy.

-- AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008

All acts, whether or not you call them "revolutions," get judged constantly in all kind of non-legal, e.g. social and individual, contexts that are more definite and far-reaching than what we call "law" (the pronouncement of the king in the "ingenious patriot").

Good/bad is as useful as any other dichotomy, but the dichotomy is unnecessary in the first place. Courts, for example, are not limited to Yes and No. Dichotomies make your argument more punchy, but also harder to understand; they distract from your real point.

-- TheodoreSmith - 05 Apr 2008 [paraphrased by AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008]

The important dichotomy is successful vs. unsuccessful -- the illegal behavior that accumulates into a groundswell that eventually changes the law. For example, Rosa Parks on the bus, and Hitler at his 1923 trial for the beer hall putsch.

Here you say "my real point," and elsewhere you said my "thesis." I'm not going to offer you any clear ethical advice, if that's what you mean by that. We're all first year law students. Why should I tell you what to do, when none of us will be able to do it for at least a decade?

-- AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008

True, I was not focusing on the purpose of the paper as a whole. Here I'm saying that you're not defending your particular position effectively, because your terms are too loose. =) (and no invoking the overall purpose of the paper... it makes it too difficult to suspend disbelief!)

I like the idea of the participatory paper, by the way!

-- TheodoreSmith - 05 Apr 2008 [paraphrased by AndrewGradman - 06 Apr 2008]

You seem to be making some kind of instability-of-semantics argument, which isn't that controversial to me or to Felix Cohen when you consider that the 'law' is anything that brings the coercive force of the community to bear on individuals. I suggest reading 'Law is Love' by WH Auden where he lists the forms of coercion, i.e. 'law', in our society.

In this sense, I agree with Teddy - the binary model fails because the question of what kind of law we speak of must precede the binary judgment. Since the answer to that question is indefinite and indeterminate, that falsifies the binary judgment model entirely.

-- JesseCreed - 05 Apr 2008

I love your suggesting "Law is Love."

If therefore thinking it absurd / To identify Law with some other word, / Unlike so many men / I cannot say Law is again, // No more than they can we suppress / The universal wish to guess / Or slip out of our own position / Into an unconcerned condition. / Although I can at least confine / Your vanity and mine / To stating timidly / A timid similarity, / We shall boast anyway: // Like love I say.

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5. Plato on anomie

Just as we cannot distinguish whether Plato was the ultimate Jayson Blair, or was "merely" a faithful stenographer/journalist/fly on the wall, we also don't know which is the real Plato:

• the bearded old man in white, dreaming/reconstructing a narrative transmitted through hearsay (for, as Plato informs us, Phaedo said to Echecrates, "Plato, if I am not mistaken, was ill"); or
• the young bearded man touching Plato's knee -- who perceived Socrates not as disembodied words, but as a coherent body -- as if that matters.

Similarly:

• without the bird's eye view, how can you determine when you've left the maze? How can you determine whether your maze can even be exited?
• even a "normal" maze, in which we can see from above a line between two apertures, might be unexitable: We can't see the vertical shafts. Man cannot reverse certain ancient falls; the problem is we don't know which.

-- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008

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6. Peter Drucker on the profit motive

The corporation is the best cost structure for marketing and innovating visions of justice. Market research suggests that there is a customer for an antidepressant that relieves anxiety produced when impersonal, publicly traded corporations move into one’s neighborhood: the voter and churchgoer; the unionized employee and her manager; and the senior on Medicare, University professor, and nostalgic former Marxist (reference available on request). That antidepressant will be consumed symbolically, i.e. as books, essays and editorials.

My long-term business plan is to obtain tenure at a university, so that my symbol factory will never be overwhelmed by costs. In the short term, I need to learn more about brain chemistry.

-- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008

Is the idea (in the Drucker hyperlink) that BECAUSE the corporation is bounded by profit, you are better able to be able to predict their motives/goals?

-- SandorMarton - 05 Apr 2008 [paraphrased by AndrewGradman - 06 Apr 2008]

Actually, I don't think that " the fact that there's no such thing as a profit motive helps us predict much.

The corporation appears to have a survival motive, like any legal person, because the opposite of profitability is death. I think that gives the act of Investing some moral weight: Investors tie CEO pay to some opaque algorithm balancing near-term and long-term stock price; then they increase the price of those stocks for which the CEO's rhetoric about present assets symbolizes growth in discounted long-term profitability. Investors are just gambling on the order in which corporations will die.

-- AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008

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7. Martin Luther King on capitalism

I have a nightmare, that in my lifetime technology will continue to improve. And as the menu of possible breads and circuses grows more complex, Americans will be unable to distinguish their options; and they will have only faith that their options are different; and, being Englishmen, they will lose faith in anyone’s ability to make the "choice" that is right for them. They will call their confusion Pluralism, and their agosticism Science: and they will replace legislatures with bureaucrats, and bureaucracies with corporations; elections with marketing, and monetize all Value; Senates with Boards of Directors, Presidents with CEOs ... The publicly-held corporation will assume the function of the democratic state ... but our language will continue to contrast the two.

That's really my dream. My dream is to someday teach at a business school, and share my nightmares with those people.

-- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008

I'll comment on the whole rather than individual parts. I wonder about two things: unity and obscurity. Maybe you don't mean for it to have conventional unity, but the parts do seem somewhat isolated. You explain what you want to do at the beginning and you follow the same format, but what is the glue that holds the parts together?

The other point is related. The paper (both as a whole and in its parts) is not easy to understand. Obscurity needs a purpose. Does the paper require the level of obscurity you give it? You could make your points in a clearer way - in particular, the relation between the models and your "strange positions." A more accessible text would encourage more participation.

-- KalebMcNeely - 06 Apr 2008 [paraphrased by AndrewGradman - 06 Apr 2008]

Kaleb,
"What holds the parts together?" "Why the obscurity?"

1. The act/actor/observer dilemma ( trilemma? ) holds it together --

1. The Haiku in "Background on this paper," cf Veblen on uniforms, what's the sign and what's the substance? Regarding our papers: Given that Eben is the observer, what's the act -- our papers, or us? Given that the paper is the act, who's the observer -- Eben or us?
2. In "Freud on Socrates," truth/justice/beauty become moving targets when you try to distinguish them. It's impossible to control variables.
3. Hippocrates on health: When an intervener ("observer") tries to improve society by improving a subset of it (whose boundaries he defines, good god, in terms of PROPER FUNCTION), he compromises his proper, larger goal. [Ted explained this one to me.]
4. Rousseau: See "Freud on Socrates:" Here, act/actor/observer = the problem of praxis -- when you make an idea real, how do you then verify that you haven't compromised your idea?
5. 6. and 7. (Plato, Drucker, and King): Our economy says it maximizes value (shareholder, consumer, CEO-agent), but value gets defined by their relationship.

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1. The Haiku in "Background on this paper," cf Veblen on uniforms, what's the sign and what's the substance? Regarding our papers: Given that Eben is the observer, what's the act -- our papers, or us?

• Cheap MRIs are creating incidentalomas -- i.e. it's making people "likely sick" faster than it's allowing us to heal them.

1. The Haiku in "Background on this paper" invokes Veblen on uniforms: what's the sign and what's the substance? Regarding our papers: Eben is the observer, but what's the act -- us, or our papers?

1. Hippocrates on health: When an intervener tries to improve society by improving a subset of it (whose boundaries he defines, good god, in terms of PROPER FUNCTION), he compromises his proper, larger goal. [Ted hit this one on the head.]

"Now, one way to be relevant is to upset as many people as possible."

How/why?

-- DanielHarris - 06 Apr 2008

-- SandorMarton - 05 Apr 2008

I see you are making several sub-points, but your main point seems to be that the doctor's emphasis on no harm in the direct and personal sense is roughly equivalent to the ethical requirements of bar admission, and that in both cases, the forest can be lost for the trees -- i.e. a system that focuses on the requirements of a specific case can lose the ability to see the requirements of the system. Is that right?

But my thesis is that no system can define how many trees becomes a forest. Since I can't define it, I don't try to define it.

-- TheodoreSmith - 05 Apr 2008

I agree with you: we haven't agreed on anything.

-- AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008

That's why the dichotomy is unnecessary here. Good/bad is as useful as any other dichotomy, but the dichotomy is unnecessary in the first place. Legal actions can be dichotomized, but not always (e.g. courts are not limited to Yes and No). Dichotomies make your argument more punchy, but also harder to understand; the emphasis on dichotomy distracts from your real point.

My long-term strategy is to upset assignments by upsetting people. My near-term tactic is to attack texts they associate with stability. It's old news that "The rules change as the rules are applied." By contrast, the notion that Rousseau, the very Framer of the West's vision of "society," defines "lawmaker" flexibly enough to include any artifact -- including e.g. the identity of the butterfly that started Hurricane Katrina -- that's a threat from left field.

So, that's why I prefer tracing absurd ideas to Rousseau, when, you're right, anyone would do.

"Consequently, Drucker defends the concept of corporate social responsibility, but only as a planned wealth endeavor that is profitable for shareholders, and not on the basis of the distorted view of social responsibilty that revolves around the stakeholder concept. Says he:

That such objectives (social responsibility objectives) need to be built into the strategy of a business, rather than merely be statements of good intentions, needs to be stressed here. Those are objectives that are needed not because the manager has a responsibility to society. They are needed because the manager has a responsibility to the enterprise."

-- SandorMarton - 05 Apr 2008

There is no profit motive. Investors tie CEO pay to some opaque algorithm balancing near-term and long-term stock price, then they increase the price of stocks for which the CEO's rhetoric about the underlying assets symbolizes growth in the present value of its long-term profitability.

The corporation has a survival motive, like any legal person, because the opposite of profitability is death. Investors are just gambling on the order in which corporations will die.

1. provide examples of tolerable narratives or world-views.
   
2. defend strange positions in light of these models.

I responded to Sandor: You're right, law is one voice among many; but I defined acts as revolutions, and only law passes judgment on revolutions.