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2004-02-20 meltdown (utc)
One of the stock ideas of SF back in the days of Giant Electronic
Brains was that the Giant Electronic Brains, being very large (hence
the name) would not be especially nimble, and thus would need to keep
puny humans around to sweep their floors and change their valves and
what have you.
Now that the InterWebNet has made it possible for Indian persons to
demonstrate how much cleverer per unit currency they are than puny
westerners, this is also pretty much the situation we are now facing:
cleverness is geographically fungible, but plumbing very certainly is
not.
You could claim prescience for our SFian predecessors here, or - as I
much prefer - stomp about the room shouting "CHANGE MY VALVES, PUNY
HUMAN!" in your best comedy Indian accent. This will probably not
reverse the inexorable tide of hollowing-out that will shortly put
your career and mine on the scrap heap, but it passes the time.
[Permalink]
2004-02-20 sam! widge! (utc)
Published in 1933 for the original Merkin flavor and 1935 for the
Britished-up version, which is the one I have. And very excellent it
is, too:
The word board had in Old English apparently the same central
meaning as today, "flat piece of wood", and, in addition to this,
several specialised meanings. One of these, "shield", has died out
entirely. Another, "side of a ship", has led to some isolated forms,
such as on board, aboard, to board (a ship), and
these have been extended to use in connection with other vehicles,
such as railway cars. A third marginal meaning, "table", survives,
again, in elevated turns of speech, such as festive board.
Before its general obsolescence, however, board "table"
underwent a further transference to "regular meals", which is still
current, as in bed and board, board and lodging, to
board (at a boarding house), and so on. This use of board
us so widely isolated today from board "plank" that we should
perhaps speak of the two as homonymous words.
[p.432]
Of course 'Wegian bord "table" lives on as the usual word for a
table, and certainly also encompasses "table (laden with food)", as in
sm�rg�sbord ("samwidge-table"). Semantic change is a very
marvellous thing, certainly, but Bloomfield points out, which is just
as true now, that the big problem is the difficulty of specifying
meaning with any precision.
[Permalink]
2004-02-20 Friday! (utc)
I seem to have talked myself into playing
the lottery, not least because there is now a shiny new YooroLotto
(T, very probably, M):
The new game, called EuroMillions, is being run in conjunction with
lottery operators in France and Spain. More countries could join next
year.
That is, if I pass a vendor on my way to Chesterfield, where I am
heading later, and they have a Lucky Dip (T, for all I know, M)
facility to relieve me of the onerous task of choosing numbers for
myself. I refuse point-blank to choose numbers.
And so what if it is a stupidity tax? I'll consider myself lucky if they
don't demand arrears.
[Permalink]
2004-02-20 morning (utc)
In a Frenchy-French car advert (VW, I think): � Le servotronic
n'abolit en aucune cas les lois de la physique . � ("The
servotronic in no way abolishes the laws of physics.") Not even, and
let's be quite clear about this, on full moons in leap years.
My group at a former place of work had as its unofficial slogan
"Policing the laws of physics", generally against acts of design -
you'd be amazed how many persons think a facility with swooshy curves
makes them immune to the second law of thermodynamics, although it by
no means does, and it was our job to break the news to them, which was
often only reluctantly accepted since our shirts were typically far
from being examples of the latest style.
[Permalink]
2004-02-19 foo! (utc)
We're on half-term ("sportlov") from Swedish class this week, but it's
dark by then, and it's nice out now, but at universitetetetet we don't
get froliclov.
It is such a hard life that it is!
[Permalink]
2004-02-19 samwidge (utc)
This sequence of posts is by no means intended as criticism,
incidentally. Translations and cultural projects benefit persons
other than are commissioned to produce them, after all. Here's one now
for film-makers:
Det sker med projektet 'Visions of Europe', hvor 25 instrukt�rer fra
hver af de 25 EU-lande giver hver deres personlige vision af livet i
Europa nu eller i fremtiden
It [a Danish project]'ll me part of the project "Visions of Yoorp",
where 25 directors from the 25 EU countries give their own personal
visions of life in Yoorp now and in the future.
UPDATE: And Birgitte points out that it isn't the EU splashing the cash at all:
Oops, it says: "EU som institution har ingen penge i projektet." and most of the comes primarily from "tv-stationerne ZDF i Tyskland og Arte i Frankrig".
The principle of subsidiarity, isn't it?
I think it would be good if they (for more-or-less arbitrary values of "they" - I'm far from fussy) commissioned 25 bloggeurs from the 25
EU countries to write pieces commemorating the event also, for which I
am available at a really very modest fee, especially compared to the
Common Agricultural Policy.
[Linkage via Birgitte, tak]
[Permalink]
2004-02-19 kaffe (utc)
Isn't
it?
1.915.000 Flemings, almost one third of the Flemish population,
watched the final of Eurosong 2004 resulting in a market share of
65,3%. [...] [T]he final of Eurosong 2004 is the most watched TV
programme in Flanders since 2000 when two football matches of Euro
2000 reached some thousands of viewers more.
Belgium, from memory of gossip (so corrections welcome and please don't
sue) alternates between Flemish and French entries on a strictly
cyclical basis, and one language (language A) generally does OK, while
the other (language B) invariably tanks horribly, which used to mean
Belgium sat out a year in the ante-chamber of ignominy before the A
speakers could get another go, about which they were other than
pleased. (I genuinely don't remember which language was which in this
account.)
I'm thinking that this year might perhaps be a Flemish year, and that
the Wallonian viewing figures might look somewhat different.
(Imagine: Language, identity and Yurovizhn - an EU-funded study by Des von Bladet. C'mon EU, splash me some cash!)
[Permalink]
2004-02-19 09:26
Oh gravy train won't you stop and let me on
Said gravy train won't you stop and let me on
I got to rush before the gravy train is gone
"Gravy train blues", Blind Spacefish Slim
All that EU money sloshing
around, and none of it for me. It's a crying shame, is what it
is.
Officials say expanding from 15 nations sharing 11 languages to 25
nations with 20 languages would almost double the number of
interpreters needed. The EU, whose translation budget was 105m euros
($134m) last year, says it needs at least 180 more interpreters. But
officials have admitted there is a shortage of translators in the
Baltic languages, Slovenian and Maltese.
(Do you think giving the dollars (rather than pounds) as subtitles for
the euros is them having a bit of a gloat on the sly?)
And Turkish is coming up on the rails as well:
Mr Benedetti [the EU's director general for interpretation] said
Turkish could soon become an official EU language if talks to re-unite
Cyprus succeeded and the entire island became a member state.
Chinese is the language of choice for the increasingly global world in
which we live, but I bet the Lithuanian->Engleesh translation
competition is less fierce...
[Permalink]
2004-02-18 afternoon (utc)
I seem to have lost the knack of afternoons. Also, spring is in the
air.
My faith in causality has lately been in abeyance, so I do not propose
to speculate on a connection between these. Especially not in, as it
currently is, the afternoon.
[Permalink]
2004-02-18 th� (utc)
A spammiste has thoughtfully alerted me to the alleged existence of
this
journal. Highlights include:
- "Manuscripts should be strictly prepared in MS WORD from MS
WINDOWS with .rtf (Rich Text Format) file extension on A4 size
paper" (Mathematicians hate word and never use it for real work.)
- "Authors should suggest two names of Indian Referees with their
complete addresses."
- "There will be page charges for preparing printing blocks etc."
On the other hand, they should pretty much sew up the market of
patriotic penguins with extensive Indian connections, dubious "proofs"
of the Riemann hypothesis and cash to burn, and good luck to them. I
would certainly rather people sent their circle-squaring breakthroughs
to this lot than to me. (I don't get much kookmail, but I don't get
none either.)
[Permalink]
2004-02-18 samwidge (utc)
BBC Yoorpean press round-up more
essential than ever:
The European press is paying close attention to Wednesday's EU
"mini-summit" of Germany, France and Britain in Berlin.
The Czech and German papers react rather differently, you will no
doubt gape in bewilderment to discover.
Where Yurovizhun leads...
After careful consideration by the Eurovision Song Contest Reference
Group, and the members of the Television Committee, it has been
decided tochange the Eurovision Song Contest to a two day event from
2004 onwards.
There will still be guaranteed places in the Grand Final, on the
Saturday night, for the hostbroadcaster, the big four contributing
countries (France, UK, Germany and Spain), and the 10highest scoring
countries from the year before.
... Yoorp follows.
And remember - if the result matters, they're not going to give you a vote.
[Based on an original analogy by Comrade B, hurrah!]
[Permalink]
2004-02-18 10:16
L'�criture chinoise, Viviane Alleton, Collection "Que
sais-je?", PUF) ISBN: 2130529216.
They've updated the cover since I got mine and put a 2002 date on it,
but it's been updated periodically since 1970 and I doubt that the
changes between the current and reviewed copies will be extensive.
(Perhaps someone may have figured out how to spell "ASCII" and that
ISO isn't an acronym. That would be good.)
The Que sais-je collection is one of the highlights of French
publishing for me; each volume is a kind of extended encyclopedia
entry/essay on its subject by a prominent scholar in the field,
designed to be read by the interested layperson. Standards are
uniformly high, in my experience, and they're the first place I look
for a non-trivial introduction to a field.
This volume is no exception to the general rule - if you want to know
about Chinese writing and you read French, then this will do the job.
Note, though, that it's about Chinese writing - it won't
teach you much of how, and there really aren't even all that many
characters illustrated, just enough to make the point on each
occasion. (Probably in 1970 it wasn't so trivial to sprinkle a text
with Chinese characters, and maybe not even in 1999.)
I've mentioned before that Chinese syllables are each morphemes
(meaning-bearing units), and almost every morpheme has its own
character; there are far more morphemes than syllables, so many
distinct morphemes share syllables, but usually have their distinct
characters. The characters often (misleadingly at best) called ideograms,
but morphemes are parts of language, rather than "ideas", and
"morphograms" is a much better term.
Alleton discusses the various kinds of character, and the ways in
which complex characters are made up of smaller elements, and is very
good on the question of how characters are classified in dictionaries
and so on, but one of the most interesting things about the writing
system is that it can be used, in many cases, across mutually
unintelligible spoken dialects*:
Le vocabulaire de la langue administrative, philosophique, politique,
scientifique, est, dans l'ensemble, � une epoque donn�e, le m�me dans
tout le pays. Abstraction faite de la pronunciation, un texte de ce
type est compr�hensible d'un bout � l'autre de la Chine. Par example,
un expos� �conomique r�dig� par un Pekinois aura un sens pour un
habitent du Sud-Est, non seulement s'il a des charact�res sous les
yeux, mais aussi s'il entend lire a haute voix dans son dialecte.
C'est ainsi qu'il peut y avoir m'importe o� en Chine des s�ances de
lecture des �ditoriaux du Quotidien du People, publi� � P�kin.
C'est probablement l'unique cas d'une traduction qui peut
s'op�rer valablement syllabe � syllabe.
[The vocabulary of the administrative, philosophical, political and
scientific language is, on the whole, at a given period, the same in
the whole country. Ignoring pronunciation, a text of this type can be
understood from one end of China to the other. For example, an
economic report written by a Beijingite will be meaningful to an
inhabitant of the South-East, not only if he is looking at the
characters, but also if he hears it read out loud in his dialect.
This is what makes it possible to have public readings across the
whole of China of the editorials of the
People's Daily, published in Beijing. This is probably the
only case of a translation that can usefully be carried out
syllable by syllable.]
I have been known to translate Swedish to English
morpheme-by-morpheme, and it generally comes out intelligible, if
slightly contrived, since the syntax of the two languages is very
similar. With the morphogrammatic writing system of Chinese, you get
this essentially for free for formal registers, and this is not
a small thing to get.
So, hurrah for Chinese writing, and hurrah for Collection Que sais-je?
and hurrah for Viviane Alleton's excellent book!
* "A shprakh
iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot" ("A language is a dialect
with an army and a navy") - Max Weinreich. The Chinese government
says they're dialects, and they have an army such as with which you
would not wish to argue, I suspect.
[Permalink]
2004-02-17 dark o'clock (utc)
On my way to the Shoppingharbourwebcam
I was ambushed by some advertising with an overdeveloped sense of
irony urging me to VisitBritain, and in particular Vind en weekend i
Newcastle Gateshead. You know you want to:
Paradis for shoppere. Newcastle Gateshead har i hundredevis
("hundreds") af m�rkevare- og specialbutikker og to af Europas st�rste
("biggest") shoppingcentre - Metrocentre og Eldon Square. Og husk
("remember") , at priserne er billigere ("cheaper") end i London, s�
her f�r du noget for pengene ("money").
(I can't bring myself to "translate" a passage that claims the
shoppingcentre are paradise for shoppere.)
[Permalink]
2004-02-17 tea (utc)
N'est-ce pas? How many languages must a functionary speak, before
you call for an interpreter?
Le minimum serait de pouvoir s'exprimer dans les langues des trois
cultures europ�ennes, latine, anglo-saxonne et germanique, � savoir le
fran�ais, l'anglais et l'allemand.
[...]
Il va n�anmoins falloir faire des choix parmi les vingt langues de
l'Union. L'Allemand est difficile, son usage suscite la jalousie des
Italiens et des Espagnols. Les Fran�ais cherchent donc � pr�server
leur avantage, l'usage de l'anglais et du fran�ais sans traduction
dans les r�unions techniques. [...] Paris a ainsi
form� au fran�ais 3 200 fonctionnaires dans les pays de
l'�largissement en 2003 et organise des sessions sp�ciales � Avignon
pour les ambassadeurs, futurs commissaires et hauts fonctionnaires,
dans une atmosph�re o� l'on essaie de faire oublier les brouilles du
pass� : ainsi l'ambassadeur de Pologne a �t� invit� � commente, cet
�t�, la vid�o au cours de laquelle Jacques Chirac expliquait aux pays
candidats qu'ils avaient "perdu une bonne occasion de se taire" en
soutenant les Am�ricains sur le dossier irakien.
The minimum would be to be able to express oneself in the language of
three European cultures, Latine, Anglo-Saxon and Germanique, namely
Frenchy-French, Engleesh and German.
[...]
It's nevertheless going to be necessary to make choices among the
twenty languages of the Union. German is difficult, its usage
incites jealousy among the Italians and Spanish. The French thus try
to preserve their advantage, the usage of Engleesh and French without
translation in technical meetings. [...] Paris has thus tranined 3
200 civil servants in French in the entry countries in 2003 and
organizes special sessions in Avignon for ambassadors, future
commissioners and senior officials, in an atmosphere which attempts to
smooth over past awkwardness: thus the Polish ambassador was invited
this summer to comment on the video during which Jacques Chirac
explained to the candidate countries that they had "missed an
opportunity to shut up" in supporting America over Iraq.
With Finno-Ugric speaking Finland already in and Estonia and Hungary
joining the Evrol�ken (European Onion) along with Slavic-speaking
Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Poland and the
Baltic-speaking Baltics, Lithuania and Latvia, the idea that Latine,
Anglo-Saxon and Germanique span the cultures of the EU is very
silly indeed.
[Via PF, tack, from miladus, tack also.]
[Permalink]
2004-02-17 apr�s-samwidge (utc)
Filed under 'A' for 'Arts', not necessarily equal to 'A' for
'Archeology' dialectically or otherwise, comes news
of a shipful of dead vikings.
One of the great missing pieces of Britain's archaeological jigsaw may
finally have fallen into place with the discovery of swords, ship
nails and a silver Baghdad coin in a Yorkshire field.
Tight security has been put on the site since metal detecting
enthusiasts came upon what is thought to be the first known Viking
ship burial south of Hadrian's Wall.
They're claiming it's an innocent Viking ship burial, but we weren't
born yesterday. With lethal weapons and Baghdad coinage -
remember all those museums looted by Ba'athiste elements from outta
town? - this is surely the work of an al-Qaeda sleeper cell. You
will note, of course, that the finders are 'anonymous' and the
location is 'undisclosed'.
Secure your tinfoil helmet, Varied Reader, there's turbulence ahead!
[Permalink]
2004-02-17 kaffe (utc)
A S Byatt has a long
essay in the Manchester Grauniad on the mind-body problem,
especially from the point of literature. (T S Eliot famously had these
terrible dissociations in the sensibilities all down his left side,
which is said to be of great consequence. By Eliotistes.) This leads to some very odd
results, since literaturistes are most preoccupied with that which is
most distinctive in an age, which is to say that which is most
idiosyncratic, which is to say that which is most inessential with
respect to our common humanity. But literary and ideological fashions
may be a thing you find very interesting, and I certainly won't say
you shouldn't, and seeing familiar territory from an unfamiliar
perspective is certainly intriguing:
For a long time I felt instinctively irritated - sometimes repelled -
by scientific friends' automatic use of the word "mechanism" for
automatic bodily processes. A machine was man-made, it was not a
sentient being, a man was not a machine. Understanding the flow of
electrical and chemical signals - or at least knowing that they were
there - changed that to an extent. Before computers there were images
of mechanical beings - touching like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz ,
nightmarish like HG Wells's Martians, sloshy organisms in killing
machines, like brains in bodies, whose descendant was the Lord of the
Daleks. Jean-Pierre Dupuy's brilliant The Mechanization of the Mind
(1994) describes the origins of cognitive science in the meetings of
the Cybernetics groups between 1946 and 1953. The scientists involved
wanted to construct a science of mind that would describe the
relations between mind and matter. They assumed that the mind operated
like a machine, and that physical laws explain how nature can appear
to have meaning. Dupuy argues persuasively that our sense of
cybernetics as a deterministic inhuman system is a travesty. Machines
and minds can reveal each other to each other, if we get the
algorithms and the metaphors right.
That's the second and decisive recommendation of Dupuy's book. I am
so very cyberneticiste, in any case. Later Byatt goes from baffling
to barking mad in one swift swoop:
Has all this burgeoning of thought about the body-mind had any effect
on literature? Here are a few arbitrarily selected examples of
mind-bodies in the moral and social world of the modern novel. I am
aware that I don't know the science fiction, where I imagine Hacking
[a philosopher]'s Cartesianism proliferates.
"I haven't read any Chinese literature, but it is probably mostly
about noodles", isn't it? There is no essay so long that it couldn't
profitably be made shorter by leaving out stuff like that.
But still, there it is.
[Permalink]
2004-02-17 morning! (utc)
Yurovizhun, that imaginary land of peace, plenty and co�peration,
offers many important cultural insights even in its preliminaries.
F'rinstance, while most countries (even newcomer Belarus!) are content
to let their citizens flex their democratic muscles at least here, old
habits die hard in "the" Ukraine:
Yuriy Melnyk, spokesperson of NTU, said the following about their song
for 2004 to our colleagues of DotEurovision.com: "If you give it
another week, I'll be ready to tell you precisely the name of our
artist and related information. Right now we are in the process of
negotiating the deal, but we don't expect it to take too much longer".
Shadowy apparachiks meeting secretly in smoke-filled rooms before
making the public an offer they can't refuse - Yurovizhun truly has it
all, nyet, tovarich?
[Permalink]
2004-02-16 tea (utc)
�1.
From Nicholas
Lezard's review of a new translation of Mr Ovid's Metamorphoses:
So a new verse translation from Penguin of the Metamorphoses is an
exciting prospect. The now-redundant prose translation was perfectly
serviceable but it was, after all, in prose. And ever since I read
Allen Mandelbaum's amazing translation of The Divine Comedy (published
by Everyman), the game has changed: you can actually translate from an
ancient tongue and retain not only fidelity but poetry.
Let's overlook the claim that Mr Dante's Tuscan is "ancient", and instead
rejoice: I have been waiting a long time to be informed which, if
any, translations of the Divine Comedy I should read, and now I have
been.
�2.
Easyjet has seven
new routes!
Passengers will be able to fly to Basel in Switzerland and Ljubljana
airport in Slovenia from Stansted in Essex. Luton Airport in
Bedfordshire is to offer new flights to Budapest in Hungary. Other
new routes,to Naples, Ibiza, Faro and Prague will depart from Gatwick.
Ljubljana, Budapest and Prague are all eligible (especially as of May
1st when they get Onionised) for celebrating the International Year of
Yoorp, although none of those airports is especially handy for me.
[Permalink]
2004-02-16 kaffe (utc)
�1. Take the Fourier transform of the autocorrelation function!
This is in fact simply the recipe for calculating the spectrum of a
time series, but it is also one of my all-time favourite things to say
in Mad Scientist mode.
�2. Banned in Tennessee!
Hoorah!
http://piginawig.diaryland.com/040112.html
has been identified as inappropriate and blocked by your Tennessee
Department of Education Internet Usage Policy.
Access to web sites that have been identified as providing inappropriate content will be blocked. This determination is based upon various content categories. Content identified as inappropriate includes:
- adult-oriented material,
- extremist-militant material,
- racist or hate-oriented material, and
- incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful
authority (seditious material).
Since I don't do adult, militant or racist (so far as I know) I am
provisionally assuming that my world view is considered seditious in
Tennessee, which is certainly greatly to its credit.
�3. 'A' is not, dialectically speaking, equal to 'A'
Leon Trotsky says
so (whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?):
At first glance it could seem that these 'subtleties' are useless. In
reality they are of decisive significance. The axiom 'A' is equal to
'A' appears on the one hand to be the point of departure for all our
knowledge, on the other hand the point of departure for all the errors
in our knowledge. To make use of the axiom 'A' is equal to 'A' with
impunity is possible only within certain limits. When quantitative
changes in 'A' are negligible for the task at hand then we can presume
that 'A' is equal to 'A'. This is, for example, the manner in which a
buyer and a seller consider a pound of sugar. We consider the
temperature of the sun likewise. Until recently we considered the
buying power of the dollar in the same way. But quantitative changes
beyond certain limits become converted into qualitative. A pound of
sugar subjected to the action of water or kerosene ceases to be a
pound of sugar. A dollar in the embrace of a president ceases to be a
dollar. To determine at the right moment the critical point where
quantity changes into quality is one of the most important and
difficult tasks in all the spheres of knowledge including sociology.
"Quantitative changes beyond certain limits become converted into
qualitative." This is the essence of the sorites paradox, as you will
surely agree, and of much else, as you may well not. The question of
what those limits are belongs, I claim, to the disciple of cognitive
metaphysics, which I have just invented.
�4. Minister for king-sitting
Had
to happen:
I forts�ttningen ska en minister alltid f�lja med p� kungens
statsbes�k. [...]
- Kungen �r v�ldigt angel�gen om att inte beh�va ta de h�r politiska
samtalen, sade [Elisabeth Tarras-Wahlberg].
In future a minister will always accompany the king on state visits.
"The kind is very keen on not having to address political matters",
said [court spokesperson] Elisabeth Tarras-Wahlberg [for it is she!].
The king will instead be focussing on his core strengths of waving and
smiling, dressing up and shaking persons' hands, and quite right too.
[Permalink]
2004-02-16 early (utc)
How many grains of sand do you need to make a pile? A single grain of
sand isn't a pile of sand, for sure, and if you have add one more
grain of sand to something that isn't a pile of sand, you still don't
have a pile of sand. Except that at some point you surely do, since
any pile of sand is made out of a finite number of grains of sand, and
you can make any finite number by starting at one and adding one a
bunch of times. This is a venerable kind of philosophical problem
known as a sorites paradox, and it is still an active area of
research. The concept of a "pile of sand" seems to be vague in ways
that seem to be explicitly hostile to being made precise. Only a very
sophisticated philosopher would say, however, that there is therefore
no such thing as a pile of sand or that to speak of one is quite
unreasonable.
A related problem occurs with the word "rich". My Varied Reader may
well have had occasion to discuss the question "How much money do you
need to be rich?". This is clearly a sorites problem at heart; there
isn't going to be a number (N, say) of UK pounds (GBP) such
that someone with N GBP is not rich while someone with
N+1 GBP is rich. Nonetheless, all but the most
philosophically sophisticated have an understanding that there is such
a thing as rich and such a thing as not rich, even if there is a very
considerable grey area in between.
Now consider the UK national lottery. Many rationalistes will argue
that it is foolish to play the lottery since the expected gain of a
player is negative. The expected gain is a kind of weighted average
of returns, weighted by probability. Suppose for the sake of example
that a stake of 1 GBP gets you a probability of 1 in 100 of winning
100 GBP - that would have an expected gain of exactly zero: You gain
-1 GBP by paying the stake plus 0.01*100 GBP (=1 GBP) as the
probability of winning times the amount won, and these exactly cancel
each other. If the prize were 101 GBP you would have a positive
expected gain, and should (according to rationalisme) play; for a 99
GBP prize you shouldn't (ditto) play.
It is obvious that the expected gain from playing the National Lottery is
negative, since money from the stakes is used for "good causes", and
the amount given out in prizes is therefore certainly less than the amount spent
on stakes. (It can be and has been calculated accurately, of course;
from memory I think it's about -0.5 UKP, but I'm not swearing to
that.) Rationalistes therefore say you shouldn't play the lottery.
But the theory of expected gain doesn't take into account some things
which many players of the lottery might consider important. For one
there's the Finite Lifetime Hypothesis, namely that the player can
only expect to live for a finite human lifetime. Suppose you have
approximately 50 years to play the lottery before you die and the
lottery happens once a week of which there are approximately 50 to the
year - the amount you would save up by putting your 1 GBP stake into a
piggy bank would be 2,500 GBP.
This, a rationaliste will insist, is a whole lot better than your
expected gain over the same period from the lottery. Quite so, but it
also isn't going to make you rich.
Now assume that the payout of a jackpot from a lottery will indeed put
you well into the rich zone beyond the grey area of sorites problems.
(It hovers around 10 million GBP in the UK, which certainly works for
me, but I have inexpensive tastes.) Suppose secondly that you would
like to be rich in precisely this sense.
We have established that the probability of getting rich by putting
the lottery stake in a piggy bank is zero, and the probability of
getting rich by playing the lottery, low though it is, is certainly
bigger than zero.
Note that this argument fails if you expect to live forever - you can
expect to sorites your pile of money up to any finite value before you
win that amount on the lottery as long as you are in no hurry and
don't die - getting to 10 million GBP will take you a mere 200,000
years, after all. The argument will also fail to convince you if you
are too philosophically sophisticated to acknowledge the idea of being
rich, or too spiritually sophisticated to consider such a thing
desirable.
But otherwise, if you want to be rich and you think the values of a
lottery jackpot would be enough to make you rich and you want
this to happen within your finite human lifespan, then playing the
lottery isn't such a bad idea, at that.
[Rationalistes! Your puny logics are no match for my cran and monkey
style dialectic! Surrender before you get hurt!]
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