Impossible irrationality

Yesterday was World Mental Health Day, and one of the most interesting blog posts I’ve read on the subject is a reflective piece by Courtney Williams. As well as being a talented student physicist, she’s also a talented communicator with an interest in mental health issues:

I once had… let’s call it a debate with a pair of psychological wellbeing practitioners about the nature of logic in reference to depression and anxiety. It was in response to a list of “rights” given out in a group therapy session (which was neither therapeutic nor conducted with a sizeable group, but that’s beside the point), one of which was something along the lines of “I have the right to make decisions with no logical basis”. An example given of an illogical action was that you could decline an invitation for no other reason besides not wanting to go. I disagreed with this – it is logical, after all, to look after oneself, and one way to do that is by putting your own interests and desires first. When and how much you do that is all down to you.

This idea intrigued me. As Courtney herself suggests a bit later on, her idea basically makes rational action (which I think is what she means by ‘logic’) inescapable. It’s almost analytic: of course every choice I make is rational, because she basically defines ‘rational’ as ‘in line with my desires right now’. Turning down a party invitation simply because I don’t feel like accepting it is rational in this way: I have a desire not to go to the party, and turning down the invitation meets that desire, so all’s well and good. And, according to this interpretation, it doesn’t matter if maybe going to the party might have benefited me because I might have enjoyed it or met some fun people or eaten some nice food… what matters is that right now my desire is not to go, so turning down the invitation is the rational thing to do for me. (If I choose something, I choose it!)

The H-block on rape

British Conservative MEPs are an interesting crowd. They divide, essentially, into two groups. On the one hand there are the old-school Tories, who are personally affable, politically moderate and reasonably realistic about the usefulness of the job they do in the European Parliament. On the other hand there are the modern neocons, who are virulently eurosceptic to the point of isolationist, support George W Bush-style defence and economic policies, deny man-made climate change, and would like to bring back the death penalty and scrap the NHS.

When I worked in politics, my boss used to jokingly refer to this second group as the ‘H block’, since their most vociferous spokespeople were Chris Heaton-Harris, Roger Helmer, and the extraordinary Dan Hannan. (This latter character was in the news last year when he went over to the US and gave interviews, ostensibly as the voice of mainstream Britain, in which he instructed Americans in the evils of our “unpopular” NHS and recommended that they should reject Obama’s healthcare reforms lest they get left with an equally unpopular system. I kid you not.)

Sadly, the H-block has broken up somewhat in recent years, as some of its members have moved on to other things. But Roger Helmer is still there in the European Parliament, standing up for neocon europhobes everywhere. And, unsurprisingly, I have never once agreed with a single one of Mr Helmer’s political pronouncements (plus he was unnecessarily rude to me once in a bar in Strasbourg, which does tend to put one’s back up a little).

But today, to my mild astonishment, I find myself not only agreeing with him, but actively sympathising with him — and on the unlikely subject, moreover, of rape.

President Clegg?

This image has been attacked as the “politics of the gutter“.

Lord Ashdown might be right to say that making a personal attack on Nick Clegg would be gutter politics. But is this a personal attack on Nick Clegg? I’m not so sure. It doesn’t actually say anything bad about him — it simply says that AV would give him the power to choose the government. Yes, this bald claim is open to misinterpretation, but that’s not to say it’s false.

The underlying message of the poster is this: by increasing the representation of smaller parties relative to the larger ones, a proportional system is less likely to deliver an absolute majority in Parliament. But since an absolute majority in Parliament is what’s needed to choose a government in this country, the parties are going to have to decide how to arrange themselves after the election is concluded, with the result that a small party (a potential junior coalition partner) has a lot of power to choose which large party gets to form the government. If the Lib Dems were the third party, Nick Clegg would be kingmaker, as he was in the general election last year.

The poster might be tendentious and a bit underhand. But I’d say it’s no worse than the equally annoying approach taken by the Yes campaign.

Proportional representation, take 2

A while ago I wrote a long, boring and waffly post about proportional representation. For reasons best known to the imps that inhabit WordPress’s servers, when I updated my blog’s theme, everything after the jump on that post was deleted, and I didn’t have a backup. Bugger.

It’s not the end of the world, though. Because of the upcoming referendum in the UK, this is once again a hot topic, and so I get an excuse to revisit my old blog entry, think things through more carefully, distill the various arguments down to their pure, bare essentials, and write something altogether sleeker and more beautiful.

Here it is, then, my pearl of wisdom on the AV referendum: I have no idea which way to vote.

What the heck are ramparts?

From Dave Barry via Language Log:

Q-What is the correct way to spell words?

A-English spelling is unusual because our language is a rich verbal tapestry woven together from the tongues of the Greeks, the Latins, the Angles, the Klaxtons, the Celtics, the 76ers and many other ancient peoples, all of whom had big drinking problems. Look at the spelling they arrived at for “colonel” (which is, of course, actually pronounced “lieutenant”); or “hors d`oeuvres” or “Cyndi Lauper.” It is no wonder that young people today have so much trouble learning to spell: Study after study shows that young people today have the intelligence of Brillo. This is why it`s so important that we old folks teach them the old reliable spelling rule that we learned as children, namely:

‘I’ before ‘C,’
Or when followed by ‘T,’
O’er the ramparts we watched,
Not excluding joint taxpayers filing singly.

EXCEPTION: “Suzi`s All-Nite E-Z Drive-Thru Donut Shoppe.”

Q-What the heck ARE “ramparts,” anyway?

A-They are parts of a ram, and they were considered a great delicacy in those days. People used to watch o’er them.

Counselling diary, week 2

I thoroughly enjoyed this week’s session. After the first week, which was mostly admin and introduction, we got stuck into some basic skills practice.

We didn’t do anything mind-blowingly new or dazzlingly unexpected. We just did a series of exercises, in pairs, about listening skills:

Counselling diary, week 1

I’ve just started a 12-week course at a nearby college which will hopefully lead to a Level 2 award in counselling skills. The main part of my assessment for the course is a weekly ‘reflective journal’ which is supposed to track my thoughts and feelings over the duration of the course, including what I enjoy, what I find difficult, and if there are things that concern or puzzle me. Since I already have a blog which hardly anyone reads (and which I usually ignore myself for most of the year), I reckon I may as well use this to record my thoughts.

So it’s week 1 of the course. The session last Tuesday was introductory and mostly pretty straightforward. The group met (about a dozen of us), chatted to each other, looked at some very brief introductory definitions related to counselling, and went away again. The structure of the course seems pretty vague — I was expecting a schema showing what we’d be looking at each week, but no such schema was forthcoming, and in fact when someone asked for some detail on what we’d be covering, the reply was equally vague, listing only a couple of very general areas plus “lots of practice”. Oh well, I suppose I don’t much mind. There’s no particular reason why I’d need to know in advance what to expect.

On what the dictionary calls “lexicography”

About a month ago, I exchanged a couple of emails with a friend of mine on the subject of dictionaries — more specifically, what kinds of stuff ought to be in them.

Our discussion started when my friend disagreed with parts of a blog post from the Language Log website by Geoff Nunberg, a linguist at UC Berkeley. The main point of disagreement was over Nunberg’s claim that dictionaries are right to act as sources of lexical authority:

You could take this all, of course, as just one more confirmation of the public’s failure to understand that the dictionary is simply “a record of the language”, as lexicographers have always liked to say. But dictionaries never record the language indiscriminately. … That is, it’s the business of the dictionary to confer legitimacy on some sources and some usages and not on others. If it didn’t, it would fail its readers.

Now, I have some limited training in linguistics, although far less than either Professor Nunberg or my friend. So the debate about whether dictionaries should be prescriptive or descriptive is not new to me. I know enough to recognise, at least, that this is one of those interesting areas where the (moderately) settled opinion of practising academic experts is completely at odds with the general consensus of non-academics on the same subject. But since I haven’t really got a settled opinion of my own, I’ve decided to try and invent one here.

Red letter day

Yesterday I received three pieces of post that made me very happy.

The first was a lovely letter from a friend which reassured me about some issues that had been bothering me. The second was a DVD of Poirot season 12. And the third was this exchange of emails…

What I do

There comes a point in most casual conversations where I’m asked, “So what is it you do?”.

This is a problem.

I can live with the fact that people don’t really know what I study. (Who knows what I did last summer?) After all, I signed up for an MA in philosophy, so I can hardly pretend now that I didn’t know a certain level of head-scratching incomprehensibility would come with the territory. (What? You don’t think it was a good use of time to spend two years worrying about whether we’re living in a computer simulation?) And besides, my MA was only part-time, so I could always just sidestep the whole conversation by not mentioning it.

But that’s not so easy to pull off when it comes to earning my daily bread, because conspicuously I do earn that bread. There’s no getting away from the fact that I do something. That ‘something’ keeps me quite busy, in fact. The difficulty is in saying exactly what it is.