First something from a comment I made yesterday at HLAS when some wack brought up the quotation from Emerson cranks and others who can’t argue well love:

Emerson is a hero of mine, and I love “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” But “With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall,” is insanely stupid–the way the writings of Foucault and the other French literary critics whose idiocy has dominated academic literary criticism in the US for so long are.  Perfect consistency is probably not possible, but maximal consistency–ULTIMATELY–is what all the largest minds try their best to end in, even Emerson, even if he might not have been aware of it in his need to be allowed to say anything he wanted to purely on the basis of how much he liked it rather than on the basis of how much reality it reflected.

“With consistency a philogusher (lover of gush) has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.”  Grumman, 5 March 2015

Better the shadow of himself he sees on the wall than one of himself that he sees on the side of a hairy green & purple unicorn eating marmalade in a thunderstorm on the moon.

–Bob G.  Hmm, I realize decades too late that I should have been signing myself “Bobb” rather than just “Bob.”

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I often write here about being in my null zone, or almost in it.  I guess I’ve mentioned a few times I’ve been in a good zone.  I rarely mention being in a good zone, though: I’m too involved with more important things to.  When I’m in my null-zone, though, I tend not to have anything else to write about.  Anyway, a few minutes ago, I was getting all kinds of ideas.  I was feeling energetic and enthusiastic.  It was like I felt for about an hour while writing about the rigidniplex.  Ergo, I should call where I was the “eurekan zone.”

I was not in it for long, not wholly in it for long.  I feel mentally in it at the moment, but physically in the null zone, and in a so-so mood.  My mood may be good enough to allow me to take care of the entry–if I can remember any of the ideas I had.

One was simply my counter to something I read in the latest issue of The New Criterion about how foolish so many thinkers were for believing that “a hard science of human affairs has been or soon will be achieved.”  I think a poor hard science of human affairs has been achieved, and that neurophysiological understandings will eventually make it equal as a science to chemistry in hardness, especially once academics are aware of my theory ( . . . I hope).

Gary Saul Morson, the writer whose words I quoted against the notion of hard science because if political science were a hard science, there would be no room for reasonable doubt for the same reason there is no room for reasonable doubt about most aspects of chemistry.  I find this no problem because (1) however hard a science is, it will never be complete, so there will always be important differences of opinion.

ns about aspects of it;  and (2) the axioms chosen to base a given hard science on will necessarily be a subjective matter, so squabbling at the roots of political science will always occur.

It may be exclusively the moral axioms of physical science that people will argue about, as they do now: for instance, which is better, a collectivist society or an individualistic one?  Answer: it would depend on whom you ask.  Security versus freedom.  The first is better for certain people, the second better for others.  Which is why our nation and others mix the two.  But how much of either is the right mix will always be debatable.

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I’m definitely out of my eurekan zone.  While briefly in it, I coined a few new terms, as I tend to do when I feel at my best.  One was “conclusory,” which consists of verosophical conclusions and the actions taken because of them.  I was thinking about the many people involved in the sciences who are not seeking important understandings of anything but using the conclusions such understandings lead to as the basis of technological accomplishments.  But that would mean they are working in technology, so “conclusory” is not needed.

“Techthetics” was my word for the equivalent field in Art.  It would be for the technological use of art for decoration.  I was trying to differentiation those artists who advance their art from mere “techthetists” who just use received art to make salable paintings that go nowhere man has not been before.  But the umbrella term “technology” covers such people as readily as it covers those whose field is applied science.  So, good-bye “techthetics.”

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I stole the following from my friend Lynne Kositsky’s Facebook page:

I was there on Shakespeare-Authorship-Question (SAQ) business.  Here’s what I wrote:

You know, we really just need to leave the Stratfordians to themselves. They’re the fringe, they’re the irrational, they’re the ones who will never, ever accept evidence, no matter what.

When we’re dealing with people who keep saying things like, “Most crucially, Shakespeare absolutely was recognized as an author during his lifetime. About half of Shakespeare’s plays were printed during his lifetime. Many of those list his name as author on the title page,” we have to recognize that we’re dealing with people who simply cannot get it.

It may be natural density, it may be some unfortunate emotional or psychological disorder, but that argument–central to their position–automatically disqualifies them from rational discourse and confirms that they’re never going to be able to understand the question, much less the answer.

Let them say what they will, let them print what they will. Let’s channel our time and other resources toward producing positive research proving that Oxford is the author. That shouldn’t be so difficult. And with a body of sound work on the record things will set themselves right when this generation of Stratfordians passes away.

Here’s my critique of the above, which I wrote because I like to do the kind of analysis it requires:

Kevin Orville Right.  I mean, Kevin Orlen Johnson: You know, we really just need to leave the Stratfordians to themselves. They’re the fringe, they’re the irrational, they’re the ones who will never, ever accept evidence, no matter what.

Me: 1. If they are the fringe, why are there so many of them?

2. Define “evidence.”  Can you really believe ALL Stratfordians are PERMANENTLY incapable of accepting evidence?  I won’t suggest you mean what you say, which is that they won’t accept any kind of evidence, for I’m willing to allow that you meant SAQ evidence.Johnson: When we’re dealing with people who keep saying things like, “Most crucially, Shakespeare absolutely was recognized as an author during his lifetime.”

Me: Few of us say that.  We say things like, “Shakespeare was recognized by many during his life as an author.Johnson: “About half of Shakespeare’s plays were printed during his lifetime. Many of those list his name as author on the title page,” we have to recognize that we’re dealing with people who simply cannot get it.

Me: You really don’t accept the names on title-pages as evidence for Shakespeare?  It’s not proof of that, but it has to be considered good evidence of it, particularly when there is no explicit evidence from the time that the title-pages were fraudulent or mistaken. And we advance many other arguments that you are ignoring here that are supported by explicit evidence–his actual picture in the First Folio, for instance–which Ben Jonson’s words authenticate.  Sure, it’s possible he was lying, but where is the explicit evidence that he was?  That is, do you have a letter of his in which he says that he feels ashamed of his lies about Shakespeare, but realized the importance of keeping anyone from finding out . . . the Truth.

Johnson: It may be natural density, it may be some unfortunate emotional or psychological disorder, but that argument–central to their position–

Me: No, it isn’t–at least for me.  At the center of my argument is Leonard Digges’s poem in the First Folio because (1) circumstantial evidence makes it hard to believe Digges did not personally know Shakespeare; (2) he calls him “the deceased Author Maister W. Shakespeare,” thus both naming him and indicating his status as a gentleman; (3) he mentions his tomb in Stratford, which names him, gives dates of his birth and death which church records confirm and speaks of “all he hath writ” and says he had the art of Virgil; (4) all this in a book with Shakespeare’s picture in it and the testimony of three men known to have been friends of his that he had written the plays in the book.  I suppose someone could fail to accept this as demonstrating that Shakespeare was the author of the plays in the First folio and not have “some unfortunate emotional or psychological disorder,” but to refuse to accept it as evidence of that is absolute proof of that.

Johnson: automatically disqualifies them from rational discourse and confirms that they’re never going to be able to understand the question, much less the answer.

Me: What in the world is the question if not, “Who wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare?”  How can anyone not understand your answer, “The 17th Earl of Oxford,” however hard to understand why it is the answer?

Johnson: Let them say what they will, let them print what they will. Let’s channel our time and other resources toward producing positive research proving that Oxford is the author. That shouldn’t be so difficult. And with a body of sound work on the record things will set themselves right when this generation of Stratfordians passes away.

Me: Considering that your side has had more than 150 years since Delia Bacon wrote the first serious attempt to show that Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him, and almost a century since John Looney advanced the theory you all now believe in that Oxford wrote those works, why do you need more time.

I’m also curious to know if you really believe no one of your generation is a Stratfordian (which I take to be people born around 1990).

One person responding to what Tom Reedy said about Johnson’s post (which was what made me take a look at it) thought something call the “Dunning/Kruger Effect”, explained it.  Here’s what an entry in Wikipedia said about it:

Dunning and Kruger proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

fail to recognize their own lack of skill
fail to recognize genuine skill in others
fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy

The phenomenon was first tested in a series of experiments published in 1999 by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of the Department of Psychology, Cornell University. The study was inspired by the case of McArthur Wheeler, a man who robbed two banks after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that, because lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, it would prevent his face from being recorded on closed-circuit-television surveillance cameras.

They noted that earlier studies suggested that ignorance of standards of performance lies behind a great deal of incorrect self-assessments of competence. This pattern was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis.

I quote it because amusing.  It is also valid but not illuminating.  For it to be that, it would have to explain the effect, not just describe it (although it has been extended by others to suggest that the incompetent have many incompetences, one being a poor sense of humor.

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Should the names of those contributing to a political campaign, or anything else, be prevented by law from being anonymous?  I say no, because (1) you should not have the freedom to know things about me I don’t want you to know; you should still be allowed to find out all you can about me that you want to so long as you break not laws; but I should be protected from your investigation by, for example, a political committee I send money to if they are willing to keep my name private, and they should be allowed to do that if they want to; (2) only morons evaluate a cause by who is for, who against it.

While on the subject, I also believe a person should be able to invest as much money, or the equivalent (like labor or pennants) in anything he wants to, anonymously and without anything about his investment being revealed–which means that the people running whatever he is investing in should have the right to keep all facts about their operation private–except, I suppose, to the IRS, in a country unfree enough to tax.  To me, it’s simply a matter of allowing a person to use his property, which includes his money, any uncriminal way he wants to.

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What if you and nine other people your age all died, and found out you’d be given new lives but would forget the life you’d just lived.  The ten of you were then asked to choose which of the two situations would apply to all of you: everyone would be win a permanent income of fifty-thousand dollars,or the equivalent in today’s dollars, or nine of you would be given a permanent income of forty-thousand dollars a year and one, chosen randomly would be given a permanent income of one-hundred-forty-thousand dollars a year.  Which would you choose?

Assuming the others were more or less like you in background, which do you think the others would vote for?

I’d instantly choose the 40/140 set-up.  For me the difference between forty and fifty thousand wouldn’t be much, but between fifty and a hundred-and-forty tremendous.  I frankly don’t think the higher amount would make the others’ lives as much better as it would make mine.  They’d be like Bill Gates, hardly doing anything of value with their wealth.  By my standards.

Redistributing money by contributing to charities as Gates seems mostly to do doesn’t do any more than redistributing the money by buying neat things for oneself, as I would do with my wealth; the difference between me and most others winning the extra income would be what I believe I could do with it versus what they would: like setting up think tanks to investigate questions like the neurophysiological basis of learning, or work out a taxonomy of poetry, or any other of a number of things–after supplying me with the computers and peripherals to allow me to do all I think I could do as a poet.  As opposed to new cars and vacation trips, etc.

Maybe a more interesting choice would be between $50,000 a year for everyone, and $20,000 a year for nine and $320,000 thousand a year for one.  I think many more would vote for the 40/140 than for the 20/320.  Twenty-thousand would be fine with me.

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I can’t understand how anyone can be considered to have been born with any rights.  Each of us is born with might, which–if effective (the way most babies’ crying is)–will convert to various rights . . . and unrights.

It may make more sense to believe each of us is born with conveyable rights–that is, we have no rights of our own, but can grant rights to others.  This is a deep thought.  Urp.

“Nuptuage,” (NOOP shoo ehdj): my very tentative new replacement for the word, “marriage,” now that the nullinguists have succeeded in killing it for any useful purpose.

In the latest issue of The New York Review Michael Walzer reviews two books on group-decisions.  In his piece, he writes, “I am reminded of a passage in the Babylonian Talmud (tractate Sanhedrin)that holds that if, in a capital case, all the judges vote to convict, the defendant is acquitted.  The absence of dissent means that there wasn’t an adequate deliberation.”  I at once thought, “Yes!”  My head quickly cleared when I realized that the judges could assign one of them always to dissent.  I also remembered that a valid verdict can be quickly reached in more than a few cases.

Shouldn’t the judges logic require the execution of a defendant they all vote to acquit?

The books Walzer discusses are to a great extent about how to improve group-decisions.  They seemed vacuous to me.  But I am biased against groups.  For me, the best way to improve a group is to reduce its membership to a single person.  If you want mush decisions, ones that are hard to disagree with but don’t accomplish anything much, increase a group’s membership, and include a lot of women.  They will use their socioceptual abilities to neutralize male logic.  Of course, one-person groups will also make the worst decisions.

Moreover, groups actually make all the decisions.  It’s just formal groups that are bad.  In fact, in my view, the best decision-makers are those who are in the most groups (externally)–and in the most varied groups.
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Scrap #1: while I was idly thinking about my theory of knowlecular psychology’s main flaw, that it is a cluster of invented mechanisms with little known neurophysiological basis, like Freud’s subconscious, id, ego, etc. ,  it occurred to me that the two main ways of doing science, theory-spinning and empiricism, can be thought of as  striving for a maximally-plausible explanation of known events (theory-spinning) versus striving for a maximally-accurate description of unknown events (empiricism).   Wanting to know what in the brain causes a person to remember his fourth-grade teacher versus what results from the activation of a given brain-cell.  Theorizing from result to possible cause versus physically searching from cause to possible result.

Scrap #2: Scrap #1 indicates how long it can take a fairly competent brain to turn what seems to it an idea of more than small interest badly expressed into what seems a trivial idea better expressed, in this case: The two main ways of doing science are theoretical science, which is the full use of the imagination to theorize one’s way from event to possible cause, and empirical science, which is the minimal use of the imagination to physically explore one’s way from event to possible result.

Scrap #3: Scrap # 2 may be a lie . . . no,make that, “unintentionally inaccurate statement.”

Scrap #4 (something about poeticks!): For the past two or three years I’ve been reading a lot of mainstream poetry and reviewing it for Small Press Review.  I have genuinely liked twenty or thirty percent of it, and found almost all the rest of it passable, just not to my taste.  Only a few times has a mainstream poem made me bubble o’er with delight, however.  Why?  Because, however snowflake-unique they are, the differences between them come to seem barely noticeable.

Now I’m talking about a kind of poem that has dominated the mainstream for fifty years or so but which may not be the only kind of mainstream poem, the one often called the Iowa Workshop Poem.

Background Scraps:

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is a two-year residency program which culminates in the submission of a creative thesis (a novel, a collection of stories, or a book of poetry) and the awarding of a Master of Fine Arts degree.

For more than 75 years emerging writers have come to Iowa City to work on their manuscripts and to exchange ideas about writing and reading with each other and with the faculty. Many of them have gone on to publish award-winning work after graduating. With the spirit of an arts colony and the benefits of the research University of which we are a part, the Writers’ Workshop continues to foster and to celebrate American literature in all its varied forms.  (Note: by “all its varied forms” is clearly meant, poem, novel, play, short story, etc., nothing more specific, like “visual poem,” which it may begin”to foster and celebrate” in another 75 years.)

This program either was the first to grant MFAs in poetry, or central to the academic, then socio-economic success, of them–to the benefit of mediocrities and cost of their superiors in the field.

Scrap #5: Actually, for possibly twenty years, jump-cut poetry under the misleading pseudonym of “language poetry” has been acadominant, which is to say that it has become the most prestigious kind of poetry in academia.  Its practitioners have won more than enough prizes and positions for it to now be considered one of the mainstream poetries.  But it doesn’t get into any of the mainstream publications I’ve been reviewing–well, except for token appearances in Poetry and the like–and is not reviewed by mainstream critics like William Logan (unless you count poets like Jorie Graham and John Ashbery “language poets,” as some do).

Scrap #6: My problem, in any case, is with Iowa Workshop Poetry.  Writing these scraps, I suddenly see that much of it, curiously, is due to my preference for theoretical science to empirical science, for it is almost entirely a kind of empirical poetry, carried out mainly in a poet’s practiceptual awareness, and never, it would seem, in the higher regions of the poet’s magniceptual awareness.  (And just as many more science professionals are empirical workers, not theoretical thinkers–although the most gifted of the former sometimes make just as important discoveries, many more poets are MFA poets, not otherstream–i.e., adventurous–poets.)

The poets I’m speaking of are more than anything else, personal poets telling us about their lives and the real world around them, in easy to understand language.  Personality and point-of-view are important for them, not technique.  Their poetry is basically conversation.  You empathize with them or you don’t, you agree with them or you don’t.  Little else matters.

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I’m sure I had more to say about Iowa Workshop Poetry, but my head has gone blank.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll remember enough of it for an entry.

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I tore what’s below out of a recent issue of my local paper:

This interests me for what it reveals about the media and polling.  It seems to me the actual question asked of the 38% of the sample who named the top eleven males and the 41% who named the top ten females was, “What did the media convince you to name the man or woman you most admired?”  A study that could test this would determine which names came up most in the media during the past year shown in a favorable light.  It might be broken down into print media and TV.  Perhaps for better analysis, the number of minutes named persons were shown on television . . . no, how many viewer-minutes they were shown for.

A more intelligent question would be, “what living person has most influenced you to do the things you’ve done in your try to be the best you could be?”  That would require one reporting on it for a newspaper to do a bit of work, for I think the answers would not be household names.  (I tried to find out how many who were polled named a friend or relative; I found nothing about the most recent poll, but on the one before that, 9% named a friend or relative; something over 30% [I’ve lost the link] named “others.”  Only 1031 people were polled.  A question just occurred to me: were they asked to think about the question and be ready to say what it was in two weeks or a month?  No.  The poll itself only last two weeks or so.)  Follow-up questions would be required, to get a few pertinent facts about each person’s mentor, or the equivalent–in particular, what it was about him that caused the one naming him to try to emulate him.

A much better question would be, “Who, of all the people you know or know of, living or dead, have you tried to emulate the most–or wished you’d emulated the most?”  “Or will try to emulate in the future?”  I wonder how many living people would be named.  How many people known personally by those naming them.

For me, it would be George Bernard Shaw early on, then (probably) Ezra Pound.  A problem for me is that I don’t think anyone really influenced me: I did what I was predestined to do by my genes, but picked out persons before me whose example encouraged me to not give up (alas).

The influence on me of others’ thought or art is a different story.   Too many to name.  The question would be whom I thought most worth stealing from, not whom I most admired.

Once again I’ve written up something and found I used up all I could say about it way too soon.

Note: while doing a search for information about this poll, I came across a guy calling himself “Pumpkin Person” who seems more politically incorrect than I.  Ethnic IQ is his main subject.  As my readers know, I escape political incorrectness about IQ scores because I don’t think they mean much.

I guess that’s it for today–except to say that to get my word-count over 500 (which it wasn’t when I wrote this line; I later added something above).
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I’m friends with the brother of the late B. Kilban, so each year get a B. Kliban cat calendar from him.  I was putting last year’s calendar away when I thought of using my favorite cat in it here, being in my null zone again.

This is about the best depiction of the painter at work that I’ve ever seen.
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First something from a comment I made yesterday at HLAS when some wack brought up the quotation from Emerson cranks and others who can’t argue well love:

Emerson is a hero of mine, and I love “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” But “With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall,” is insanely stupid–the way the writings of Foucault and the other French literary critics whose idiocy has dominated academic literary criticism in the US for so long are.  Perfect consistency is probably not possible, but maximal consistency–ULTIMATELY–is what all the largest minds try their best to end in, even Emerson, even if he might not have been aware of it in his need to be allowed to say anything he wanted to purely on the basis of how much he liked it rather than on the basis of how much reality it reflected.

“With consistency a philogusher (lover of gush) has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.”  Grumman, 5 March 2015

Better the shadow of himself he sees on the wall than one of himself that he sees on the side of a hairy green & purple unicorn eating marmalade in a thunderstorm on the moon.

–Bob G.  Hmm, I realize decades too late that I should have been signing myself “Bobb” rather than just “Bob.”

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I often write here about being in my null zone, or almost in it.  I guess I’ve mentioned a few times I’ve been in a good zone.  I rarely mention being in a good zone, though: I’m too involved with more important things to.  When I’m in my null-zone, though, I tend not to have anything else to write about.  Anyway, a few minutes ago, I was getting all kinds of ideas.  I was feeling energetic and enthusiastic.  It was like I felt for about an hour while writing about the rigidniplex.  Ergo, I should call where I was the “eurekan zone.”

I was not in it for long, not wholly in it for long.  I feel mentally in it at the moment, but physically in the null zone, and in a so-so mood.  My mood may be good enough to allow me to take care of the entry–if I can remember any of the ideas I had.

One was simply my counter to something I read in the latest issue of The New Criterion about how foolish so many thinkers were for believing that “a hard science of human affairs has been or soon will be achieved.”  I think a poor hard science of human affairs has been achieved, and that neurophysiological understandings will eventually make it equal as a science to chemistry in hardness, especially once academics are aware of my theory ( . . . I hope).

Gary Saul Morson, the writer whose words I quoted against the notion of hard science because if political science were a hard science, there would be no room for reasonable doubt for the same reason there is no room for reasonable doubt about most aspects of chemistry.  I find this no problem because (1) however hard a science is, it will never be complete, so there will always be important differences of opinion.

ns about aspects of it;  and (2) the axioms chosen to base a given hard science on will necessarily be a subjective matter, so squabbling at the roots of political science will always occur.

It may be exclusively the moral axioms of physical science that people will argue about, as they do now: for instance, which is better, a collectivist society or an individualistic one?  Answer: it would depend on whom you ask.  Security versus freedom.  The first is better for certain people, the second better for others.  Which is why our nation and others mix the two.  But how much of either is the right mix will always be debatable.

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I’m definitely out of my eurekan zone.  While briefly in it, I coined a few new terms, as I tend to do when I feel at my best.  One was “conclusory,” which consists of verosophical conclusions and the actions taken because of them.  I was thinking about the many people involved in the sciences who are not seeking important understandings of anything but using the conclusions such understandings lead to as the basis of technological accomplishments.  But that would mean they are working in technology, so “conclusory” is not needed.

“Techthetics” was my word for the equivalent field in Art.  It would be for the technological use of art for decoration.  I was trying to differentiation those artists who advance their art from mere “techthetists” who just use received art to make salable paintings that go nowhere man has not been before.  But the umbrella term “technology” covers such people as readily as it covers those whose field is applied science.  So, good-bye “techthetics.”

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I stole the following from my friend Lynne Kositsky’s Facebook page:

I was there on Shakespeare-Authorship-Question (SAQ) business.  Here’s what I wrote:

You know, we really just need to leave the Stratfordians to themselves. They’re the fringe, they’re the irrational, they’re the ones who will never, ever accept evidence, no matter what.

When we’re dealing with people who keep saying things like, “Most crucially, Shakespeare absolutely was recognized as an author during his lifetime. About half of Shakespeare’s plays were printed during his lifetime. Many of those list his name as author on the title page,” we have to recognize that we’re dealing with people who simply cannot get it.

It may be natural density, it may be some unfortunate emotional or psychological disorder, but that argument–central to their position–automatically disqualifies them from rational discourse and confirms that they’re never going to be able to understand the question, much less the answer.

Let them say what they will, let them print what they will. Let’s channel our time and other resources toward producing positive research proving that Oxford is the author. That shouldn’t be so difficult. And with a body of sound work on the record things will set themselves right when this generation of Stratfordians passes away.

Here’s my critique of the above, which I wrote because I like to do the kind of analysis it requires:

Kevin Orville Right.  I mean, Kevin Orlen Johnson: You know, we really just need to leave the Stratfordians to themselves. They’re the fringe, they’re the irrational, they’re the ones who will never, ever accept evidence, no matter what.

Me: 1. If they are the fringe, why are there so many of them?

2. Define “evidence.”  Can you really believe ALL Stratfordians are PERMANENTLY incapable of accepting evidence?  I won’t suggest you mean what you say, which is that they won’t accept any kind of evidence, for I’m willing to allow that you meant SAQ evidence.Johnson: When we’re dealing with people who keep saying things like, “Most crucially, Shakespeare absolutely was recognized as an author during his lifetime.”

Me: Few of us say that.  We say things like, “Shakespeare was recognized by many during his life as an author.Johnson: “About half of Shakespeare’s plays were printed during his lifetime. Many of those list his name as author on the title page,” we have to recognize that we’re dealing with people who simply cannot get it.

Me: You really don’t accept the names on title-pages as evidence for Shakespeare?  It’s not proof of that, but it has to be considered good evidence of it, particularly when there is no explicit evidence from the time that the title-pages were fraudulent or mistaken. And we advance many other arguments that you are ignoring here that are supported by explicit evidence–his actual picture in the First Folio, for instance–which Ben Jonson’s words authenticate.  Sure, it’s possible he was lying, but where is the explicit evidence that he was?  That is, do you have a letter of his in which he says that he feels ashamed of his lies about Shakespeare, but realized the importance of keeping anyone from finding out . . . the Truth.

Johnson: It may be natural density, it may be some unfortunate emotional or psychological disorder, but that argument–central to their position–

Me: No, it isn’t–at least for me.  At the center of my argument is Leonard Digges’s poem in the First Folio because (1) circumstantial evidence makes it hard to believe Digges did not personally know Shakespeare; (2) he calls him “the deceased Author Maister W. Shakespeare,” thus both naming him and indicating his status as a gentleman; (3) he mentions his tomb in Stratford, which names him, gives dates of his birth and death which church records confirm and speaks of “all he hath writ” and says he had the art of Virgil; (4) all this in a book with Shakespeare’s picture in it and the testimony of three men known to have been friends of his that he had written the plays in the book.  I suppose someone could fail to accept this as demonstrating that Shakespeare was the author of the plays in the First folio and not have “some unfortunate emotional or psychological disorder,” but to refuse to accept it as evidence of that is absolute proof of that.

Johnson: automatically disqualifies them from rational discourse and confirms that they’re never going to be able to understand the question, much less the answer.

Me: What in the world is the question if not, “Who wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare?”  How can anyone not understand your answer, “The 17th Earl of Oxford,” however hard to understand why it is the answer?

Johnson: Let them say what they will, let them print what they will. Let’s channel our time and other resources toward producing positive research proving that Oxford is the author. That shouldn’t be so difficult. And with a body of sound work on the record things will set themselves right when this generation of Stratfordians passes away.

Me: Considering that your side has had more than 150 years since Delia Bacon wrote the first serious attempt to show that Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him, and almost a century since John Looney advanced the theory you all now believe in that Oxford wrote those works, why do you need more time.

I’m also curious to know if you really believe no one of your generation is a Stratfordian (which I take to be people born around 1990).

One person responding to what Tom Reedy said about Johnson’s post (which was what made me take a look at it) thought something call the “Dunning/Kruger Effect”, explained it.  Here’s what an entry in Wikipedia said about it:

Dunning and Kruger proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

fail to recognize their own lack of skill
fail to recognize genuine skill in others
fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy

The phenomenon was first tested in a series of experiments published in 1999 by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of the Department of Psychology, Cornell University. The study was inspired by the case of McArthur Wheeler, a man who robbed two banks after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that, because lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, it would prevent his face from being recorded on closed-circuit-television surveillance cameras.

They noted that earlier studies suggested that ignorance of standards of performance lies behind a great deal of incorrect self-assessments of competence. This pattern was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis.

I quote it because amusing.  It is also valid but not illuminating.  For it to be that, it would have to explain the effect, not just describe it (although it has been extended by others to suggest that the incompetent have many incompetences, one being a poor sense of humor.

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Should the names of those contributing to a political campaign, or anything else, be prevented by law from being anonymous?  I say no, because (1) you should not have the freedom to know things about me I don’t want you to know; you should still be allowed to find out all you can about me that you want to so long as you break not laws; but I should be protected from your investigation by, for example, a political committee I send money to if they are willing to keep my name private, and they should be allowed to do that if they want to; (2) only morons evaluate a cause by who is for, who against it.

While on the subject, I also believe a person should be able to invest as much money, or the equivalent (like labor or pennants) in anything he wants to, anonymously and without anything about his investment being revealed–which means that the people running whatever he is investing in should have the right to keep all facts about their operation private–except, I suppose, to the IRS, in a country unfree enough to tax.  To me, it’s simply a matter of allowing a person to use his property, which includes his money, any uncriminal way he wants to.

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What if you and nine other people your age all died, and found out you’d be given new lives but would forget the life you’d just lived.  The ten of you were then asked to choose which of the two situations would apply to all of you: everyone would be win a permanent income of fifty-thousand dollars,or the equivalent in today’s dollars, or nine of you would be given a permanent income of forty-thousand dollars a year and one, chosen randomly would be given a permanent income of one-hundred-forty-thousand dollars a year.  Which would you choose?

Assuming the others were more or less like you in background, which do you think the others would vote for?

I’d instantly choose the 40/140 set-up.  For me the difference between forty and fifty thousand wouldn’t be much, but between fifty and a hundred-and-forty tremendous.  I frankly don’t think the higher amount would make the others’ lives as much better as it would make mine.  They’d be like Bill Gates, hardly doing anything of value with their wealth.  By my standards.

Redistributing money by contributing to charities as Gates seems mostly to do doesn’t do any more than redistributing the money by buying neat things for oneself, as I would do with my wealth; the difference between me and most others winning the extra income would be what I believe I could do with it versus what they would: like setting up think tanks to investigate questions like the neurophysiological basis of learning, or work out a taxonomy of poetry, or any other of a number of things–after supplying me with the computers and peripherals to allow me to do all I think I could do as a poet.  As opposed to new cars and vacation trips, etc.

Maybe a more interesting choice would be between $50,000 a year for everyone, and $20,000 a year for nine and $320,000 thousand a year for one.  I think many more would vote for the 40/140 than for the 20/320.  Twenty-thousand would be fine with me.

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I can’t understand how anyone can be considered to have been born with any rights.  Each of us is born with might, which–if effective (the way most babies’ crying is)–will convert to various rights . . . and unrights.

It may make more sense to believe each of us is born with conveyable rights–that is, we have no rights of our own, but can grant rights to others.  This is a deep thought.  Urp.

“Nuptuage,” (NOOP shoo ehdj): my very tentative new replacement for the word, “marriage,” now that the nullinguists have succeeded in killing it for any useful purpose.

In the latest issue of The New York Review Michael Walzer reviews two books on group-decisions.  In his piece, he writes, “I am reminded of a passage in the Babylonian Talmud (tractate Sanhedrin)that holds that if, in a capital case, all the judges vote to convict, the defendant is acquitted.  The absence of dissent means that there wasn’t an adequate deliberation.”  I at once thought, “Yes!”  My head quickly cleared when I realized that the judges could assign one of them always to dissent.  I also remembered that a valid verdict can be quickly reached in more than a few cases.

Shouldn’t the judges logic require the execution of a defendant they all vote to acquit?

The books Walzer discusses are to a great extent about how to improve group-decisions.  They seemed vacuous to me.  But I am biased against groups.  For me, the best way to improve a group is to reduce its membership to a single person.  If you want mush decisions, ones that are hard to disagree with but don’t accomplish anything much, increase a group’s membership, and include a lot of women.  They will use their socioceptual abilities to neutralize male logic.  Of course, one-person groups will also make the worst decisions.

Moreover, groups actually make all the decisions.  It’s just formal groups that are bad.  In fact, in my view, the best decision-makers are those who are in the most groups (externally)–and in the most varied groups.
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Scrap #1: while I was idly thinking about my theory of knowlecular psychology’s main flaw, that it is a cluster of invented mechanisms with little known neurophysiological basis, like Freud’s subconscious, id, ego, etc. ,  it occurred to me that the two main ways of doing science, theory-spinning and empiricism, can be thought of as  striving for a maximally-plausible explanation of known events (theory-spinning) versus striving for a maximally-accurate description of unknown events (empiricism).   Wanting to know what in the brain causes a person to remember his fourth-grade teacher versus what results from the activation of a given brain-cell.  Theorizing from result to possible cause versus physically searching from cause to possible result.

Scrap #2: Scrap #1 indicates how long it can take a fairly competent brain to turn what seems to it an idea of more than small interest badly expressed into what seems a trivial idea better expressed, in this case: The two main ways of doing science are theoretical science, which is the full use of the imagination to theorize one’s way from event to possible cause, and empirical science, which is the minimal use of the imagination to physically explore one’s way from event to possible result.

Scrap #3: Scrap # 2 may be a lie . . . no,make that, “unintentionally inaccurate statement.”

Scrap #4 (something about poeticks!): For the past two or three years I’ve been reading a lot of mainstream poetry and reviewing it for Small Press Review.  I have genuinely liked twenty or thirty percent of it, and found almost all the rest of it passable, just not to my taste.  Only a few times has a mainstream poem made me bubble o’er with delight, however.  Why?  Because, however snowflake-unique they are, the differences between them come to seem barely noticeable.

Now I’m talking about a kind of poem that has dominated the mainstream for fifty years or so but which may not be the only kind of mainstream poem, the one often called the Iowa Workshop Poem.

Background Scraps:

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is a two-year residency program which culminates in the submission of a creative thesis (a novel, a collection of stories, or a book of poetry) and the awarding of a Master of Fine Arts degree.

For more than 75 years emerging writers have come to Iowa City to work on their manuscripts and to exchange ideas about writing and reading with each other and with the faculty. Many of them have gone on to publish award-winning work after graduating. With the spirit of an arts colony and the benefits of the research University of which we are a part, the Writers’ Workshop continues to foster and to celebrate American literature in all its varied forms.  (Note: by “all its varied forms” is clearly meant, poem, novel, play, short story, etc., nothing more specific, like “visual poem,” which it may begin”to foster and celebrate” in another 75 years.)

This program either was the first to grant MFAs in poetry, or central to the academic, then socio-economic success, of them–to the benefit of mediocrities and cost of their superiors in the field.

Scrap #5: Actually, for possibly twenty years, jump-cut poetry under the misleading pseudonym of “language poetry” has been acadominant, which is to say that it has become the most prestigious kind of poetry in academia.  Its practitioners have won more than enough prizes and positions for it to now be considered one of the mainstream poetries.  But it doesn’t get into any of the mainstream publications I’ve been reviewing–well, except for token appearances in Poetry and the like–and is not reviewed by mainstream critics like William Logan (unless you count poets like Jorie Graham and John Ashbery “language poets,” as some do).

Scrap #6: My problem, in any case, is with Iowa Workshop Poetry.  Writing these scraps, I suddenly see that much of it, curiously, is due to my preference for theoretical science to empirical science, for it is almost entirely a kind of empirical poetry, carried out mainly in a poet’s practiceptual awareness, and never, it would seem, in the higher regions of the poet’s magniceptual awareness.  (And just as many more science professionals are empirical workers, not theoretical thinkers–although the most gifted of the former sometimes make just as important discoveries, many more poets are MFA poets, not otherstream–i.e., adventurous–poets.)

The poets I’m speaking of are more than anything else, personal poets telling us about their lives and the real world around them, in easy to understand language.  Personality and point-of-view are important for them, not technique.  Their poetry is basically conversation.  You empathize with them or you don’t, you agree with them or you don’t.  Little else matters.

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I’m sure I had more to say about Iowa Workshop Poetry, but my head has gone blank.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll remember enough of it for an entry.

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I tore what’s below out of a recent issue of my local paper:

This interests me for what it reveals about the media and polling.  It seems to me the actual question asked of the 38% of the sample who named the top eleven males and the 41% who named the top ten females was, “What did the media convince you to name the man or woman you most admired?”  A study that could test this would determine which names came up most in the media during the past year shown in a favorable light.  It might be broken down into print media and TV.  Perhaps for better analysis, the number of minutes named persons were shown on television . . . no, how many viewer-minutes they were shown for.

A more intelligent question would be, “what living person has most influenced you to do the things you’ve done in your try to be the best you could be?”  That would require one reporting on it for a newspaper to do a bit of work, for I think the answers would not be household names.  (I tried to find out how many who were polled named a friend or relative; I found nothing about the most recent poll, but on the one before that, 9% named a friend or relative; something over 30% [I’ve lost the link] named “others.”  Only 1031 people were polled.  A question just occurred to me: were they asked to think about the question and be ready to say what it was in two weeks or a month?  No.  The poll itself only last two weeks or so.)  Follow-up questions would be required, to get a few pertinent facts about each person’s mentor, or the equivalent–in particular, what it was about him that caused the one naming him to try to emulate him.

A much better question would be, “Who, of all the people you know or know of, living or dead, have you tried to emulate the most–or wished you’d emulated the most?”  “Or will try to emulate in the future?”  I wonder how many living people would be named.  How many people known personally by those naming them.

For me, it would be George Bernard Shaw early on, then (probably) Ezra Pound.  A problem for me is that I don’t think anyone really influenced me: I did what I was predestined to do by my genes, but picked out persons before me whose example encouraged me to not give up (alas).

The influence on me of others’ thought or art is a different story.   Too many to name.  The question would be whom I thought most worth stealing from, not whom I most admired.

Once again I’ve written up something and found I used up all I could say about it way too soon.

Note: while doing a search for information about this poll, I came across a guy calling himself “Pumpkin Person” who seems more politically incorrect than I.  Ethnic IQ is his main subject.  As my readers know, I escape political incorrectness about IQ scores because I don’t think they mean much.

I guess that’s it for today–except to say that to get my word-count over 500 (which it wasn’t when I wrote this line; I later added something above).
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I’m friends with the brother of the late B. Kilban, so each year get a B. Kliban cat calendar from him.  I was putting last year’s calendar away when I thought of using my favorite cat in it here, being in my null zone again.

This is about the best depiction of the painter at work that I’ve ever seen.
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