Animist for spare change

LSAT Logical Reasoning, Oct 2001, Section 1, Q23: My take

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 06:23:00 +0000

Some statisticians claim that the surest way to increase the overall correctness of the total set of one’s beliefs is: never change that set, except by rejecting a belief when given adequate evidence against it. However, if this were the only rule one followed, then whenever one were presented with any kind of evidence, one would have to either reject some of one’s beliefs or else leave one’s beliefs unchanged. But then, over time, one could only have fewer and fewer beliefs. Since we need many beliefs in order to survive, the statisticians’ claim must be mistaken.

The argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that it

(A) presumes, without providing any justification, that the surest way of increasing the overall correctness of the total set of one’s beliefs must not hinder one’s ability to survive.

(B) neglects the possibility that even while following the statisticians’ rule, one might also accept new beliefs when presented with some kinds of evidence.

(C) overlooks the possibility that some large sets of beliefs are more correct overall than are some small sets of beliefs.

(D) takes for granted that one should accept some beliefs related to survival even when given adequate evidence against them.

(E) takes for granted that the beliefs we need in order to have many beliefs must all be correct beliefs.

Answer: (A)

Again, it is fun to deduce this. First, let us eliminate the wrong answer choices.

(B) is wrong because you can't change the total set of beliefs by adding to it (the surest way criticized says so!)

(C) is irrelevant

(D) is wrong because it holds the statisticians' claim against a person who rejects the statisticians' claim

(E) is irrelevant twaddle

Let's work (A) out...

According to some statisticians:

Surest way to increase correctness of the total set of beliefs --> Reduction in beliefs (1)

According to the person who rejects the statisticians' claim, survival requires maintaining some beliefs, or, ~(reduction in beliefs).

Survival --> ~(Reduction in beliefs)

(or)

Reduction in beliefs --> ~Survival (2)

Taking an assumptive leap by combining (1) and (2),

Surest way to increase correctness of the total set of beliefs --> ~ Survival

In other words, the person who rejects the statisticians' claim is assuming that the surest way proposed by them hinders survival. This clearly implies that this person is assuming that any surest way of increasing the total set of beliefs must not hinder survival, which is what (A) says.

LSAT Logical Reasoning, Feb 1996, Section 4, Q25: My take

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 10:22:00 +0000

Louis: People's intentions cannot be, on the whole, more bad than good. Were we to believe otherwise, we would inevitably cease to trust each other, and no society can survive without mutual trust among its members.

The argument is most vulnerable to which one of the following criticisms?

(A) It fails to rule out the possibility that a true belief can have deleterious consequences.

(B) It mistakenly assumes that if two claims cannot at the same time both be true, then they cannot at the same time both be false.

(C) It challenges the truth of a claim merely by calling into question the motives of those who profess that they believe it to be true.

(D) It assumes without any warrant that in any situation with two possible outcomes, the most negative one will inevitably occur.

(E) It provides no reason to believe that a statement that is true of a given group of individuals is also true of any other group of individuals.

Answer: (A).

It is very easy to arrive at (A) by elimination because the others are poor contenders.

However, why (A) is correct is worth analyzing.

The conclusion here is that people's intentions cannot be, on the whole, more bad than good. The conclusion is obviously to be held as a true belief, so the "were we to believe otherwise" bit turns it into a false belief.

Holding the false belief leads to negative things that finally end in extinction of society.

False belief -> Negative things that end in extinction of society

does not rule out

~ (False belief) -> Negative things that end in extinction of society

(or)

does not rule out

True belief (conclusion) -> Negative things that end in extinction of society (deleterious consequences), which is what (A) says.

The possibility that the true belief of the conclusion still leads to the negative things that end in the extinction of society renders the argument unsound.

ASIDE: As an analogy, consider the statement that those who believe in God (G) are saved (S).

G -> S only renders the contrapositive ~S -> ~G true always

It does not rule out ~G -> S

because there may be some who do not believe in God (~G) but are still saved (S). Those who are saved (S) definitely include all those who believe in God (G) and may include at least some of those who do not believe in God (~G). What is true for sure is that if one is not saved (~S), then one definitely does not believe in God (~G).

Writ On The Steps Of Puerto Rican Harlem - Gregory Corso

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 20:11:00 +0000

from Long Live Man

There’s a truth limits man

A truth prevents his going any farther

The world is changing

The world knows it’s changing

Heavy is the sorrow of the day

The old have the look of doom

The young mistake their fate in that look

That is truth

But it isn’t all truth

Life has meaning

And I do not know the meaning

Even when I felt it were meaningless

I hoped and prayed and sought a meaning

It wasn’t all frolic poesy

There were dues to pay

Summoning Death and God

I’d a wild dare to tackle Them

Death proved meaningless without Life

Yes the world is changing

But Death remains the same

It takes man away from Life

The only meaning he knows

And usually it is a sad business

This Death

I’d an innocence I’d a seriousness

I’d a humor save me from amateur philosophy

I am able to contradict my beliefs

I am able able

Because I want to know the meaning of everything

Yet sit I like a brokenness

Moaning: Oh what responsibility

I put on thee Gregory

Death and God

Hard hard it’s hard

I learned life were no dream

I learned truth deceived

Man is not God

Life is a century

Death an instant

Snake Eyes - Amiri Baraka

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:03:00 +0000

That force is lost
which shaped me, spent
in its image, battered, an old brown thing
swept off the streets
where it sucked its
gentle living.
And what is meat
to do, that is driven to its end
by words? The frailest gestures
grow like skirts around breathing.
We take
unholy risks to prove
we are what we cannot be. For instance,
I am not even crazy.

A poem for speculative hipsters - Amiri Baraka

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 01:24:00 +0000

He had got, finally,to the forest
of motives. There were no
owls, or hunters. No Connie Chatterleys
resting beautifully
on their backs, having casually
brought socialism
to England.
Only ideas,
and their opposites.
Like,
he was really
nowhere.

American Defense - Son House

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 04:51:00 +0000

No use to shedding no tears, No use to having no fears,
This war may last you for years.

American defense will run you some cents
Just had to take care of your boys.
You must raise more, produce far more cents than they use
Just to save all your worries and toils.

No use to shedding no tears, No use to having no fears,
This war may last you for years.

Well, the red, white and blue that represent you
You ought to do everything that you can.
Buy war saving stamps; young men go to the camps;
Be brave and take this stand.

No use to shedding no tears, No use to having no fears,
This war may last you for years.

Don’t let troubles sometimes all upset your mind;
For you won’t know just what to do.
Keep pushing, keep shoving, don’t be angry, keep loving,
Be faithful, be honest and true.

No use to shedding no tears, No use to having no fears,
This war may last you for years.

You can say yes or no, but we got to win this war
Because General McArthur’s not a friend.
There won’t be enough Japs to shoot a little game of craps
Because the biggest of them all will be dead.

No use to shedding no tears, No use to having no fears,
This war may last you for years.

This war sure do bother our mother and father,
Our sisters and brothers too.
Dear friends and relations, the war’s end creation,
Don’t let this worry you.

CONCAVE CEILINGS - Francis Picabia

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:32:00 +0000

CONCAVE CEILINGS

why like a monstrous old man
in this cemetary of rags
with your turban of coffins
barren crop of coarse grass
incomprehensible gymnasiarch
domestic stir
chinese lantern
don't you see enemy of light
that i am the genius virtue.

Special Delivery - Peter Blegvad

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 11 May 2008 16:56:00 +0000

Everyone's too nice to me, the way Vincent Price would be
with midnight coming on
They say everything twice to me, they look me in the eye and say
we love you like a son (we love you like a son)
But it's just sinister diplomacy, and anyone with eyes can see
they're leading me on

Oh, soon it will come: Special delivery!
though there's nothing to deliver me from

And everything in life could be a cutting edge or a knife
so we'd better watch our eyes
Through pinholes in the meat we see portions of eternity
that go unrecognized
While our cells obey biology and do what we do endlessly:
the great divide

Oh, soon it will come: Special delivery!
though there's nothing to deliver me from
(Delivered in an unknown tongue)

The king protects his subjects, drawing all his strength from objects
we pay for with our blood
And the prince is a catastrophe, but only cos he's asked to be
he's bad for the public good
The old moth-eaten monarchy, the cretinous aristocracy
nostalgia for the mud

Oh, soon it will come (What's gonna come?)
Sight to the blind! (Oh, sure)
Conversation to the dumb
And courage to the cowardly
Sensation to the numb!

Delphic - Hyman J. Sobiloff

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:48:00 +0000

Darkness surrounds the question
I ask my drowsy owl:
In which old year did laughter die?

I listen to a forest clock of crickets,
Watch opposite windows between branches
Divide and redouble the moon.

My blinking owl
My bleak austerity
Hoots across the silence.

Sourdough Mountain Lookout - Philip Whalen

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:31:00 +0000

Tsung Ping (375-443). "Now I am old and infirm. I fear I shall no more be able to roam among the beautiful mountains. Clarifying my mind. I meditate on the mountain trails and wander about only in dreams."

-in The Spirit of the Brush, tr. by Shio Sakanishi. p. 34.

FOR KENNETH REXROTH

I always say I won't go back to the mountains
I am too old and fat there are bugs mean mules
And pancakes every morning of the world

Mr. Edward Wyman (63)
Steams along the trail ahead of us all
Moaning, "My poor old feet ache, my back
Is tired and I've got a stiff prick"
Uprooting alder shoots in the rain

Then I'm alone in a glass house on a ridge
Encircled by chiming mountains
With one sun roaring through the house all day
& the others crashing through the glass all night
Conscious even while sleeping

Morning fog in the southern gorge
Gleaming foam restoring the old sea-level
The lakes in two lights green soap and indigo
The high cirque-lake black half-open eye

Ptarmigan hunt for bugs in the snow
Bear peers through the wad at noon
Deer crowd up to see the lamp
A mouse nearly drowns in the honey
I see my bootprints mingle with deer-foot
Bear-paw mule-shoe in the dusty path to the privy

Much later I write down:
"raging, Viking sunrise
The gorgeous death of summer in the east"
(Influence of a Byronic landscape-
Bent pages exhibiting depravity of style.)

Outside the lookout I lay nude on the granite
Mountain hot September sun but inside my head
Calm dark night with all the other stars
HERACLITUS: "The Waking have one common world
But the sleeping turn aside
Each into a world of his own."

I keep telling myself what I really like
Are music, books, certain land and sea-scapes
The way light falls across them, diffusion of
Light through agate, light itself...I suppose
I'm still afraid of the dark

"Remember smart-guy there's something
Bigger something smarter than you."
Ireland's fear of unknown holies drives
My father's voice (a country neither he
Nor his great-grandfather ever saw)

A sparkly tomb a plated grave
A holy thumb beneath a wave

Everything else they hauled across Atlantic
Scattered and lost in the buffalo plains
Among these trees and mountains

From Duns Scotus to this page
A thousand years

(" . . . a dog walking on his hind legs-
not that he does it well but that he
does it at all.")

Virtually a blank except for the hypothesis
That there is more to a man
Than the contents of his jock-strap

EMPEDOCLES: "At one time all the limbs
Which are the body's portion are brought together
By Love in blooming life's high season; at another
Severed by cruel Strife, they wander each alone
By the breakers of life's sea."

Fire and pressure from the sun bear down
Bear down centipede shadow of palm-frond
A limestone lithograph-oysters and clams of stone
Half a black rock bomb displaying brilliant crystals
Fire and pressure Love and Strife bear down
Brontosaurus, look away

My sweat runs down the rock

HERACLITUS: "The transformations of fire
are, first of all, sea; and half of the sea
is earth, half whirlwind. . . .
It scatters and it gathers; it advances
and retires."

I move out of a sweaty pool
(The sea!) . And sit up higher on the rock

Is anything burning?

The sun itself! Dying
Pooping out, exhausted
Having produced brontosaurus, Heraclitus
This rock, me,
To no purpose
I tell you anyway (as a kind of loving) . . .
Flies & other insects come from miles around
To listen

I also address the rock, the heather,
The alpine fir

BUDDHA: "All the constituents of being are Transitory: Work out your salvation with diligence."

(And everything, as one eminent disciple of that master Pointed out, has been tediously complex ever since.)

There was a bird
Lived in an egg
And by ingenious chemistry
Wrought molecules of albumen
To beak and eye
Gizzard and craw
Feather and claw

My grandmother said:
"Look at them poor bed-
raggled pigeons!"

And the sign in McAlister Street:

IF YOU CAN'T COME IN
SMILE AS YOU GO BY
LOVE THE BUTCHER

I destroy myself, the universe (an egg)
And time-to get an answer:
There are a smiler, a sleeper, and a dancer
We repeat our conversation in the glittering dark
Floating beside the sleeper.
The child remarks, "You knew it all the time."
I: "I keep forgetting that the smiler is
Sleeping; the sleeper, dancing."

From Sauk Lookout two years before
Some of the view was down the Skagit

To Puget Sound: From above the lower ranges,
Deep in forest-lighthouses on clear nights.

This year's rock is a spur from the main range
Cuts the valley in two and is broken
By the river; Ross Dam repairs the break,
Makes trolley buses run
Through the streets of dim Seattle far away.

I'm surrounded by mountains here
A circle of 108 beads, originally seeds
of ficus religiosa
Bo-Tree

A circle, continuous, one odd bead
Larger than the rest and bearing
A tassel (hair-tuft) (the man who sat
under the tree)
In the center of the circle,
A void, an empty figure containing
All that's multiplied;
Each bead a repetition,
a world Of ignorance and sleep.

Today is the day the goose gets cooked
Day of liberation for the crumbling flower
Knobcone pinecone in the flames
Brandy in the sun

Which, as I said, will disappear
Anyway it'll be invisible soon
Exchanging places with stars now in my head
To be growing rice in China through the night.
Magnetic storms across the solar plains
Make Aurora Borealis shimmy bright
Beyond the mountains to the north.

Closing the lookout in the morning
Thick ice on the shutters
Coyote almost whistling on a nearby ridge
The mountain is THERE (between two lakes)

I brought back a piece of its rock
Heavy dark-honey color
With a seam of crystal, some of the quartz
Stained by its matrix
Practically indestructible
A shift from opacity to brilliance
(The Zenbos say, "Lightning-flash & flint-spark")
Like the mountains where it was made
What we see of the world is the mind's
Invention and the mind
Though stained by it, becoming
Rivers, sun, mule-dung, flies-
Can shift instantly
A dirty bird in a square time

Gone
Gone
REALLY gone
Into the cool
O MAMA

Like they say, "Four times up,Three times down."
I'm still on the mountain.

Sourdough Mountain I5:viii:55
Berkeley 27-28:viii:56