![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The number three
Feb. 21st, 2004 12:32 pmToday's thought is brought to you by the number three. But because I want it to be the third thing you read, here are two other thoughts, one by Brian Eno and one by Naomi Klein.
Lessons in how to lie
The problem is not propaganda but the relentless control of the kind of things we think about, says Brian Eno.
'How exactly did it come about that, in a world of AIDS, global warming, 30-plus active wars, several famines, cloning, genetic engineering, and two billion people in poverty, practically the only thing we all talked about for a year was Iraq and Saddam Hussein? Was it really that big a problem? Or were we somehow manipulated into believing the Iraq issue was important and had to be fixed right now - even though a few months before few had mentioned it, and nothing had changed in the interim?' Read more...
Feel guilt. Then move on
Those who supported the war because of Bush and Blair's lies now cast themselves as victims. This won't help Iraq's dead and dying, says Naomi Klein.
'So long as Bush's opponents cast themselves as the primary victims of his war, the real victims will remain invisible. The focus will be on uncovering Bush and Blair's lies - a process geared towards absolving those who believed them, not on compensating those who died because of them.' Read more...
Okay, now my thought.
What's the opposite of 3?
I'm still trying to work this out in my mind, says Momus, but why is it that words often have opposites and numbers never do?
I'm still trying to work this out in my mind, but why is it that words often have opposites and numbers never do? There's no 'opposite' of the number 3. The number three has meaning in relation to all the other numbers in the decimal number system. Only in binary applications of number systems, like the one computers are based on, do numbers have opposites. The opposite of zero is one, and the opposite of one is zero. That's because numbers are being used there as words: the words 'on' and 'off' or 'yes' and 'no'. But couldn't we see numbers as essentially the same kind of self-enclosed meaning system as words? And, if that's the case, couldn't we see an exemplary pluralism in the number system? The number 3 gets its meaning because of its relationship with the whole 'community' of numbers. It acknowledges its dependence on every other number. It is not obsessed with its 'opposite number'. It doesn't have an opposite number. At worst, we could imagine the number 3 hung up on its relationships with 2 and 4, and how 4 thinks it's better than 3, and how 2 should clean up its act. Or we could imagine it feeling some kind of family affinity with 6, 9, 12 and so on, practicing nepotism or incestuous troilism with the numbers it's a multiple of. But if 3 has any brains, it ought to realize that what's important is the big picture; its place in the entire system of numbers.
Words really could learn something from numbers, it seems to me. Because, although real human power in this technocratic age works mostly with numbers, the way politicians speak to the public who elect them works with words. And words have this tendency to pair off into binaries. Us and them. Right and left. War and peace. As Brian Eno points out, politicians don't necessarily want to make us agree with them, but they really want us to accept the binaries they're proposing, and the way they're setting them up. They want to frame the questions of the day, rather than compel specific answers. As Naomi Klein points out, when we've established a binary like Iraq victor / Iraq victim, it's easy to 'spin' the definitions of who's who. Klein argues that Democrats and Republicans alike are seeking to substitute figurative American victims for literal Iraqi ones. These politicians are substituting, as victims of the Iraq war, words like 'the truth', 'our self-esteem' and 'our resources' for the 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed since the invasion. Seen from another angle, it's the substitution of a bunch of words for a number.
I was just listening to a radio programme last night about how the application of Nobel prize-winning mathematician John Nash's game theory earned the British government 23 billion pounds in the form of auctions made by the government for telecom licenses. These auctions raised this huge sum by applying the Nash Equilibrium. The Nash Equilibrium is:
'a set of strategies , one for each player, such that no player has incentive to unilaterally change her action. Players are in equilibrium if a change in strategies by any one of them would lead that player to earn less than if she remained with her current strategy. For games in which players randomize ( mixed strategies ), the expected or average payoff must be at least as large as that obtainable by any other strategy.'
This picture of a harmonious and mutually-profitable game is in stark contrast to the simplest game model, the 'zero sum game', in which the winner takes all and the loser loses everything. Now, the political application of this idea of a game in which everyone wins is surely not hard to see. It would be a pluralistic liberalism with benefits to all. It would be egalitarian. It would be as far beyond war scenarios as the Nash Equilibrium is beyond the zero sum game. It would look a lot more like Clinton's America than Bush's America. And it would look more like number systems, where every number depends for its meaning on every other number, than language systems, where false and spinnable binaries are constantly coming into play, blocking our view of the interdependence of all things.
Nash actually went mad thinking about how to apply his ideas to politics. He says in the autobiography he prepared for the Nobel committee:
'Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.'
But if attempts to politicize science drive scientists crazy, attempts to make politics scientific drives politicians crazier. Some academics have said that governments and big companies are now under huge pressure to think through every possible outcome of their actions before they make them, and that this 'forensics of the future' is not only impossible, it forces governments to go through all sorts of deceptions, to keep changing their explanations for the things they've done, to keep spinning the framing binaries so that the opposite of Iraq invasion is one minute destruction of Britain in 45 minutes, the next tolerance of a 'madman', and the next failure to act against 'a prominent supporter of the 9/11 terrorists'.
This is a slippery slope for governments. It takes them into a realm in which only bright children, brilliant liars, imaginative artists and amazing storytellers survive. That realm might be seen as 'the land of lies', but in fact it's a remarkably realistic place, because it's where we acknowledge that there is a third term to every binary, and beyond the third a fourth and fifth, and that they are all equally valid. It's the realm of pluralism and equilibrium. In this world, things work not because they're true or false, but because they're interesting. Or because they're there. De facto, sociological, present, alive. Nobody wins and nobody loses. We just all live together. Like numbers, everybody counts. Relativism, pluralism.
It's ironic that Tony Blair's big idea used to be the third way, a step beyond the stale old binaries of past politics. The number three is indeed the symbol of a way beyond binaries, a signpost to pluralism. The number three says 'Don't stop at me, all the other numbers in the number system lie just beyond, and they're all just as true as three.'
Lessons in how to lie
The problem is not propaganda but the relentless control of the kind of things we think about, says Brian Eno.
'How exactly did it come about that, in a world of AIDS, global warming, 30-plus active wars, several famines, cloning, genetic engineering, and two billion people in poverty, practically the only thing we all talked about for a year was Iraq and Saddam Hussein? Was it really that big a problem? Or were we somehow manipulated into believing the Iraq issue was important and had to be fixed right now - even though a few months before few had mentioned it, and nothing had changed in the interim?' Read more...
Feel guilt. Then move on
Those who supported the war because of Bush and Blair's lies now cast themselves as victims. This won't help Iraq's dead and dying, says Naomi Klein.
'So long as Bush's opponents cast themselves as the primary victims of his war, the real victims will remain invisible. The focus will be on uncovering Bush and Blair's lies - a process geared towards absolving those who believed them, not on compensating those who died because of them.' Read more...
Okay, now my thought.
What's the opposite of 3?
I'm still trying to work this out in my mind, says Momus, but why is it that words often have opposites and numbers never do?
I'm still trying to work this out in my mind, but why is it that words often have opposites and numbers never do? There's no 'opposite' of the number 3. The number three has meaning in relation to all the other numbers in the decimal number system. Only in binary applications of number systems, like the one computers are based on, do numbers have opposites. The opposite of zero is one, and the opposite of one is zero. That's because numbers are being used there as words: the words 'on' and 'off' or 'yes' and 'no'. But couldn't we see numbers as essentially the same kind of self-enclosed meaning system as words? And, if that's the case, couldn't we see an exemplary pluralism in the number system? The number 3 gets its meaning because of its relationship with the whole 'community' of numbers. It acknowledges its dependence on every other number. It is not obsessed with its 'opposite number'. It doesn't have an opposite number. At worst, we could imagine the number 3 hung up on its relationships with 2 and 4, and how 4 thinks it's better than 3, and how 2 should clean up its act. Or we could imagine it feeling some kind of family affinity with 6, 9, 12 and so on, practicing nepotism or incestuous troilism with the numbers it's a multiple of. But if 3 has any brains, it ought to realize that what's important is the big picture; its place in the entire system of numbers.
Words really could learn something from numbers, it seems to me. Because, although real human power in this technocratic age works mostly with numbers, the way politicians speak to the public who elect them works with words. And words have this tendency to pair off into binaries. Us and them. Right and left. War and peace. As Brian Eno points out, politicians don't necessarily want to make us agree with them, but they really want us to accept the binaries they're proposing, and the way they're setting them up. They want to frame the questions of the day, rather than compel specific answers. As Naomi Klein points out, when we've established a binary like Iraq victor / Iraq victim, it's easy to 'spin' the definitions of who's who. Klein argues that Democrats and Republicans alike are seeking to substitute figurative American victims for literal Iraqi ones. These politicians are substituting, as victims of the Iraq war, words like 'the truth', 'our self-esteem' and 'our resources' for the 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed since the invasion. Seen from another angle, it's the substitution of a bunch of words for a number.
I was just listening to a radio programme last night about how the application of Nobel prize-winning mathematician John Nash's game theory earned the British government 23 billion pounds in the form of auctions made by the government for telecom licenses. These auctions raised this huge sum by applying the Nash Equilibrium. The Nash Equilibrium is:
'a set of strategies , one for each player, such that no player has incentive to unilaterally change her action. Players are in equilibrium if a change in strategies by any one of them would lead that player to earn less than if she remained with her current strategy. For games in which players randomize ( mixed strategies ), the expected or average payoff must be at least as large as that obtainable by any other strategy.'
This picture of a harmonious and mutually-profitable game is in stark contrast to the simplest game model, the 'zero sum game', in which the winner takes all and the loser loses everything. Now, the political application of this idea of a game in which everyone wins is surely not hard to see. It would be a pluralistic liberalism with benefits to all. It would be egalitarian. It would be as far beyond war scenarios as the Nash Equilibrium is beyond the zero sum game. It would look a lot more like Clinton's America than Bush's America. And it would look more like number systems, where every number depends for its meaning on every other number, than language systems, where false and spinnable binaries are constantly coming into play, blocking our view of the interdependence of all things.
Nash actually went mad thinking about how to apply his ideas to politics. He says in the autobiography he prepared for the Nobel committee:
'Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.'
But if attempts to politicize science drive scientists crazy, attempts to make politics scientific drives politicians crazier. Some academics have said that governments and big companies are now under huge pressure to think through every possible outcome of their actions before they make them, and that this 'forensics of the future' is not only impossible, it forces governments to go through all sorts of deceptions, to keep changing their explanations for the things they've done, to keep spinning the framing binaries so that the opposite of Iraq invasion is one minute destruction of Britain in 45 minutes, the next tolerance of a 'madman', and the next failure to act against 'a prominent supporter of the 9/11 terrorists'.
This is a slippery slope for governments. It takes them into a realm in which only bright children, brilliant liars, imaginative artists and amazing storytellers survive. That realm might be seen as 'the land of lies', but in fact it's a remarkably realistic place, because it's where we acknowledge that there is a third term to every binary, and beyond the third a fourth and fifth, and that they are all equally valid. It's the realm of pluralism and equilibrium. In this world, things work not because they're true or false, but because they're interesting. Or because they're there. De facto, sociological, present, alive. Nobody wins and nobody loses. We just all live together. Like numbers, everybody counts. Relativism, pluralism.
It's ironic that Tony Blair's big idea used to be the third way, a step beyond the stale old binaries of past politics. The number three is indeed the symbol of a way beyond binaries, a signpost to pluralism. The number three says 'Don't stop at me, all the other numbers in the number system lie just beyond, and they're all just as true as three.'