writing reading colophon search feed
May 4, 2022

Hank Green, “5 Ways to Actually Understand Very Large Numbers”

I appreciate that each of these strategies drives at a different kind of understanding. One all–encompassing comprehension isn’t the goal, but rather more clarity in distinct contexts.

Still, I have to admit that my strategy for understanding big numbers is often to, uh, just give up? Take the idea of the “cosmic calendar”, which condenses all of time into one calendar year: If Ye Big Bang is the dawn of 1 January, then the Earth forms on 14 September, eukaryotes on 15 November, dinosaurs on 24 December, and humans around 10:30 p.m. on 31 December; the Renaissance occurs around 11:59:59 p.m.

The cosmic calendar simile might make the time scale in question more legible, but I don’t think that’s the same as making it more understandable, or making that understanding more useful. When it comes to the age of the universe and the utter brevity of our existence in it, I think the correct response is in fact to wallow, for just a while, in the incomprehensible vastness of the numbers involved.

green-hank quote
May 4, 2022

lives and minds

Reading thread
An Anthropologist on Mars Oliver Sacks
Beautiful Minds: The Parallel Lives of Great Apes and Dolphins Maddalena Bearzi & Craig B. Stanford
The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence Carl Sagan
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How they Communicate Peter Wohlleben
“What is it like to be a bat?” Thomas Nagel

Two books I’ve thrown on the pile that belong in this thread, both with deliciously questioning titles:

  • are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? by Frans de Waal. Via Alan Jacobs, linked below.
  • what would animals say if we asked the right questions? by Vinciane Despret. Via Robin Sloan, “The Plunge”.

There’s evidently something in the air in this corner of the blogosphere I lurk about in…

I think many of us, and I count myself in this number, feel that all the discourse about human uniqueness hasn’t been good for us or for the rest of Creation. It’s not (this is what I would say anyway) that we need to deny human uniqueness — we are by any measure a very strange animal indeed, and with a distinctive role in God’s economy — but rather that we don’t seem to be able to talk about our uniqueness in ways that help us to live more wisely with one another or with the rest of Creation. And that’s a reminder that some things can be true and yet not always edifying to dwell on.
Alan Jacobs, “Uniqueness”

Not only not edifying, but often a non sequitur unrelated to the different point actually being made.

I once heard an m.d. commencement speaker who structured his whole address around what supposedly made humans unique among creatures — language, writing, tool use, self–awareness. For one thing, his science was embarassingly out of date. Even then we knew that these things are not unique to humans but shared with (at least) apes and dolphins. We now know that some of them are not even limited to animals: trees can communicate, tell time, and have individual personalities.

But for another, why did he feel the need to justify to these new doctors the value of their field by comparison to other animals? Was he worried that some of them would jump ship at the last minute, throw off their white coats, and join the veterinarians? Healing is a noble art, a useful and needful service to people. Surely that’s justification enough.

We’re unique, sure — in the way that all species are unique: similar enough to each other to produce fertile offspring together; different enough from all others to not.

To me it is not in the least demeaning that consciousness and intelligence are the result of “mere” matter sufficiently complexly arranged; on the contrary, it is an exalting tribute to the subtlety of matter and the laws of Nature.

Carl Sagan, the dragons of eden, p. 221

fauna flora jacobs-alan mind nonseq reading sagan
May 2, 2022

convincing

In freshman year of college, I took a poetry workshop for non-English-majors. It was a low stakes course led by an m.f.a. candidate from the creative writing program, and only offered at all, I think, because grad students like him were available to have the work squeezed out of them. We read our student–instructor’s favorite poets and talked unsophisticatedly about theory and craft. We wrote poems of our own and tried to contribute to a Respectful Space of Critique.

One question recurred constantly in our discussions: is this convincing? Taking a poem as a whole or singling out one gesture or metaphor, we asked each other whether were convinced by it. It became a closing ritual: at the end of the period we would pass judgement, convinced or not, and honorably or dishonorably dismiss the poem.

About halfway through the semester, I realized I had no idea what to be convinced even meant.

I never brought this up in workshop, which I (stupidly) thought was a place not for worries but for opinions confidently stated as truths. And if I didn’t know exactly what made a poem convincing, I did know that, whatever it was, my poems had it.

But I was concerned: underneath all the posturing to not appear the worst non–major poet in the room, what were we all talking about?

I’ve just come across one possible answer from the philosopher Thomas Nagel:

My own philosophical sympathies and anipathies are easily stated. I believe one should trust problems over solutions, intuition over arguments, and pluralistic discord over systematic harmony. Simplicity and elegance are never reasons to think that a philosophical theory is true […]

What ties these views about philosophical practice together is the assumption that to create understanding, philosophy must convince. That means it must produce or destroy belief, rather than merely provide us with a consistent set of things to say. And belief, unlike utterance, should not be under the control of the will, however motivated. It should be involuntary.Preface to mortal questions

Our judgments in workshop were just that: essential, subjective: whether deep in our guts we believed what a poem was saying. It’s interesting that being convinced here is different from being persuaded, if persuasion is the work of rhetoric on reason and will. Of course we discussed form, meter, metaphor, word–choice, whatever — all the technical and rhetorical pieces that made a poem’s argument, gave it style — but that discussion wasn’t sufficient. A rhetorically accomplished poem didn’t necessarily convince us of its truth.

Introducing his collected pomes, W.H. Auden makes a similar point re poetry directly. But unconvincing poems were to Auden not just lesser (cf. Nagel’s “merely” consistent), but much much worse:

Some poems which I wrote and, unfortunately, published, I have thrown out because they were dishonest, or bad–mannered, or boring.

A dishonest poem is one which expresses, no matter how well, feelings or beliefs which its author never felt or entertained. […] I once wrote, “History to the defeated / May say alas but cannot help nor pardon.” To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable. Foreword to collected poems (1965)

Pretty rhetoric can beguile in both philosophy and poetry because both are largely rhetorical pursuits. If well–put lines aren’t the end of an argument or poem, they’re not easily done without, either. The sirens are always singing their song of simplicity, elegance, and rhetorical effectiveness.

So good philosophy and good poetry must pass three tests: First and least important, is it rhetorically successful? Second, is it convincing, ie. does it produce or destroy belief? And third but foremost, does it tell the truth?

auden daysof nagel philosophy posey writing
May 2, 2022

[…] at that point my brain just goes totally smooth and all new concepts slide off it like so much melting cheese off oiled teflon (this is EXACTLY what it is like, I promise you) […] Webcurios 29/04/22 (via the incomperable maya.land)

This is EXACTLY what it is like! Quote in re math and physics concepts above a certain difficulty/complexity. I feel like I’ve tried to express this for myself about certain philosophical writing… I can’t find it in this post, so I must have taken it out to sound more confident?

Pretty much every book listed in The Tables as abandoned were abandoned for this reason. I cite “boredom”, but really boredom often isn’t the problem precisely; it’s that they slide right off my gone–smooth brain.

quote
April 26, 2022
Large, relevant questions too easily evoke large, wet answers. Thomas Nagel, preface to mortal questions
quote
April 18, 2022

the ninth

Confusion drops from a shining hand,
Off its baton — the man
In charge has gone out without a score.
Dynamics pile up, and

Behind the caterwauling quartet
The chorus take a breath
And gird for their entrance afire
With adrenaline and sweat.

The lights have been left up; they can see
Our faces. Now belief
Becomes essential. High young voices
Crack, strain with desperate need

To make joy shudder this brutal hall.

poem