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