The Blind Dice-Thrower

I just got this e-mail from the Church of Scientology:

Dear BDT,
We are surveying Scientologists to find out how bright they are. Make out the following.

Thank you.

Kate Clarke

Consultant

Dianetics and Scientology Information Center

Clearwater, Florida

(727) 214-5743

QUESTIONNAIRE

Fill this out and send it in.

1. What is the most certain thing you can get about yourself?

2. What is the most certain thing you can get about your ability to communicate?

3. What is the most certain thing you can get about your ability to work?

4. What is the most certain thing you can get about your ability to help others?

5. What is the most certain thing you can get about children?

6. What is the greatest certainty that you can get about groups in general?

7. What is the greatest certainty that you have about mankind in general?

8. What is the most certain thing that you can get about animals?

9. What is your highest certainty about the physical universe?

10. What is your greatest certainty on the subject of spirits?

11. What is the greatest certainty that you can get about God?

12. What is your greatest certainty about life?

13. What is the greatest certainty that you have about Scientology?

14. What is the greatest certainty that you have about L. Ron Hubbard?

15. What is the most certain thing you can be certain of in present time?

16. What is the greatest certainty that you have about the future?

-------------------------------------------------------------

I'm not entirely sure what these questions are actually asking. Some of them are so badly worded and the whole e-mail is terribly presented. Part of me wants to know what the Church Of Scientology think the correct answers to these questions are. I suspect if I answered them honestly they would regard me as not very bright. If there was a promise of feedback from this then I would fill it in but as there isn't it isn't worth responding. These people are notorious for hounding you until the end of the Earth, so it's not worth provoking them.

I forget what new albums will be out this year so here is a list of them for future reference.

Alela Diane- To Be Still - February 09
Pure Reason Revolution- Amor Vincit Omnia - March 09
Yeah Yeah Yeahs- It's Blitz! - March 09
Sonic Boom 6- City of Thieves - April 09
Lacuna Coil- Shallow Life - April 09
Green Day- 21st Century Brekdown - May 09
cKy- Carver City - May 09
Manic Street Preachers- Journal for Plague Lovers - May 09
Courtney Love- Nobody's Daughter - June 09
Placebo- Battle for the Sun - June 09
Muse- TBA- Summer 09
Spinnerette- A Prescription for Mankind - June 09
Auf der Maur- Out of Our Minds - 2009
My Vitriol- TBA - 2009
Garbage- TBA - 2009
Dogs Die In Hot Cars- Dogs Die In Hot Cars is making Pop Nonsense - 2009
No Doubt- TBA- 2010
Tenacious D- TBA - 2010

Imagine a centipede game is being played by perfectly rational agents. As has been well-established, the first player reasons using backward induction, and also reasons that their opponent will use backward induction, and therefore to maximise their own utility they are forced to end the game immediately, taking 1 util for themselves and none for their opponent, even when it was possible that they receive (about) 100 utils each had they co-operated.

Here's the question. If the first player didn't end the game immediately, the second player would have good evidence that the first player plans to co-operate for some time to come. If the first player made the co-operative decision on the first turn, then they will on most of the rest since they are identical scenarios. Therefore the second player ought also to co-operate. Even if the other player decides to end the game prematurely in the future for no discernible reason, you still make more than you would by playing an ultra-defensive strategy. However there still is some kind of paradox looming, as the end-game will still be in the minds of the players. I haven't worked this one out yet.

Centipede could be one of those rare games that turns up in game theory where it pains the player to be rational, just as Lewis thought the Newcomb's game paid off those less rational 1-boxers. One problem with this game is about knowledge. In the centipede game, your opponent knows that you are "rational", therefore you cannot choose to play irrationally because it is a given fact already how you will play. Hence decision theory of this sort becomes ironically indecisive and determined. We need to use the concept of common belief rather than common knowledge. In Centipede, if you play the co-operative move you also falsify the other player's belief, which will cause them to play differently. Not irrationally. It just happens that their behaviour is identical to the behaviour of an irrational agent, but not their thought process. This is a phenomenon that is observed very frequently in the world of professional poker.

Suppose CBR, common belief in rationality, and suppose that Backwards Induction is essential for rationality. My earliest instinct then is that, given both players have CBR, if the first chooses to play co-operatively, the second player no longer has CBR, i.e. he comes to believe that the first player cannot be using backwards-induction and is therefore irrational. However, this cannot be the case. There are players who do use backwards induction but who still co-operate because they expect or suspect their opponent of being able to sympathise with them. So when the first player co-operates, essentially the other player still cannot tell whether the first is using BI or not. Like in poker, when an opponent makes a play you can only tell that they are not an intermediate, they could still either be an expert or a beginner.

I'm just reading about this supposed paradox that apparently results from Jeffrey's logic of decision. It's a lot like the Newcomb's Paradox in that it raises the issue of whether causal back-tracking is metaphysically supported.

The problem is this. You are in the cinema and want some popcorn. What you prefer most is for you to go to the lobby, there to be popcorn, you buy some, return to your seat and enjoy it, even though you will miss some of the film. The next best option is if you decide not to get popcorn and there really wasn't any there, so at least you didn't miss the film. The next best alternative is if you go down to the lobby and there is no popcorn so you miss some of the film. The worst option is to miss out on popcorn by deciding not to leave the cinema, and find on the way out that there was popcorn there all along.

At the same time, you are fairly sure that there is no popcorn out there, because there very rarely is. Also, you're certain that if there was popcorn out there, the owners of the cinema would project onto the screen a subliminal message, reading "POPCORN!!!" every few seconds. You consider yourself to be suggestible, so if this were occurring you would definitely choose to go and look in the lobby for popcorn.

Sobel argues that of all the alternatives, the probability that popcorn being in the lobby given that you look for it, and the probability that there will be no popcorn given that you don't look for it, are both close to 1. As the first of these alternatives has the highest expected utility, using Jeffrey's conditional decision theory we ought to go and look for the popcorn, which would otherwise seem irrational given that we already think the probability of popcorn being there is suitably low.

This is similar to the Newcomb's problem because in both cases we suppose that our future actions could causally determine a past action to come to pass or be reversed. We know that the popcorn is either already out there or not. Our deciding to go and look for it should not affect it's being there. This is my conclusion and that of the 2-boxers, a group I am proud to share with the great David Lewis. I reject Sobel's argument for the following reason:

We are told simply that if they had popcorn then they would be displaying the subliminal message, and we would decide to look for popcorn. But presumably we could decide to look for popcorn independently of the subliminal message, which it seems is a lot like what's happening now to the 1-boxers. Can we be sure that we are in an identical mental state now to how we would have been had the subliminal message been aired, i.e. that it would cause us to invoke decision theory and make the reasoning we are currently using? Let's just say yes for the purpose of the problem. Now, if it were also established that these thoughts of decision theory would not have entered my head unless the subliminal message was displayed, then I would be certain (or at least highly suspect) that there is popcorn outside and go looking for it. If it isn't impossible, i.e. if I could independently think of that reasoning without the message, then I would need to know the frequency with which my thought is caused by the message and the frequency with which my thought is caused by my own curiosity or urge for popcorn. If I don't know the frequencies then I probably end up making a principle of indifference between them, assigning them equally 1/2. I therefore only go outside to get the popcorn if my utility for "leave and get popcorn" is more than double my utility for "stay and miss out on popcorn".

That is my current conclusion. I'll red what Sobel has to say about it and possibly edit this post later to account for belief revision.

I think my favourite story during my childhood was that depicted in the Iliad, of the Greek invasion of Troy, focusing on Odysseus, Agamemmnon, Menelaus, Achilles and Diomedes, and Hector and Paris. When I was young we used to listen to a story in the car when we were driving on holiday. There were two audiobooks, "Odysseus: The Hero Of Them All" and "Odysseus: The Journey Through Hell", co-written and narrated by Tony Robinson. For about 5 years I tried to find these on the internet as we had had them from the library, and I finally managed to track them down and buy two copies of them, although I haven't re-listened to them yet because I'm waiting until I can convert them to a digital format.

But these stories were one of the best parts of my childhood, the story of how Odysseus was called away from Ithica to fight in a war he didn't want to fight in, and the events of that war and his unbelievable journey to get home after the war. Tony Robinson managed to express comedy and tragedy perfectly, expressing deep sorrow for the deaths of Odysseus' comrades, the predicament of Penelope and the suitors, and Odysseus' unceasing fury when he returns.

Since then I've read or watched at least three other depictions of the Trojan war. Firstly, there is the Iliad, wrriten by Homer, which the others are mostly based on. It's a tough read, mostly about constant warfare, talking about one hero killing another and very hard to follow given the number of names involved. There's one section close to the start that simply lists all the names of the Greek heroes and contingents sailing for Troy which lasts several pages. Secondly, there's Shakespeare's play "Troilus and Cressida", which puts forward some strange differences to the original. For example, Pandarus is not an archer but a merchant, and Troilus is considered to be a good fighter who at one point fights off both Diomedes and Menelaus (I think).

Thirdly, there is the quite new film called Troy, starring Brad Pitt and Eric Bana. I've actually seen several film and TV adaptations of the Trojan war, but that one is by far the best. I now cannot even imagine the character of Achilles without thinking of Brad Pitt. Achilles was thought of as being the most beautiful man alive, and so is Brad Pitt. What I particularly like about the film is how you are never sure which side you prefer to win. The Iliad is extremely pro-Greek (and "Hellenocentric"?). You only ever see Hector dressed for full battle. Quite often you only hear about him on some other side of the battlefield cutting swathes through the Greeks. But the worse thing about the Iliad depiction, I believe, is that when Achilles challenges Hector to fight, Hector runs away from him leading to a humiliating chase around the walls of the city before he finally gets caught. And then he's killed with one stroke of Achilles' sword. I much prefer the depiction of the fight from the film Troy, where Hector is shown to know that he will die fighting Achilles but goes anyway as a matter of duty. Troy is one of the few Hollywood films with a fight where the audience honestly does not know who to root for. As far as the audience is concerned both Hector and Achilles are virtuous and good. That's extremely rare for Hollywood as it's almost always "Goodie vs. Baddie". In Troy there is a baddie, the despotic king, Agamemmnon, but the general attitude is that both the Greeks and Trojans are good (or they're all equally bad?), and that this war is an inevitable and tragic result of politics.

The film does have some ridiculous alterations to the plot which ruins it though, for example Agammemmnon being killed by Briseis, and also Hector killing Menelaus during his duel with Paris. There's also a suggestion that Hector kills Ajax, and there's a complete lack of the other important characters like Diomedes, Antilochus, Idomeneus, Aeneas, Sarpedon, "little Ajax", Cassandra and a few others.

When I read the Iliad a few years ago, I was quite disappointed about the ending, Hector's burial. I quickly began reading the Odyssey and was saddened to see a huge gap in the events that I had learned about growing up. Where was Achilles' death? Where was Ajax's suicide? Where was Paris' death, killed by an arrow shot by the bow of Hercules? (tipped presumably with the blood of the hydra) And of course, the famous wooden horse, the murders of Priam and Little Ajax's rape of Cassandra? (I think he's referred to as Oilean Ajax but I prefer "little Ajax"). In the film, Troy, I believe they had Briseis kill Agammemmnon to introduce some feminine influence, but they could have included the Amazonian Queen Penthesilea, who Achilles killed. They could have had the Ethiopian king, Memnon, who killed Antilochus and was in turn slain by Achilles. So much happens between the Iliad and the Odyssey which Homer only vaguely refers to during the Odyssey. Where did all this stuff even come from? Who wrote about those other stories?

What I'd quite like to do is collect all the sources, all of the stories, and collect them into one good novel, probably about as long as The Lord Of The Rings. Absolutely every part of the story could be included, even Shakespeare's version, everything that doesn't contradict with some other bit anyway. Plus, like the film, Troy, the metaphysic of the novel would be atheistic, it would even resemble our best current scientifically influenced metaphysical theories as best as possible. For instance, Achilles would not be immortal, but purely an excellent fighter. Many others might believe him to be immortal, although he probably doesn't believe it himself. The novel could be written based on the notion that the Iliad represents an exaggerated and mystical history of the original event. Everybody believed Achilles was immortal, then he was shot in the heel with a poison-tipped arrow, and suddenly the story would become "He was dipped in the River Styx as a child and was immortal everywhere except his heel." There would be no gods fighting on the battlefield, guiding arrows to their targets, or arguing on Mount Olympus between scenes, although the characters might reasonably believe it.

The toughest part of writing such a novel would be how to treat the Odyssey. How do you explain a cyclops or Scylla, a journey through Hell or sirens with a naturalistic explanation? It's possible that there would actually be a good opportunity for creativity to re-write the Iliad, explaining that most of the widely-known story is simply story, and that what really happened was actually completely different but somehow still related closely enough to make the plot intriguing. There's even the possibility you could develop the character of Odysseus to make him more sinister and cowardly than he was thought to be. If you think about it, if all that's left of an army is its general, who's washed up on the Ithican beach, you'd think there's more likely than not some foul play going on there. We already know that he was very quick-thinking and a good problem-solver, so the story could include his fabricating the whole story of the Odyssey. There is definitely a great potential for a brilliant story here. Possibly the story could be developed to include the stories of Aeneas, Diomedes, Menelaus and Agamemmnon after the Trojan War to make it a true epic tale that ties up every loose end.

I was reading Peter van Inwagen's introduction to metaphysics recently, and he uses an argument against Anti-Realism which I've seen all too often and which I think badly misrepresents the Anti-Realist. I've seen the same sort of argument used against the Sceptic. First, let's just throw some definitions out there:

Global Scepticism (GS): The proposition that knowledge about any proposition is impossible.
Global Anti-Realism (GAR): The proposition that there is no objective reality, and therefore no true or false propositions.

The van Inwagens of this world use the following sort of argument:

GS is self-contradictory because if you believe that there is no knowledge, then how can you know that? It's simply self-contradictory to assert that all propositions are unknown because to assert that statement is to assert that that statement is known, and that statement is a member of the set of all propositions. Therefore even asserting Global Scepticism is as meaningless to your audience as asserting "This statement is false".

Likewise with GAR. If you argue that no propositions have the property of being true, you automatically assert that that statement is true.

Now in the cases of both GS and GAR there is one consistent position that van Inwagen may allow. Call these WGS and WGAR respectively ("W" for "Weak"). WGS states that "The only known proposition is that no other propositions are known." This is a lot like the famous saying of Socrates which went something like, "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing", but don't confuse the two as the latter is a kind of aphorism, whereas the former is truly believed by an advocate of WGS. It could be argued that WGS is also contradictory because once you know that you can't know anything, you may also know a few more things, like "Either nothing is known, or nothing is known." But I disagree. The whole point of Global Scepticism is to deny knowledge of everything, including that there are axioms of logic which entail that "A or A" follows from "A". I think WGS and WGAR are consistent positions, but they are a little arbitrary.

van Inwagen argues that a GARist is forced to express something like "It seems to me that there is no objective truth", which is not incompatible with "It seems to you that there is an objective truth.", and that therefore the GARists are forced to just shut up and let the realists carry on with their lives.

I believe that both GS and GAR are consistent propositions, and this is why. They should not be expressed as I have expressed them in my original definitions, which are quite similar to how most people define them. Instead they should be defined like this:

Global Scepticism: If knowledge is defined as XYZ, then it is not the case that knowledge exists. (Or there exists no proposition which has the property of being known).

Global Anti-Realism: If objective truth is defined as ABC, then there is no proposition with the property of truth.

These sentences are not self-contradictory, because they do not self-refer. These positions actually assert that the opposing views (let's call them Realism and Epistemic Realism) are false, at least given the definitions of truth and knowledge available and agreed upon. Global Sceptics are not asserting that they know that nothing is knowable. Instead they are asserting that if we adopt a certain definition of knowledge, then nothing in the world corresponds to that definition.

This position is sometimes referred to as Pyrrhonism, and distinguished from regular Scepticism. Why it is distinguished I have no idea, as it's immediately obvious that Scepticism, understood as how I defined Global Scepticism at the beginning of this post, is self-contradictory, whereas Pyrrhonism is quite sensible. I know of no similar distinction with regard to Anti-Realism though. All the GARist is really pointing out is that you cannot reasonably accept some definitions of "truth" and also believe that anything is true, because actually nothing has the property that you define as truth. That is all that is going on. I think that most Anti-Realists are merely saying that truth is an impossible thing, and what is important is some other thing that they may try to analyse. Likewise most Sceptics argue that knowledge, defined as justified true belief, does not exist, but that there is some other epistemic notion which is important and worth looking for and worth having.

It occurred to me recently that petitions are almost completely pointless. If I were the Prime Minister and I received a petition signed by 10 million people that called for a stop to X, I would infer that probably 95% of those 10 million people really don't care much about X and whether it continues or not. Because it's just far too easy to sign a petition. There's nothing to lose. In their programme, "Bullshit!", Penn and Teller demonstrated as much when they persuaded people to endorse banning water and other such ridiculous notions because they just didn't think about what they were signing and inferred that it was easier to sign than not.

I have a solution! In every town and city we should have a public building devoted to solitary reflection. When you sign a petition endorsing some action occur you must also agree to attend one of these centres for one hour and sit there on your own and reflect for an hour upon the cause that you think is so important. Well, of course you wouldn't be forced to think about that, but you are essentially giving up one hour of your time to show some tiny degree of dedication to the cause. You can't read, do crosswords, or even talk to other people, but just sit, in relative comfort, and think about something. You're entitled to meditate but you cannot sleep, otherwise it would be too easy to appear more concerned about a cause than you really are, by just sleeping through the hour. Only when you have attended one of these events is your vote on the petition made official. If I were the prime minister and was told that 10 million people had individually given an hour of their time as an expression that they believed in some cause, that a total of 10 million hours had been sacrificed, then I would take immediate notice of the cause, and do something to satisfy the people. Until this state of affairs has become actual, petitions will continue to be meaningless.

For the past couple of years I seem to have become more and more addicted to music. Since I first realised how to get lots of it for free I've been collecting huge archives of songs of all kinds of different music. It never used to be so bad. I would get a new album or a few singles and listen to them and if I liked them I'd add them to my general playlist which would rotate songs randomly. Then I found methods to get more music, faster than I could really listen to it. So now I have a huge waiting list of music to listen to, and yet I'm still pre-occupied with adding to the list rather than listening to any of it.

I think my central reasoning is that what I'm doing is stocking up on resources that will last me throughout my life, and the opportunity to get it so easily may not always be available.

I've also begun to realise that the only reason I think I'm better than other people is to do with my musical taste. It isn't because I'm more intelligent or know more than them (which is usually true too), but because I have better musical taste. I'm tempted to think that musical taste is entirely subjective, that of course everybody thinks that they have good musical taste like they think they have a good sense of humour, and that therefore the evidence that you believe either of these ought to make you doubt them. Most people believe them and are wrong, so therefore my belief in the same is probably wrong too. But at the same time, I've never come across somebody who has the same attitude to me. I don't think that's because I'm particularly arrogant. I think it's more likely that most people don't claim to be better in virtue of their musical taste because they would admit that they had not really been very moved by music anyway. They're modest and they've got a lot to be modest about. If I came across somebody who shared my attitude then I would want to know what they'd been listening to in order to have such an attitude, and as a result I'd possibly discover new good music and have more justification for my own attitude.

One genre of music that I'm currently not very interested in is classical music. I suppose some sophisticats would instantly make disparaging remarks about my musical taste were they to learn that. I know a few classical pieces, a few names of pieces and a few names of composers but I think the only case where they all overlap is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. I don't think I can identify the tune, composer and name of any other piece. I believe it's simply a mistake that classical music is superior to modern music, or even foundational to it. I'm mostly only interested in music that contains the two greatest instruments. Firstly, the guitar. It's just so much more versatile than a piano. You can get it to do far more. A piano is just a glorified drumkit. Secondly, there is no instrument that can express as much emotion as the human voice. and because it's so natural, there's nobody who can play any musical instrument as well as most people can sing. I think that people who prefer classical music to modern pop are probably quite emotionally stunted, to the point of solipsism.

One of my favourite quotes of Napoleon is the following:

"Death is nothing. But to live defeated and without glory, is to die every day."

I think he was probably influenced to say such a thing by reading the Shakespeare play, Julius Caesar, where the title character says:

Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once.
--Caesar [Julius Caesar 2.2.32-33]

A similar sentiment is expressed in this quote reported on the internet to belong to Marcus Aurelius:

"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."

However I am 90% certain that Aurelius never said this and that the above quote is a bastardised version of his opening paragraph of Book XII of the Meditations, which reads quite differently:

"If then, whatever the time may be when thou shalt be near to thy departure, neglecting everything else thou shalt respect only thy ruling faculty and the divinity within thee, and if thou shalt be afraid not because thou must some time cease to live, but if thou shalt fear never to have begun to live according to nature - then thou wilt be a man worthy of the universe which has produced thee, and thou wilt cease to be a stranger in thy native land, and to wonder at things which happen daily as if they were something unexpected, and to be dependent on this or that."

Whether he said the first quote or not, I like it and prefer it to what he actually said. But are any of these quotes right? Let's just make a brief analysis of them. They seem to be saying that bravery, valiance, risk-seeking, glory-seeking behaviour is a necessary virtue for a good life. The quotes are metaphorical, saying that to live without such a virtue is not to live at all; which we should understand as not living well. They remind me a little of Bertrand Russell's quote:

"Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so."

I'd like to think all the quotes are metaphorical, otherwise they are relatively de-humanising. It's quite a common sentiment in the world that such-and-such a person, lacking such-and-such virtue or property, isn't really living at all. Sometimes these statements are deliberately hyperbolic, for example if I were to say, "You haven't lived until you've tasted this chocolate cake!" I should interpret them as saying:

"Without glory, life is unfulfilling."

The majority of people lead inglorious lives, but seem reasonably satisfied with them, finding value in other virtues. Or perhaps they equate less significant victories in their lives with glorious victories. Where Napoleon fixates on events like Marengo and Austerlitz, maybe for your typical peasant such events as a marriage, child or even a successful party or work bonus counts as a glorious victory. Does Napoleon reserve the glory for himself and his subordinate generals, or for every soldier in his army, and by extension the citizens of France who share in their glory? I don't think he believes in any such thing as shared glory. While Napoleon may revel in his role at Marengo (which he probably and rightfully believes to be the most important role), other soldiers can revel in their own roles at Marengo. Certainly he would say that the private who fights heroically without credit has more glory than the general who commands badly but contingently ends up on the winning side, and is acknowledged as such in dispatches.

Glory cannot be bought or sold and only in a perfect world is it conjoined with credit. Some people would say that there's little to distinguish bravery from stupidity. As they say in the movies when the hero makes a rash and dangerous decision, "He's either very, very brave, or very, very stupid." And glory or death, the foci of our enquiry, are the most likely results of bravery. So if the equivalence of bravery and stupidity holds credence then we could define glory as either stupidity plus fortune or merit plus opportunity. As Napoleon also said, “Ability is of little account without opportunity.” Even the best need a little bit of luck, or they need to at least not be cursed. If we are elite then we are given two choices. We can play it safe, take few risks and expect to reside in upper mediocrity, or we can take the endless risks and have a chance to be the greatest. I don't think that any of the sources of the quotes ignore the non-elite. I believe they would argue that the non-elite can and should make the same risk to be greater than their talents deserve: to beat themselves. But I think the sources are specifically implying that if you are elite and choose to remain in mediocrity then you're the least virtuous. To pass up on a chance at greatness, no matter how small the chance, is despicable, since for most people there is no amount of opportunity that in conjunction with their ability will result in true glory.

Such a theory is hinted at in the episode of Red Dwarf, "The Inquisitor", that I've always found intriguing. In it, the Inquisitor is said to be an agent who lived until the end of the universe and somehow invented a time machine. He then decided that only he could give life a purpose by acting upon his theory of the virtuous life. So he goes back in time to every person who has ever lived and if their lives are deemed worthy they are allowed to remain actual. If not then he deletes them from actuality and they are replaced by one of their inactual counterparts. The intriguing part is that for every person he generates a psychological clone and has the clone judge the original. Each person judges themselves as to whether they succeeded enough in life given the ability and opportunity they were given. Both of those facts we regard as being pre-determined though, or at least they are out of our own control. So it seems unfair to judge somebody on two facts that were out of their control. There must be a third factor then, akin to effort. The question then becomes, given the abilities you were born with, and the opportunity (luck) that befell you, have you tried hard enough? What you have achieved ought to be a direct function of these three factors. Those who I think the sources condemn are those whose ability was abundant and who didn't take the necessary risks, didn't try hard enough to fulfill what they could have fulfilled. Even those who were technically rational, those who settled for upper mediocrity rather than take the gamble between greatness and absolute failure (death), are to be condemned. In fact those who died trying to achieve more than their ability, desire and luck could produce are often celebrated: people like Ned Kelly, Guy Fawkes, Donald Campbell, William Wallace, Harold Godwinsson, Hector and Achilles of the Iliad, the Red Baron and Wat Tyler. I'm tempted to include Admiral Nelson but it's possible that he achieved exactly what he wanted, including his death. Sometimes these people are more celebrated than those whose successes were absolute and still lived to tell the tale, like Churchill, Wellington, Odysseus, Thomas Cochrane and Marshal Bernadotte. Maybe it is because these people never experienced the sensation of ultimate sacrifice, even if they were more than prepared for it. Or maybe it is because we can't be sure that the successful ones really tried as hard as their limits allowed. They probably did but we can't be sure. Maybe Calzaghe and Mayweather each could have been regarded as the greatest boxer ever had they continued to fight. Ricky Hatton, who has been defeated once, might be thought to be probably more glorious by Napoleon because he fought a boxer beyond his ability, effort and luck, his ability was finally quantified and he would be judged to have put in more than an acceptable amount of effort to be the greatest.

It's also worth keeping in mind that three of the people these quotes are attributed to were emperors. That they were willing to risk everything to get to the top ought to tell you that they would have these sorts of opinions, and it suggests if anything that these opinions are the result of imbalanced mental states. Quite a lot of their possible counterparts that failed at an early stage we would probably mock as being rather silly people. These people would prefer to probably look rather silly than actually be unfulfilled and timid.

I haven't really got any further to working out whether these quotes are true. Such is the problem of ethics. There just aren't enough justified premises to make arguments with. Moore's Open Question Argument pretty much puts an end to any objective account of morality. All of these quotes appear to be merely expressions of the preferences of risk-seeking people. We're subjected to more aphorisms that express that attitude because history is filled with successful people who are far more likely to be naturally risk-seeking than not and who got the opportunity to say what they believe publicly, and even though the majority of common people do not share the attitude, they do share a respect for it, and a respect for the people who have it. So we enjoy the content of quotes like:

"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees",

much more than we enjoy the content of quotes like:

"Better safe than sorry",

even if we really agree more with quotes like the latter. I suppose like most moral issues, any truth of the matter about whether these quotes are correct is down to personal preference, or they aren't even truth-apt. But they sound cool.

I don't get much traffic on this blog. Either the posts I write are too technical, not really interesting to anybody but me or not even that coherent. Sometimes all three. The reason I keep this blog is mainly so that I can re-read at a later point whatever I used to believe, and either mock it or use it to revise my own belief set. I also write down ideas I have here which I would otherwise forget about. Anyway here are some of the keywords that Blog.co.uk tell me that people use that link to my blog. I think they probably google these terms and end up here.

The most common term is "Life Tilt", a poker term expressing a mental state marked for its self-destructive nature, belief that the world is constantly conspiring against you, leading you to the delusional belief that you just don't care any more. Just fuck it. Fuck it all to hell. But of course you do care and hate yourself all the more for it. I don't know what would make somebody google "Life Tilt" . It could be to make themselves feel better about their current tilt by reading about somebody else's even worse life tilt. Unless you're Archie Karas there'll be somebody out there with a worse bad beat story than yours. By the way I have a tip for live tournament players who experience tilt. When you're knocked out, whether on a bad beat or not, you're perfectly entitled to walk away from the table in a bad mood. Shake your opponent's hand if they offer it, but you don't need to offer your own. Just get up and walk away and cool off for a bit: anywhere between 10 minutes and an hour. Then come back to the table and wish the person who knocked you out good luck (if they are still there), and your tilt should soon dissipate. In the heat of a knockout it's easy to hate your opponents with the deepest hate, but after a cooling off period you should be able to come back and wish them luck as a casual, neutral observer. You might even find yourself thinking, "Thank God I'm no longer involved in this complete madness."

The second most searched-for term is "naomi campbell evolutionary psychologists". This is followed by terms like "Keira Knightley" and "do men find keira knightley attractive?" and "the media's false beauty". Whoever came to my blog searching for those terms would have seen my entry entitled, The Popular But False Conception of Beauty. The main thing I regret about that entry was that I didn't make it clear enough that there are two conceptions of beauty. Ultimately, beauty is subjective. If you think it's beautiful then it is beautiful, I suppose. But I was mainly referring to human beauty from evolutionary game-theoretic perspective, i.e. not too dissimilar to Darwinian fitness. My point was that a lot of people, actually men and women, moreorless anybody who subscribes to some popular view about fashion, are deluded about what beauty is. They let small groups of people dictate to them what will make them more attractive to the opposite sex, and unfortunately these claims are mostly false.

I have a few searches about Rime Of The Ancient Mariner and The Odyssey which must link to my piece on The Odyssey and Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, probably one of the better or more accessible entries in this blog. Somebody asked, "are the sirens in the rime of the ancient mariner", so maybe it is quite common to compare the two, although I had never heard of such a thing prior to my study of Ancient Mariner.

The next most searched-for term is on Marshal Bernadotte, a subject I seemed to have quite little to say about. I'm still of the opinion nowadays that Bernadotte has done more than most to protect his bloodline, and that he is perhaps a greater paragon of meritocracy than Napoleon himself. Of all the marshals and their Emperor though I probably idolise Marshal Ney more than any of the others. One of my greatest fascinations in life is with the concept of chance, and more specifically: luck. Ney simply has to be one of the luckiest people to ever live. I have always had this strange (admittedly irrational) idea that being lucky is better than being good. I sometimes fear that I might die in some bizarre, slightly hilarious way that no person could ever reasonably hope to avoid, like being struck by falling masonry or randomly killed in an armed robbery. When I read articles about people who die through no fault of their own I cannot help but think that they just fail at life. I have a guilty chuckle that everything they ever did was a waste. Their diet was a waste because they were going to die a week later anyway. Their studies were a waste. They could have enjoyed themselves but instead they invested foolishly in their own non-futures. I feel like a dick for thinking this way, but I can't really help it, and I fear the same thing happening to me.

Of course Ney was both good and lucky, probably the best and the luckiest. He fought in over one hundred battles, usually leading from the front. He was wounded in quite a lot of the battles he fought in, but somehow the enemy never managed to keep him down. He commanded the rearguard action of the Grand Army on its retreat from Moscow. When he left Moscow he had something like 20,000 soldiers in his corps but by the time he reached Kovno it was less than 200. Some people even say that it was just him. There's a story, probably false, about how he entered an inn and told General Dumas that he was all that was left of the rearguard. Several times his band of survivors were totally surrounded by the enemy, he was ambushed at virtually every location he possibly could be, and they still never got him.

But that's not even the most astounding story of his survival. At Waterloo, it is reported, he personally led the French cavalry charge that resulted in Napoleon's defeat. He is said to have charged the British squares between ten and twenty times, unsuccessfully. He is also said to have had about 5 horses shot from underneath him during the battle. British marksmen were trained to shoot specifically at officers, and he was the most conspicuous person on the battlefield, so I don;t understand how he survived that. What I understand even less is that he was apparently at the head of the Old Guard when they advanced on the last military orders Napoleon would ever give. From what I know, Ney was at the front of the column, and it's also widely believed that the column was ripped to shreds by infantry fire, particularly at the front. How did he survive that? When the Old Guard retreated Ney was left in one of the three remaining squares that refused to surrender. The British were swarming all over them and somehow he escaped. One story states that one of the squares was surrounded by British who ordered the French to surrender and give up their arms, to which their general replied "The Guard dies, it does not surrender!" Ney, suicidally distraught at this point, with a blackened face and uniform destroyed by bulletholes, managed to stumble back to his own lines evading capture. One quote of Napoleon that I've been thinking about recently is the line, "Death is nothing. But to live defeated and without glory, is to die every day." I wonder sometimes whether I agree with this. If I do then it's not something I agree with enough to live by.

The fourth most searched for term is "nietzsche fail". That's quite a comical thought and I don't know why anybody would search for it. "Fail" is a concept, as I understand it, that is quite new and mainly exists only on the internet. It can be summed up by funny pictures like this, always with the appropriate "fail"-related caption.

I find the concept of "Nietzsche fail" quite funny, although not necessarily appropriate in most contexts.

But the weirdest keyword anybody has used to find my blog has been "Horse Ejaculates". They must have got to my entry on RPT. I also have a strange number of keywords based around Steeleye Span tabs. I don't know why because I don't think there are any on the blog. This anti-climactic technique of finishing an entry without a conclusion is probably the fourth reason as to why this blog isn't a very good blog.