A white elephant is something that is beautiful, aesthetic. But is of little profit besides that, and is on the contrary quite costly to maintain. Why then would so many, with inadequate resources, seek white elephants?
Could be an overarching sense of aesthetics.
Or else, merely a desire to be perceived as great and aesthetic.
Common to either is the great cost.
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I think that the horrifying disaster that struck our country is sufficient reason to interrrupt my break. I want to contribute to the relief of course. But what I am thinking is:

1. It is better to contribute to a private NGO than to the government – needless to say.
   
2. I want to contribute to an NGO that will spend its money efficiently, i.e. doesn’t spend too much on “administrative expenses” (i.e. salaries for its managers).
   
3. I want to contribute to the longer term rehabilitation, rebuilding and prevention. Immediate relief is important of course, but with the glare of publicity, I am sure there will be attention focused on the short term, but when our attention wavers, I am sure that the longer term activities will get neglected. I want to do what little I can to reduce that problem.
   
4. I would particularly prefer to contribute to someone who will focus on things that others are likely to miss. I mean, I am sure everyone will focus effort on building houses, repairing fishing boats etc. But is there someone who is perhaps working on innovative approaches to help people withstand disasters? Is there someone who will work on rigging up an early-warning system that relies on low-tech? My money will go there. Once again, the “normal” things are important. It is precisely because you people are contributing so generously to the normal things that I am thinking that perhaps I have the luxury of looking for other ways to help.
   

Readers are invited to respond in the comments giving names and descriptions of such off-beat NGOs that fit the criteria above.

I also want to do what I can to monitor the efforts of these organizations over the longer term. This will obviously have to be a collaborative effort. Any ideas?

A distributed way of approaching the goals question is to talk about rights. Rights are entitlements to an individual to do or not do something, that is recognized by the entire society. Since these entitlements might intersect, and there might be clashes between the members of society, there is a system of rules and customs – law – for arbitration.

This post is about rights. Entitlements. Now typically these entitlements derive more from moral/ethical rather than efficiency standpoints. For e.g. in earlier times, women were not entitled to vote. Even murder and thievery are considered “morally repugnant” as opposed to merely societally inefficient.
This is dangerous.
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I think I am doing a grave injustice to the tradition of this blog by the deplorable lack of bad jokes. In my defence, I was glib in the belief that I was having the same effect of making people go mad and tearing out their hair, with just my articles. But I feel that that has been insufficient.
Ok…
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1. After a week of debauched merriment, near death experiences, a meeting with a kindred soul and a long and painful journey, I check my blog at the free terminal provided at Changi like a good budget traveller, and what do I see?

   Ontological!

   My blog has set a new record! I am sure this is the first time in its history that a five syllable word has been used!

2. Amit wants to know why I named my blog The Examined Life. It was named after a quote attributed to either Socrates or Plato – “The unexamined life is not worth living”.

   I am sure Nozick also named his book after the same

3. I am still on my break and guestblogging will continue till I choose to return next year. You are all requested to patronise the The Examined Life with the same enthusiasm you’ve been showing.
   

One of the facets of libertarianism is positioning liberty and freedom as “goals” as opposed to mere “means”. This requires a bigger leap of faith than most realize, and that is indeed why the number of libertarians is even fewer than those who watch Fear Factor. Interestingly, many libertarians adopt a switch tactic, and waylaying the axiom of liberty as a goal; argue instead along the lines of liberty being the best means to achieve happiness.
Typically these tend to run weak sometimes.
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When we solve a mathematical problem, the foremost thing to check is do we have the proper mathematical tools (theorems etc.)? If we are solving a differential equation, do we know enough theorems and lemmas and procedures for differential equations?

One can go a level deeper.
Do we have the proper mental tools to solve the mathematical/scientific problems we face? Turns out, we don’t.
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In the last few posts, I have been talking a lot about goals. Goals for humans, for humanity, for nature, for evolution. All and sundry seem to be brimming with goals.
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Distributed computing is a fairly recent “innovation” of humankind. Yet everything
that we see around us would not have been possible without it. Not only is it the most important, it is also the most common thing in nature really.
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In many an earlier post, I have made the statement that “the goal of a society is the maximum satisfaction of its needs and desires.” This is seen as something very obvious, an axiom really. One argues about the best methodology (socialism, capitalism, etc.) to achieve this goal, but not about this goal itself.
I must confess I don’t think much of this goal at all.
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[Previous Episodes: #1, #2,#3, #4]

And then the Engineer showed everyone the Plan. The Plan was very simple, and everyone had a place in it. Everyone would just do what they felt like doing, because the part of the Plan that they were supposed to execute was already within them, the AlGodRhythm had always been inside them. Somehow they had come to believe that they had Consciousness, when in reality they were simply schizophrenics. Somewhere between the Iliad and the Odyssey, the bicameral humanoid brain had developed what it felt was a Consciousness. Until that day, we had all been ant colonies and bee-hives.

After thousands of years, the spiral having turned, they were all going back to The Beginning. The hive was coming back.
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As libertarians, we look upon incentives with a worshipping eye. Perhaps even more than Pavlov might have. And with the same benevolent eye, we view the mechanism that facilitates the giving and receiving of incentives between the teeming individuals of society – the market. Indeed, the Market is the closest to any God for a spiritually-starved libertarian atheist.
Spiritualists, Puritans et al, however, decry this. Crass materialism they call it. They shake their heads at the degradation of a society that considers Markets and Money as the primary driving influences. And with a sigh, they go back to their rosaries.
Actually, I agree with them.
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