2023 Prius

The car’s visibility is modelled on that of a tank. A substantial fraction of driving happens by instruments: radars and a rearview camera, with the latter easily disarmed by the sun. The instrument cluster lacks a visor. Nevertheless, at night or when the sun shines of a favourable angle, one can just about make out the car’s speed, outlined in a thin font that must have looked pretty in a fashion magazine ten years ago. Little else in the instrument cluster is discernible to the naked eye.

The windows are cut to declare on the owner’s behalf: “I hate where I live. All I want to see is the strip of the road directly in front of me.” The rear window is just large enough to alert the driver when his car is in the direct path of a chasing dinosaur. In a parking lot, the cars parked diagonally behind and similarly placed columns are invisible to the eye, though visible to the radar. As a result, one learns to drive the car the way one may play a computer game. The outlines of the car as seen in the rearview camera are calibrated to be too wide apart.

The steering wheel is pleasant enough to the touch and is pleasantly small. (The shifter is unpleasantly small.) The placement and the design of rear-door handles is a cost-saving measure with no ergonomic justification. The roofline is so low that entering and exiting the car come with health and safety hazards of their own.

The fenders are pliable, presumably for the benefit of the pedestrians who may choose to approach and come into contact with the vehicle from unexpected angles. Once inside the car, one has the strong desire to push the encroaching roof and the pillars out with one’s forehead and hands, and one probably could, both in the front and in the back seats.

The car handles well on the highway. It feels stable and accelerates fast enough to merge with the traffic.

The driver feedback is haphazard. There is a set of chimes that anticipates the illegibility of the instrument panel and alerts the driver to the developments inside the car. Another set of chimes alerts the deriver to various external hazards. Then there is a collection of sounds that are supposed to inform the  driver about how the car feels about moving in various directions. The internal combustion engine refuses to play with the band and has a parallel gig of its own.

Nowadays it is fashionable to worry about the alignment problem: what happens if robots take the goals that humans have programmed them to pursue a little too literally (under the circumstances that human programmers have failed to foresee) and inflict misery onto the human race. The Prius proves that the alignment concerns are not utterly misplaced. Prius appears to have been designed to pursue one goal only: mileage maximisation. In the blind pursuit of this goal, Prius has chosen to drop the human from the equation.

The Mountaintop

(The Geffen Playhouse, 24 June 2023)

She is too tall. He is too short. The script is too thin. The direction is dry. The actors try hard. The public has style.

"The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On 'Liberal' as an Adjective" by Michael Walzer (2023)

For Michael Walzer, to be liberal (adj.) is to be capable of recognising and navigating trade-offs; to be nondogmatic; and---not explicitly stated but implied---to be committed to looking for, and exploiting, the opportunities to make everyone better off. In other words, to be liberal is to be a good economist.

Walzer is not shy of wearing his politics on his sleeve. He should not be. After all, his politics is his and has not been thrust upon him by the accident of birth. One is free to broadcast any aspect of one's persona one pleases---the bandwidth of the public square permitting---and to broadcast the aspect that one is wholly responsible for (with a little helps from one's friends and, in Walzer's case, comrades) is the American way.

The Empire Strips Back

 (Logan Square Auditorium, 11 June 2023)

It is not difficult to improve on the films; the show accomplishes that much. The opening two acts are good. The show fails to pick up momentum, however. MC's rants before every number deserve some of the blame. (MC's one saving grace was the invocation of the Star Wars maxim "Win not by fighting what you hate but by saving what you love.") In addition, the weaker numbers should have been axed and the stronger ones expanded.

It is hard to think of a problem in life that cannot be solved by throwing mathematics at it, or money, or classical ballet training. The show is a testament of how much can be achieved with classical ballet training.

"Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality" by David Edmonds (2023)

One does not envy an ideal circle. Nor an ideal square. One does admire the ideal, though, for everything else can be obtained as a convex combination of ideals.

Parfit was an ideal. His intensity seemed unnatural and inaccessible to most and threatening to some. It may be tempting---it seems to have been tempting to the book's author---to deflect the perceived threat by saying: "While Parfit has brilliant, he was incapable of happiness, for he did not gorge---perhaps, because incapable of gorging---on what the masses habitually gorge on. He was different, and, therefore, defective." This temptation deserves resistance. One does not take solace in the perceived unhappiness of a theorem. The appropriate response to an individual who---be it thanks to his intellect, wealth, physical prowess, or beauty---strikes one as almost alien is the same as to a theorem: "thank you."

The ideal circle cannot be accused of eccentricity.

At times, the entire philosophical community may seem like a sorority, an elitist club whose members are cool not because of what they say (for most of the time what they say is either trivial or false) but because of how they say it. At other times, philosophy seems like an incubator of apolitical political thought, an arena where future leaders seek to define and engage with fundamental questions. It is probably both.

It is not clear that the cultural enterprise requires a philosophical leadership (or any leadership at all). Science appears to be capable of guiding itself rather well, without supervision by the elites. It does not appear that philosophers or philosophies have much influence on arms control negotiations, nuclear energy policies, or pandemic management. Agitators for special interests do, and they need slogans. These slogans may as well come from philosophy. But to equate philosophy with a slogan factory is to equate the All Souls College with the Media Arts Lab (except that the All Souls places its output into the public domain). The choices of agitators are explained by political economy rather than philosophy, though.

Much of what Parfit says is either self-evident or incomprehensible. Of course, one ought to interrogate the widespread intuitive appeal of equality as a primitive desideratum. Of course, a life spent trying to reconcile conflicting moral intuitions---just like a life spent trying to aggregate disparate consumption tastes---is a life well lived. And surely it is a salubrious habit to challenge the logic of being upset about geopolitical developments today so much more than about the tragic events of the past. Perhaps, it is thanks to Parfit's work in the 1980s that these truisms are perceived as such today.