Evidence of Intent

I have a few pet peeves, and the one that gets me into the most trouble would be my refusal to do any zeroth order work. Zeroth order work is work that when done now saves one exactly the same amount of effort as when it is done later. It is the merest type of work, work with a zero interest rate, work that doesn’t reflect any form of investment. Granted, work of the purely zeroth order type is not easy to find - even doing the laundry makes one more proficient at doing laundry, after all. However, amongst the different tasks available, there are just some that are so blatantly close to zeroth order that I cannot bear to do them. These are the tasks that, as I do them, I feel the clock of mortality ticking away, and I feel guilt at having wasted another second, minute or hour of my biological life while the mental clock was stopped.

High order activity, on the other hand, is a delight. It is usually hard to determine exactly how many orders up a particular activity is, but I’ve always looked to philosophy as ultra-long-term investment, fruitful activity that may take a while, but inevitably trickled down into one’s life in a myriad of ways, enriching many branches with subtle, strengthening transformations.

The ethical question of fairness, of whether to treat people equally, does not depend on whether or not people are in fact equal. I get irate at how people confuse these two. To treat unequal people equally is an ethical decision, not an expression of belief in pre-existing equality. The expense of this moral choice, however, IS proportional to the extent to which equality is truly there.

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I used to complain quite a bit about the lack of introspection in other people. More recently, another possibility has struck me - maybe it was I who was engaging in excessive introspection. Sorta like having a buggy Garbage Collector for cyclic structures.

Of Sex and Marriage - “…it seems to me that we are talking ourselves to death.”

The Pursuit of Happiness - “Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.”

We’re all Big Babies - “The crucial difference is my grandfather’s lack of self-consciousness, and that self-consciousness is a hallmark of the perpetual, infantilised adolescents we have all become, monsters of introspection hovering twitchily on the edge of self-obsession, occasionally aware that the life that exists only to be examined is barely manageable; barely, indeed, a life.”