April 4, 7pm: Done. Comment ruthlessly. Attack, defend, ruin my grade, ramble on a random inspiration. As always, I am trying to provoke, if not dispute, dissonance.

BACKGROUND: In my Columbia admissions essay, I said I was dissatisfied with my undergraduate debate team because it never attempted to explain WHY it was possible to defend any position. This semester I came up with an attractive-sounding reason why. I express that account in comments on two classmates' early paper ideas. (1), (2), (3).

Here, I will

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

I will save my less idiosyncratic paper idea for the third exercise, in which the school encourages us to pretend not to be ourselves -- in which, as in sibling rivalries and pissing contests,

Long peers learned to long
To be ranked by uniform
Not in spite of it.

-- AndrewGradman - 31 Mar 2008

2. 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!

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POSITION: Truth is a symptom of minority status

-- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008

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

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POSITION: Alan Dershowitz (who defends unpopular plaintiffs and makes their narratives symbolic of social malaise) is the most compliant man among us.

-- 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

I think medicine ought to lead the way. Last night my dad told me that he once accepted a stroke patient from the mafia who told him, "I knew I had a problem when I wasn't able to pull the trigger." And the boom in cheap MRIs is making people nervous (i.e. "likely sick") faster than it's making them healthy.

Surgery, like litigation, wastes resources, and society can't cap the costs because it doesn't know, "What's too much to spend, on health or on justice?"

-- AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008

I think this is an interesting point, but I think you need to make it more clear. (I feel like you tend to talk your way around your thesis but never directly express it.)

I feel like there are sub-points you are making, but I understand your main point to be that the emphasis on no harm in the direct and personal sense (for the doctor), is roughly equivalent to the emphasis on the ethical requirements of practicing law, and that in both cases, the forest can be lost for the trees, in the sense that a system that focuses on the requirements of a specific case can lose the ability to see the requirements of the system. Is that at all where you are trying to go?

-- TheodoreSmith - 05 Apr 2008

No: No system can define how many trees becomes a forest. My personal opinion? We're not losing forests for trees -- we're finding more forests than we ought to! (cf. Heller, we're finding more "Commons" than we ought to )

-- AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008

4. Rousseau’s lawmaker = every perceived artifact

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POSITION: All observable behavior consists entirely in externalities; all externalities soon become either failed or successful revolutions; Law is the voice that teaches us: (good vs. bad) / (long term vs. short term) / (surveil or don't) / (education, marketing, campaigning, trust, map-writing vs. propaganda, exploitation, enslavement, lies, art).

-- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008

Are trying to get at the idea that all objects of perception are bound by conceptual forms that we have created and used to build 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, kind of going along with what Sandor mentioned in 3, I think that putting things in dichotomies (good vs. bad) is maybe not that helpful, and a little distracting from your central point.

-- TheodoreSmith - 05 Apr 2008

I responded to Sandor: You're right, law is one voice, but I've defined acts as revolutions, and only the law can pass judgment on revolutions.

And given that the law, like medicine, gets implemented in binary (i.e. plaintiffs ask questions, and courts say "Yes" or "No" / inpatients present symptoms, and doctors say "intervene/don't"), I think that "good"/"bad" is as useful as any other dichotomy.

-- AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008

6. 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.

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POSITION: As scientific progress advances the necessary division of labor, disparities in education and training will cause neighbors to look more like magicians, and act more like magicians, and be less and less capable of empathizing with each other's actual needs. For:

• 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

7. 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.

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Position:
1. [revised cover letter]: "That is why I want to work for Bristol-Myers Squibb: I trust their opinion, more than I trust the opinion of a private nonprofit with a private agenda, because it is the function of a publicly traded corporation to answer this question correctly.
2. Die Gedanken Sind Frei is the name for the competitor's antidepressant.

-- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008

I the idea that the corporation is bounded by profit... so you are more likely to be able to predict their motives/goals correctly?

"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

Definitely not their motives: CEO pay is tied to some opaque algorithm balancing near-term and long-term stock increase. The corporation has a survival motive, like any legal person. Shareholders do not invest to maximize profit: they follow rhetoric and actions that symbolize a high present value of long-term profit.

-- AndrewGradman - 05 Apr 2008

8.
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 think these are different; and, being Englishmen, they will lose faith in anyone’s ability to provide them the RIGHT bread and circuses. 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.

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POSITION: I have a dream, that one day CEOs will use those moments when they're not being watched by Boards Directors to increase consumer rather than shareholder value.

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