Category Archives: Philosophy

Arts, Books, Philosophy

Book Review: The Score

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: If you feel like your life is just a game, this book explains why. As philosopher C Thi Nguyen explains, have we let metrics twist our values? The author argues that when we use simple, clear metrics to measure success, we often “capture” our complex values and shrink them down to fit those metrics

In the Domesday Book of 1086, a manuscript record of the Great Survey conducted at the behest of William the Conqueror, philosopher C Thi Nguyen tells us, English surveyors measured land by the “hide”: the area an average family needed to sustain themselves. No doubt that was a useful measure, but you need local knowledge to use it. Some places are more productive than others, so how much land, exactly, would the average family need? It could be 40 acres, or 60, or 120.

If decisions are taken locally, there’s little issue. But as soon as authority and powers begin to centralise, units such as the “hide” disappear, replaced by standardised measures that are easier to record and act upon. Local knowledge is forgotten. The more centralisation advances – and in our modern age it has only advanced – the greater the problem grows.

– Nguyen examines how institutions and bureaucracies use game-like scoring to control behaviour, often at the cost of our autonomy and personal joy

The Score is part polemic and part philosophical inquiry. At its heart, Nguyen’s argument is that in an effort to be objective and unprejudiced, our governments have turned metrics into targets and built rules around them. The result is that our civic life has become a superficially efficient but fundamentally amoral – not to mention inescapable – game. As well as being a philosopher, Nguyen is a lover of board games, video games, technical climbing, and even yo-yoing; or, in other words, he understands the utility of rules. Yet, he writes, that, in the desire to make life ever more frictionless and reasonable, we’ve let metrics twist our values.

Early on, for instance, he mentions a pastor who, instructed to meet a baptism quota, finds himself ignoring the pastoral needs of the rest of his flock. At least the pastor works in a setting where the problem can be aired. For most of us, fixated on annual targets in various settings, the number of likes on social media, and the steps recorded on our fitness apps, external metrics work beneath our notice, replacing our original values. ‘I have 1,000 friends and took 10,000 steps today’: supposedly makes the claimant healthy and popular.

Academia, to no one’s great surprise, is far from immune either. Nguyen argues that the US News & World Report university rankings “no longer celebrate academic distinctiveness”, because prospective students now outsource their reasoning to the US News algorithm. Do you want to fight for social justice or make a killing on Wall Street? Either way, you’ll apply to the same law school – the one at the top of the list.

More ominous examples follow. There is, for example, a US department of state metric called Tip (Trafficking in Persons), which measures the effectiveness of policies to reduce modern slavery, and sex trafficking in particular. It is well established that slavery flourishes in areas of extreme poverty. But if a country reduces its ambient poverty and, as a result, reduces sex trafficking, the Tip report’s metrics indicate failure – because conviction numbers drop off. As Nguyen explains, the metric “incentivises countries to keep sex trafficking around so that there will be plenty of traffickers to convict.”

The author’s most profound insight lies in plain sight: to quote Wordsworth, “our meddling intellect misshapes the beauteous forms of things”. Games do exactly that, and offer a refreshing refuge – for a few minutes or a few hours – from the ambiguities of the real world. The gamification of real life, on the other hand, traps us all, with no prospect of an ending.

So how do we escape a gamified world? Read more books? Take up the violin? Stick it to The Man wherever we can? Such things don’t sound like a call to revolution, and I’m not sure Nguyen’s heart is in the fight. Individuals may recover their agency – and this book will help them do so – but it’s hard to see why businesses, governments, and bureaucracies of all kinds would abandon their self-empowering rhetoric of “objective” metrics.

In the early part of the narrative, Nguyen says: “I had an entire theory about games, in which clear and simple scoring systems were the magic ingredient that opened the door to a whole world of delightful play. And I had an entire theory about metrics, in which clear and simple scoring systems killed what really mattered.” This is well put.

In an otherwise trenchant and entertaining book, critics may well point to the fact that Nguyen follows the rules of his genre very closely. Like every “popular thinker” on the shelf, he can’t resist sharing his personal journey to enlightenment. If you’ve ever read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to children, you’ll know how much young readers delight in repetition. Nguyen, to many readers, is the Eric Carle of philosophy. For those up to speed with his topic, his steady circumspection may prove exasperating.

But don’t discard him. A book, too, is a kind of game, in which “we adopt a goal in order to get the struggle that we really want.” It’s about going the long way, a particular way, using a particular method. If we truly want to understand our civic plight – and not just merely tick off some talking points – then The Score should be read. You’ll find that Nguyen has planned this particular long way round with adeptness.

– The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game is published by Allen Lane, 368pp    

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Arts, Books, Philosophy

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: This is a biography by Anthony Gottlieb. It offers a fresh perspective on one of the 20th century’s most complex thinkers by framing his philosophical evolution against the backdrop of the industrial and technological revolution  

IN October 1911, a 22-year-old postgraduate student in aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester travelled by train to Cambridge. Intrigued by mathematical logic, he wanted to brainstorm and converse with Bertrand Russell, a newly arrived lecturer at Trinity College. A few months later, Russell amazed the young man’s eldest sister by telling her: “We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother.”

And so, it proved to be. Ten years later, Ludwig Wittgenstein published his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a book that he strongly believed had solved all the fundamental problems of philosophy. It hadn’t, of course: philosophical problems are by definition intractably insoluble. Yet even though Wittgenstein would come to recant much of the Tractatus, it remains one of the 20th century’s great books.

The Tractatus is essentially a treatise on the limits of language, which, Wittgenstein argues, is useful only for the stating of facts. It follows that a great deal of what we say is literally meaningless. When we talk – as we so often do, about issues of morality, matters of religion, or questions of aesthetics, we use language within these areas that it’s simply not equipped to deal with. We are, according to Wittgenstein, talking nonsense. And that “we” includes philosophers – for they deal not in empirical statements (as scientists do), nor in tautologies (as mathematicians do), but merely in pseudo-problems engendered by the ineluctable and slippery confusions of language.

It should be said that Wittgenstein was none too happy with this – unlike the logical positivists, a grouping of naïve science-focused luvvies, who believed and accepted that the Tractatus was the final word on everything. Wittgenstein didn’t think that the only things that matter are what we can talk about, rather than what we can’t. For all its minatory sound, the Tractatus’s closing line – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – isn’t a cry of triumph but a howl of anguish. Philosophy ends not with a bang but a whimper.

Fittingly enough, the Tractatus was translated into English in 1922, the year of The Waste Land and Ulysses, and Ezra Pound’s declaration that this was “Year One of a new era”. For Wittgenstein’s book was no less modernist than Eliot’s or Joyce’s, not only in thought but in form too. A series of brief, numbered, and crystalline statements, it has an incantatory attraction that makes it one of those rare works of philosophy that you can read for pleasure.

And then Wittgenstein ripped it all up, proposing instead a radically new set of arguments fundamentally opposed to everything set forth in the Tractatus. Alas, he died in 1951, a couple of years before the publication of his second masterpiece, the Philosophical Investigations. In it, he grounded our problems with language not in logic, but in our own strictures on how language is used in practice.

Wittgenstein did more than just think. As Anthony Gottlieb shows in his elegantly brief biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes, quite a lot went on between the publication of those two great books.   

Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 to one of Europe’s wealthiest families (six days after Adolf Hitler; for a while, the two boys attended the same school). He was a peripatetic soul. Just as he gave up aeronautics to become a logician, so he gave up logic to train as an elementary-school teacher, gave up teaching to become a gardener at a monastery, and later gave that up to spend two years as a soi-disant architect designing a spookily perfect house, as austere in its design as the Tractatus, for his youngest sister, Gretl.

His love life was even less settled. One of history’s most tormented homosexuals, Wittgenstein was a tormentor in his turn. He was in the habit of proposing to women while being adamant that their marriage would be chaste. Nor were things easier for the invariably young men he loved, not least because he never told them he loved them. Wittgenstein said that David Pinsent, the dedicatee of the Tractatus, “took half my life away” when he died in a flying experiment a few months before the end of the Great War. Yet “there is no sign”, says Gottlieb, “that Pinsent was aware of such feelings… or that he felt them himself”.

And while the “boyish, kind, sensitive” Francis Skinner was assured of Wittgenstein’s love, Wittgenstein’s diaries reveal that he himself was none too certain: “Lay with him two or three times. Always at first with the feeling that it was nothing bad, then with shame.”

For all the flowing felicities of Gottlieb’s style, none of this is easy to read. Which is only right. Wittgenstein occupies such a prominent spot on the philosophical pantheon that it is good to be reminded that he wasn’t just the saintly sage as embodied in Ray Monk’s magnificent The Duty of Genius. He was human, all too human. Unimpeachably brilliant, he was also insufferably arrogant. As his no-less-brilliant friend Frank Ramsey groaned: “If you doubt the truth of what he says, he always thinks you can’t have understood it.” And for a man who argued that ethics can’t be meaningfully discussed, he spent a huge amount of time haranguing people moralistically. Norman Malcolm complained of “his tendency to be censorious”. Georg von Wright, one of Wittgenstein’s literary executors, said that talking with him “was terrible… like living through the day of judgment”.

To be sure, the person Wittgenstein was always hardest on was himself. Thoughts of suicide were rarely from his mind. More than one of his friends was made to listen while he read out a list of his lies and sins. And years after beating his pupils at a primary school in Austria, he returned to apologise to them individually. Before departing this world, he exclaimed: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” Maybe so, but one is bound to close this wonderful biography thinking that the linguistic philosopher JL Austin summed him up best: “Poor old Witters.”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes by Anthony Gottlieb is published by Yale University Press, 232pp

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Arts, History, Philosophy, Science

Quantum Leaps: John Dalton

1766–1844

FOR much of his life, the primary interest of John Dalton, an English Quaker, was the weather. Living in the notoriously wet country of Cumbria, he maintained a daily diary of meteorological occurrences from 1787 until his death, recording in total some 200,000 entries. It was, however, his development of atomic theory for which he is most remembered.

Different atoms – It was around the turn of the nineteenth century that Dalton started to formulate his theory. He had been undertaking experiments with gases, in particular on how soluble they were in water. A teacher by profession, who only practised science in his spare time, he had expected different gases would dissolve in water in the same way, but this was not the case. In trying to explain why, he speculated that perhaps the gases were composed of distinctly different “atoms”, or individual particles, which each had different masses. Of course, the idea of an atomic explanation of matter was not new, going way back to Democritus of Abdera (c. 460–370 BCE) in ancient Greece, but now Dalton had the discoveries of recent science to reinforce his theory. On further examination of his thesis, he realised that not only would it explain the different solubility of gases in water, but would also account for the “conservation of mass” observed during chemical reactions as well as the combinations into which elements apparently entered when forming compounds (because the atoms were simply “rearranging” themselves and not being created or destroyed).

Atomic theory – Dalton publicly outlined his support for this atomic theory in a lecture in 1803, although its complete explanation had to wait until his book of 1808 entitled A New System of Chemical Philosophy. Here, he summarised his beliefs based on key principles, including: atoms of the same element are identical; distinct elements have distinct atoms; atoms are neither created nor destroyed; everything is made up of atoms; a chemical change is simply the reshuffling of atoms; and compounds are made up of atoms from the relevant elements. In the same book he published a table of known atoms and their weights, although some of these were slightly wrong due to the crudeness of Dalton’s equipment, based on hydrogen having a mass of one. It was a basic framework for subsequent atomic tables, which are today based on carbon (having a mass of 12), rather than hydrogen. Dalton also erroneously assumed elements would combine in one-to-one ratios (for example, water being HO not H2O) as a base principle, only converting into “multiple proportions” (for example, from carbon monoxide, CO, to carbon dioxide, CO2) under certain conditions. Although scientific arguments over the validity of Dalton’s thesis would continue for decades, the foundations for the study of modern atomic theory had been laid and with ongoing refinement were gradually accepted.

Prior to atomic theory, Dalton had also made a number of other important discoveries and observations in the course of his work. These included his “law of partial pressures” of 1801, which stated that a blend of gases exerts pressure which is equivalent to the total of all the pressures each gas would wield if they were alone in the same volume as the entire mixture.

Dalton also explained that air was a blend of independent gases, not a compound. He was the first to publish the law later credited to and named after Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles (1746–1823). Although the Frenchman had been the first to articulate the law concerning the equal expansion of all gases when raised in equal increments of temperature, Dalton had discovered it independently and had been the first to publish.

Dalton also discovered the “dew point” and that the behaviour of water vapour is consistent with that of other gases, and hypothesised on the causes of the aurora borealis, the mysterious Northern Lights. His further meteorological observations included confirmation of the cause of rain being due to a fall in temperature not pressure.

Further achievements – John Dalton began teaching at his local school at the age of 12. Two years later, he and his elder brother purchased a school where they taught some 60 children.

His paper on colour blindness, which both he and his brother suffered from, and which was known as daltonism for a long while, was the first to be published on the condition. Dalton is also largely responsible for transferring meteorology from being an imprecise art on folklore to a real science.

Chronology  

. 1793 Meteorological Observations and Essays published

. 1801 Dalton states his Law of Partial Pressure

. 1803 Outlines his atomic theory in a lecture. This transformed the basics of chemistry and physics

. 1808 A New System of Chemical Philosophy published.

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