h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Red Kite
My philosophical phrase is:- "Work to live don't live for work."
Occasionally we forget that our lives here and now are the performance not the rehearsal! Enjoy it while you can after all you don't want to miss the show!

My name is Maddy, but here on h2g2 I'm mostly known as:

Researcher 227000
.M.c.B. - TigerlilyTimbits (....Llama....)

And my philosophical quote:

“This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction.” - Albert Camus

humm...name and nickname you can see/find...
"i believe in nothing, everything is sacred.
i believe in everything, nothing is sacred." -tom robbins

"music equals language plus emotion." --me, on another thread.

Big Brother is not watching us, but neither are we watching big brother !

I tried to join many moons ago, however I don't seemed to have managed it yet

NemoNihilque: Do not be afraid to believe, for the fear of what may be, but act on faith for the hope of the world unseen. For by believing that the thing you hope for exists, you may find it to lay before you, and that you lay among it.

yeah....I realize that my name and nickname are displayed, but the message in the box thingy said: "Please type in your name and a Philosophical Phrase to join."
I was just blindly following instructions!

Marc (Pull the Other) Wunn:

"Far more clever is it to conceal the mechanism of your cleverness, than it is to appear clever..."

Back in 399 The Professor wrote: "A small boy, age 5 (lets call him Gunther) is given a ball point pen one day. His parents tell him "This is a magic pen, if you hold onto a surface for 5 seconds, the surface will start on fire. Don't use it until you're 15 though."
Gunther goes through life believing his pen is a fire stick of sorts. The schools don't teach about how fire is created really, until chemistry some years later. (In other words, all his life, he has found no reason to doubt that his pen his magical) One day, when he had reached the age of 15, he went to a large building in his city, and placed the pen on it's wall for five seconds. Needless to say, nothing happened.

The Question: Can Gunther be tried for attempted arson?"

Nice scenario, but

(a) to put someone on trial you need a case that can be taken seriously in court, and
(b) there is no five-year-old who will defer trying out his lighter for ten years.

The moral dilemma was well put by a writer in the Observer thirty-odd years ago who told the story of a questionnaire he filled out while applying for a job. One question was "would you be prepared to lie for the sake of the company?" His response was that he certailnly would not, but for the sake of getting the job he wrote down yes.

When he got home he realised he had just lied; for the sake of the company.

Or had he told the truth?

(Quite irrelevantly: he didn't get the job)

That's quite clever.

You cannot say there is no 5 year old who would defer from using his lighter for 10 years. There may be, he could just be very respectful, or very slow.

I believe he could be tried if he confessed to his intentions and they were backed up by both witnesses and his parents who had led him to believe this all his life.

The Professor
Societas Eruditorum

If you believe those two things, could I ask you what the weather is like today in Cloud Cuckoo Land?

There was a TV psychology programme a few months ago that demonstrated the development of the ability to cheat and lie (in small ways) as a necessary step in early childhood. The child that can respect parental wishes in the face of such temptation is not a normal child.

So we are left with statements that are true but insignificant, both in this case and the court case. A much frequented philosophical backwater

'alas poor yorick, i knew him well' or whateverthehey that quote is.

was i a normal child? by whose standards? opinions, like philosophy and fun things, are rampant. especially THIS week.

Was George Washington a normal child?

It is a confusing world. Is normality desirable? If so then lying cheating and all sorts of selfish underhand behaviour is . . .

As Mandeville showed in "The Parable of the Bees"

The Fable of the Bees
by Bernard Mandeville, 1705.

This is good stuff:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~maartens/philosophy/mandeville/fable_of_bees.html

The above link is wretched: use this one instead
http://www.ac-toulouse.fr/philosophie/textes/mandevillethefableofthebees.htm

I like the question. It's like that one about the bus driver. I will elaborate if asked.

good one about the trial. My impressions are,
a) It seems that court cases no longer have to be taken seriously, at least in America, with a failing judicial system all one needs is a more proficient attorney, not neccessarily proficient in law, but at least in "B.S" and public persuasion. I suppose that it is not a matter of "can he be tried for attempted arson", but a matter of how a Prosecuter might go about proving the case. "What are the merits of the case?" would be interesting.
b) I've always heard that you can't prove a negative. To say that there is no child that would not do a thing would be nigh impossible to prove, and it would be exceedingly inefficent to do so. I'm no sociologist, but I think the statistics of childeren born every year are in the millions, at least that sounds right. Now multiply that by however many years you want to search, and that is the number of children you would have to analize, at least in order to be definite.

It's very difficult to prove anything. All our scientific "laws" are based upon inductive reasoning. They're not really proved, more just good guesses. That haven't yet been wrong. Often.

I take both of Nemo's points. A skilful lawyer can make the justice system turn cartwheels. That's what Socrates complained of and the justice system sentenced him to death.

Also, yes of course I can't say "no child" anything. Transpose your arena from common discourse to mathematics and nothing is unexceptionable (even this sentence )

I've been through this before; I wrote an entry A1084673 "How to Gamble and Win" in which I originally claimed that with a certain wager repeated over a vague number of occasions you are "guaranteed to win". In Peer Review I was taken to task for the unliteral use of the word "guaranteed". I took it out (for a quiet life) but the odds were 2:1 for God's sake, how safe do you want your bet to be? Two to one is not safe for one or two wagers but over time (10, 20, 30 bets) it becomes a tidal wave in your favour. As in A1138655 "The Monty Hall Problem".

By the way, though it is hard to prove anything impossible, it is possible to prove conclusively that something is possible.

I have the considerable misfortune to be both unlucky in love and cards.

Just a thought, but that could be a pessimistic view. If the love was not going right you might actually have been lucky that it ended sooner rather than later. With cards, if you lose early on, you are less likely to send good money after bad therefore you have had a lucky escape. Most times I think we make our own luck. We just have to be able to look at things from a different angle.
I wish you good luck in all you do
Red Kite