Uncommon Priors

Could a computer be programmed to make moral judgments about cases of intentional harm and unreasonable risk that match those judgments people already make intuitively? * * * Drawing on deontic logic, action theory, moral philosophy, and the common law of tort, particularly Terry’s five-variable calculus of risk, I outline a formal model of moral grammar and intuitive jurisprudence along the foregoing lines, which defines the abstract properties of the relevant mapping and demonstrates their descriptive adequacy with respect to a range of common moral intuitions, which experimental studies have suggested may be universal or nearly so. Framing effects, protected values, and implications for the neuroscience of moral intuition are also discussed.

Uh, is this a paper or an entire academic discipline?

Confession time: the financial constraints of even well-funded grad school can be a strain even on the intellectually-oriented folks drawn to grad school in the first place. Contrary to popular opinion, a love of books does not rule out a love of shoes. You can’t divide the world into the materialistic types drawn to lucrative fields or husbands and those of us too preoccupied with what Sartre really meant by this one sentence to wonder whether Camper ever has such a thing as a clearance sale.

The trade-off–do what you love, buy what you need–is worth it for most of us, most of the time. Things must feel quite different for those who have prior experience with the opposite trade-off. If you go more or less straight to grad school from college, on the one hand you don’t have to adjust to a change in lifestyle, but on the other, the older you get, the stranger it can feel to live as a student. You go from being amazed that someone will pay you to read to realizing that you’re doing as much work as your friends in other fields, yet no one’s willing to rent you an apartment because you’re a student. It’s good to keep in mind that even a salary of $5,000 (to give a dramatic example) sounds like lots of money to someone used to being a student/unpaid intern, but the expenses of adulthood, even without kids or a car, are impossible to overestimate.

Advising others not to pursue a well-paid profession because doing so would make you miserable is considered reasonable advice. Telling those interested in doctoral programs to prepare themselves for thinking twice about buying nail polish at the drug store (normal for a teen, but sadder when one approaches 30) sounds silly–who cares about nail polish when you could be pondering Ideas?–but it’s something to be prepared for before signing on.

I’ll just add that as someone who has some amount of “prior experience with the opposite trade-off” (indeed, as the person who Phoebe linked for just that point), having come from the practice of law — but not an extreme version, because I never worked at a big firm — the grad school trade-off is, in my experience, much better. Money is great, but, let’s face it, spending ten hours a day being bored to tears and unhappy is no way to live.

It’s definitely a trade-off though. I’m in a very well-funded program, but, even so, there are definitely times when the finances of the whole enterprise are pretty scary. Like when my car breaks down — it can be genuinely terrifying to contemplate some extortionate mechanic’s bill on a grad school budget.

Phoebe also reveals the deep, dark, secret of grad school life: the used book store. It is, I’m afraid, all true. It’s impossible to resist a book selling for less than five dollars. Any book.

I wrote: “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.”

It appeared as: “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh.”

There is no length issue. This is someone thinking “I’ll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and i know best”.

Well, you fucking don’t.
This was shit, shit sub-editing for three reasons.
1) ‘Nosh’, as I’m sure you fluent Yiddish speakers know, is a noun formed from a bastardisation of the German ‘naschen’. It is a verb, and can be construed into two distinct nouns. One, ‘nosh’, means simply ‘food’. You have decided that this is what i meant and removed the ‘a’. I am insulted enough that you think you have a better ear for English than me. But a better ear for Yiddish? I doubt it. Because the other noun, ‘nosh’ means “a session of eating” – in this sense you might think of its dual valency as being similar to that of ’scoff’. you can go for a scoff. or you can buy some scoff. the sentence you left me with is shit, and is not what i meant. Why would you change a sentnece aso that it meant something i didn’t mean? I don’t know, but you risk doing it every time you change something. And the way you avoid this kind of fuck up is by not changing a word of my copy without asking me, okay? it’s easy. Not. A. Word. Ever.

2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, i was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as “sexually-charged”. I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y.. I have used the word ‘gaily’ as a gentle nudge. And “looking for a nosh” has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob. Not specifically gay, for this is soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. “looking for nosh” does not have that ambiguity. the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you’ve fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don’t you read the copy?

3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed ‘a’ so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

That is all kinds of fabulous.