Since some of the recent visits to this 'blog are by way of search strings containing preference symbol, I put together a table of characters frequently used to represent preference relations. Click on the graphic for a PDF file providing symbols, their interpretation, their Unicode values in hexadecimal and in decimal, the names given to these symbols by the Unicode Consortium, and the LAΤΕΧ mark-up that one would enter for each of the symbols.

In the context of thinking about pocket watches for other reasons, I've noted how many people around me check their cell-phone sets when they want to know the time. I've yet to see anyone iRL wear his or her set on a wrist, like a Dick Tracy communicator; instead, when not in use, the set is typically stored in a holster, in a bag, or in a pocket. Yup, the cell-phone set is serving as a pocket watch; not just as a pocket watch of course, but as a pocket watch none-the-less.

As for me, I carry a wrist watch, but I perhaps shouldn't. If I wear it when I wash my hands, water gets trapped under it, so I tend to stick it in a pocket before I get my hands dirty in the first place; then I usually forget about it. When I want to know the time, well, I check my cell-phone set.

To address a small issue in the history of economic thought, I wanted to consult a copy of the first edition of The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. I didn't find it reliably quoted on-line, nor did I find it listed in the on-line library catalogue for USD nor in that for UCSD. So I thought that perhaps I'd buy a copy.

I consulted the Used and Out-of-Print listings of AddAll, and quickly concluded that, no, perhaps I won't buy a copy. The lowest price that I found was four thousand, nine hundred and fifty-nine dollars, and twenty-nine cents.

I'm not sure who would pay that much, but the next lowest seller wants seven thousand, five hundred and ninety-one dollars, and ninety-three cents.

Another remarkable thing is the range of prices being asked for just that next seller. Through Biblio.com and through Biblio.co.uk, the price would be that $7591.93. From that same seller, but through Find-a-Book (listed by AddAll as ilabdatabase.com), the price would be $7614.96. And through AbeBooks (whom I encourage you to avoid in any case), the book would be $7867.54, still from that same seller. There's a $275.61 range here, determined by which intermediate service one uses.

Now, even as I was writing this entry, some of these prices were changing; that's because the seller is based in London, and the exchange rate has been in flux. And that suggests that part of the price range may be explained by different methods being used to calculate a rate of exchange. $275.61 may not seem a trivial sum, but it's only about 3.63% of $7591.93.

Addendum (2019:09/30): This morning I returned to the aforementioned small issue in the history of economic thought, and discovered that in the time since I posted this entry Google Books came to provide what they call a snippet view of a scan of the first edition, which view was enough to answer my question. I wish that I'd had that answer when writing my paper on indecision; but at least I have it as I write my paper synthesizing a theory of decision-making in which preörderings both for preferences and for probabilities may be incomplete.

After 18 months, two weeks, and 6 days without any a decision on whether to accept Indifference, Indecision, and Coin-Flipping on the part of Theory and Decision (published by Springer-Verlag), and after the failure of the editor to tell me the actual status of the paper in the application process, I have ended the application.

As I have mentioned before, I submitted a version of this paper to them on 5 September 2009, alerting them that one of their editors was creditted in the acknowledgments. I was told that I needed to redact those acknowledgments; I submitted a version with that change on 8 September of 2009.

The paper was submitted by way of a website running software called Editorial Manager, which offers a report of the ostensible current status of each paper. Neither the publisher of this software nor Springer seem anywhere to define the respective stages, nor even to identify them, except in-so-far as, as one waits and watches, various statuses are reported.

It took a little while before the status was reported as Editor assigned, but I had been assured by a JEO Assistant on 9 September that an editor was assigned. The status was subsequently up-dated in early January of 2010, when it became Reviewers assigned. Needless to say that I was concerned that it should have taken four months just to get reviewers assigned. In any case, the status was not up-dated again until 23 March 2010, at which point it was, well, Reviewers assigned, but now with a time-stamp of 23 March, as if reviewers had withdrawn, and new reviewers had to be found.

Nothing in the report had changed as of 28 June, when I finally wrote.

Can you please provide some information on the status of "Indifference, Indecision, and Coin-Flipping" (THEO789), submitted to Theory and Decision?

The manuscript was submitted on 8 Sep 2009. Since early January, the status reported at Editorial Manager has been "Reviewers Assigned", although the time-stamp of the status was changed in late Narch [sic, *facepalm*].

I received a reply on 29 June from the JEO Assistant.

We apologize for the delay in the processing of your paper.

There seems to be some difficulties in finding potential reviewers. However, I have forwarded your mail to Editor.

I did not receive anything from the essentially unidentified Editor. In any case, it seemed that Reviewers assigned meant something other than that reviewers had been assigned; rather, it could mean something such as that reviewers were being sought. And, 9 months after my paper had been submitted, it still didn't have any.

At the first anniversary of the submission, the status still read Reviewers Assigned (with, however, no further changes in the time-stamp); so, on 9 September I wrote

Could you please provide some information on the status of "Indifference, Indecision, and Coin-Flipping" (THEO789), submitted to Theory and Decision?

The manuscript was official submitted on 8 September 2009.

The JEO Assistant promptly replied

We apologize for the delay in the processing of your paper. Your manuscript has been sent out for review and I have forwarded your mail to him.

You will be notified once the decision has been taken.

So, apparently, Reviewers assigned could mean that reviewers were sought, or that they'd indeed been appointed; and it seemed that now my paper actually had them, though it wasn't clear when it got them between 29 June and 9 September. I went back to waiting.

On 15 November, the status reported by Editorial Manager was changed to Under review. So it would seem that a paper could be sent out for review, yet it would take another month-and-some-days before it would actually be under review. Or something. Evidently, the status labels are names, not descriptions; without a special dictionary, they tell one nothing.

I discovered that John Turri, commenting at a 'blog of Brian Leiter, reconstructed the labels of the Editorial Manager statuses as

1. New submission
2. Editor assigned
3. Reviewers assigned
4. Under review
5. Reviews complete
6. Editor has a decision

Anyway, as of 21 March of this year, the status was still reported as Under review. So I wrote

This article has been in your hands for over 18 months. While that is not a record, it is none-the-less a rather dire length of time.

For more than four months, Editorial Manager has labelled the article as "Under review". Whatever one may say for or against this paper, it does not take such time to actively read, digest, and critique. I would like to know what "Under review" actually indicates and, more importantly, what the actual status of this paper is.

I fear that I have simply wasted considerable time having submitted this paper to Springer Verlag, and that I should look for a publisher who might actually want to publish it.

and I received a reply on 21 March.a

We apologize for the delay caused.

I have forwarded your inquiry to the editor and will let you know once I hear from him.

Now, that word caused gives me pause. If there'd been some assertion about causation, the caused would be fairly natural. As it is, that's just a bald caused, as if there'd been some concern that the delay might be uncaused — ex nihilo, as it were; but I don't think that they're trying to preëmpt metaphysical concerns on my part. That use of caused may be an attempt to allude to the period of time, never exactly identified for me, when potential reviewers were fleeing into the wilderness, but it could be that I'm looking at wording that has been imperfectly recycled.

The Editor hadn't bothered to contact me as of 23 March (and the reported status was unchanged), so I wrote

Given the history here, I have little expectation of receiving an adequate response from the editor or from anyone else at Springer Verlag before I yank my article from submission.

The reply on 24 March was

We apologize for the delay caused.

I have forwarded your inquiry to the editor and will let you know once I hear from him.

and, yeah, that's verbatim what I was told on 21 March. Recycled.

I could speculate about what the Hell has been and is happening at Theory and Decision, but it would just be speculation. I don't know whether I've been confronted with incompetence, indifference, malevolence, or some combination of two or of three of these; or if everybody's grandparents and uncles keep dying. (I'm pretty sure that one person over at Springer is mostly just helpless in the face of what others are doing, or choosing not to do.) But it's toxically infra dignitatem to continue to endure this situation. If the Editor were to have contacted me, to identify bottle-necks and sticking points, and to offer some reason to expect that the end result wouldn't just be rejection based upon a sloppy, last-minute reading of my paper, then it would be a different story.

So I've written to them

The offer of this paper to Theory and Decision is ended, as more than eighteen and a half months have been allowed to lapse without a decision, and the reluctance to keep me informed has now descended to a refusal to answer queries at all.

Whatever your superiors might direct notwithstanding, please none-the-less spare me any boiler-plate or otherwise vaguely insulting expression of regret.

I'll need to find another journal to which to submit the paper; I fear that this will be difficult. When other journals rejected the paper and gave reason (as did all but one), it was always that the paper was not appropriate to a readership as general as theirs; so I'd need to find a journal that can tolerate what is, for economics, very formal mathematics, concerned with what many readers would mistake for impractical refinement.

I've made or will make a few changes as well. I've modified the formulæ so that braces are only used to bound the definitions of sets, and angle-brackets are only used to hold the elements of lotteries; I'm hoping that these two changes help the reader. I've abandoned the use of partial ordering and, where I quote Savage using it, explained that the term incomplete preordering would now be more typical. I've corrected a spelling error in the acknowledgments. I have gone back and forth on whether to use a which or a that for a particular clause in a foot-note. I may perhaps include a brief commentary, essentially reïterating points about it made in this 'blog, on a paper by Eliaz and Ok.

Up-Date (2011:04/18): I have posted a continuation (and presumed completion) of the tale of these communications with Springer concerning this paper.

If you're actually trying to install another version of Firefox, then click on the Firefox tag, as there may be an entry on that other version.

Since a fair number of the hits to this 'blog are from searches as to how to install earlier versions of Firefox on earlier versions of RHEL, I'm going to infer that people are and will be surfing the WWWeb for instructions on how to install Firefox 4.0 under RHEL 6.x. Here are the steps that I recommend:

1. Download the archive, firefox-4.0[.n].tar.bz2.
2. The tarball contains a directory, firefox, which should be dropped-in as a sub-directory of something. If you want to ponder where, then study the FHS. As for me, as root, I put it in /opt:

   tar -xjvf firefox-4.0[.n].tar.bz2 -C /opt/

   (Omit that [.n] if it isn't in the name of the archive that you downloaded. Replace it with the actual number from the name of the archive if such a number was included.)
3. You'll need a .desktop file for Firefox (though you may already have one). As root, edit/create /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop, ensuring that it reads

   [Desktop Entry]
   Categories=Application;Network;X-Red-Hat-Base;
   Type=Application
   Encoding=UTF-8
   Name=Firefox
   Comment='WWW browser'
   Exec='/opt/firefox/firefox'
   Icon='/opt/firefox/icons/mozicon128.png'
   Terminal=false

   (If you didn't install in /opt, or changed the name of the firefox directory, then you'll need to change the above accordingly.)
4. Log out and back in or restart the system (to up-date the GUI).

Whether a decision as such is good or bad is never determined by its actual consequences as such.

Decisions are made before their consequences are reälized (made actual). Instead, decisions are made in the face of possible consequences. There may be an ordering of these consequences in terms of plausibility, in which case that ordering should be incorporated into the making of the decision. Most theories even presume that levels of plausibility may be meaningfully quantified, in which case (ex hypothesi) these quantifications should be incorporated into the process. But even in a case where there were only one outcome possible, while the decision could (and should) be made in response to that unique possibility, it still were possibility of the consequence that informed the decision, and not actuality. (Inevitability is not actuality.)

When the reälized consequences of a decision are undesirable, many people will assert or believe that whoever made the choice (perhaps they themselves) should have done something different. Well, it might be that a bad outcome illustrates that a decision were poor, but that will only be true if the inappropriateness of the decision could have been seen without the illustration. For example, if someone failed to see a possibility as such, then its reälization will show the possibility, but there had to have been some failure of reasoning for a possibility to have ever been deemed impossible. On the other hand, if someone deemed something to be highly unlikely, yet it occurred anyway, that doesn't prove that it were more likely than he or she had thought — in a world with an enormous number of events, many highly unlikely things happen. If an event were highly unlikely but its consequences were so dire that they should have been factored into the decision, and yet were not, the reälization of the event might bring that to one's attention; but, again, that could have been seen without the event actually occurring. The decision was good or bad before its consequences were reälized.

A painter whose canvas is improved by the hand of another is not a better painter for this, and one whose work is slashed by a madman (other than perhaps himself) is not a worse painter for that. Likewise, choosing well is simply not the same thing as being lucky in one's choice, and choosing badly not the same as being unlucky.

Sometimes people say that this-or-that should have been chosen simply as an expression of the wish that more information had been available; in other cases, they are really declaring a change in future policy based upon experience and its new information. In either case, the form of expression is misleading.

Some readers may be thinking that what I'm saying here is obvious (and some of these may have abandoned reading this entry). But people fail to take reasonable risks because they will or fear that they will be thought fools should they be unlucky; some have responded to me as if I were being absurd when I've referred to something as a good idea that didn't work; our culture treats people who attempt heinous acts but fail at them as somehow less wicked than those who succeed at them; and I was drawn to thinking about this matter to-day in considering the debate between those who defend a consequentialist ethics and those who defend a deöntological ethics, and the amount of confusion on this issue of the rôle of consequences in decision-making (especially on the side of the self-identified consequentialists) that underlies that debate.

Last night and this morning, I used Writer2LAΤΕΧ to export the notes for my principal paper-in-progress from ODT format to a LAΤΕΧ file, imported that into LyX, and then spent some time cleaning things. This was in an attempt, which looks fairly successful, to overcome the problem that I now have of OpenOffice under RHEL failing to render various mathematical characters.

The results for the formulæ are not really WYSIWYG (nor does LyX seek to offer exactly a WYSIWYG display of formulæ), but they are close enough that, as I look at them, I don't have to spend most of my time thinking about the mark-up rather than thinking about the theoretical constructs that they are supposed to represent. (In fact, I'm one of those folk who prefers to word-process with the non-printing characters represented, and I'm quite comfortable with most of the extra stuff here in the representation of formulæ.) The symbols that I want are being rendered nicely, with the notable (but not egregious) exception of which is presently displayed as \defeq. (It's defined in a LAΤΕΧ document preamble as \stackrel{\mathrm{def}}{=}.)

I still have to learn more of my way around LyX but, barring some unexpected remedial action on the part of OpenOffice programmers, I will probably migrate to LyX for the production of technical documents.

This morning, I went to the website of NBC New York, to read a news story and a promo on the right-hand side of the page caught my eye: So NBC not only expects that I would enjoy reading about the mutilation of these people, but openly caters to such presumed enjoyment, and encourages its readers to indulge in it.

I am not aware of any reason that I should find gratification here.

I'm not a fan of cosmetic surgeory except to effect some bona fide reduction of injury. Most cosmetic surgeory instead represents an falsification of youth, of health, or of preferred genetic endowment, and does so at a cost of lasting (though perhaps concealed) injury. Nor am I a fan of celebrity (a creätion of journalism, with its need for material), nor of most celebrities, who are, as the saying goes, well-known for being well-known, and rarely arrive at their status by by virtue of desirable character traits. And, sure, to some extent, virtually every one of these people has brought it on themselves, but so would most other people if given a chance.

Celebrities did not and could not elect themselves to celebrity; for all the celebrities out there, there are many more people who try for it and fail, and an even greater number who simply wish for it to be thrust upon them. And whatever one might claim about actual celebrities wasting the opportunities that they are given, my experience of other people convinces me that a share as great or greater of the wannabe celebrities would make as much a mess if they had those opportunities. If I should wish ill upon the actual celebrities, I should wish it upon most of humankind.

Nor is cosmetic surgeory driven by vanity or by insecurity just an indulgence of the famous. If I flip through an issue of the local weekly, I find plenty of advertisements for such procedures, and I'd be rather surprised if NBC New York weren't selling commercial time to plastic surgeons. I certainly see plenty of women with utterly unnatural breasts, and occasionally see ruined noses or lips. I'm not sure what I'd find at the beach, but it probably wouldn't be pleasant. Some of the rich may keep going in surgical self-destruction, but many of these other folk have merely run short of funds and of collateral.

There's nothing new in the proposition that envy, sadism, or a lack of empathy will cause some people to indeed enjoy reading about plastic surgeory gone especially wrong, and looking at images of the results. But our culture has coarsened; the presentation and enjoyment has been moved into the mainstream. Bad enough that, for some, it's a pleasure; now it's a pleasure without a sense of guilt or even of shame.

In a previous entry, I discussed the meaning — or lack of meaning — of the word capitalism. With an eye towards future entries, I want to write now about the word socialism.

The OED (and the New SOED) provide the original definition of socialism:

A theory or policy of social organization which aims at or advocates the ownership and control of the means of production, capital, land, property, etc., by the community as a whole, and their administration or distribution in the interests of all.

It's pretty straight-forward: collective, communal ownership of the means of production, and administration for the collective benefit. But there's at least three points to be raised here. First, and most important, is that different conceptions of the community are possible. The community in question might be the whole world; it might be every human being within a particular jurisdiction; it might be a particular religious community; or it might be members of an ethnic group of some sort. Second, the definition here does not intrinsically entail comprehensive communal ownership; that is to say that it doesn't declare that all means of production must be communally owned for a system to be socialistic. Third, those who indeed advocate a comprehensive communal ownership of the means of production often fail to note that labor is an important means of production, so that such ownership would mean that an individual must work when, where, and how the community or its representatives told him or her to work.

Merriam-Webster gives us set of definitions, each somewhat different from that original definition:

1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2 a: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

The first three M-W definitions here (1, 2a, and 2b) all ignore the issue of for whose benefit the means of production are employed. Definition 1 is additionally broader than the original, in that it includes state ownership as possibly different from collective ownership. Definitions 2a and 2b are each otherwise narrower, as one precludes any private property, and the other insists upon state ownership. The final definition is introduced because Marxism, an important school of thought, made peculiar use of the term. Jointly, this set of definitions illustrate how a word can lose usefulness when popular use is uncritically accepted.

My 1975 copy of the AHD defines socialism as

1. A social system in which the producers possess both political power and the means of producing and distributing goods. 2. The theory or practice of those who support such a social system. 3. In Marxist-Leninist theory, the building, under dictatorship of the proletariat, of the material base for communism.

In the case of the first definition, one might begin by asking why the system should be called socialism; there is no mention of society or of community here, except in-so-far as this is a social order (as would be many in which producers would not have ownership or political power). Even if we regard the relevant community as that of the producers, the definition says nothing of them owning qua community; all property could be private, so long as the producers had means of production and distribution! Frankly, the author was so swept-up in his or her theory of socialism (recall the definition of capitalism that appears in the same edition) that he or she lost sight of its essential structure. (And perhaps the author was too enraptured to note that different folk would have different ideas about whom one should take to be a producer.) The second definition is purely derivative of the first. The third definition pushes-aside Marxism more generally in favor of Marxist-Leninism in particular, but is roughly a reïteration of the same notion, for about the same reason.

The 1993 version of the AHD defines it thus

1.a. A social system in which the means of producing and distributing goods are owned collectively and political power is exercised by the whole community. b. The theory or practice of those who support such a social system. 2. The building of the material base for communism under the dictatorship of the proletariat in Marxist-Leninist theory.

The first definition here has nearly restored the original sense: collective, communal ownership of the means of production, and administration for the collective benefit. (The three points that I raised in response remain germane.) But now there's an insistence that political power is exercised by the whole community. This is a response to the great embarrassment of decidedly undemocratic regimes claiming to represent the community in the administration of the means of production. (The reference to political power in the earlier edition was probably an ineffectual attempt to deal with that embarrassment.) The second definition is again purely derivative of the first. The third that from the earlier edition, with a non-substantive reördering of words.

All right now. When someone else has introduced the word socialism into the discourse, I've tried to respond to it based upon how that someone else is or at least seems to be using it, Or I've explicitly asked what he or she means by it; but when I've introduced or will introduce the word socialism into the discourse, what I've meant is

collective, communal ownership of the means of production and administration for the collective benefit

And I do plan to be writing again about socialism, very soon.