Criticism and the Graces

I very readily concur in your Opinion, Critophilus, that a Work of Criticism is the most difficult to be executed with a proper Taste of any literary Composition whatever. There is something so repugnant to the Pride of Mankind in general, something so detractive from the supposed Sagacity of every Reader to pretend to inform by the dry Method of Precept, that except an Author has all the Delicacy and artful Address imaginable, to seem to accompany the Judgments of those he writes for, rather than to lead them into Discoveries, in such a Performance, he will meet with that kind of contemptuous Treatment, which those good-natured People receive, who are ready to give their unasked Advice in the common Concerns of Life upon every Occasion. It is highly necessary therefore, in such kind of Writings, to sacrifice liberally to the Graces, without whose Inspiration Learning will there degenerate into Pedantry, and the Precepts even of Wisdom pass unrelished.

John Gilbert Cooper, Letters Concerning Taste (1757), Letter XIX

Small Favors

Well, the White House petition site is good for entertainment, if nothing else. One of the petitions that reached the threshold was a petition requesting the Obama Administration to begin building the Death Star. The petition was answered by Paul Shawcross, Chief of the Science and Space Branch at the White House Office of Management and Budget. It turns out, thankfully, that the Administration does not support building weapons capable of destroying entire planets or (which was perhaps more in question) putting the United States quadrillions of dollars into debt.

Slightly more seriously, you can also get the White House homebrewing recipe for White House Honey Ale and White House Honey Porter.

An Unexpected Journey

I finally got around to seeing The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey yesterday. A great deal of what people are saying about it is true. It's a bit padded -- the entire Azog storyline could have been removed and the Radagast bits cut down without much detriment, and almost certainly some improvement. Parts of it are simply cheesy -- the Great Goblin was just silly, and while there was something a bit fun about, the entire scene with Radagast and the orcs had something extraordinarily surreal about it as well, as if a fragment of some very strange movie had accidentally been inserted into this one. But there were also genuinely excellent parts. Martin Freeman is a near-perfect Bilbo, and handles the all-important riddle scene beautifully. I was afraid that the dwarves would be played too much for comic effect, but while there was some of that, it wasn't generally beyond the bounds of the sort of thing in The Hobbit itself, and they managed to do here what they failed to do with Gimli in LOTR: you can see very clearly that, whatever their quirks and comic weirdnesses, the dwarves are not people to be messed with. And there are other nice touches throughout. Fili and Kili are handled surprisingly well throughout. Thorin at several points shows special concern for Fili and Kili, which is exactly right, given that they are in fact the sons of his sister, and that they are his heirs. They also clearly took care to link their clothing and mannerisms to Thorin's. I think it is quite clear, in fact, that for all the dwarves both the costume department and the actors really went out of their way to try to get them right, but this is especially clear for Fili and Kili, who are, besides Thorin and Balin, the dwarves about whom we know the most. This sort of detail does a lot for the movie.

I think it's important to grasp the fact that Jackson is not, despite the title, making a movie for The Hobbit. He is making a prequel series for his LOTR movies, and using The Hobbit as the primary structure for it. The non-Hobbit material that attempts to stay fairly close to Tolkien, like the Council of the Wise, for the most part works, although there are things that could be done better. Given how this movie was structured, I suspect that the second will consist of two lines of plot: getting the dwarves from the Misty Mountains through Mirkwood to Erebor, and the assault of the Council of the Wise on the Necromancer. And, frankly, if the latter is handled well, it will be worth it. It would certainly be spectacular -- we know from side comments in The Lord of the Ring that the Council of the Wise were partly able to drive the Necromancer out through the use of Saruman's cunning war machines, his last great act for the good guys. In any case, that would leave the third movie actually to cover Smaug and the Battle of Five Armies, as well as getting home and final set-up for LOTR.

In a movie that is necessarily part of a series, a great deal depends on how the rest of the series goes. It's nice that we get the subtle Fili & Kili touches, for instance, because we actually know that Fili and Kili will die at the end, defending Thorin's body. If this is handled well, it will give this first movie a strength that can't be seen at present. In any case, it is, despite some odd choices, worth seeing.

The Enfant Terrible of Natural History

Is Man a development of the beast? Why, certainly. Did you not know that you were a brute once? That when your bodily frame first came into existence, you had no right to be thought higher in the scale of creation, more precious in the sight of God, than the unborn young of an animal?...And if it should prove that our bodies, this slime we were formed from, is part of a coherent system of gradual biological evolution, we are still, as intellectual creatures, the enfant terrible of Natural History, a cuckoo's egg in the nest of bewildered Creation.

Ronald Knox, The Beginning and End of Man

Semiautomatic

I find myself largely neutral on gun control. I don't have a gun myself, nor can I currently imagine ever being in a position of owning one. I could probably count on one hand the times I've fired a gun, all in Boy Scouts, and all years and years ago. It just doesn't affect me. I have a lot of hunting friends and families, and have known people even here in the United States who really did depend on hunting for their food -- one of my friends in high school in South Dakota had to go hunting every year, despite the fact that she hated it, because they needed that extra little bit to take the pressure off. So I have no sympathy at all with the No Guns Ever crowd. But beyond that, I don't really have much of an opinion about the particular legal regulations used to keep order in this area of human life.

But I do have a pedantic streak in me, and even I, who have not touched a gun in something like twenty years, know what a semiautomatic is, and it gets annoying to keep coming across people who clearly don't yet insist on saying something about it. Semiautomatic does not mean 'scarier'. A semiautomatic rifle, for instance, is neither the most powerful, nor the most accurate, nor the most reliable rifle. There is one and only one thing that makes a gun semiautomatic:

It reloads automatically, but does not fire more than one bullet per trigger-squeeze.

While it varies considerably, for engineering reasons, semiautomatic weapons tend to be less powerful, less accurate, and less reliable (more likely to fail) than manual action weapons, in which the gun is reloaded by pulling or sliding something. Since they are self-loading and thus cut out loading time, semiautomatic weapons have a certain amount of convenience to them, which is why they are popular. But military snipers, for instance, almost universally use bolt-action rifles, with manual reloading: bolt-action rifles are usually better than semiautomatic rifles in power, accuracy, and reliability, and snipers can easily afford the tiny amount of extra loading time if it gives them an extra advantage in those three areas.

What is more, even though a semiautomatic weapon saves on loading time, this is really a very small amount of time. A pro with his favorite pump-action rifle is not going to be at any serious disadvantage in speed compared to most people with a semiautomatic. So, in other words, 'semiautomatic' is purely a term for how the gun is loaded (how the bullet is chambered); it tells us nothing else whatsoever.

It is, on the other hand, useful, as opposed to 'assault', which is a bizarre mish-mash category. MrD had some recent interesting posts about this category:

Assault Weapons Part 1: Battle Rifle to Assault Rifle
Assault Weapons Part 2: Assault Rifles vs. "Assault Weapons"
Assault Weapons Part 3: Gun Control

Ought and Is

In my philosophical folklore post last week I asked about other tidbits of philosophical folklore, and commenter Ray Ingles gave one example:

The “is-ought fallacy” is another recurring ‘folk philosophy’ phrase – meaning “you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’”, after Hume.

This is a very interesting one, and it is undeniably common — even the exact phrase “you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’” returns something like 48000 hits on Google, and when you start adding variations, the number explodes. The principle is sometimes called ‘Hume’s Guillotine’, a label that seems to go back to philosopher Max Black in the 1960s. Others call it ‘Hume’s Law’, the source of which I have not been able to trace, although it does seem to be both more recent and less useful, given that there are plenty of other things that have also been called ‘Hume’s Law’. As is often the case with things that reduce to a slogan, it seems to be used in very different ways. Here are some various formulations that often get thrown around when talking about the ‘Is-ought fallacy’ or ‘Hume’s Guillotine’:

You can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.
You can’t derive an imperative from an indicative.
You can’t derive value judgments from factual judgments.
You can’t derive normative claims from factual claims.
You can’t derive evaluative claims from non-evaluative claims.

But oughts, imperatives, and value judgments are all very different things. ‘Ought’ statements, for instance, are generally indicative statements. What adds to the confusion is that all of these, even if they are often true, seem to have obvious counterexamples, yet they are all treated as absolute statements. There are many intriguing puzzles here, and the question is sometimes even raised as to whether the use of the principle is self-defeating. As a friend of mine, James Chastek, once joked, “We can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’; therefore we ought not to try.”

Perhaps we should go back and look at the source of this slogan, David Hume (1711-1776).

Read the rest of this post at the First Thoughts blog.

Jewel in the Night

Christmas Eve music a couple days ago from the International Space Station (it was Christmas Eve by the Julian calendar; they were celebrating it with the Russians):