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travelling

June 28, 2012

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I'm travelling and won't be posting for a few months.

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Casual Intimacy

For a long time I’ve felt that the general discourse surrounding love and relationships has been deficient. It seems to oscillate between the two poles of casual sex and full-on ‘serious’ relationships, replete with labels and rules. My impression has always been that there is a word missing from this discourse – intimacy. I can understand that for many people, casual sex is not good enough, and can even feel demeaning. The expression implies a lack of emotional space, or any real connection beyond the physical. In contemporary Australian culture, it is increasingly something you do ‘just for fun’, and a strictly a no-strings attached affair. At the same time, an absolute devotion to ‘serious’ relationships also seems brain dead to me. In my experience, you can’t go looking for a serious relationship; you just have to fall into one. We aren’t adequately conscious of what we want to be able to go and find it. We need to stumble upon it. I would also argue that the notion of a perfect...

Maths is not science, and it doesn't produce knowledge

I’ve written about this topic before with specific reference to economics; this is more of a general piece. There seems to be a fundamental confusion among intellectual types regarding the epistemological usefulness of mathematics. Epistemology just means ‘relating to knowledge’. Maths provides a very pure kind of ‘knowledge’ in the sense that if you arrive at a mathematical proof then it is basically beyond doubt. Unfortunately, we experience reality inductively, not deductively, and we want knowledge of reality not an abstract mathematical space. That means that you have to step away from mathematics the instant you want to get knowledge about reality, and things get messy. I get a little shitty with people who bang on about the purity of mathematics, because pure maths produces, in a sense, useless knowledge.

What is the Washington Consensus?

The Washington Consensus for development was a reform list imposed on recipients of IMF and World Bank structural adjustment loans in Africa and Latin America in the late 80s. It is one of the most common reference points for ‘neoliberalism’. Countries that received these loans suffered horribly, and yet we continue to espouse much of the Washington Consensus in development economics today. How can that be right? It’s right because the failures surround the practicalities of trading with Europe and America and with the specifics of austerity and currency devaluation in Africa and Latin America at the time. They are failures of the structural adjustment lending programs not the Washington consensus itself. Certainly things were bungled and the consensus has had to change, but the theory behind most of the consensus is very sound. Those keen to see development into the future would do well to understand the shortcomings of the consensus rather than avoiding it altogether. I’ll t...

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