Students are oysters. Education is sand.

Some recent positive economic news is being met with some skepticism, especially along the lines that mere decreases in revenue loss or job loss do not constitute bona-fide gains. Seems obvious, but somehow the same thinking does not seem to be occurring with respect to sustainability, where new products, transitions to solar and wind power, and decreased automotive emissions are perceived as “earth friendly” or “good for the environment.” Nonsense. Less bad may be better, but it ain’t good. Recycling just means less waste, not zero waste. Solar power still requires someone to manufacture the panels. Hybrids still burn gas, and they still wear tires, and “earth friendly” products still require manufacturing facilities, transportation, packaging. No way is the entire lifecycle of every one of those dependencies earth friendly. Not even close.

Granted, from a total impact standpoint, most forms of alternative energy are overall better than fossil fuels, and the second law of thermodynamics guarantees that completely eliminating “waste” is impossible. Still, it’d be nice to see fewer people dislocating their shoulders in self-congratulation over how green this guilt-free facade on consumerism is.

Why are some people (like many American men) obsessed with gadgets? Perhaps because tools connote ability, and ability connotes status. This goes way, way back. Tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Your value to society is measured by your ability to get things done. Your are what you can do. It’s the mandate of the hunter and the executive. Into this equation, add a term for peacock feathers (ostentatious expense as a signal of abundant personal resources) and I think you can explain our obsession with things ranging from filigreed armor to Leathermen and gold Rolexes.

If what you are doing must be done, and must be done by you, then do not hesitate. Do it perfectly. But if you have not yet decided what to do, then by all means stop to reflect and choose wisely. Do not waste perfection on that which is not worth doing at all.

Two thoughts for today:

(1) This one pretty much straight from Wittgenstein. Adjectives like “this,” “that,” and “other” have obvious practical utility and one can easily imagine their arising in the natural circumstances surrounding linguistic evolution. When the nouns they describe are commonplace — this rock, that apple — we have few problems. So far, so good. I just saw on tv a couple talking about “welcoming [their child] into this world” (my emphasis). From a syntactical point of view, this is a perfectly reasonable construction. But from a semantic point of view, use of the phrase “this world” almost automatically leads to an inference that there are other worlds. It was unstated in the tv show, but I got the impression that the couple was religious, and if so I can guess that they might have the usual sort of belief in “another” world. The word “world” as it is used here ought to have a little rule attached to it: this is not one of those nouns that can be modified by the seemingly harmless adjective “this.” But there’s no such rule, at least in English. If there were, I wonder if the speaker of this sentence would have had to have been more explicit about the claim she was making so subtly and perhaps unconsciously.

In short, I worry that the mere exercise of our syntactic machinery — the creation of syntactically valid expressions — leads us to legitimize the external reality of the states of affairs entailed by those expressions.

(2) Aphorism in progress: “Critical thinking is immunization to nonsense.”