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< | READY TO BE GRADED | | | History and Evidence of a coordinate
When you come sixteenth in a race for fifteen seats, it’s cold consolation to be told, “Don’t worry, it’s just a popularity contest”—as though life were a Family Circus strip. But I don't regard losing popularity contests as a personal defeat. I hear my social web whispering, "take the loss personally, but also constructively" -- and they're right, pragmatically: man, a social construct, must obey his social web. | | | 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 tell you what I said to Eben, that got me into this class. I'm happy to share in person, what I mean by personally deriving a personal "Republic," i.e. a vocation.
If you want an advance idea of what I'm doing, ask yourself this:
Which figure is Plato, and why?
I'm not trying to be cryptic or trivial. My father surprised me by sending me this print for my birthday, and I've lost sleep looking at it. What the hell is David getting at? | |
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| | | My guess: He's the depressed dude sitting at the foot of the bed. He is depressed because he knows Socrates points to the ceiling, and not a higher realm of existence. Perhaps he thinks Socrates is foolish not to flee.
Anyways, I really enjoyed this paper. It is very honest. I recommend getting a new checklist from an experience that allows you to connect and relate to people from different walks of life. I'll comment more later... I want to think about this some more. | | | This paper is fascinating. But to the significant degree to which it refers to the recent senate election, it is monumentally self-serving. Andrew, it is not a matter of misunderstood genius to fail to win an election that you fail to take seriously. I cast six votes out of my allotted 15 in this election: one for each candidate who took it at least somewhat seriously. I am not the only one who disregarded candidates who did not articulate why they sought office. My votes included some incumbents, some non-incumbents (admittedly including myself), but not you, because your candidacy statement consisted almost entirely of one-liners. Funny, yes; enough to knock an incumbent out of office, never. It was not misunderstood genius that lost you the election, it was arrogance. The more I think about this essay, well-written as it may be, the more I am struck by your choice to list the phonetic pronunciation of your proper name on Lawnet as "your majesty." | |
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> | -- RyanMcDevitt - 30 Mar 2008 | | | --
Hi Ryan,
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< | I respect your honest comments, which I know you intended to be both accurate and useful. Last night I woke up to loud voices from your side of the hall at about 7:50 Greenwich Mean Time; had I known that you were commenting on my paper at that moment, I would have walked next door and asked to hear you talk about my paper too.
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
You don't acknowledge this, but it does factor into your acknowledge this yourself -- perhaps without knowing it -- when you define the "arrogance"
I think this is what you were doing when you mentioned that I list the phonetic pronunciation of my name, on Lawnet, | >
> | I respect your honest comments. I only added a signature line to the end. Last night I woke up to loud voices from your side of the hall at about 7:50 Greenwich Mean Time; 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 comments in more detail. | | | | |
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> | First, your comments are gratifying, in that they show that I've finally managed to write both an "essay" and a "personal essay." In that sense you're right, my paper is self-serving. | | | | |
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> | For that very reason, I'm surprised that you limit the scope of my "self-serving" behavior to the "extent to which" I comment on my senate loss. Whatever I say "about the Senate election," or about anything else, must be about how people view me in totality, because a election, like a jury verdict, passes judgment on the entire person:
- 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
You don't acknowledge that you know this, but you know it, consciously or unconsciously: For example, you identify the "arrogance" in my Senate statement with the "arrogance" underlying my listing of the phonetic pronunciation of my name on Lawnet (literally, "YOR MAA-je-stee," which I guess in some dialects and tongues would come out sounding like "Your Majesty," though I've never heard anyone pronounce it that way). | | | | |
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< | I also appreciate your attempting to translate the binary "yes/no" of the referendum -- or social experiment, as William James would call it. By itself it was so ambiguous | >
> | So I say that I'm "learning lessons", but on a second read-through you might find cause to think that I'm not trying to learn "from the election." In fact I wrote this paper because I thought it would be foolish try to do so -- i.e. foolish to try to translate the binary outcome of the referendum (or social experiment, as William James might call it) into an English-language hypothesis. If I tried to do so, I'd be making the same mistake I warned Adam Carlis to avoid in his LSAT poll:
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
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- 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. | | | | |
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> | That's why I don't regard myself as competent to explain my Senate loss, and never attempt to do so. (You read the first step of my two-step process, "taking the loss with certitude but also socially," out of context, which abuses my attempt to set out a technique for this paper, i.e. replacing subjective-psychological with empirical-sociological arguments). Instead, in order to extract meaning from the election (whose criticism was binary), I analogized it to my Second Paper (whose criticism was nuanced), since these were written by the same person. The rest of this paper interprets my previous Second Paper in light of those nuanced reactions, which I'm competent to do. | | | | |
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< | don't know if you read the previous draft, the sort of paper a person writes when a quarter o | >
> | Your comments reflect that you never read those previous drafts, and you also have the disadvantage of not having had a long conversation with me since Legal Methods. I'm therefore not surprised that you interpret my paper as a commentary on my election loss. But I still don't see why you think you're a competent commentator on the outcome of an election. You are competent to comment on why you didn't vote for me. | | | | |
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< | There are a lot of people who know me better than you do (I'm assuming you didn't read previous drafts of my second paper, and I know you haven't spoken with me since Orienation
I'm glad you noticed that this paper was about the senate elections.
These are not the sort of comments I was looking for, but I won't turn down an opportunity to hear what people don't like about me. Thi | >
> | Instead, you do what I didn't do -- you explain the outcome of the "experiment" in terms of your own "method and hypothesis," i.e the reasons you didn't vote for me. That's fine, I'm glad to hear it. But I'm surprised to be hearing it first, not to my face but in a public place, and justified as representative of public opinion. | | | | |
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< | I'd like you to be more specific about a few things, since it's possible you | >
> | Unfortunately, you've already cornered the market for redefining the phrase "monumentally and pathetically self-serving." I'll let you go without an epithet. I'll just comment that 7:50 Greenwich Mean Time is a poor hour to be making credible arguments. | | | | |
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< | I'm glad that you find my paper "monumentally ... self-serving," and I'm not at all even if I find it a bit strange that you regard [my decision to / the manner in which I] write a self-serving paper But I do appreciate that I've finally written a
I'll respect that we're probably facing asymmetric information about which parts of my paper, since according to Greenwich Mean Time you posted this comment at 3:30am the morning after Dean's Cup.
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> | -- AndrewGradman - 30 Mar 2008 | | | | |
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< | This experiment could be interesting. But what's your hypothesis, and what's your method? 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 ..."
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 | >
> | 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 best 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. | | | | |
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> | -- RyanMcDevitt - 30 Mar 2008 | | | | |
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< | 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 best 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. | | | \ No newline at end of file | |
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