The word “interests” in English has two meanings:

(a) things that are to your advantage,

(b) things you find interesting.

Most people run their lives according to (a) to a degree I find had to fathom. Calculations of self-interest may be conscious (a Senator supporting Trump’s election lies) or not-so-conscious (a cyclist going without a light since the police don’t enforce that rule). (The calculation may be essentially valid or not, but that’s not my concern here.)

Which brings me to (b). So many people’s interests are so narrow! I think that’s often because they are mainly interested in things they perceive as related to their self-interest. Most people, to a degree I find hard to fathom, are not very interested in topics or activities beyond what will advance their lives and their careers. So (a) and (b) end up entwined after all.

[16 October 2022]

According to my best count, there are 16 different places that I have lived for a year or more. This becomes 22 if you look at six months or more, and 35 for three months or more.

13 years: 23 Barberry Rd, Lexington, MA, USA (1955-70)
9 years: 11 Church Way, Iffley, Oxford, UK (2013-)
7 years: 36 Jack Straws Lane, Headington, Oxford, UK (1998-2006)
6 years: 11 Hemlock Way, Ithaca, NY, USA (1991-1997)
4 years: Harvard College, Cambridge, MA, USA (1973-77)
3 years: 16 Upland Rd, Cambridge, MA, USA (1984-87)
3 years: 9 Fuller Rd, Lexington, MA, USA (1987-90)
3 years: 61 Sunningwell Rd, Oxford, UK (2009-12)
2 years: Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH, USA (1970-73)
2 years: 242 Curtner Ave, Palo Alto, CA, USA (1978-80)
2 years: Euclid Ave, East Palo Alto, CA, USA (1980-82)
2 years: Washington Square Village, New York, NY, USA (1982-84)
2 years: John Towle Close, Oxford, UK (2007-09)
1 year : 141 Moreton Rd, Summertown, Oxford, UK (1997-98)
1 year : 10 Rodean St, Fig Tree Pocket, Brisbane, Australia (2003-4)
1 year : 49 rue St. Jean, Lyon, France (2017-18)

[22 January 2023]

When I look at a mathematics paper, often I am annoyed at how badly is written. Once I decode the underlying idea being so poorly expressed, often I am annoyed at its shallowness. How can this person be so dim?

There’s an obvious paradox here. My success as a mathematics professor results precisely from my thinking more deeply and writing more clearly than most of the competition. If they were all like me, I would be just average. So why am I annoyed by the very thing that has made me successful?

I tried to figure out a resolution of this paradox and eventually realized that not every paradox has a resolution. My love of strong ideas clearly expressed is genuine. So is my love of personal success. Sometimes, one’s loves may point in contrary directions.

[8 January 2023]

Decade after decade, though the political landscape changes, Republicans and Democrats remain more or less equally balanced in the fight for political power. The Economist’s Lexington column this week tries to explain this effect, asking “Why is the country divided so evenly?”

The analogy with sex ratios in biology suggests to me that the explanation may be dynamical as well as political. The familiar paradox is that to maximize offspring, humanity would do better to have 10 women for every man, but that’s not how it happens. In such a world, men would end up with many more descendants than women. This would give a huge selection advantage to parents who gave birth to more than the usual small fraction of boy babies, quickly pushing the ratio back towards 1:1.

With political parties it won’t be as clean or as reliable, but I imagine there may be an analogous dynamic in play.

[7 January 2023]

Several of my notes assert that it is “natural” to value a nearby person more than a distant one, and a human being more than an animal or an alien. Thus I measure utility with a weight function w(x,t,s) (s=species) that decays as x/t/s move away from here/now/human. Hence my resolution of Pascal’s wager and my rejection of a key assumption of Effective Altruism.

A philosopher may object: what kind of an argument is this? What in the world does “natural” mean?

My answer is that objective moral truths do not exist. If they did, then indeed, it would be hard to see how my own place, time and species could be special. But in fact, we cannot justify moral feelings, we can only explain them, and natural selection is a big part of the explanation. That’s what “natural” means.

[20 November 2022]

At the current COP27 climate summit in Egypt, many people are pointing out how unfair it is that poorer nations are suffering the most while having done very little to bring on the problem. Climate change is the fault of the industrialized West, which is therefore morally obligated to pay “loss and damage” recompense.

I feel the power of this argument. One might quietly wonder, however, about the mathematics. If you consider the total impact of the industrialized West on the poorer nations of the world — a terrifying prospect — you see enormous negatives but enormous positives too, including the doubling of life expectancies. On balance, positive or negative? This question is so fraught, so tied to passions entirely understandable, that it’s hardly surprising it is never brought up for discussion.

[9 November 2022]

As Kate comes near the end of writing Silence: A Literary History, I find myself looking at 53 years of index card notes and mulling over a silence question of my own. There are a number of notes that I think are good, but might be better without their final sentences or paragraphs. These are cases where I present a situation and then spell out the moral explicitly. My older self now wonders, might it have been better if I had left that un-spelled out?

But it’s never a simple call. I dislike aphorisms that are slickly minimalist: it is my aim to be a philosopher, not a poet. Omitting all hints as to the point I am attempting to convey would be going too far.

Of course the poets must think about this issue all the time, and Robert Frost with his rural wisdoms was an interesting case. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…,” I like to imagine he mused, is a great start. Now then, should I really spell out “I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference,” or is that too heavy-handed?

[14 October 2022]

I have marveled that although my life is far past half-way done, this doesn’t bother me much, which seemed irrational. But I’ve also argued, in connection with Pascal’s wager, that we are decoupled from our past and future selves by decreasing weight functions: that the present value of a pound of pleasure a year from now is only a few ounces.

I still hold to this view, and it explains the ice cream effect. If I assess my stage of life by integrating from birth to death without a weight function, then yes, I am 75% finished. With a weight function in there, however, the early and late years drop away. And that is why, throughout life, until near the end, as long as one is healthy, it can feel like the middle.

Living in the here-and-now is like driving at night with headlights shining on the road. A hazard ahead is nearly invisible until you get quite close.

[14 October 2022]

The other day on Holywell Street, I backed up without looking properly and put a couple of pedestrians at risk. This was bad driving. I was at fault.

The man gestured to me to lower my window and yelled at me about my bad driving. He was completely right, and I tried to tell him that I agreed and was deeply sorry. However, he was too mad, and he stalked off without hearing my apology.

And then boy was I mad too.

[4 October 2022]

The New York Times points out on the front page today that “Recently, Britain lost its place as the world’s fifth-largest economy to India.”

What an odd statement — not mentioning that India’s population is 20 times greater.

[5 October 2022]