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- + hamsters - - George Bernard Shaw A week of the holidays gone, and I could (should) have done much more (but having to get out for the past few days for one reason or another didn't help). Getting back into the mood by doing something, anything at all, which happens to include blogging. One thing that was accomplished was a settling of scores with the hamsters, though; they thought that they could get away with biting people freely without suffering any consequences, just because they happen to be passably cute. Ha!  It looks like another crisis of belief is hitting me in terms of my FYP - does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? Hopefully, I'm just being lazy as usual. It would do well to remember that a month of holidays isn't really that long, but I still have several outstanding things I have been waiting to do for some time. Well, time to pay myself first, as in myself myself. I started by reactivating all my sixty-six Dragon Court accounts, then checking in on the Kingdom of Loathing accounts that I have abandoned for close to a year, only to be reminded why I retired from that game. Started Mousehunting (in the process wondering when I would ever seriously get some game off the ground), and even engaged in a spot of Neopets item arbitrage, just like the good old days (almost forgot how addictive - like an online flea market - it could be), until I realised that their trading post was buggy and didn't refund unsuccessful bids sometimes. Your Standard Idealistic and Useless Undergraduate Expousing his Short Analysis on the Current State of the World and How It Should Be Run Buying and selling virtual stuff led me to think of the recent real-life occurences, and how much value is indeed "real". The more I read about finance, the more it seems that stuff doesn't add up (quote: "...he had asked his young assistant, Dan Gertner, a chemical engineer with an M.B.A., to see if he could understand them. Gertner went off with the documents that purported to explain C.D.O.s to potential investors and for several days sweated and groaned and heaved and suffered. 'Then he came back,' says Grant, 'and said, I can't figure this thing out. And I said, I think we have our story.'") For example, take a sealed box (or slightly more valuable item) that some trusted agents vouch is worth... something rather more than it actually is, when in fact it is gloriously empty; the box can then be bought and sold, and bets taken against the movement of its price, with jobs, firms, even whole industries springing up around it. And when somebody actually opens Pandora's box to find nothing inside, we get a "correction" or "burst bubble", resulting in a dark period where nobody wants to touch sealed boxes with notarized ten-foot poles, whereupon the masses pontificate over the evils of the imperialist capitalist model - until next time, when the sealed boxes are Web 3.0 ready, or come with a free sealed tincan, and the whole business begins anew...  Source: Dilbert.com Value is indeed a strange thing. It is not unthinkable for say, farmers to be better off if, through some combination of bad weather and tardiness, they collectively produce a poor harvest. It might then be possible for them to raise prices sufficiently to make much more profit than they would have otherwise in a free market, as people have got to eat no matter what. Of course, local or specific shortfalls would have far less effect, and were a global situation actually to occur, some combination of price controls, rationing, or even military requisitions would likely come into play. Perhaps it is true that what's important is simply whatever somebody else is willing to pay for something, in which case creating the illusion of value may be more important than creating actual value. Note that with enough stored value, one can subtly adjust the rules in order to preserve and propagate their own value ("unfair" labour practices, tax avoidance, legacy admissions etc - question: are people aware of the long-term repercussions of their current decisions?), admittedly alongside the beneficial effect of allowing those proven to be able to generate real value to continue their good work. But is there any other way to measure value? If all parties concerned were honest and consistent judges of value and were agreeable on the value of any commodity, then yes - indeed, this sometimes occurs, as when deals were sealed with a gentleman's handshake after short pleasantries. However, quite often both parties are eager to get the better half of the deal, and on top of that they might have no reason to believe themselves capable of assigning proper value - how many apples is an orange worth? Then, the only reasonable thing to do might be to hawk one's wares around and see what they can fetch. These issues can likely be reduced to fundamental problems that have probably been recognized from antiquity, but which humans have essentially made zero progress on, that is if it is assumed that progress can be made in the first place. So what was the point of philosophy at all? (Discussion collapses) The Dark Knight (Spoiler warning, blah blah) Observation 1: If a criminal is instructed to shoot his accomplice after his part of the heist is done in order to receive a bigger share, shouldn't he have some suspicion that it will occur to him later? Response 1: If they were big on rational long-range planning, perhaps they wouldn't be criminals to begin with. Observation 2: If a criminal threatens to continue murdering people in a city if his demands are not met, should the city accede, or refuse? Response 2: This is a case of blackmail, and as with most cases where the object of blackmail (in this case the ability to murder) is not surrendered upon payment, there are just two logical responses in an isolated case - refuse to pay right from the beginning, or be prepared to pay everything eventually. The reasoning is that there is nothing to stop the blackmailer from repeating his demands after receiving his payment, especially where the circumstances are such that the blackmailer is unlikely to be a nice fella. However, this discounts the fact that paying does buy something else - it buys time, and the hope that the blackmailer will indeed keep to his word. Repeat blackmail by the same person/organization is another matter - take kidnappings for ransom, say in Columbia. While it might be expected for a sufficiently heartless kidnapper to slay his hostage after (or even before) collecting his payment, and minimize the risks of being identified in future (though possibly increasing the resolve of the general public and police to apprehend him, whatever that counts for), a kidnapper who plans to continue would do well to return hostages safe and sound, as otherwise there would be little incentive to pay up. This now poses a dilemma - if a blanket policy were put in place refusing any negotiation or payment, the business of kidnapping should eventually dwindle to nothing as the kidnappers recognize that they are not going to earn anything. However, this will likely cost the lives of innocent hostages in the meantime (as releasing hostages alive further reduces the probability of getting paid), many of whom relatives might be very willing to pay reasonable amounts to secure their release. Canny kidnappers might at this point demand a paltry, but public, ransom to test the resolve of the public - letting a loved one be killed for a mere thousand dollars would certainly leave a sour taste in the mouth. The authorities would look bad in the eyes of many if they refused this, but if they go back on their word they could hardly be taken seriously again when the kidnappers up the ante. In many cases, this would settle into a sort of balance, with organized crime being self-regulating and taking their cut, with authorities and the general public grumbling but unwilling to endure the costs of booting them out. Now it is easy to condemn them to a morass of their own making, and say that they would have avoided it if they were perfectly upstanding. However, morality exists on a gradient, and is not even self-consistent. For instance, it is commonly held to be a virtue to be helpful and tell the truth. What then if a violent mob asks one for the (known) location of an individual? Should the person keep to his basic principles and tell the truth, or lie and protect that individual's safety? There are many other examples which have no doubt come to pass - what should a conscripted soldier do, if commanded to torture and kill a civilian? One option is to make the death as quick and painless as possible, and another is to refuse, but which would almost certainly result in worse torture and eventual death for both himself and the civilian. Other possibilities would be for the soldier to kill himself and/or the civilian, or go on a suicide rampage and attempt to take out as much of the evil leadership as possible; perhaps he could even do his job well, in the hope of rising to a position of prominence, then change the system from within, thus saving many more (twisted as this may sound)! Should we resort to torture to foil terrorist plans, if we know that tens of thousands of lives are at risk? And if we know that the terrorists themselves are impervious to torture, but the torture of their innocent relatives might cause them to reveal the required information? A key obstacle in reality is that we never completely know the outcomes of our actions. It is reasonable to expect that a stone we release will fall to the ground, but especially where other humans are concerned, it is difficult to predict the effects. Observation 3: Rig two ferries up with explosives and hand the people in each ferry the detonator to the other ferry, with the condition that they will survive if they blow up the other ferry, but if neither detonator is pressed within a specified time limit, then both ferries explode and everybody dies. What should happen? Response 3: This was a scenario set up by the Joker in the movie, with one ferry filled with convicts, and the other with ordinary citizens. In the movie, one convict persuaded the captain of his ferry to hand the detonator over by saying that he knew the captain couldn't kill anybody, and that they could later say that he snatched the detonator over by force, before throwing the detonator out of the porthole once it was in his hands. On the other ferry, the citizens took a vote, in which about three-quarters of the people voted to blow up the other ferry. However, no one was willing to press the detonator itself, and even the most vocal proponent of their right to live ended up putting the detonator back into its box after attempting to gather enough willpower to activate it. This resulted in a rather uplifting feel-good effect, especially as Batman was on hand to smack the Joker's universal detonator out of his hands and deliver the "they're not as ugly as you, you're alone" speech to the evil mastermind (knowing the Joker, it would have been a nice touch for the ferries to have actually been supplied with the detonators to their own ship, though). But if I had to stake everything on predicting what would happen in real life, and not according to the whims of a Hollywood scriptwriter, what would I guess? Firstly, the detonators were held by seemingly experienced and doughty sea captains/officers flanked by reliable crew, in the movie, with many of their passengers already clamouring for the detonator to be pressed once the initial pronouncement was made. Had the detonator found its way to one of their number, it is not improbable that it would have been pressed, and rather early on at that. We must also recognize that the act of pressing the detonator would be a very public act - the one who did the actual deed could expect to be vilified, rightly or wrongly, for the rest of his life. "A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation." (quote from Dune). What then if the Joker had rigged up a system such that any individual (or small number of individuals) could detonate the other ferry without being identified (offhand, one method would be requiring each ferry to send a certain number of SMS messages every few minutes to avoid detonation of both ferries, but broadcasting a special code that any individual could send through an SMS to blow up the other ferry)? My personal expectation would be that destruction would be nearly assured and come very swiftly (as both sides know that the chances of a single less-than-patient guy on the other side would spell their doom), though this need not necessarily reflect badly on the majority of the people (and would probably be less satisfying for the Joker, which may be why he didn't try this variation) Also, would it be right for one ferry to decide to blow up the other just before the time limit, reasoning that if the outcome could not be averted, it is better for half of them to die rather than all of them? There are two immediate objections: One is that it would be a victory for the Joker, and more generally evil, against good (and knowing the Joker, they might very well end up dead anyway). The second is that the result is unfair. We might negate these objections by borrowing a scene from Dune - here, two people are trapped in the path of an oncoming sandstorm, and the only way to survive is to wedge oneself into a hole within solid rock, or be torn apart by the sand. Such a hole exists, but is only large enough to fit a single person. In the story, the two play a game of skill, with the winner gaining the right to hide it out and also taking responsibility for the other person's kin. Now it might seem that this is an eminently reasonable outcome, and I for one would not see the point of both perishing in the open just for fairness' sake. We then transform this back to the original problem. We now have two fully-loaded ferries, each containing thousands of people. Let these ferries be slowly but inexorably washed towards a waterfall, which happens to have a concave-shaped rocky outcrop in the middle which should be sufficient to stop one ferry. However, its size is such that if both ferries try to come to a stop against it, both will not be held but instead tumble over the edge. Now also suppose that the ferries can communicate. Would it then be right for them to try to come to some agreement (perhaps just flipping a coin) about which ferry would be saved, and which go down? Again, it appears the most enlightened response would be to do so, to have half rather than all the passengers lose their lives where it could be avoided. So, it appears that the major sticking point is the symbolism of giving in to evil - yet on some level this seeming defiance might be looked upon as a complete capitulation, a surrender in the interests of one's selfish personal integrity. Maybe there is no absolute morality after all. N.B. Some ideas borrowed from The Pig that Wants to be Eaten by Julian Baggini, and also here previously. Observation 4: Does Batman really think his breathy voice is intimidating? Response 4: Whatever rocks his Batmobile. Next: Youhappynow
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