A kind of culmination of the material on maguffins, loss aversion, and the management of longing.  The sunk costs of antes.  The symbolic value of the last cigarette before you quit.  That last cigarette being a kind of maguffin which allows for making it satisfy both the desire to smoke and the desire to quit.

A lot of stuff on rhyming, on emic and etic understanding, on phonemes, before we finally get back to Wordsworth, in particular Simplon Pass and what follows: the strange melancholy mansion they stay in; then the Winander Boy: all about estrangement from nature, and being at home in that estrangement, at home in homelessness.

Narrating gambling.  Getting the benefits of the breaks.  Kinds of gambling narratives: present tense as you're playing and presenting yourself to the other agonists, and past tense: stories of loss.

Powerful anticlimaxes.  How being estranged from childhood, and then recognizing that childhood is already the beginning of estrangement, is to achieve the destiny of being at home in homelessness.  [Wild turkey flies into a window across the quad and freaks us all out, one way or another.]  Mention of Frankenstein.  Some of Book VI of The Prelude.

A class -- since no one is keeping up with the reading, to put it mildly -- on the effect that endings have on our desires for narrative.  The way endings turn all preferences into short term ones, whereas with the whole novel, movie, epic, series to go, long term preferences will tend to clash more with short term ones.  This is (though I don't mention him in the class) one of the ways that convergence works, e.g. in Dan Decker's Anatomy of the Screenplay.

Money offer on the table when we came in!  Loss aversion -- it depends how you present things, as Thaler et al show.  Medical versions.  A brief introduction to Bayesianism and why MD's need to learn some Bayesean analysis.  Brandeis's plan to sell its art collection and the "endowment effect."  Wins above replacement.

We finally get to the end of The Intimations Ode, after detours again through "Frost at Midnight" and the nature of nature in The Prelude and the relation of nature to death.  

In which I try and fail to remember the form of a good paradox about loss aversion; some discussion about narratives and macguffins, and the two word summary of every exciting story with a happy ending: "loss, averted"

Echoes of Milton in Wordsworth.  More of the Intimations Ode with a detour through Tintern Abbey.  The shockingness of "O joy!"

MacGuffins in Hitchcock, as an intro to Ainslie.  Why we like suspense fiction.  Hitchcock on suspense.  Rereading.  Relation to the sublime vs. the beautiful as described by Smith and Kant.

We start on Ainslie -- hyperbolic vs. exponential discounting and we broach the question of what Ainslie calls "the management of longing."

More about the Prelude -- the skating scene, the boat-stealing scene, Wordsworth's later revisions for accuracy but against memory or wishful memory or the superpositions of memory.  Shades of the prison house in the Intimations Ode.  The child and its two worlds.

Money burning a hole in your pocket. Strategies of Commitment Lotteries as savings devices.  Hyperbolic discounting.

We go back briefly to the intimations ode and to Montaigne's that philosophy is learning how to die -- intimations of mortality.   All philosophy is.  Then we knock around The Prelude -- recumbent o'er the surface of past time, the two consciousnesses, and some of the boat-stealing scene, with a digression on metaphor: sex as a vehicle in that scene about vehicles.

Poker. Common knowledge, where everyone's knowledge of what everyone else knows converges.  The psychological components of games of skill. Turing tests and reverse Turing tests.

The difference between new money and old money.  The value of old money, or of high culture -- its relation to value.  The idea that that kind of value is related to the potlatch as a marker of status which precisely refuses monetization.  Cultural capital in subcultures.  (Essentially Bourdieu's ideas, though I don't explicitly cite him.)

Blake's view of Wordsworth, as reported by Henry Crabb Robinson in a letter to Dorothy Wordsworth and in his reminiscences.  Robinson on Wordsworth's technical death in 1814: his indifference to tyranny after the fall of Napoleon.  Return to the Intimations Ode and the subtle new start manifested in stanza 5.

This ended up being a class on common knowledge -- that is on games (and puzzles) with complete information.

We start with the Intimations Ode, which means we really start with "My Heart Leaps Up" -- and after the fourth stanza, which is where Wordsworth broke it off, we go to the glad preamble of The Prelude.  Some attention to echoes between Coleridge and Wordsworth.

Since no one had read The Gambler, this class was a kind of summing up of thinking from Mandeville to Kant under the rubric of Mauss -- how credit, gratitude, obligation bring in other minds and differentiate our credit with them from the way money is a bookkeeping measure.

Basically a class where we rush through "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal," with a little reference to a couple of Shakespeare sonnets Wordsworth was probably thinking of -- 73 and 104.

In which we go over the answers to the midterm -- you don't need to read it, since I read the questions out.  A little discussion Merchant of Venice: paying with all my heart, and of Ulysses: Leopold Bloom's joke advertising jingle, "Tell me where is fancy bread? At Burke's the Baker's, it is said."

Using the game show Golden Balls, we look at some Prisoner's Dilemma situations, and discuss Golden Balls as a more classic PD than it might seem at first (it's certainly at the least a modified PD).  Episodes for watching are available here (an anthology) and here ("Weirdest split or steal every").  Different ways of valuing, different ways of strategizing.

Wordsworth on Gray in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.  Like Blake he channels Milton's view that poetry is something other than artifice, and like Blake he corrects the Miltonic example.  Home at Grasmere vs. Paradise Lost.

Adam Smith on utility and beauty -- revealed preference as a tautology -- utilitarianism -- Smith on how preference isn't a tautology -- different from Mandeville.  Smith on utility here.  This will lead to Smith on self-command.