I've heard people like eating these days

In this post in the Atlantic Business Channel, Daniel Indiviglio argues that people being underemployed is going to stunt economic growth:

People have begun watering down their résumés to seem more appealing to jobs below their experience level. This is bad news for job seekers, but it's also bad news for the U.S. economy.

A few responses to this: People like, you know, eating. And showering. And all those other little goods and services that modern living provides often in exchange for labour. It'd be great if everyone could get employed in the position of their choice that fully maximises their output to the economy, but with the economy in the doldrums as it is, it's not like they have that much of a choice. Besides, it doesn't seem like people get all in a tizzy when we hear stories of overqualified migrants driving taxis or working in restaurants or some such.

Secondly, what do you propose people do, Mr. Indiviglio? Are you saying that people should be honest in their resumes? Cause that's gonna work real swell, according to you:

I was talking to a friend just yesterday considering résumés for an entry-level position. My friend received a six-page résumé from a candidate so overqualified, she won't even be considered.

He also argues that this underemployment will also be detrimental to workers:

That is, of course, if their résumé is not tarnished permanently by spending several years in a position that is a step back on their career path.

Right, because being unemployed for god-knows-how-long is going to look just super on your résumé.

Again, it'd all be well and good if we could get everyone the job they want and are qualified for, but sometimes, underemployment is the best of a bad lot.

I'm only posting this so that no one reads my substandard response to Brendan's 'thing', but I realise that most of you have some kind of RSS reader, which completely foils my dastardly plan. Dang.

ASIDE: I'm quoting Indiviglio who's quoting Yahoo who's quoting the Wall Street Journal. Now, I just need the WSJ to quote me and the news cycle of life will be complete. It's true, and you're right, the internets have turned into a house of echoey horrors.

Inappropriate intrusions on emotions

Someone from the internets made criticised me, and you know how important it is to go after people who say things on the Interwebs. The answer: Very Important.

In his opening salvo, Mr Wojit has made some claims regarding the appropriateness of emotion in moral frameworks, namely utilitarianism. I'd like to respond to some of those claims, as well as defend myself against any crude caricatures made of me. I'll place all the substantative claims up the top of this and append any other nitpicks that I have at the bottom of this, if you so wish to peruse them.

The general argument that I'm running is this: Emotions qua emotions are not inherently damaging. I'll admit that emotions do play a fairly strong and probabilistic role in motivating action, but I think what this does is that it changes the question from a logical one to an empirical one, in ways that that'll be detailed below.

Imagine some person spends all day thinking of terrible horrifying fantasies of murder and pain and general gruesomeness. Said person derives a lot of pleasure from this activity, more so than any other activity available to her. If a utilitarian wants to maximise pleasure, than I can't see any reason why they would object to this persons' emotions/actions.

Another example: say I think, 'man, it'd be great if I went and firebombed an abortion clinic.' But I never go through with said action, because of material/time/knowledge constraints etc etc (building a firebomb is a PITA). But I have this thought nevertheless, and harbor positive emotions and feelings towards this thought. Now, let's assume I never express this thought in any public and keep it purely within myself. If it gives me pleasure, and doesn't hurt anyone else in any way, I don't see any reasons to evaluate it in any way.

The quasi-Humean motivational 'objection': So imagine the case whereby I harbor a great unjust antipathy to certain other people of the human race, namely distinguished by the colour of their skin i.e. white people. Now, I can imagine a case whereby I maintain these very antagonistic emotions towards them, without ever acting on those emotions; they may inspire detestment or hatred or some other negative emotion but I never act on them, due to various reasons, be it fear of consequences or a general understanding that emotions should not play a part in motivating my actions or some other reason all together. My actions look exactly the same as a non-racist person; I hold doors open for them, I tip my hat and say 'hullo' when I meet them, I don't discriminate against them socially or financially or otherwise. Furthermore, these emotions do make me happy in some way, in that they provide me with some comfort in the privacy of my mind. This is again a place where I don't utilitarians can relevantly object to me having these emotions, as repugnant as they may be.

Rules are too broad: with the case of the angry person throwing a punch, we can modify the rule. We can and should say, 'Don't throw punches at people without justification' or something along those lines, rather than 'throwing punches because you are angry is bad'. Hell, we could even be a more parsimonious and bracket out the anger bit, and say something like 'Throwing punches [because you are angry] is bad'. Again, this has to do with my general skepticism of judgment of motivation. As someone who leans consequentialist, I'd much rather have good things happen, than be overly concerned about how those good came about.

The problem of appropriate response: One of the severe problems that virtue ethics faces is what constitutes appropriate virtues, and I think that problem extends here. What can we consider appropriate emotional responses to an act or state of affairs? Turn the other cheek or eye for an eye? Even reasonable persons can have completely differing and polarised emotional responses to the same situation e.g. abortion. I certainly don't want to say that your emotional responses on those cases are wrong or inappropriate per se; if they proceed to act on those emotions i.e. either commit some kind of property or personable damages or base some kind of justificatory argument on those painful emotions, then I would claim those actions are misjudged in that they are based on bad premises. But those emotions qua emotions are not in themselves damaging.

Consider the example of videogames. They often inspire very strongly felt emotions in its subjects, very frequently emotions we would rightly condemn outside of those spheres. But this doesn't necessarily mean that gaming subject act on those emotions; we don't see people gunning down people and beating up hookers for money (well, we do, but we can be pretty sure that it's not the game that motivated them to behave in that manner). Again, emotions are not in and of themselves damaging, and as such shouldn't be subject to moral scrutiny or censure. NB: I'm not ruling out other types of scrutiny or censure.

I'll also make an argument from parsimony, based of a metaethical tripartite division of intentions, acts and effects/outcomes (Told you there was going to be metaphysical baggage). Moral frameworks should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Utilitarianism, especially, should focus more effects/outcomes, and to a lesser extent, acts. Intentions should be given minimal, if not negligible, concern. The example I am primarily thinking of is the ill-gotten charity example: imagine a person giving to charity not because of charitable intentions but rather of trying to cultivate good will and personal reputation. Utilitarians shouldn't care about the intentions (which are 'bad') and care more about the act (good, in this case, though it is obviously possible to have bad acts that produce good outcomes) and care most about the outcomes (good, in this case as it alleviates suffering/produces more pleasure). To critique emotions/intentions/thoughts in this case would be detrimental to the utilitarians' case of increasing the amount of pleasure in the world.

What the argument from parsimony and the videogame example should point out is that we are much better at acting on with outcomes and acts, then we are at dealing with intentions and emotions (In fact a point that you make later in the post).

A consequentialist would care more about the outcome than how the outcome was caused (but that doesn't mean she doesn't care at all about the causes, it just means she cares less). In this case, the case over appropriate emotions becomes an empirical one: how much did the emotion matter in contributing to the outcome? Answering this question would have to be done on a case-by-case basis, as the examples above clearly show cases of emotions that have no net negative effects. In some cases, sure the emotion played a major contributive/motivating factor. But in many other cases, it has no effects on the outcomes of that case.

What a lot of this boils down is my general anti-paternalist tendencies: I value autonomy, especially autonomy over your mind and thoughts as being especially paramount. I don't mind being told what to do, especially if you can convince me in a rational manner. But being told what to feel is another matter altogether; not only is it often a unbidden, non-rational response, it's a deeply primal and often integral part of human imagination and experience. In other words, you can lead a horse to water and even convince him to drink it; but that doesn't mean he's obligated to feel nice towards you.

OPTIONAL NITPICKS

Nitpick the first: I'd add to the whole, "loving the murderer who killed your loved one means that the victim wasn't really a loved one", to me it doesn't strike me that you could in honesty and in good faith love someone who just killed your loved one. Love, by definition, to me precludes this, but i'm more than willing to say that is possible that there is someone out there who is capable of such psychological gymnastics.

Semantic/Linguistic Nitpick:

You say:

That is to say something like: there is a strong probabilistic link between the emotion, anger, and the action, violence. [emphasis added]

But then next sentence:

So unless there is some other, more direct & effective way to reduce instances of punch-throwing without having to go through emotional proscription, then it seems we have perfectly good reasons to morally worry about, judge, and critique emotions. [emphasis added]

I'm not quite sure whether I want to equate perfectly and probabilistic. I'd rather change the second sentence to probabilisitic good reasons to etc etc, but this is some pretty minor hairsplitting/handwaving.

Please stand by

An operator will be with you shortly

While I figure what the hell I want to say in reply to Mr Wojit's post, realising in the process I have no idea what the hell I want to say, and weave and dodge between arguments that make no sense to little sense and back again; then realise that I'm agreeing with him, then resolve not to. It's all very complicated.

So in temporary lieu of what is likely to be a pretty poor response, here's some cute to soften/stupid you up:

What freaks me out thusly

It's not what I know about I don't know, it's what I don't know about what I don't know.

So, one of the reasons that I rarely reach zero unread articles on my Greader is that I'm subscribed to a lot of things. No, it's probably more honest and straightforward to just blame The Browser, but that doesn't really mitigate the point. Either way, I have a lot of interests. As of writing, i've got about 6 tabs open, ranging from a longitudinal study on happiness in The Atlantic, an article on smear tactics by Gordon Brown, a lovely poem in The New Yorker, the wiki article on copyright (which by the way is still happening, but i'm making a sort of series of installments rather than one thing) and Thinkin' Lincoln, which is hilarious and I blame Matt for sucking up what precious little time I have left devoted to eating.

This is crippling.

Recently, when I went climbing, Rob asked me during one of my more extreme bouts of enthusiasm on why I didn't go climbing earlier (i've only been doing it for about three weeks) on account of the fact that I enjoy it so much (it's true, it is incredibly fun). In addition to simple pragmatic reasons of scheduling conflicts, material constraints, etc, one reason that struck me wasn't that I didn't know I enjoyed climbing; it was that I didn't know that I didn't know. If someone were to ask me the question, "Do you enjoy climbing?", I could heartily respond, "Yes, I do very much enjoy climbing." But here's the rub: Nobody asked that question, not even me. I didn't know that I enjoyed climbing, because the question of climbing-enjoyment never occurred to me within my cognitive frame of reference.

Another example: The New Yorker publishes a wide mix of reportage, newsgathering, and fictional pieces such as poems and short stories. Ordinarily, i'm more interested in the reportage and newgathering stuff, and would generally skip over the fiction stuff. But (being somewhat of a knowledge 'completist') I read the fiction, because i'm afraid i'll skip over some incredible piece of writing which I would totally love and adore. Case in point: Jonathan Lethem. Having never heard of him before, I proceeded to read Lostronaut in The New Yorker, which has been one of the nicest examples I have ever read within the short story genre. It wasn't just a 'I know this Jonathan Lethem fellow who apparently writes good shit, I haven't read any, but I know of it', but rather a complete lack of knowledge of who Lethem is and what he does.

It is precisely this kind of serendipitous finding, this finding out of things that I didn't even know I didn't know, these second-order knowledge questions, these hidden knowledge questions, that bugs me the most and compels me to spend so much time on topics and even forms of writing that are so completely varied. I'm afraid that by subscribing to a select few fields of knowledge that I know I'm fairly interested in, i'm going to miss out on some other field of knowledge that I would completely love and adore and be willing to sacrifice someone else's firstborn child to it.

Now, I realise that this is a bit of a bogeyman argument: you can't constantly be asking the 'what if' question. I understand that most people are able to resolve this argument and move on with their lives, but I haven't been able to find a satisfying resolution to this problem that allays the worst of my fear of commitment and allows me some form of peace-of-mind. I intensely dislike the 'ignorance is bliss' argument, as I feel it is a even worse argument that the one I am proposing.

In a related and grandiose but completely untenable thesis, I have the idea that this is sort of what the current Age of Knowledge is all about. That is, modern day knowledge gathering isn't a case of 'What is the answer to question X?' but rather a case of 'What are the questions that need to be asked in regards to question X?' Case in point: metaethics. Whenever I start doing ethical thought of any kind, it inevitably flounders and sinks into the quicksand that is foundational ethics. Everytime I try and do ethics, I end up doing metaethics.

So, who knows? My crippling commitment to a lack of commitment will probably (has already, i'm wagering) end up marring my life, in ways I can't even imagine, due to the reasons detailed above. Is it possible to monetise my capacity as knowledgable oddball?

Star Trek

Summation: not that bad. Read on!

You know how critics of all shapes and sizes wear out that hoary old cliche that runs something along the line of 'an exercise in tedium, punctuated by bouts of action'? Well, Star Trek could well be described as an exercise in action, punctuated by bouts of tedium. Thankfully, J.J. Abrams did not horribly mangle a wonderfully well-loved franchise that has seen better days and was on the verge of dying out completely, following the tepid performance and subsequent cancellation of Enterprise.

He did kinda kick it around a bit though.

Time-travel is such a well-worn trope and general audience-pleaser in the Star Trek oeuvre that it's possible to make a story involving whales and time-travel that still makes more sense than the plot of this latest iteration. How Abrams manages to screw time-travel up is left as an exercise for the viewer. He does it in a minor manner, mind you, mostly concerning plot that doesn't really impact on the rest of the movie in a notably negative way, but it does leave the hardcore- and even the casual-Trekkie with a little confusion and bafflement.

Good things: The dialogue, the casting and probably what most people will remember, the CGI was good. Actually, scratch that, the CGI was great. Seriously. I am very very glad that they did not skimp out on the CGI. One of the continuing historical weaknesses of the Star Trek genre has been the low-quality special FX, which generally gives the series a vaguely campy feel. It's difficult to take a hostile alien encounter in space (with pew pew lasers, no less) seriously if all you see is people falling awkwardly off chairs and sparks flying off chunky grey metal boxes. There's a level of professionalism, production values and grown-up adultness in this movie that really creates a much stronger immersive experience when bad shit happens. You see people die; not in a gratuitous, gory sense, but you can't mistake it. The explosions are loud, bright and geniunely enthralling; the thuds and slams of fists against faces are satisfyingly meaty. And most importantly, we get to see other parts of the fucking ship than just the bridge! In addition, hearing characters other than the main ones spouting scientific-sounding background chatter during conflict scenes is a good touch.

In fact, the CGI in the movie strikes me a good deal better than atleast two other major special FX monsters: Spiderman 3 and Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. In the former, despite the billion-dollar budget, the CGI looked terrible in places, namely the fights between Spidey and...everyone else. In the latter, the opening scene is a gorgeous interstellar battle that eventually runs into boring and confusing. Star Trek still makes sure the CGI contributes, rather than takes over the movie.

All in all, it's a pleasant revival of a franchise that was thought to be long overdue to be put out to pasture. It's worth your money, and more importantly, your time.

A thing that is starting to bother me

First of many?

So, something i've been noticing recently is this habitual bias people tend to have against non-institutionalised activity. It seems to be that if you haven't participated in some particular institutionalised method of activity, your activities (even if they're the exact same activities, without institutional recognition) are somehow illegitimate, or non-worthwhile.

This bothers me, and it should bother you too, for very obvious reasons.

Related: My/your experience means squat. Seriously. It should be called the fallacy of (personal) experience or something similar, and more and more people should learn it. I'm sure i've talked about it at length with many of you.

My lulz for the day: My bugmenot login for the NYT is spectordefector.

Nice.