WHO WE ARE: Bertrand Russell, plus Tyrus and Kennedy!

WEDNESDAY MAY 14, 2025

Snapshots of who we are: Off on our monthly medical mission, during yesterday's several down times, we turned again to one of our favorite passages.

The passage is drawn from Stephen Budiansky's 2021 book, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel. The passage in question deals with Bertrand Russell, a giant of the twentieth century whose IQ was something like 300 or was perhaps a bit higher than that.

We enjoy pondering this pregnant passage. This is part of who we are:

Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

[...]

(page 108): ...Russell's idea had been to establish the soundness of mathematics by showing how it could all be reduced to principles of logic so self-evident as to be beyond doubt. Defining even the simplest operations of arithmetic in terms of what Russell called such "primitive" notions, however, was far from an obvious task. Even the notion of what a number is raised immediate problems. The laboriousness of the methodology and notation was all too evident in the (often remarked) fact that that it took more than seven hundred pages to reach the conclusion, "1 + 1 = 2," a result which Russell and Whitehead described as "occasionally useful."

Say what? In Budiansky's formulation, Russell and Whitehead took more than seven hundred pages to reach the conclusion, "1 + 1 = 2." They did so in their giant work, Principia Mathematica.

Budiansky seems to be chuckling about that apparent side trip to Mars. For ourselves, we're not entirely sure what was involved in that "often remarked" bit of intellectual labor.

That said, we find the surface nuttiness of that passage appealing. Skipping past other puzzling passages in Budiansky's presentation, we find Russell chuckling at his own behavior on the next page of this book:

(page 109): "Russell's Paradox," as it came to be known, echoed paradoxes that had been around since antiquity. The prototype is the Liar's Paradox, attributed to Epimenides the Cretan, who asserted, "All Cretans are liars." Russell noted that this was akin to the conundrum posed by a piece of paper on which the sentence, "The statement on the other side of this paper is false" is written on one side, and the sentence "The statement on the other side of this paper is true" on the other.

"It seemed unworthy of a grown man to spend his time on such trivialities," Russell later recalled, and "at first, I supposed that I should be able to overcome the contradictions quite easily, and that there was some trivial error in the reasoning." The more he thought about it, the more he realized it was a flaw in the reasoning too deep to be ignored.

It did indeed come to be known as "Russell's Paradox." According to Budianksy, Russell started out regarding the alleged conundrum at its heart as a "triviality"—as a matter unworthy of a grown man's time. Somehow, though, he came to regard that triviality as "a flaw in the reasoning too deep to be ignored."

As he continues, Budiansky quotes other statements in which Russell displays "his usual self-mocking humor." At one point, Russell ruefully notes the fact that virtually no one on the face of the earth ever made it all the way through the lengthy book he wrote with Alfred North Whitehead.

(According to Budiansky, Russell and Whitehead's "massive manuscript, with its complex notation which could only be written out laboriously by hand, had to be carted in a four-wheeler cab to the offices of the Cambridge University Press when it was finally done.")

As an intellectual, but also as an activist, Russell was a giant. Have we mentioned the fact that his IQ was something like 300—a perfect bowling score?

On a purely technical basis, Russell was very smart! That said, he somehow got deeply tangled in a triviality which was, on its face, a bit of a parlor trick. 

Almost no one read the book. According to Budianksy, Kurt Gödel was one of the few who did. Today, Gödel is routinely described as "the greatest logician since Aristotle," a span of well over two thousand years.

That reputation is the fruit of Gödel's "incompleteness theorem(s)." That leaves us with another apparent conundrum:

How could the greatest work in logic in 2500 years possibly have been built on the framework of something as apparently silly as Russell's famous "paradox?" How could any such thing be true in this, the smartest of all possible worlds? 

We don't exactly understand that passage from Budiansky, but we like to ponder it on occasion. We love to picture Russell and Whitehead fighting their way through 700 pages to prove, show or explain the basic fact in which 1 +1 does equal 2.

We enjoy marveling at that puzzle. We tend to lump it in with Albert Einstein's inability to explain the important concept known as "the relativity of simultaneity" when he was persuaded to write the first "Einstein made easy" book, way back in 1916.

On its face, Einstein's explanation of that concept (in that book) made no apparent sense. In his 2007 biography of Einstein, Walter Isaacson may have explained how that situation came about: 

Einstein: His Life and Universe

[...]

In 1916, ... [Einstein] wrote a formal exposition of his general theory of relativity, which was far more comprehensive, and slightly more comprehensible, than what he had poured forth in his weekly lectures during his race with Hilbert the previous November.

In addition, he produced an even more understandable version: a book for the lay reader, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, that remains popular to this very day. To make sure that the average person would fathom it, he read every page out loud to Elsa's daughter Margot, pausing frequently to ask whether she indeed got it. "Yes, Albert," she invariably replied, even though (as she confided to others) she found the whole thing totally baffling.

"Elsa's daughter Margot" was Einstein's 16-year-old niece. According to Isaacson, she was so much in awe of her famous uncle that she couldn't bring herself to tell him that she actually didn't understand his book for general readers.

Einstein was a giant as a theoretical physicist. He doesn't seem to have been equally skilled as a "popular writer."

There's no reason why he should have been! We lump this in with this discussion for the following reason:

To this day, we know of no one who has noted the fact that Einstein's explanation of that topic in that book didn't seem to make sense. 

Indeed, almost a hundred years later, in his biography of Einstein, Isaacson produced the same explanation of that key topic, without comment or challenge. Eight years after that, Nova presented the same explanation in a retrospective on relativity for viewers of PBS. 

On its face, the explanation doesn't seem to make sense. We're prepared to blame Einstein's niece for that—but a century later, it still seemed that no one had noticed.

So it went with Russell and Gödel, and also with a century of presentations about Einstein's revolutionary work. During that century, along had come the later Wittgenstein, breaking with Russell as he offered a view of the western world's highest-order reasoning.

His view went something like this:

Was Wittgenstein Right?

[...]

Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed, the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking.

This attitude is in stark opposition to the traditional view, which continues to prevail...It’s taken for granted that there is deep understanding to be obtained of the nature of consciousness, of how knowledge of the external world is possible, of whether our decisions can be truly free, of the structure of any just society, and so on—and that philosophy’s job is to provide such understanding. Isn’t that why we are so fascinated by it?

If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking. 

So said Professor Horwich, in a post for the New York Times. It seems to us that Horwich was basically right about Wittgenstein's work, which is itself extremely hard to decipher.

Uh-oh! According to that analysis, Russell and Gödel had been trapped in a realm of "confusion and wishful thinking." They got tangled up with "mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking."

Can some such theory be accurate?  We're speaking here of Russell and Gödel—even, in a tangential way, of the fact that Einstein's apparently bungled explanation continues to be good enough for academic and journalistic work.

Early in the last century, there they sat—Russell and Gödel, with a cast of thousands to follow. Their possible failures—their alleged capture by linguistic illusion and muddled thinking—is one part of who (and what) we are.

Today, in a slightly different realm, our flailing nation's public discourse lies in the hands of a whole different breed of cat. Last Tuesday night, on the Fox News Channel, this is who they were:

Panelists, Gutfeld! program: May 6, 2025
Kennedy: Former MTV VJ
Tyrus: Former professional "wrestler"
Greg Gutfeld: Host. Also, co-host of The Five
Jamie Lissow: Star of "The Divorced Dad Comedy Tour"
Paul Mauro: Former NYPD Inspector 

Not that's there's anything (automatically) wrong with it!

The Fox News Channel had assembled that Gang of Five to discuss an array of news topics on a prime time "cable news" program. Tomorrow, we'll show you some of what they said.

Russell and Gödel were part of who we are. So are Kennedy and Tyrus.

There's no reason why analysts like Kennedy and Tyrus couldn't offer insightful commentary on various issues and topics. Tomorrow, we'll show you some of what they said that night about Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. If the later Wittgenstein can be believed, we humans are strongly inclined to wander off into various types of error.

Kennedy and Tyrus are part of who we are. So are the people in Blue America who insist on ignoring what's being said, and what's being done, on the Fox News Channel.

In truth, we Blues also seem to have a whole lot of splainin' to do! Major aspects of the Biden years remain unexplained, with some of the mysteries of that tenure starting to hit the fan.

Once in a while, in the face of all that, we like to think about the pages devoted to 1 + 1 equaling 2. Russell's IQ was roughly three million. What hope can there possibly be for us if he somehow got himself all tangled up in that?

Tomorrow: As heard last week on the Fox News Channel, but cited exactly nowhere:

"A lot of people don't have grandparents today because of that son of a bitch."