Month: April 2013

Lack of Clarity is Better

Another classic example from the football world. It is right that punishments for “unacceptable” transgressions of rules are in some sense arbitrary in their severity.

If there becomes a rule for the punishments against breaking the rule, then we have a game-changer where calculations based on the punishment become part of the rule-breaking decision. Pardew is wrong for this very reason, precisely because he wants clarity on the punishments. Liverpool in this example, but Chelski are the usual suspects in this morality play. I last highlighted this in the Hazard / Ballboy counter example here and the John Terry / “Professional” Foul case here.

Art for Art’s Sake ?

Not only is science a branch of economics, so now is art.

See: BBC Story and Guardian piece.

In fact if you think about the current scale of funding into fundamental physics, actually science is the branch of culture being funded for it’s own sake. Mad. The world turned upside down. (Follow @TiffanyJenkins)

Full transcript here.  Less bleak than the journalists’ selective headlines.

Terry Eagleton & Roger Scruton on “Culture” (Hat tip to David Morey on FB)

[Post Note : The price of everything and the value for nothing.
Deputy London major Munira Mirza, via @TiffanyJenkins]

Dennett Hard Talk

Missed this last week on BBC World Service – Stephen Sackur interview with Daniel Dennett – introduced predictably as one of the “4 Horsemen of New Atheism“.

Much confirmation of my own view that Dennett is the most considered and sophisticated thinker in this space. The four I have before ranked Dennett > Harris > Hitchens > Dawkins (the first two are philosophers notice). The questioning by Sackur is typically caricatured in terms of the standard arguments, but Dennett always manages subtle qualification in his responses, though he pulls no punches with his final statement:

[Whatever theistic religion evolves into …]
“Love, faith, beauty and joy – I hope it lasts forever.”

[Note – the HardTalk link is only for one week. I have an offline copy if anyone wants to hear it.]