Wanting to be loved is irrational

I think that, properly speaking, you can never rationally want to be loved, as such. This will be clarified by my argument for it, as follows.

I think no one can want to “be loved” for its own sake, because by itself and apart from all particular signs of it in experience, “being loved” is a feeling in someone else’s mind, and doesn’t affect your experience of the world. So, the desire for “being loved” must exist for the sake of other desires, and therefore, it can be divided into the reasons why you want to be loved.

These reasons, I claim, are either:

• (a) unrelated to who it is that loves you (e.g. you want to be loved because you like being praised, receiving gifts, etc, and it doesn’t particularly matter where it comes from) or
• (b) precisely because of who it is that loves you (i.e. you want the person you love to want you around more, so you get to be around them more).

The first kind, (a), are not properly a “desire to be loved”, because they’re really a desire for some other good, such as praise, gifts, etc., and being loved doesn’t actually matter to that.

The second kind, (b), are technically a desire to be loved by that specific person, but this, in turn is also a feeling in someone else’s mind, and therefore, it cannot be desired for its own sake, and must be desired for the sake of something else, which means it can be divided into the reasons why you want to be loved by that person.

These reasons, I claim, are either

• (b1) a desire to be tolerated by the other person (if what you want is to get to know them), or
• (b2) a desire to be sexually wanted by the other person (if you have a sexual interest in them),

whereas any other feelings of love don’t really contribute to your experience, except insofar as they make it more secure that you’ll remain tolerated and/or sexually wanted.

So, properly speaking, you can never rationally want to be loved, as such, although you can want to be loved, by a specific person, as a kind of security regarding some of their other attitudes towards you.

Hedonometry and Mindreading

As a supporter of Murray Rothbard’s views on utility and welfare economics, I believe that it is impossible to measure individual utilities (often conceived of as pleasure and pain), in the sense of putting them in terms of a common cardinal unit (often called “hedons” for pleasure and “dolors” for pain).

I believe this because, as Rothbard noted, the lack of an objectively extensive physical quantity which would correspond to such units means that they cannot be operationalized, and therefore cannot be meaningful. (“Objectively extensive” means that it must be a quantity with physically extended dimensions in the objective, interpersonally-accessible world.)

If we grant, as we plausibly might, that it is physically possible to invent machines that manage to read into human minds, then this language about it being impossible to do this must be qualified to saying only that it has never been done, and that it is unlikely to be done in the foreseeable future.

I believe that, even in a world with such machines, there would always be stubborn hardliners, who would claim that their experiences are richer than, or different from, what the machines say they are. There would be an ideological split over whether to accept the results of mindreading machines. If I’m right about this, then even if mindreading is possible, it cannot be achieved in such a way as to be uncontroversial and universally accepted, or commonly accepted enough to be a basis of policy or of economic science. In this way, it may be called impossible as a ground for economics, even if it is physically possible in itself.

But I concede that, properly speaking, my strong claims about impossibilities can only really stand if all these caveats are made.

Brazilians Use Sunday First

Almost all calendars in Portuguese-speaking countries, such as Brazil and Portugal, have Sunday as the first day of the week, because this is baked into the language itself. Portuguese, along with Galician and Mirandese, are the only Romance languages where, instead of the names of the weekdays being derived from the pagan planetary gods, they are derived simply from numbers, numbered from Sunday.

Example Brazilian calendar.

The names for the days of the week literally just mean “the Lord’s day”, “second-day”, “third-day”, “fourth-day”, “fifth-day”, “sixth-day” and “sabbath”. So calendars follow along with this, it feels wrong not to. In English, it is sometimes disputed that Sunday should not be first because then there is no singular “weekend”, there are two “ends” of the week at Saturday and Sunday. But we just use the equivalent expression and assume it refers to the “work week”.

Regarding the weekend, as in many other Romance languages, the word for Saturday is literally the same word used to talk about the Sabbath, while the word for Sunday is a word that just means Sunday, but is etymologically derived from Latin for “lord”.

Regarding the weekdays, the word used for “day” within the ordinal weekdays is “feira”, which comes from Latin “feria” meaning a day, but in modern Portuguese does not mean a day at all outside of these fixed weekday names, it means a street fair. Many children are confused why there are so many street fairs in the calendar, and often they don’t even get an explanation, they just stop asking about it.

Although it is so confusing, the word “feira” has the advantage of being feminine, unlike the normal word for day, “dia”, which is masculine. So it is in fact impossible to confuse the second-day (Monday) with the second day (e.g. of the month), since the latter is masculine.

Portuguese does have a descendant of “feria” from Latin in actual uncompounded use, which is the word “férias” (almost always plural) referring to a vacation. I like to use the Phineas & Ferb theme song as an example of that word: the initial line “there’s 104 days of summer vacation” was rendered in Portuguese as “são três meses de férias, que passam depressa”, which, translated back, means “there are three months of vacations, which pass by quickly”. (The additional clause, about “passing by quickly”, was inserted to fit the meter, because otherwise the line would be too short. And I guess they made it “three months” to make the song more plausible with regard to Brazilian school schedules.)

The word for “third” within Tuesday (terça-feira) is actually usually only used for a third as in the fraction (one-third is “um terço” in the masculine and “uma terça” in the feminine) in modern Portuguese, whereas for the ordinal third you usually say a different word (the third ordinal place is called “terceiro” in the masculine and “terceira” in the feminine).

Meme explanation: the King Size of Rio de Janeiro

I often mention the meme about “the King Size of Rio de Janeiro”, which can be a problem when I do so in an English-speaking context, because it’s a Brazilian meme in Portuguese, and it’s kind of obscure even within Brazil. It refers to this video:

In the video, they picked a random man off the street to say his opinion about the ferry service in Niterói, and he obliges. However, it happened that the man they picked was insane. After briefly saying something about the ferry service, he attaches a deadpan schizophrenic rant about the “King Size” dynasty. (He uses the actual English words “king size” in what is otherwise a Portuguese-language speech, making it clear that he mistook a size of bed for a sort of title of nobility.) In full, what he is saying translates to this:

The ferry service is an excellent service, because it is a transport of a not very high cost, it takes you to Rio de Janeiro, and it will get better as soon as I take over as King Size, the lord of the lands of Rio de Janeiro.

The Chinese mafia had the ability to scale my existence to rape my daughter's mother, and making this a motive of constant mockery in my life. Being that this purpose was for me to disappear from Rio de Janeiro and not make the discovery of being the King Size.

The King Size—the Kings Sizes are the greatest kings that exist on the planet. In Portugal, in 1485, by the Portuguese Court—the Portuguese Court gave the Kings Sizes the King Size Coat of Arms. Arriving in Rio de Janeiro, and in many lands of Brazil, they colonized—immigrated and colonized many lands in Brazil.

Today, I am the youngest son, I am the King Size, and I have my daughter, who is Késia Castro Lima, who is going to be heir to everything within a very—in a short time.

Alright, the ferry service has much to improve as soon as the Jumbo Cat reopens, because there is an orgy going on in there, where innumerable executions go on. I am Alexandre dos Santos Lima, the King Size of Rio de Janeiro.

Awkward phrasings in this translation are an attempt to reflect awkward phrasings in the original speech.

In Brazil, although the video was viral, the meme had few repercussions, the most important one being the Brazilian Uncyclopedia (Desciclopédia) article about it, which I will not translate because it mostly rehashes the video itself.

One noteworthy part of the humor is that the business name “Jumbo Cat” is said in a way that sounds like “Ju Boquete”, that is, a common woman’s nickname (“Ju”, which may be short for Julia or Juliana or some such name) and a slang word for “blowjob”. But it is fairly certain that “Jumbo Cat” is what was said.

I enjoy making references to the video. I may express my feelings of vague optimism by saying that something “will get better as soon as I take over as King Size, the lord of the lands of Rio de Janeiro”. Also, the chaotic image of “an orgy with innumerable executions” may be brought back to my mind by various other chaotic situations.