Discussion: I would like to have a conversation...

with you about your economics lessons and your views on morality. Not that I expect much disagreement, but rather that it may be interesting what insights your 0 to 60 education affords you about actual events vs. my jaundiced and cynical view.

I'm in. Perhaps at ROC?

When are you getting to ROC? I am there on Friday night, but Saturday I have lots of meetings.

I will likely be there Friday night (I'm riding up with Jeff Schapiro). I suppose we see each other sufficiently frequently that it's unnecessary to schedule.

I wonder if you think that only difficult actions are admirable what your views on say physiological pain thresholds might be.

Runner A and B have blisters and are trying to finish a long race. Runner A is mentally strong, bears down and overcomes the discomfort. Admirable. Runner B has a high threshold for pain, doesn't really notice the blisters so much and finishes the race as well. Not admirable? One cannot control how much adversity they shall need to overcome to reach their goals. We got lucky by being born into good homes and being white males in this society helps too. Basically nothing we ever attempt will be "that hard" compared to what 99 percent of the world is up against.

Can an action be laudable even if it's accidental?

Ross adds an additional overlay of wisdom to this question. Well worth considering.

Not wishing to challenge the orthodoxy or be too much of a Sophist, but...

While "white malesness" and its connotations and ensuing advantages are not hard to comprehend, what is the working definition of a "good home" and how does it provide advantages? Again, I don't mean to be a rube, and not to say I can't come up with something myself... I just think this one is more nebulous and maybe not as clear cut. Or maybe I am just looking for a free education from the more psychologically-minded of you.

From my original reflection and Ross's comment, consider that laudable and admirable are not well defined states. I define an action as admirable if I admire it; necessarily, my admiration is a continuous quantity in that the possible values of admiration are dense. (Remarking that an action is admirable implies some sort of discretization, the method of which I will not expound here.)

The set of admirable acts are given (measurable, perhaps) in that given a set of events, I will admire some subset of those. I'm not actually interested so much in the method by which I arrive at what is admirable and what is not; what I find interesting is this intriguing property that my admiration is positively correlated with activities I find difficult. E.g., I admire the act of running a five minute mile more than I admire the act of solving a typical undergraduate Newtonian mechanics problem.

This correlation does not account for all situations, because there exist acts x, y such that x is more difficult than y and I admire x less than I admire y. Examples might be understanding One Hundred Years of Solitude (for some definition of "understanding") and running five days a week for a year. I suggest the former is more "difficult," but I just don't care about it at all. "Difficult" is also not well defined in that there does not exist an ordering on the set of all acts, even for me.

I suppose it's easier to muse on such topics when you're oxygen deprived.