Some sweeping around

I’m gonna start password-protecting some of the more confessional posts, in hope to one day make this a presentable webpage to people who otherwise wouldn’t understand the rollercoaster stuff. The password for those is “confessional”.

Well, what’s the point of telling people the password? Well, I’m broadcasting it to the RSS susbcribers and giving most people a chance of finding this post open for a few weeks.

Houellebecq

Pour lire un bon roman français comme ce Houellebecq que j’ai commencé aujord’hui, c’est un peu comme fumer. Un cigarette fonctionne au même temps comme un anxyolitique et un stimulant, et c’est ça qui donne au tabac sa avantage vis-a-vis les benzodiazépines, qui font bien pour le stress mais pas pour la productivité. Moi, j’avale un rivotril par nuit et une long-acting méthylphénidate pilule par le matin; l’addiction au tabac peut attendre quelques ans. Je ne fume qu’en des situations extrèmes, et on peut simuler cette sensation d’être au même temps fatigué avec le mond et l’engageant au même temps, il semble, par ce type de literature fatigué et energetique. On est pris même par ce désir d’écrire en français, pourtant que on n’a jamais eu confiance dans sa capacité pour ça et pourtant qu’il semblait  qu’on avait perdu la habilité d’y lire. 

Je ne suis ni même inquiet au sujet de ma grammaire. Ça, c’est probablement horrible, mais seulement hier j’etait practiquement incapacité pour le français.

Pride

I have fleetingly expressed my distaste for the cheap muckraking of Furious Seasons and ilk, too debased to fulfill the credibility standards I have set to be satisficing. There’s a subtle difference, most famously put forward by Herbert Simon, between satisficing and satisfactory — between “good enough” and unqualifiedly good. Simon is not arguing pragmatics; in fact, his largely unfulfilled ambition was to contribute to economics by adding a layer of realism onto the formally strict definitions of rational decision-making.

In a sense Simon was largely unaware of the deeper intellectual program of mainstream microeconomics of his day, and was ineffably swallowed by the fringe that was pushing superficially similar ideas such as “fundamental uncertainty” and “animal spirits”, thus failing to make the theoretical impact that the restricted rationality theories of Kahneman and Tversky — which where framed properly in the contemporaneous noncooperative game theory framework and hence useful for the progress of economics.

It can’t be said that Kahneman and Tversky stole Simon’s thunder, for his concept of “satisficing” worked at the primitive level of late 19th-century marginalism and couldn’t be phrased in terms of convex analysis, then the cutting edge framework for progressive generalization of economic theory. But there are epistemological implications from the theory of satisficing that failed to make a thunder in the then-emerging “pragmatic” philosophy of science spearheaded by the likes of Kuhn and Lakatos.