THE PLATONIST FILE: Goldstein tries to explain what Godel believed!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

Professor takes Platonist challenge: Rebecca Goldstein is a ranking philosophy professor.

She's also a highly-regarded novelist. For our money, her inclination to tell the human story didn't serve her especially well when she wrote her 2005 general interest book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel.

Goldstein goes into substantial internal detail about the way Godel "fell in love" when he was still a teen—about the "ecstatic transfiguration" produced by his love affair with Platonism.

She goes on and on, then on and on, about this "transfigurative intellectual love." At times, though, she also makes it sound like Godel had sworn allegiance, at this point in his life, to some revolutionary political group.

According to Goldstein, Godel "had become a Platonist in 1925," the year during which he turned 19. He "was already a committed Platonist in 1926," the year in which he began attending meetings of the super-elite discussion group called the Vienna Circle.

Godel was moving in lofty academic circles at a very young age. It's also true, according to Goldstein, that he didn't want the Circle to know about his commitment to Platonism. In effect, he was an Alger Hiss hiding within a circle of people all named Whittaker Chambers.

Back in 2005, Jim Holt reviewed Goldstein's book for The New Yorker. He told a shortened version of this slightly comical story in that review, which has now become the title essay of his own new book, When Einstein Walked with Godel:

HOLT (page 8): Gödel entered the University of Vienna in 1924. He had intended to study physics, but he was soon seduced by the beauties of mathematics, and especially by the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. This doctrine, which is called Platonism, because it descends from Plato’s theory of ideas, has always been popular among mathematicians. In the philosophical world of nineteen-twenties Vienna, however, it was considered distinctly old-fashioned. Among the many intellectual movements that flourished in the city’s rich café culture, one of the most prominent was the Vienna Circle, a group of thinkers united in their belief that philosophy must be cleansed of metaphysics and made over in the image of science...

Gödel was introduced into the Vienna Circle by one of his professors, but he kept quiet about his Platonist views. Being both rigorous and averse to controversy, he did not like to argue his convictions unless he had an airtight way of demonstrating that they were valid...

Members of the Vienna Circle had no idea that a Platonist was lurking among them! For better or worse, Goldstein tells the story of the "clandestine Platonist" at much greater length, and with much more dramatic flair.

At any rate, Godel was "a committed Platonist" by the time he was 20. He was lurking among the "logical positivists," unwilling to let them know about his deepest beliefs.

By the time he was 24, Godel had formulated and publicized his "incompleteness theorems," the theorems which are said to identify him as the greatest logician since Aristotle. Essentially, Godel saw these theorems as the proof of his beloved Platonism. Or so Goldstein says, we would assume correctly.

As of 1930, this silliness was consuming one of the western world's highest intellectual elites. Along the way, we may puzzle a bit at the stakes involved in this war of the worlds.

As we saw yesterday, Godel, the second greatest logician, was trying to figure out how we can know that 2 + 2 equals 4. He'd fallen in love with Platonism, and wanted to prove that the doctrine was true.

Can major battles of this type really revolve around matters like 2 + 2? As we proceed today and tomorrow, we'll see other apparently vapid puzzlements move to center stage in this remarkable tale.

Before proceeding, we ought to admit it—this story of the "committed Platonist" strikes us as amazingly silly. Today, though, we ask a more challenging question:

In the course of writing her book, was Goldstein able to explain the nature of this "doctrine?" To what beliefs had Godel committed when he committed to Platonism, if in clandestine fashion?

As we saw yesterday, Holt made virtually no attempt to describe this powerful doctrine in his review of Goldstein's book. Was Goldstein, a ranking philosophy professor, able to clarify matters further, writing at much greater length?

In her first attempt at taking the Platonist challenge, Goldstein had, rather unhelpfully, offered the formulation shown below. We've shown you this passage before. Try to ignore the technical language:

GOLDSTEIN (page 44): Godel's commitment to the objective existence of mathematical reality is the view known as conceptual, or mathematical realism. It is also known as mathematical Platonism, in honor of the ancient Greek philosopher...

Platonism is the view that the truths of mathematics are independent of any human activities, such as the construction of formal systems—with their axioms, definitions, rules of inference and proofs. The truths of mathematics are determined, according to Platonism, by the reality of mathematics, by the nature of the real, though abstract entities (numbers, sets, etc.) that make up that reality.

There it stands. In this, her first pass at the Platonist challenge, Goldstein tells us this:

The Platonist believes in "the objective existence of mathematical reality," whatever that is supposed to mean. But wait—there's more.

According to the Platonist, the truths of mathematics are determined by the reality of mathematics! More specifically, the truths of mathematics are determined by the nature of the entities which make up that reality.

So this ranking professor has said. Presumably, everyone can see how unhelpful this first attempt at explication was. That leaves us asking an obvious question:

Does Goldstein go on, in her book-length text, to clarify, unpack, elucidate or explain the essence of this alleged doctrine? Does she ever do a better job helping us understand the nature of the doctrine to which the second greatest logician in history is said to have committed his life?

What the heck is Platonism? Does Goldstein ever provide an answer which is, quoting from the blurbs on her book, lucid, accessible, clear?

We're going to say that she doesn't. To give you a sense of what we mean, let's take ourselves to page 87 of her general interest book.

Friend, let's start with a basic admission. There's no way to present an excerpt from this book without exciting a possible objection. The reader may suspect that a tiny shard of Goldstein's brilliantly lucid exposition has been taken out of some larger context.

Go ahead—keep that possible objection in mind! Then proceed to read this passage, in which Goldstein tells us what a possible fool believes:

GOLDSTEIN (page 87): For a Platonist, mathematical truth is the same sort of truth as that prevailing in lesser realms. A proposition p is true if and only if p. "Santa Claus exists" is true if and only if Santa Claus exists. "Every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes" is is true if and only if there is no even number greater than 2 that is the sum pf two primes (even if we can never prove it).

What does a Platonist believe? With what sorts of beliefs did our second greatest logician fall in transfigurative love?

According to Goldstein, a Platonist believes the following. A Platonist believes that the proposition "Santa Claus exists" is true if and only if Santa Claus does exist!

No, really. That's what it says!

Friend, you must be a Platonist if that's what the doctrine is! Every person on your block is a committed Platonist too.

"Santa Claus exists" is true if and only if Santa Claus exists? Everyone believes that statement—and everyone believes the other two examples provided in that peculiar passage.

To marvel further at the type of work which routinely emerges from our academic elites, we turn to the footnote on that same page. In that footnote, Goldstein further discusses the third example from the passage we've already posted, the example involving the sum of two primes.

According to that footnote, "the Prussian mathematician Christian Goldbach (1690-1764) had conjectured that every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers."

So far, so perfectly clear. But in her footnote, Goldstein further discusses Goldbach's conjecture. As she does, she tries again to let us know what a Platonist believes and asserts:

GOLDSTEIN (page 87): Goldbach's conjecture has been confirmed for every even number that has ever been checked; however, no proof has of yet been discovered for the universal conclusion that every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes. The fact that Goldbach's conjecture remains unproved means (at least according to the Platonist) that lurking out there beyond the point where mathematicians have checked there might be a counterexample: an even number that isn't the sum of two primes. Then again (according to the mathematical Platonist), there may not be a counterexample: every even number may be the sum of two primes, without there being a formal way of proving that this is so. A Platonist asserts that there either is or isn't a counterexample, irrespective of our having a proof one way or the other.

"A Platonist asserts that there either is or isn't a counterexample, irrespective of our having a proof one way or the other?"

Tell the truth! At least on its face, does that make any sense?

"A Platonist asserts that there either is or isn't a counterexample?" Who wouldn't make that "assertion?" And why would it take a Platonist to make the other assertions Goldstein lists in that passage about the conjecture?

Goldbach's conjecture remains unproved (and unrefuted)? Why would it take a Platonist to say that there might be a counterexample which hasn't yet been checked? Wouldn't anyone say the same thing? Ecstatic transfiguration to the side, what's love of Platonism got to do with it?

Goldstein's examples in this footnote bring us back to Santa Claus, who can only accurately be said to exist if he does exist. We flash on our second greatest logician trying to figure how we can know that 2 + 2 equals 4.

Misguided respect for academic authority will induce the trusting soul to assume that there must be some lofty explanation for these peculiar presentations. We'll strongly suggest that, in matters like these, such trust will be leading us wrong.

At substantial length, Goldstein tells a novelist's tale in her book—a tale of the powerful intellectual love which produced a committed Platonist. Respect for intellectual authority may incline us to believe that some actual great beliefs lie at the heart of this tale.

On the other hand, yesterday, in Holt's text, we saw our second greatest logician puzzling over 2 + 2 = 4. Today, we see a high-ranking professor offering what seems like perfect twaddle concerning the existence of Santa Claus.
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In Goldstein's book, we also encounter the passage shown below. In this passage, Goldstein gives another example of what is, or was, at stake in this battle. Today, we'll highlight that passage:

GOLDSTEIN (page 44): Godel's commitment to the objective existence of mathematical reality is the view known as conceptual, or mathematical realism. It is also known as mathematical Platonism, in honor of the ancient Greek philosopher...

Platonism is the view that the truths of mathematics are independent of any human activities, such as the construction of formal systems—with their axioms, definitions, rules of inference and proofs. The truths of mathematics are determined, according to Platonism, by the reality of mathematics, by the nature of the real, though abstract entities (numbers, sets, etc.) that make up that reality. The structure of, say, the natural numbers (which are the regular old counting numbers: 1, 2, 3, etc.) exists independent of us, according to the mathematical realist...and the properties of the numbers 4 and 25—that, for example, one is even, the other is odd and both are perfect squares—are as objective as are, according to the physical realist, the physical properties of light and gravity.

According to the Platonist, the claim that the number 4 is even is an "objective" claim. So is the claim that 25 is a perfect square. (That is, that it's the product of 5 x 5.)

These claims are "objective," the committed Platonist cries. But so does everyone you've ever known, along with all those you've never met. This account of what a Platonist believes doesn't seem to make any sense—and yet, this is the way a ranking academic authority explain this ancient "doctrine," with three academic stars blurbing how lucid she is.

According to Goldstein and Holt, Platonism is the doctrine which defined the world of our second greatest logician, a man who seemed to be mentally ill throughout his life and who was famous for believing a long list of crazy ideas. According to Goldstein, it was on this peculiar plain outside Troy that a giant battle was waged involving our second greatest logician and a lofty academic Circle.

Does any of this make any sense? Respect for authority tells us it must.

Experience tells us something different. Then too, there's the passage from G. H. Hardy, another alleged Platonist, which Goldstein quotes early on.

Tomorrow: When mathematicians stray, or how can we humans possibly know that 317 is a prime?

THE PLATONIST FILE: Attempts to explain 2 + 2 = 4!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2018

The perfect timeless world of our greatest logicians: At this point, it's important to remember who we're talking about.

We're speaking here about Kurt Godel, "who has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle." So says the widely praised science/math writer Jim Holt in the opening pages of his new book, When Einstein Walked With Godel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought.

Is it true? Was Godel really the greatest logician since Aristotle? Since Godel (1906-1978) lived in the twentieth century, that would make him the greatest logician in something like 2400 years!

You'd almost think that a person like that would have made some great, identifiable contribution to human thought. You'd almost think his name would be well known.

With Godel, the story is different. In Holt's telling, this second greatest logician seemed to struggle with mental illness since perhaps the age of 5—mental illness which became so extreme that he ended up dying of self-starvation.

Then too, there were the crazy ideas. Holt discusses them early on, contrasting Godel with his friend, Albert Einstein:

HOLT (page 4): Although Einstein’s private life was not without its complications, outwardly he was jolly and at home in the world. Gödel, by contrast, had a tendency toward paranoia. He believed in ghosts; he had a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases; he refused to go out when certain distinguished mathematicians were in town, apparently out of concern that they might try to kill him. “Every chaos is a wrong appearance,” he insisted—the paranoiac’s first axiom.

Our greatest logician believed in ghosts. He had a morbid fear of gases from the fridge.

Holt essay first appeared in 2005 as a somewhat disguised review of Rebecca Goldstein's book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel. As such, almost all Holt's material seems to be drawn from Goldstein's book, in which she presented an amusing list of Godel's apparently crazy ideas—crazy ideas which didn't seem to spring directly from paranoia or other such illness.

Does it seem strange to think that our greatest logician was perhaps best known, in his adult years, for his various crazy ideas? We'll let you wrestle with that one. For ourselves, we'd be inclined to see this syndrome as perhaps being instructive, illustrative of the vast intellectual dysfunction at the heart of the human experience.

Godel became known as "the greatest logician since" because of his incompleteness theorems, which Holt and Goldstein struggle to explain in their respective texts. We'll examine those struggles next week, marveling at the kind of journalistic/academic work which is reflexively praised for its clarity by long lines of scripted nimrods within the upper-end press.

This week, we're puzzling about something different; we're puzzling about Godel's alleged "Platonism." At great length and in flowery language, Goldstein describes the murky "doctrine" as the enduring, rapturous love of Godel's life—as a doctrine with which he "fell in love" when he was only 19.

Holt's essay condenses this portrait of Godel's affair—but what the heck is "Platonism" even supposed to be? As we've noted, the following passage includes Holt's first bite at that worm-infested apple. As he continues (see text below), some comical themes will emerge:

HOLT (page 8): Gödel entered the University of Vienna in 1924. He had intended to study physics, but he was soon seduced by the beauties of mathematics, and especially by the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. This doctrine, which is called Platonism, because it descends from Plato’s theory of ideas, has always been popular among mathematicians...

It's just as we told you last week! According to Holt by way of Goldstein, the young Godel was "seduced by...the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind."

So says Holt, almost seeming to assume that this puzzling definition of Platonism makes some sort of earthly sense.

Does Holt go on to explicate this "doctrine?" We'll consider his fleeting effort below. First, let's consider the puzzling places to which we humans can be taken in explorations of modern "philosophy" at its highest levels.

Holt is halfway through a lengthy paragraph at the point where we've left off. From the rest of his graf, we can extract a minor attempt to flesh out the concept of "Platonism"—but we're also taken to a peculiar place, a place where we ponder 2 + 2 and the mysterious way in which 2 + 2 can be known to equal 4.

Are we humans the rational animal, or was that widely bruited assertion Aristotle's error? Is it possible that our highest intellectual elites have more often turned out ruminations which more closely resemble clown shows?

Have our highest academic elites sometimes resembled harlequins, clowns? We cut-and-paste, you decide:

HOLT (continuing directly): In the philosophical world of nineteen-twenties Vienna, however, it was considered distinctly old-fashioned. Among the many intellectual movements that flourished in the city’s rich café culture, one of the most prominent was the Vienna Circle, a group of thinkers united in their belief that philosophy must be cleansed of metaphysics and made over in the image of science. Under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, their reluctant guru, the members of the Vienna Circle regarded mathematics as a game played with symbols, a more intricate version of chess. What made a proposition like “2 + 2 = 4” true, they held, was not that it correctly described some abstract world of numbers but that it could be derived in a logical system according to certain rules.

A significant name pops up in that passage—the name of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Before our post-philosophical explorations are done, we'll consider his admittedly murky, but conceptually simple, later work at some length.

Setting that matter aside for the present, let's look at Holt's attempt to explicate Platonism. Also, let's consider the fact that our greatest minds have struggled over the nature of the famous schoolboy proposition, 2 + 2 = 4.

In that extended passage, Holt seems to contrast young Godel's Platonism—his fervent belief that the number 3 lives a perfect timeless existence—with the hard-boiled views of a group of thinkers called the Vienna Circle.

Mercifully, Holt ascribes no particular "isms" to that particular group. But within that passage, a reader can discern a tiny attempt by Holt to explain Platonism in a bit more detail:

You might be a Platonist if! From that passage by Holt, it sounds like a Platonist believes that a proposition like 2 + 2 = 4 is true because "it correctly describes some abstract world of numbers."

Reader, tell the truth! Do you have even the slightest idea what that proposition might mean? Before you give a defensive answer in which you defer to academic authority, please remember that we've asked you to stick to the truth.

People, what makes a proposition like “2 + 2 = 4” true? According to Holt, our loftiest gangs of intellectuals were debating this chin-scratcher as recently as 1930, with Godel clinging to a belief which he was refusing to reveal:

According to Holt, Godel believed the proposition "2 + 2 = 4" is true because it correctly describes some abstract world of numbers. So believed our second greatest logician as he fell in love with the idea which would drive his work throughout his entire life.

Friend, do you have the slightest idea what any of that might mean? Do you feel sure that you can explain what it means to believe in the existence of "abstract worlds" at all? More specifically, do you know what it means to believe in the existence of the "abstract world of numbers"—which, presumably, is the place where the number 3 lives its perfect timeless existence, surrounded of course by the circles?

Do you have even the slightest idea what it means to believe in such things? We're going to guess that you do not—that you could never explicate, explain or unpack the essence of such alleged beliefs, which represent Holt's only attempts to explain what "Platonism" is.

Luckily, Holt briefly extends his explanation at one additional point. As it turns out, the truth of 2 + 2 = 4 was, for Godel, all about our ESP! For now, let's ignore the technical language and stick to the matter at hand:

HOLT (page 10): [Gödel] believed he had shown that mathematics has a robust reality that transcends any system of logic. But logic, he was convinced, is not the only route to knowledge of this reality; we also have something like an extrasensory perception of it, which he called “mathematical intuition.” It is this faculty of intuition that allows us to see, for example, that the formula saying “I am not provable” must be true, even though it defies proof within the system where it lives...

How can we know that 2 + 2 equals 4? According to Godel as told by Holt, we have "something like an extrasensory perception" which lets us discern such realities about the abstract world of numbers where the number 3, and all other numbers, live their perfect timeless existence in the company of circles.

Briefly, a word of praise. In her own book, Goldstein offered a perfect, simple explanation of how we can know that 2 + 2 equals 4.

Goldstein's perfect explanation doesn't involve ESP. You'll rarely see a philosophy professor make such a perfect statement. We'll get to that statement next week.

For today, let's leave matters at this. Back around 1930, the greatest logician in 2400 years was trying to determine how we can possibly know that 2 + 2 equals 4.

At Princeton, during his later years, he was known for his various crazy ideas. Starting around the age of 19, he developed the Platonistic idea that we can know about 2 + 2 because we have some faculty which resembles ESP.

This is the way our highest academic elites were playing during these not-so-distant years. According to Holt, even Lord Russell got dragged into this ridiculous mess. Again, ignore the technical language to focus on the sad absurdity of what is being said:

HOLT (page 9): Gödel’s incompleteness theorems did come as a surprise. In fact, when the fledgling logician presented them at a conference in the German city of Königsberg in 1930, almost no one was able to make any sense of them. What could it mean to say that a mathematical proposition was true if there was no possibility of proving it? The very idea seemed absurd. Even the once great logician Bertrand Russell was baffled; he seems to have been under the misapprehension that Gödel had detected an inconsistency in mathematics. “Are we to think that 2 + 2 is not 4, but 4.001?” Russell asked decades later in dismay, adding that he was “glad [he] was no longer working at mathematical logic.”

Lord Russell, "the once great logician," worried that he was being asked to believe that 2 + 2 might not equal 4 after all! This made him glad that we was no longer mired in the world of (mathematical) logic.

Respect for academic authority tells us that we must believe that these ruminations, by these great intellectual figures, simply must have made sense. By the end of the 1940s, Wittgenstein had torn such suppositions to shreds in a self-admittedly poorly-written book, Philosophical Investigations.

Professor Horwich has said that our current professors have stopped teaching Wittgenstein because his demonstrations mean that they would pretty much have to stop teaching everyone else. Down the road, we'll return to that claim, concerning which we'd occasionally joked on the world's greatest comedy stages before first encountering Horwich.

We'll return to Horwich's conjecture at some later date! Tomorrow, we'll return to Professor Goldstein's attempts to explicate "Platonism." We'll start with a comical story mentioned by Holt in passing:

A Platonist was hiding among them! Yes, it actually gets that silly, that puny, that tiny, that dumb.

Tomorrow: What a Platonist believes

THE PLATONIST FILE: You might be a Platonist if...!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2018

Timeless lack of clarity: Friend, are you a Platonist? You might be a Platonist if you adhere to certain "beliefs."

Maybe you've found yourself thinking that "numbers and circles have a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind."

Perhaps you've come to believe that "the truths of mathematics are determined by the reality of mathematics"—more specifically, "by the nature of the entities that make up that reality."

Granted, those are fuzzy claims, at least as presented. But such fleeting thoughts may serve as signs of incipient Platonism.

Borrowing from Professor Foxworthy, You might be a Platonist if...—if you believe such puzzling and/or apparently vapid claims. Beyond that, you may be part of a slightly embarrassing, mildly endearing human story—a story which has been unfolding for several millennia now.

We mention Professor Foxworthy, a resident scholar at Humorist U., because this is, in large part, an ongoing comical story. Indeed, if it weren't for all the warfare and killing which accompany the intellectual dysfunction of our upper-end intellectual elites, we could call it a comical story and leave the matter right there.

Who is Professor Foxworthy? This professor, searching for fun, has often employed this formulation: "You might be a redneck if..."

After presenting that formulation, the professor has told a series of jokes. Like his forerunner, Professor Irwin Corey, the professor has done this for fun.

That's what one resident scholar has done, though only in search of amusement. Concerning the loftier question—the question of whether you might be a Platonist—well, that largely ridiculous question emerges from a more consequential tale.

Friend, are you a Platonist? Depending on how you want to score it, it's possible that no one is—but some of our leading intellectual lights apparently say they are. We base that claim upon this passage from Jim Holt's well-reviewed new collection of essays, When Einstein Walked With Godel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought:

HOLT (page 8): Gödel entered the University of Vienna in 1924. He had intended to study physics, but he was soon seduced by the beauties of mathematics, and especially by the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. This doctrine, which is called Platonism, because it descends from Plato’s theory of ideas, has always been popular among mathematicians...

It's Holt who was willing to define Platonism as "the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind." To us, that formulation seems to exhibit a perfect, timeless lack of clarity. But there it sits, right near the start of Holt's robotically-praised new book!

Friend, you might be a Platonist if you find yourself advancing that fuzzy claim or quite a few others much like it. And if you are, it seems that you'll never walk alone!

According to Holt, this supposed doctrine "has always been popular among mathematicians." This claim also appears in Goldstein's earlier book, the book Holt was reviewing back in 2005, when he penned this version of the title essay from his current book.

Warning! "Philosophy" done by mathematicians may be a bit like shortstop play as done by 350-pound left tackles. That is to say, even the most brilliant mathematician may not be especially skilled at the types of rumination which fall under the traditional rubric of "philosophy"—and judgments about this fuzzy "doctrine" would certainly land on that pile.

Alas! Each Thanksgiving, your Uncle Charlie, who you otherwise love, may prove to you, at the dinner table, that he may not be the most expert political analyst in the land. That doesn't necessarily mean that he isn't a wonderful uncle.

A similar type of situation may imaginably obtain when those perfervid mathematicians succumb to a bout of philosophizin', however brilliant they may be in their principal field.

As we saw last week, Holt is the fellow who offered that first, remarkably fuzzy account of Platonism. The second account we've cited above comes from Goldstein, a highly-regarded philosophy professor who wrote the 2005 general interest book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel.

That second, tautological-sounding definiton seems to be lurking here::

GOLDSTEIN (page 44): Godel's commitment to the objective existence of mathematical reality is the view known as conceptual, or mathematical realism. It is also known as mathematical Platonism, in honor of the ancient Greek philosopher...

Platonism is the view that the truths of mathematics are independent of any human activities, such as the construction of formal systems—with their axioms, definitions, rules of inference and proofs. The truths of mathematics are determined, according to Platonism, by the reality of mathematics, by the nature of the real, though abstract entities (numbers, sets, etc.) that make up that reality...

Friend, do you believe in "the objective existence of mathematical reality," whatever that perfect, timeless bowl of salad is supposed to mean? You might be a Platonist if you adhere to such murky ideas!

Now that we've had our transient fun, let's get down to brass tacks. Let's go where the rubber meets the road, where the reader will surely think this:

The reader may be inclined to assume that we're being unfair to Goldstein and Holt, each of whom is praised as a highly skilled authority figure by members of our lightly-skilled upper-end mainstream press corps.

The reader may be inclined to assume that Holt and Goldstein went on, in their respective works, to offer fuller, clearer accounts of this "doctrine. A decent, fair-minded reader may be inclined to make that assumption. We'll explore that assumption all week.

Above, we've offered shards of explication by Goldstein and Holt. Sadly, you might be an Aristotelian if—if you assume that these widely praised writers went on to explain "Platonism" in a capable manner.

More precisely, you may be another victim of the misconception we'll describe as Aristotle's error—of the self-admiring supposition that "man [sic] is the rational animal."

Stating the obvious, no rational person would leave those fuzzy accounts of Platonism laying there all by their lonesome, with no further attempt at clarification. You may assume that star writers like Goldstein and Holt, proceeding onward from there, produced explications of this alleged doctrine which are amazingly clear.

It would be natural to assume such a thing. It would also be wrong.

To what extent are we humans really "the rational animal?" To what extent do our rational abilities, such as they are, really define our essence?

In our own studied view, that timeless doctrine from Aristotle "surrounds the actual working of [human nature] with a haze which makes clear vision impossible." It may disperse the fog to spend a few days studying the efforts made by Goldstein and Holt to make the Platonist doctrine more clear, with mathematician G. H. Hardy thrown in.

Aristotle is said to have said that we humans are "the rational animal." At least over here in the western world, this doctrine lies at the heart of the way we've tended to define ourselves, rather plainly seeing ourselves from afar.

By way of contrast, Professor Harari has said that we came to rule the world through our chance acquisition of a less lofty set of skills. Friend, you may be seeing things Harari's way by the end of our current file.

Tomorrow: As cited by Holt, 2 + 2 = 4!

THE GODEL FILE: Digest of reports!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2018

New chapter starts tomorrow: Below, you find links to the four reports from last week which constitute the Godel file.

Tomorrow, we start a new report, the Platonist file. Internationally, experts agree—somebody has to say it!

Tuesday, September 4: Who the heck was Godel? The greatest since Aristotle!

Wednesday, September 5: In what way was Godel "strange?" Let's start with the self-starvation.

Thursday, September 6: A Platonist was hiding among them. But was that a crazy idea?

Friday, September 7: We've been seeing ourselves from afar. Bushmen meet Aristotle!

Starting tomorrow: Holt, Goldstein and G. H. Hardy try to explain Platonism. With side trips to such curious places as 2 + 2 = 4!

(But nobody cares about this, you complain. In a leopard-skin pill-box nutshell, that's precisely our point!)

BREAKING: How drunk was "Mr. Drunky Pants?"

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2018

Rational animal's horseplay: According to the New York Times, "a night of heavy drinking" had been involved.

This claim could be true, of course. That said, it also could be false. At the end of December, this is way the front-page report began:

LAFRANIERE, MAZZETTI AND APUZZO (12/31/17): During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

You'll note the lack of specific sourcing concerning the amount of drinking. That said, the Times led with the "heavy drinking," which of course made the story more fun.

Especially in the realm of corporate cable news, rational animals often just want to have fun. A few months later, a major star of the clownish medium entertained us humans as shown below.

As this corporate channel explicitly says in its ads, this is why we watch:

ANONYMOUS HUGE CABLE STAR (3/1/18): The New York Times reported late last year that it all started because of a demon drink. The Times reported that the FBI's counterintelligence investigation on the Russia matter began during the campaign because of some drunken talk by Trump adviser George Papadopoulos.

Quote: "During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos made a startling revelation to Australia's top diplomat in Britain. He said that Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton." That is what triggered the FBI investigation.

When the special counsel charged George Papadopoulos with lying in October, we got more about where that drunken talk had come from. Quote: On or about April 26th, 2016, the professor, a professor from Malta named Joseph Mifsud, mysterious character, told defendant George Papadopoulos that they, the Russians, have dirt on her. The Russians had e-mails of Clinton. They have thousands of e-mails.

George Papadopoulos bragged about that to a guy in a bar drunkenly in May 2016. But he really had been told about it the month before, in April 2016. And it turned out to be true.

I mean, it was drunken smack talk when he bragged about it to this Australian guy, but it was true information. The Russians did have thousands of e-mails they stole from the Democrats and the Clinton campaign.

Thanks to Mr. Drunky Pants and his eventual guilty plea, we know that before those stolen Democratic e-mails began appearing online in July 2016, the Trump campaign, at least one member of the Trump campaign, knew that Russia had them—knew, was aware, that Russia had those e-mails, aware about it enough to brag about it in a bar over a few drinks.

Good lord, that was fun! On this occasion, Ms. Cable News Stupid Ass entertained us rubes with highly entertaining talk about Mr. Drunky Pants!

Just to be clear, Drunky Pants hadn't just been drunk on that drunken evening! Drunky Pants had been bragging too, back when he engaged in all that drunken smack talk.

On Olympus, the gods refer to this type of clowning as "the horseplay of the animals." They laugh, indeed they laugh very hard, as they delightedly say this.

This particular cable clown had similarly entertained us on January 2. On that occasion, she had described the way the "drunk braggart" in question "got drunk in London last May and, on a drinking binge...told a top Australian diplomat that Russia" blah blah blah blah blah.

That's what the drunk braggart had done "on this drunk evening in London."

For all our famous rationality, we famously rational rational animals love this type of amusement. But how odd! After March, this particular clowning cable news clown stopped amusing us in this manner.

Why did the Drunky Pants horseplay stop? It may have stopped because the Australian diplomat said, in an April interview, that there had been no heavy drinking on the drunken night in question. Not even by Drunky Pants!

This may or may not have been true, of course, but that's what the diplomat told a reporter from The Australian in a formal interview. The news report which resulted started off like this (no free link available):

MAGRAY (4/28/18): Alexander Downer is sitting in the comfy Australian high commissioner's office at the century-old Australia House that overlooks the Strand. As the bells of St. Martin-in-the-Fields ring in the background, he leans across the coffee table and insists conspiratorially: it was just the one gin and tonic.

And to stress the point, he says the gin measure was typically mean—just 25ml, which is normal for a London bar, not the sort of lavish pour one might offer friends at Stoke Lodge, the Australian government's residence near Hyde Park.

But it was over that single short drink, accompanied by Erika Thompson, a counsellor at the high commission, late one afternoon in May 2016 that Downer met George Papadopoulos, then an adviser in Donald Trump's campaign team.

Wouldn't you know it? All over the world, we famously rational animals made the amount of drinking the lede!

Downer may have been lying, of course, but that's what Downer said. As far as we know, Erika Thompson hasn't gone on the record about the amount of drinking involved, whether by Mr. Drunky Pants or by her diplomat boss.

Yesterday, Drunky Pants went on the record about the drinking himself. He did so in an interview with the New York Times.

The interview boasts a comical aspect. You can enjoy it here:

MAZZETTI (9/8/18): Going back to the meeting with [Alexander] Downer. What were you guys drinking?

PAPADOPOULOS: I think I had a gin and tonic.

MAZZETTI: Did you drink a number of gin and tonics? How much did you drink?

PAPADOPOULOS: No, I think I had one or two drinks. I think Downer himself, in numerous interviews, kept explaining that we had one drink or two drinks. No one was drunk, as some articles stated that we might have been. At least I don’t remember being drunk. I don’t think he was drunk. I don’t think his assistant was drunk. I think we had a couple drinks, that we were just talking.

This account may be untrue, of course. That said, Drunky Pants made a point of citing Downer's past statements on this topic—statements we'd never heard anyone mention, perhaps because they would have introduced uncertainty into this part of the tale, undermining our fun.

The humor occurs when Papadopoulos refers to "some articles [which] stated that we might have been [drunk]." He was speaking to one of the authors of the original news report which put that notion into play, but neither Mazzetti nor Drunky Pants chose to address this point.

Last night, the cable clown who likes to cavort quoted this part of the interview. She quoted Drunky's denial of drunkenness, and his reference to Downer's earlier denial of drunkenness.

Being a thoroughly rational animal, she didn't address the way these statements contradict the earlier fun she'd provided. Instead, she found a new way to destroy her viewers' brain cells, along with their sense of what actually matters:

ANONYMOUS CORPORATE-OWNED CLOWN (9/7/18): The judge ordered Papadopoulos to serve two weeks in jail. The judge said he had been inclined to give Mr. Papadopoulos a month in jail but he cut in it half because he was impressed by Papadopoulos` remorse over what he had done.

So, George Papadopoulos impressed the judge with his remorse. He will do 14 days in jail, plus a year of supervised release, plus 200 hours of community service, plus a fine of $9,500.

That sentence led to these ecstatic tweets from George's mom, Kiki Papadopoulos.

It is amazing the number of people I've learned about who I would never otherwise encounter because of the criminal cases involving people close to the president and his campaign.

Mrs. Papadopoulos said this today, after the sentence. Quote: "Just left courthouse. Amazing judge. Judge gave George two weeks of jail time! Amazing! God bless America."

And then, a few minutes later, "Judge Moss is a fair and good man! Everything went amazing! He is grrrrrreat."

Like Tony the Tiger. Grrrrreat!

So entertaining, and so insulting to the viewer's intelligence! To watch this idiot please you this way, you can just click here.

As usual, this cable star had found a way to talk about herself. It's amazing, the number of people she's learned about!

As usual, she was entertaining us the rubes with brainless, mindless drivel.

As we've told you in the past, she loves to drag in, and attempt to embarrass, any uninvolved parents and kids. In this case, she decided to go all Tony the Tiger on the mother of Drunky Pants.

This cable star clowned on other points, including a few basic matters. Back in April, for whatever it's worth, Downer had also undercut a few pleasing parts of the standard tale.

That said, we're going to let you search these points out. Ain't rational conduct grand?

THE GODEL FILE: We've been seeing ourselves from afar!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2018

Bushmen meet Aristotle: Long ago and far away, even before Kurt Godel died, we were teaching delightful fifth graders in the Baltimore City Schools.

(For our previous report, click here.)

At one point, we came upon a rather dull textbook which included a memorable anecdote. If memory serves, it was the third or fourth grade social studies text of one of the major publishers.

The textbook focused on the planet's many peoples and cultures. The memorable anecdote concerned the Bushmen of the Kalahari. They were among the shortest people in the world, the lower grade textbook said. In part for that reason, they have a standard traditional greeting:

"I saw you from afar."

Theoretically, this greeting was this group's attempt to compensate for smallness of stature. The greeted party was so large and imposing that he'd been seen from afar!

We never used that textbook, but the anecdote stuck in our heads. As it turns out, it had probably surfaced through the work of Marlin Perkins, later of TV's Wild Kingdom fame.

In 1965, Perkins and his wife, Carole Morse Perkins, had written a children's book about the Kalahari. The book was well received in a short review in the New York Times:

BERKVIST (5/9/65): This delightful little book, 50-odd pages of well-chosen words and photographs, opens a window on the world of the Bushmen, a remarkable handful of people who have somehow managed to strike a precarious bargain with nature in South Africa's vast, inhospitable Kalahari Desert.

"During their stay in the Kalahari," the reviewer went on to say, "the authors watched [the Bushmen] meet the harsh demands of desert life with good-humored dignity."

You can possibly guess the name of the Perkins book: "I Saw You From Afar!" The Times explained this traditional greeting as that textbook later did:

"The title echoes a highly complimentary form of greeting among Bushmen, most of whom are less than five feet tall and like to be told otherwise."

So the Times reviewer said—and so it went as the western world reached out to indigenous peoples. But the anecdote always stuck in our heads. At long last, we may know why:

Long ago and far away, Aristotle, the father of logic, is said to have made an basic assessment, one which became iconic:

"Man [sic] is the rational animal."

So Aristotle is commonly said to have said. Or words to that effect!

As the centuries passed, this flattering assessment came to define our species' basic self-assessment, at least within western culture. It strikes us as a near relation to "I saw you from afar."

Are we humans really "rational" in some definitive way? Aristotle, the father of logic, may have been wrong about that. And what better illustration, one might imagine, than the tragedy of Kurt Godel, who is commonly said to be our second greatest logician?

How odd! The western world's second greatest logician was severely mentally ill and given to crazy ideas! In the face of this slightly odd state of affairs, along come the popularizers, with their slavish, scripted enablers within the mainstream press corps.

The popularizers pretend to explain Godel's "incompleteness theorems." In turn, the journalists say that they've managed to make Godel's ideas and achievement just amazingly clear.

Along the way, we gullibles are told that the second greatest logician in history devoted his life to a key idea. The great logician was a Platonist, we're told. This "doctrine" is then made stunningly clear:

HOLT (page 8): Gödel entered the University of Vienna in 1924. He had intended to study physics, but he was soon seduced by the beauties of mathematics, and especially by the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. This doctrine, which is called Platonism, because it descends from Plato’s theory of ideas, has always been popular among mathematicians...

Godel believed that numbers and circles have a perfect, timeless existence! At least, that's the way Jim Holt explains the "doctrine" in the title essay of his new, perhaps slightly plagiarized book, When Einstein Walked With Godel: Excursions to the Edges of Thought.

Holt derives his material, with lax attribution, from Rebecca Goldstein's 2005 book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel. In that general interest book, Goldstein describes the great logician''s key belief like this:

GOLDSTEIN (page 44): Platonism is the view that the truths of mathematics are independent of any human activities...The truths of mathematics are determined, according to Platonism, by the reality of mathematics, by the nature of the real, though abstract, entities (numbers, sets, etc.) that make up that reality.

See there? According to Goldstein, our second greatest logician believed that the truths of mathematics are determined by the reality of mathematics! More specifically, the truths of mathematics are determined by the nature of the entities that make up that reality!

We humans! We've been seeing ourselves from afar for an extremely long time! At long last, along came the later Wittgenstein, making something resembling that claim about the various proclamations and assertions which constitute historical philosophy.

Wittgenstein said our allegedly greatest minds—not excluding himself, in his earlier efforts—had been seduced and led to ruin by conceptual confusion.

Back in 1969, we told Professor Cavell that we'd give him and Albritton fifty year to get this whole thing straightened out.
After that, we'd have to speak up, we said. Or words to that effect.

Stanley Cavell died in June, at age 91. Even as this loss occurs, the inanity of modern American journalism has finally overwhelmed even us.

This morning, we watched the clowning on Morning Joe as the children burned oodles of time trying to guess who wrote the op-ed column. We just can't go there any more. We're finally saying goodbye to all that, at least for the most part.

We've decided to move on to the larger story which has been lurking here. We've started with Godel this week because Holt's favorably-reviewed new book has brought the topic to mind.

"I saw you from afar," the Bushmen are said to say. We're forced to say that we hear an echo in Aristotle's famous remark.

Over here in the western world, we self-flattering human beings have hidden behind that remark. Now, we're going to bring you the never-before-told, dramatic true stories of human intellectual failure at its highest levels.

In truth, the extended tale we're going to tell is largely a comical tale. If you could ignore the endless wars and the endless killing, it would be humorous all the way down.

Along the way, we'll offer two paradigms—a pair of competing capsule accounts of our ballyhooed human race. One will come from Aristotle, one from Professor Harari:

The Aristotelian account: We humans are the rational animal.

The Harari heuristic: Our human species, Homo sapiens, is a slightly improved great ape. We drove all other human species into extinction because, through chance mutations, we developed 1) the ability to "gossip," and 2) the ability to promulgate, and believe and affirm, irrational, sweeping group "fictions."

So says Professor Harari in his widely-praised best-seller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, or words to that effect.

Along the way, we'll describe the building blocks of the Harari heuristic in more detail. For today, we'll only say this:

The idea that numbers have a perfect timeless existence is a remarkably good example of what Harari means when he describes the group "fictions" which gave our particular human species a competitive advantage. In Harari's account, this advantage came from the new ability to believe and affirm sweeping claims which don't make observable sense.

So how about it? Does the number 3 have a perfect timeless existence independent of the human mind? Do circles share that perfect existence with their good friends, the numbers?

According to Holt, that's what the second greatest logician in history believed from the time of his youth. According to Goldstein, he didn't believe in evolution, in part because Stalin said.

Numbers and circles have a perfect existence! Holt makes little attempt to explain what such a "belief" could possibly consist in or mean. But then again, so what?

At the New York Times, at the Wall Street Journal, rational animals stood in line to say how clear it all is. This has been going on forever, and it's a comical tale.

Next week: A Platonist among them!

THE GODEL FILE: A Platonist was hiding among them!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2018

But was this a crazy idea? Many people have heard of Einstein, who enjoyed his walks with Godel.

Aristotle's name is also well known. That said, we'll guess most people wouldn't know that Aristotle is said to have been our greatest logician, at least until Godel came along.

(For our previous Godel File report, click here.)

Godel is hailed as our second greatest logician because of his incompleteness theorems. We'll take a first peek at those theorems tomorrow—but for today, we tip our hat to Rebecca Goldstein.

Goldstein wrote the book on Godel; she did so in 2005. Along the way, she outlined Aristotle's work as a logician, in a footnote on page 55:

GOLDSTEIN (page 55): Aristotle is commonly acknowledged as the father of logic. His work in logic is laid out in the Prior Analytics, which is part of the posthumous consortium known as the Organon. The philosopher had the seminal insight that in a deductive logical argument, some words are logically relevant while others are not. The irrelevant words can be dispensed with by making them variables...

Goldstein goes on to offer a "stock syllogism" as an example of what she's talking about. She then says, "The move toward denoting logically irrelevant words with variables was a move toward generality and thus toward the science of logic."

At this point, we start in surprise. Has someone actually made a science of logic? If you read American newspapers, or if your watch our "cable news" programs, you might be greatly surprised by any such allegation.

As everyone must understand by now, "the science of logic" plays almost no role in our modern American discourse. Within our failing culture's pseudo-discussions, basic information and basic facts are almost wholly verboten. But anything resembling logic is typically frowned upon too.

This destructive state of affairs can't be blamed on Aristotle. Because Godel lived in modern times, we'll be a bit less forgiving when it comes to him.

Sad! Modern logicians have created a system in which their highly abstruse ruminations have nothing to do with the bungled logic of our public discussions. Godel lived until 1978. At some point, he probably should have stepped in.

At any rate, our modern logicians walk to work in the clouds, where they engage in high-brow endeavors which even they may not be equipped to explain. This brings us to a fascinating part of Godel's horrifically tragic story, as told by Goldstein in 2005 and then by Jim Holt in the derivative title essay of his well-received new book.

We refer to a possibly crazy idea to which Godel was apparently devoted throughout the course of his life. We refer to Godel's alleged belief in "Platonism," an alleged doctrine with which Goldstein says Godel "fell in love" when he was in his late teens.

In our previous report, we learned an unfortunate fact. Godel, who died of self-starvation, exhibited signs of severe mental illness throughout the course of his highly unusual life.

"At the age of five, he seems to have suffered a mild anxiety neurosis," Holt writes in his new book, drawing on Goldsetin's work. "At eight, he had a terrifying bout of rheumatic fever, which left him with the lifelong conviction that his heart had been fatally damaged."

By normal reckoning, Godel's apparent paranoia eventually led to his death. But then, as noted yesterday, he had always struck the Princeton community as being extremely odd.

In her book, Goldstein cites an array of peculiar ideas Godel is said to have expressed. Our continuing question is this:

Should it seem strange to think that the western world's second greatest logician was apparently in the grip of serious mental illness? Asking a slightly different question, should it seem strange that "Aristotle's successor" was in the grip, throughout his life, of some extremely peculiar ideas?

In theory, the mental illness, however tragic, shouldn't matter at all. If a person achieves some great intellectual breakthrough—in the physical sciences, let's say—that achievement isn't negated by the tragedy of a severe mental illness.

That said, Godel's achievements didn't come in the realm of physical science. Indeed, Goldstein quotes him telling one Princeton-based scholar, "I don't believe in natural science." She quotes him telling Thomas Nagel that he doesn't believe in evolution, offering Stalin's similar disbelief as supporting evidence.

She quotes him saying this to Noam Chomsky: "I am trying to prove that the laws of nature are a priori." Should it seem strange to hear that history's second greatest logician was bruiting such notions around?

In fairness, these peculiar-sounding statements were made during Godel's adult life. He formulated his "incompleteness theorems" when he was just 23.

If those theorems make sense and are actually important in some way, later delusions and mental illness can't vitiate the achievement. That said, we might want to consider the lifelong belief in "Platonism" which, according to Goldstein's book, played the key role in Godel's thinking from his teenage years on.

What the heck is Platonism? According to Goldstein, Godel "fell in love" with the doctrine while he was still a teen.

"First exposure to Plato can be an extremely heady experience for those with a passion for abstraction," Goldstein writes. "It can amount to a sort of ecstasy."

Parenthetically, Goldstein says that she can remember her own first exposure to Plato. But what is the doctrine which may result? What is this "Platonism?"

In the opening essay of Holt's new book, he defines this doctrine, or he at least pretends or attempts to do so. As critics robotically praise the clarity of Holt's writing, he sketches the doctrine like this:

HOLT (page 8): Gödel entered the University of Vienna in 1924. He had intended to study physics, but he was soon seduced by the beauties of mathematics, and especially by the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. This doctrine, which is called Platonism, because it descends from Plato’s theory of ideas, has always been popular among mathematicians...

Say what? According to Holt, Godel, who was still in his teens, was "seduced by" a certain notion. More specifically (or possibly less so), he was seduced by "the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind."

According to Holt, this "doctrine," which is called Platonism, "has always been popular among mathematicians." In fairness, this suggests that it isn't something the teen-aged Godel somehow dreamed up by himself.

At this point, our review of the Godel file reached a critical turn. We're told that the western world's second greatest logician was swept away by a seductive idea, an idea which lay at the heart of his subsequent work.

What did this greatest logician believe? According to Holt, he believed that numbers have a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. So Kurt Godel believed!

Readers, how about it? Do you believe that the number 3 "has a perfect existence independent of the human mind?" Do you believe that the number 3 has a perfect existence at all?

Indeed, let's ask the more relevant question: Do you have even the slightest idea what Holt is talking about? Granting the fact that you can memorize Teacher's words and reproduce those words on the test, would you have even the slightest idea what you were talking about?

Readers may be inclined to suppose that Holt proceeds from there to explain this murky bit of word salad. In our view, such a supposition would be badly mistaken.

(To peruse his original New Yorker essay, you can just click here.)

Does Holt clarify this description? We'll set that question aside for another day. Instead, we'll turn to Goldstein, to the start of her attempt to explicate "Platonism."

Godel fell in love with the doctrine, she says. She lays out the doctrine as follows:

GOLDSTEIN (page 44): Godel's commitment to the objective existence of mathematical reality is the view known as conceptual, or mathematical realism. It is also known as mathematical Platonism, in honor of the ancient Greek philosopher...

Platonism is the view that the truths of mathematics are independent of any human activities, such as the construction of formal systems—with their axioms, definitions, rules of inference and proofs. The truths of mathematics are determined, according to Platonism, by the reality of mathematics, by the nature of the real, though abstract entities (numbers, sets, etc.) that make up that reality. The structure of, say, the natural numbers (which are the regular old counting numbers: 1, 2, 3, etc.) exists independent of us, according to the mathematical realist...and the properties of the numbers 4 and 25—that, for example, one is even, the other is odd and both are perfect squares—are as objective as are, according to the physical realist, the physical properties of light and gravity.

Goldstein muddies her account with a fair amount of technical language. (How many general interest readers are likely to know what a "formal system" is?)

Beyond that, she seems to think, all through her book, that the terms "objective" and "subjective" explain themselves in contexts like this. Sadly, they very much don't.

Whatever! In this passage, Goldstein starts describing the doctrine with which Godel "fell in love" as a teen. According to Goldstein, the ardor Godel felt for this doctrine impelled him to devise the "incompleteness theorems" which made him famous among certain academics, while leaving him completely unknown to everyone else on the face of the earth.

Godel's ardor for this alleged doctrine forms the core of Goldstein's work. And how does she describe the doctrine? She describes it like this:

According to Goldstein, Godel fell in love with the view that "the truths of mathematics are determined...by the reality of mathematics."

So far, so completely no good! Explicating further, she says Godel adopted the view that "the truths of mathematics are determined by the nature of the entities that make up" the reality of mathematics.

As an overview, she starts by saying that Godel developed a "commitment to the objective existence of mathematical reality!"

Readers, tell the truth. Would you say that the essence of this key doctrine has begun to come clear? We're going to say that we're munching on salad—that it's word salad all the way down!

At this point, we'll raise two questions, after which we'll adjourn for the day. One of our questions will concerns Kurt Godel. The other question will concern writers like Goldstein and Holt, who are robotically praised, by scripted journalists, for the clarity of their work.

Regarding Godel, we'll ask this question: Is it possible that the western world's second greatest logician fell in love at an early age with a crackpot idea?

He believed many other crazy things in the course of his tragic life. Could this idea, which drove the work for which he's lauded, possibly have been the first of his crackpot ideas?

That's a question about our second greatest logician. Our second question concerns Holt and Goldstein—and it's built on a basic concept:

Here's the basic concept. Some claims or ideas are right or wrong. But some claims, and some ideas, don't rise to that level.

Such claims and ideas aren't right or wrong—they're simply incoherent!

This idea is stunningly basic. To what extent are general interest writers like Goldstein and Holt conversant with this idea?

Tomorrow: A Platonist in their midst (we didn't get there today)

THE GODEL FILE: In what ways was Godel "strange?"

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Let's start with the self-starvation: According to science writer Jim Holt, Kurt Godel "has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle."

Chronologically, any such assessment covers a lot of ground.

(For our previous report in the Godel File, click here.)

Aristotle, whose name is well known, lived and died in Classical Greece, roughly 2400 years ago. Godel, who no one has heard of, was a man of our own twentieth century.

According to Holt, the "incompleteness theorems" which account for his status within the world of logic were formally presented in 1930, when he was just 24. Also according to Holt, Godel "has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle" because of these theorems.

One person who has referred to Godel in this way is Rebecca Goldstein, an upper-end philosophy professor who wrote a general interest book about Godel in 2005.

Goldstein earned her Ph.D. from Princeton in the 1970s. She has taught at an array of universities, including Columbia, Rutgers and Trinity.

She won a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1996. The led to the writing of one of her well-received philosophical novels.

(How well-received are they? According to the leading authority on her work, her most recent novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, was chosen by National Public Radio as one of the "five favorite books of 2010" and by The Christian Science Monitor as the best book of fiction of 2010.)

In early 2005, Goldstein published her aforementioned book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel. This very year, some thirteen years later, Holt has published his own latest book, When Einstein Walked with Godel.

When Einstein Walked with Godel? If we were Goldstein, we might be slightly peeved with Holt, given the way her book has been used in the opening essay of his new book. Quickly, a bit of background:

As we noted yesterday, the opening essay of Holt's new book first appeared in The New Yorker in February 2005. In essence, it was a review of Goldstein's book about Godel.

That said, we aren't entirely sure that a reader of the The New Yorker would have realized that Holt was reviewing Goldstein's book, given the way his essay was laid out. Today, that New Yorker piece, slightly edited and with a new title, has reappeared as the first essay—indeed, as the title essay—in Holt's new book.

Holt's essay is built around a human interest story. He describes the way Einstein and Godel would walk to and from work together when each man was a resident scholar at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, starting with Godel's arrival in the 1940s.

These walks continued into the 1950s. Holt's story is entirely based on Goldstein's book, a fact which is almost entirely lost in the way his retitled essay appears in his book, with The New Yorker's insufficient attributions to Goldstein cut substantially further.

A reader of Holt's new book has no real way to understand that she is reading a simplified version of Goldstein's work. If we were Goldstein, we might feel that Holt and/or his publisher played a bit fast and loose with attribution, given the way his New Yorker piece now appears in his book.

At any rate, Goldstein is one of the people who has referred to Godel as "the greatest logician since Aristotle." Whether in her own voice or quoting others, she refers to Godel that way, or as "Aristotle's successor," at six different points in her 2005 book.

(At one point, she even quotes a scholar giving Godel an upgrade. "If you called him the greatest logician since Aristotle you'd be downgrading him," she says this scholar told her. At the time, she was a graduate student at Princeton with fleeting exposure to Godel, who could sometimes be spotted in area grocery stores.)

At any rate, Holt's title essay is drawn from Goldstein's work, though his essay, as it now appears, provides little sense of this fact. It was Goldstein who told the story of the way Einstein sought the company of Godel when each man worked and lived in Princeton.

Something else is true about Goldstein's book. It explains part of the intriguing statement by Holt which we quoted yesterday. Right at the start of his title essay, Holt's statement goes like this:

"Gödel, who has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, was a strange and ultimately tragic man."

Holt goes on to explain that statement—and it's a vast understatement. In our view, the "strangeness" of Godel's life shouldn't be ignored by people who want to explain the intellectual history, such as it is, of our error-prone human race.

What made Godel's life so strange? Let's start with the way it ended, in an act of self-starvation. Holt describes this event near the end of his book's title essay.

Einstein, Godel's only friend, died in 1955. For Godel, things went downhill from there, though not without a lifetime of foreshadowing:

HOLT (2/28/05): After Einstein’s death, Gödel became ever more withdrawn. He preferred to conduct all conversations by telephone, even if his interlocutor was a few feet distant. When he especially wanted to avoid someone, he would schedule a rendezvous at a precise time and place, and then make sure he was somewhere far away. The honors the world wished to bestow upon him made him chary...He had hallucinatory episodes and talked darkly of certain forces at work in the world “directly submerging the good.” Fearing that there was a plot to poison him, he persistently refused to eat. Finally, looking like (in the words of a friend) “a living corpse,” he was taken to the Princeton Hospital. There, two weeks later, on January 14, 1978, he succumbed to self-starvation. According to his death certificate, the cause of death was “malnutrition and inanition” brought on by “personality disturbance.”

Stating the obvious, this seems to have been an instance of the most intense type of mental illness. In her book, Goldstein traces Godel's psychological difficulties all the way back to incidents at the ages of 5 and 8.

What was Godel like as an adult? Goldstein describes his years in Princeton like this:

GOLDSTEIN (page 31): Though Princeton's population is well accustomed to eccentricity, trained not to look askance at rumpled specimens staring vacantly (or seemingly vacantly) off into space-time, Kurt Godel struck almost everyone as seriously strange, presenting a formidable challenge to conversational exchange. A reticent person, Godel, when he did speak, was more than likely to say something to which no possible response seemed forthcoming.

Goldstein offers three examples of puzzling exchanges Godel had with major scholars. In one of these exchanges, he said he didn't believe in evolution, citing Joseph Stalin for support.

"You know Stalin didn't believe in evolution either, and he was a very intelligent man," Godel is said to have said. Thus allegedly spake our world's second greatest logician.

Late in her book, Goldstein refers to Godel's "paranoic fantasy of imperiled rationality." She refers to "the paranoid tendencies from which Godel had suffered even in his youth," apparently from the age of 8.

It's fairly clear that Godel was mentally ill at the time of his death. Goldstein says this unfortunate tendency extended through the full extent of his life.

Question:

Should it seem strange that our greatest logician seems to have been mentally ill? We tend to think of logic as a companion to clear thinking. Should it seem strange that "Aristotle's successor" suffered throughout his life in the ways described?

Within our culture, we tend to be drawn to the idea of the suffering artist. We also tend to be drawn to the notion that madness and genius are cousins.

No evidence of mental illness could undo true academic achievement—in the physical sciences, let's say. But Godel is said to have been our greatest logician:

Is it possible that our greatest logician also had some incoherent "philosophical" ideas? Is it possible that he wasn't alone?

Tomorrow: A Platonist in hiding! But what the heck is that?

BREAKING: The mental age of Donald J. Trump!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

And of the New York Times: Is Donald J. Trump "mentally ill" in some way? Might he be cognitively impaired?

It seems that such questions are implied by the contents of Bob Woodward's forthcoming book about the Trump White House. Consider this anecdote, newly reported by the Washington Post:

RUCKER AND COSTA (9/4/18): At a National Security Council meeting on Jan. 19, Trump disregarded the significance of the massive U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, including a special intelligence operation that allows the United States to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds vs. 15 minutes from Alaska, according to Woodward. Trump questioned why the government was spending resources in the region at all.

“We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told him.

After Trump left the meeting, Woodward recounts, “Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like—and had the understanding of—‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’ ”

In Woodward’s telling, many top advisers were repeatedly unnerved by Trump’s actions...

Is Trump a victim of mental illness or of cognitive impairment? We've raised those question on many occasions.

That said, we've sometimes wondered about the mental status of some within the New York Times. Just yesterday, we wondered again about the "mental age" which may obtain inside some parts of the Times.

Why has our national discourse been so pitifully low-IQ over the past thirty years? Consider the "Here to Help" feature on yesterday morning's Page A3 (print editions only).

Yesterday was Labor Day, and Labor Day is a holiday. In one of its strangest manifestations yet, the "reimagined" Page A3 asked Tim Herrera to help you figure out how to spend it.

How should Times readers spend holidays? The feature started like this:

Here to Help
WHAT TO DO WITH A DAY OFF

Happy Labor Day! If you’re fortunate enough to have the day off from work, the most important thing on your to-do list today is to actually take the day off. Studies have shown that “people only send 40 percent less email” on holiday Mondays compared with regular Mondays. (Thank you, smartphones and tablets.)

So, great, we’re all out of work mode and ready to enjoy the day. But what to do? Here are a few suggestions on how best to spend your day off. TIM HERRERA

In hard copy, Herrera proceeded to list five suggestions. We'll skip the supporting detail he offered in each case. His five suggestions were these:

Herrera's five suggestions:
Give your fridge the deep clean it deserves.
Have a family meal.
Do that one thing you’ve been putting off.
Get introspective about your career.
Do absolutely nothing.

No, we aren't making that up. Now that we were "all out of work mode and ready to enjoy the day," Herrera's first suggestion was that we could give our refrigerators the deep clean they so richly deserve.

We wondered about the mental state of an editor who would publish a feature like this. We wondered what that editors might think, perhaps correctly, about the general mental state of this foppish newspaper's readership.

We also wondered who Herrera could be. Here's what we learned about Herrera on our own day off:

According to his official Times bio, Herrera is "the founding editor of Smarter Living, where he edits and reports stories about living a better, more fulfilling life."

Smarter Living, we came to learn, is a New York Times blog. As Herrera's bio continued, we learned more.

"In a previous life," the bio says, Herrera "was a metro reporter for amNew York and Newsday." After that, he worked as a reporter and editor at the Washington Post.

This made it sound like Herrera has been around a while. Apparently, not so much! He seems to be eight years out of college (NYU, class of 2010). That "previous life" at amNewYork began in September of that year.

For several years, we've wondered about the mental status of President Trump, whose possible illness and/or cognitive issues makes him seem like an extremely dangerous man. We've also wondered about the New York Times, which is branded as one of the nation's top journalistic guardian.

Yesterday, we wondered again about the mental status of people inside the Times. Some editor assigned a youngish reporter to tell Times readers how they might spend their day off. This struck us as strange all by itself, but first suggestion the newspaper published took the cake:

Now that we were "all out of work mode and ready to enjoy the day," we could go ahead and spend the day cleaning out the fridge!

The western world has long run on the pleasing fuel which says that we the people are primarily "rational animals." Nothing in recent human behavior justifies that upbeat notion, and the New York Times routinely makes us wonder about the mental age of our modern upper-class elites.

Donald Trump strikes us as impaired, and dangerous. The New York Times routinely strikes us as impaired and foppish, inane.

For the original post: Yesterday's hard-copy Here to Help feature was derived from this original Smarter Living post.

In his original post, Herrera listed six things we could do on our day off. The first suggestion he listed was this:

"Fix your finances"

Now that we were out of work mode, Herrera's original first suggestion was that we might do that!

BREAKING: What can Gotham hope to accomplish?

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

Through "desegregation:" Could New York City improve its public schools through some form of "desegregation?"

Could the city improve the social experience its children receive in their schools? Could the city expect to produce academic improvement?

Hardened figures like Kevin Drum say this is unlikely. We're strongly inclined to agree with Drum when he "goes on" in this way, based in large part on the student demographics of Gotham's public schools.

Depending on how you want to define it, there's only so much "desegregation" you can produce in a giant school system with the student demographics detailed below. Given standard progressive models of how you improve academic performance through types of "desegregation," it isn't clear that you can engineer any academic improvement at all:

Student demographics, New York City Public Schools
White students: 15 percent
Black students: 27 percent
Hispanic students: 41 percent
Asian-American students: 16 percent

Low-income students: 75 percent

To make the numbers believable, we've taken them from the New York Times—from this June 2016 magazine piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has often written about public school desegregation, for the Times and elsewhere.

Liberal academics have been amazingly inventive in their ability to generate new definitions of "desegregation," a term which is historically fraught. That said, common sense suggests that there's only so much desegregation you can achieve within a system with New York City's student demographics.

In terms of academic improvement through desegregation, the challenge is especially daunting, if we consider the standard models for such strategies of the past twenty years. That said, you'll rarely read about such topics in the Times, which tends to use "desegregation" as a type of magical talisman—as a brand- and identity-builder.

At one time, "segregation" referred to schools where kids from different "races" were kept totally separate from each other as a matter of law. New York City's schools aren't legally segregated in that way. Plenty of kids already attend public school in New York with kids of other "races."

This further limits the possible gains to be achieved through additional "desegregation"—that is to say, through efforts to produce greater racial and income balance within each of the giant system's many schools.

That doesn't mean that such efforts would be a bad idea, although they always could be. It means that the possibilities are limited, unless "desegregation" is mainly a tool made for the use of glorifying our own flawless and pure liberal souls.

In this semi-back-to-school week, we'll be taking a look at recent efforts within the Times to glorify this liberal or possibly pseudo-liberal crusade.

Last Thursday, this report was produced by a new, and youngish, New York Times reporter. In our view, the report was a study in the insulting, uncaring foolishness the Times routinely promulgates in this realm. Warning to those youngish scribes:

It's great to land a job at the Times. But the Times will dumb you way, way down, especially in this area!

This morning, the Times has gone front-page with this 3000-word further paean to the "desegregation" being imagined for Gotham's schools. The new chancellor is "all in" on this crusade. But if we care about Gotham's kids, to what extent does this make ultimate sense?

Our final thought for today:

Take another look at those student demographics. With those data in mind, how much can Gotham sensibly hope to accomplish through "desegregation?"

How much can Gotham expect to achieve? Please disregard any possible gains to our glorious liberal tribe's all-important self-image.

THE GODEL FILE: But who was Godel?

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

Greatest since Aristotle: An interesting statement appears at the start of a new book by a best-selling author.

The best-selling author is Jim Holt. His previous book, Why Does The Universe Exist?, was selected by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year.

The year was 2013. We wouldn't have rated Holt's book that way, but Holt has long been one of the go-to guys for popularized explanations of difficult science and math.

The critics agree about Holt. The New York Times review of Holt's new book says it's his "conviviality, and a crispness of style, that distinguish him as a popularizer of some very redoubtable mathematics and science."

The Christian Science Monitor agrees, as is required by Hard Pundit Law. According to the headline on its review, Holt's new book "is science writing at its best."

The interesting statement we're about to quote appears right at the start of Holt's new book, a book which bears this title: "When Einstein Walked with Godel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought."

As it happens, the new book is a collection of Holt's essays from down through the years. The essay from which the book's title is drawn first appeared in The New Yorker in 2005, under the title Time Bandits.

That said, the revised title of the first essay in Holt's new book—indeed, the title of Holt's new book itself—will perhaps be perplexing for some.

"When Einstein Walked with Godel?" Everyone has heard of Einstein; Albert Einstein is very famous. But all in all, no one has ever heard of Kurt Godel, the man with whom Einstein walked.

No one has heard of Godel! That's part of what makes the early statement in Holt's new book so intriguing. On the second page of the book, in paragraph 3 of the book's first essay, that statement reads as shown below, just as it did in The New Yorker back in 2005:

"Gödel, who has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, was a strange and ultimately tragic man."

Say what? Kurt Godel "has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle?" The statement appears right at the start of paragraph 3 in Jim Holt's new book.

But as with Einstein, so too here! Everyone has heard of Aristotle, but no one has ever heard of Godel, who Holt seems to be identifying as the second greatest logician in the history of the (presumably western) world.

No one has heard of Kurt Godel! This may say something about the role logic plays in our floundering culture. On the other hand, it may say something about what counts as "logic" in the world within which Godel lived and worked, and now famously walked, with Albert Einstein no less.

Who the heck is Godel? The leading authority on his litle-known life answers your question thusly:

Kurt Friedrich Gödel (1906-1978) was an Austrian, and later American, logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle, Alfred Tarski and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were analyzing the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics pioneered by Georg Cantor.

Gödel published his two incompleteness theorems in 1931 when he was 25 years old...

Was Godel really the western world's second greatest logician? If so, he made his mark upon the world when he was just 25!

According to that capsule report, Godel is known for his "incompleteness theorems," which he published in 1931. According to this leading authority, he is considered, "along with" Tarski and Frege, to be one of perhaps the four most significant logicians in history—along with Aristotle, of course.

It wasn't just Godel—it was also Tarski and Frege! And no one heard of them either!

Aristotle once famously served as tutor to Alexander the Great. He lived and died almost 2500 years ago. Since that time, the greatest logicians, experts say, have been Tarski, Frege and Godel.

So the experts tell us. But what does it say about our world that no one has ever heard of these people, or of the giant breakthroughs in logic they apparently engineered? If Godel "made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century," why does no one you know know his name?

(Imagining that question a different way: What does it say about our logicians, including our apparent handful of giants, that, 2500 years after Aristotle got the ball rolling, our public discourse is so spectacularly lacking in the most elementary tools of logic, with no logicians from the academy attempting to come to our aid?)

With such award-winning questions as these, we're starting down a new road at this site. There will be grumbling and some complaints; that is only natural. But after twenty years of trying to reason with Aristotle's "rational animals," might a fellow perhaps be allowed to bump things to the next level?

We'll start to outline our new goals as the week proceeds. In the meantime, who the heck was Godel? And if we might borrow from the better-known Robert Zimmerman:

But oh, what kind of logic is this, which goes from bad to worse?

Tomorrow: As stated by Holt, an "ultimately tragic man"

BREAKING: The Washington Post critiques CNN!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2018

Masterful understatement: Don't despair! Next week, we'll take a look at the New York Times' latest report on middle school "desegregation."

(For some, this promise may also serve as a trigger warning.)

Thursday's report was the latest in a long line of heinous reports by the Times on this pseudo-subject. The piece was written by a (well-regarded) youngish reporter who has just joined the Times.

In this instance, "youngish" means six years out of college (Columbia, class of 2012). To such well-intentioned youngish reporters, we will only say this:

At the Times, you'll be asked to traffic in manifest nonsense concerning favored Times hobby horses. There's simply no way to be coherent in the face of such an assignment.

Thursday's report was a case in point. We'll review the report next week.

For today, we postpone that excursion into the ether in favor of an analysis piece by the Washington Post's Paul Farhi, with whom we chatted, long ago, at an undisclosed location.

Farhi is one of those upper-end mainstream scribes who has somehow managed to maintain his sanity down through the many long years. In today's report, he critiques CNN's conduct in its recent fandango involving Lanny Davis.

For the record, Farhi is critiquing CNN today. He isn't critiquing Davis. He isn't critiquing Michael Cohen, Davis' current client.

More specifically, he's critiquing CNN's peculiar conduct in late July in the course of filing a "bombshell report"—a bombshell report for which Davis both was, and wasn't, a source.

Davis was and wasn't a source? Farhi starts with an account of the basic facts of the case. Simply put, CNN used Davis as an anonymous source for its report, then said that he had "declined to comment" about the bombshell report:

FARHI (9/1/18): President Trump and his supporters have seized on a single line in a CNN article to question the credibility of the story and of the network. Why, they ask, was a key source for the article described as not commenting when he later admitted that he very much had?

The question and the criticism open up a broad—and arguably unflattering—vista on the way journalism sometimes works.

CNN has stood by the story, published on July 26 under the byline of three writers, including legendary Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. The article reported that former presidential lawyer Michael Cohen was prepared to tell special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that he knew that Trump was aware in advance, and had approved, a fateful meeting with Russian operatives at Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign.

[...]

The story reported prominently that one of Cohen’s attorneys, Lanny Davis, had declined to comment on the matter.

In fact, CNN was well aware that Davis had commented plenty. The reason: He was one of CNN’s key sources, albeit a “background” source, one who divulges information with the promise of anonymity. Davis himself later acknowledged he was a source, outing himself in an interview . . . on CNN; Davis subsequently backed off the claims he made in the story, but CNN is standing by it, saying other sources have corroborated its reporting.

Are we following that? Davis was an (anonymous) source for the CNN report, which was treated as a bombshell by CNN and MSNBC. But in the course of its report, CNN said that Davis had "declined to comment" about the bombshell report!

Making matters worse, Davis later admitted that he shouldn't have been a source at all, essentially because he hadn't had the slightest idea what he was talking about. By now, he has taken every possible position on the matter at hand, and a few more just for good measure.

That's a problem with Davis' conduct. Farhi examines CNN's behavior in today's piece in the Post.

In the first of several understatements, Farhi says (see above) that his report involves "a broad—and arguably unflattering—vista on the way journalism sometimes works."

Arguably unflattering? We'd have to say that Farhi's report takes us well past that point. As he continues, he suggests that this particular type of sleight of hand is fairly routine within modern journalism. He also authors a second understatement:

FARHI: [P]eople at CNN defend the Cohen-Davis piece by asserting that there’s no contradiction between a reporter speaking to a source on a background basis and then saying that same person declined to comment. Although readers and viewers often aren’t aware of it, “it’s done all the time in Washington,” said one person at CNN, who—yes—declined to be identified or to make an “on-the-record” comment.

But critics say the practice is murky at best and ethically dubious at worst. Reporting that someone “declined to comment” when he or she actually had could mislead readers into believing an individual had no role in shaping a story.

In that passage, Farhi quotes someone at CNN who says this sort of thing is "done all the time." Resorting again to understatement, Farhi says that critics say this practice may be "ethically dubious."

"Ethically dubious?" That's what the practice is "at worst," according to Farhi's (unnamed) critics!

We're sorry, but this practice is grossly misleading at best, constitutes an obvious scam when judged by straightforward measures. As Farhi continues, he quotes a professor saying as much—though he had to go all the way to Wisconsin to find someone willing to state this fairly obvious point.

After that, Farhi seems to say, in his own voice, that this type of sleight of hand is hardly unknown in the contemporary press:

FARHI (continuing directly): “If CNN did tell its readers and viewers that Davis did not comment when he was indeed one of their confidential sources, that breaks a bond of trust with the public,” said Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s deceptive and wrong. And if it is the case, CNN needs to be as transparent as possible immediately and develop practices to ensure this never happens again.”

It’s not clear how widespread this practice is among reporters or how long it has been used. Mainstream news organizations officially frown on saying someone didn’t comment when they actually spoke on background or off the record (meaning not for attribution or publication in any way). But this guideline isn’t always enforced.

Way off in the heartland, Culver was somehow able to state the obvious about this deceptive practice. According to Farhi, meanwhile, this doesn't seem to have been unprecedented behavior by CNN:

News org "frown on" the practice, he says. But the frowning is sometimes ignored!

As he continues, Farhi describes the hoops through which our journalists sometimes jump in an effort to make this practice seem to be technically ethical. Eventually, he quotes Glenn Greenwald describing the obvious reasons why this sort of thing shouldn't be done.

Meanwhile, sad! Farhi's report begins with the always thoughtful Donald J. Trump saying, in effect, that this CNN report was the latest example of "fake news." We liberals hate to acknowledge the fact, but cons like this help explain why Trump supporters can be induced to believe in sweeping claims of this type.

Full disclosure:

As we read Farhi's report, we thought of a type of complaint we first made in the fall of 1999. Our complaint arose from a punishing New Yorker report in which two major journalists delivered the latest Official Standard Attack on the disfavored Candidate Gore.

The report was built on what seemed to be an array of anonymous sources. But just how many anonymous sources were the journalists actually quoting?

There was no way to know that! It seemed they were quoting a lot of people. Or were they simply quoting one or two disgruntled sources, adjusting the way these sources were described as their screed unfolded?

Star journalists would never do that, you may be inclined to say. And certainly not at The New Yorker!

Our major stars would never do that? Who's being naive now, Kay?

Back then, the guild got its way. By their lights, Gore hadn't savaged Clinton strongly enough for having engaged in sexual conduct without first getting press corps permission.

On that basis, they slimed Gore for twenty straight months, thus sending George Bush to the White House. As we all understand but refuse to discuss, people are dead all over the world because our star journalists did this.

Today, Farhi describes another reindeer game. Our question, if you should choose to discuss it:

If a lynch mob chases a guilty party, isn't it still a mob?

The fall of 1999: In the fall of 1999, then into the winter of 2000, the press corps was simultaneously 1) inventing wild statements by Candidate Gore, and 2) disappearing wild statements by Candidate McCain, with whom they were conducting a childish love affair on a bus.

Eventually, they were forced to admit that they had engaged in Reindeer Game #2, but their confession came and went quickly. Because (as we know) script never dies, the narratives they developed in these ways linger on to this very day.

Our journalism is largely script. Again and again, then again and again, the narrative must go on.