[FRIAM] "the arc of ...bends toward ...."

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Glen Hath Said: 

 

Hah, the arc of technical universe is long, but it bends toward best
practices?    

 

Wow, Glen, did this send me down a rat-hole.  I thought at first that it was
something that Oliver Wendall Holmes might have said about justice, because
Holmes was at the table with Peirce and James invented pragmatism, and, I am
told, tended to think about Justice in the same way that Peirce thought
about truth.  The arc of inqury bends toward truth.  That led me to search
the quotations of OWH, father and son, but, as you know, I never found the
quote in either Holmes, Sr or Jr,  because it is not there.  It is of course
from that famous Pragmatist Philosopher, Martin Luther King who cribbed it
from a 19th Century Abolitionist minister, Theodore Parker, who was a
notable member of the same community in which the young Peirce ,young James
and young Holmes grew up.
(https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/) .

 

However, I don't regard the time as lost.  An hour rummaging around in the
quotations of the Holmes's was well worth it.  I recommend it.  My favorite
of the moment is

 

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.

 

Which seems somehow to bear on the paradox of free will. 

 

Glen, the recent efflorescence of reflection on free will, etc., caused me
once again to try and distill the correspondence, so I could try to grasp
it.  This time I tried with nabble.  Still no luck .   Yeah, I know.  Now
that I have climbed out thie 'arc of . justice" rat hole, I may make another
try.  Does the arc of effort bend toward success?  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen?C
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2020 11:44 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] alternative response

 

Well, maybe not. But we all do it. We can't help it because we are
truncating machines. Even the most fastidious of us will succumb
sporadically and truncate others according to our own limitations. We're all
just cookie cutters slicing up the world arbitrarily. But I agree that we
should be pressured into making our cookies larger ... and maybe with better
designs. There are too many round cookies. Who, in their right mind, tiles a
rectangular pan with circles?

 

On 6/15/20 10:28 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

> It is not cool to expect people to structure the world around some random
person's laziness.    Should they join a lazy club in order to get more
political clout, then it is even more contemptible.

 

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