Bianca Steele

Jared Diamond and Writing about Book-Length Nonfiction

At the academic anthropology blog, Savage Minds, this post, the first in a series, on Jared Diamond’s most recent book, is a nice example of how to write about complete books on the Internet, especially when you’ve got too much to say.  A lot of times I end up abandoning a piece, especially about a nonfiction book, because I’m not sure how to approach it.  In part, I worry about sounding too critical and writing a piece that ends up offputting.  In part, I think, my model for what writing about books should be has become something like Andrew Seal’s Blographia Literaria.  Seal, and the bloggers who wrote like him, always set each book in context with finality and authority, indicating its proper place in a larger discourse, apparently certain that they knew what was expected in the best literature-discussion circles.  But even if I felt competent to do the same, which I don’t, it wouldn’t really get at what I wanted to say about my reading.

Boredom as an Excuse for Not Writing

In today’s Boston Globe, Maria Konnikova writes about recent research on boredom. Yesterday, in the New York Times business section, Alisa Tugend wrote about the same work. Konnikova cites research suggesting that we get bored when we’re prevented from concentrating as deeply as we’d like. This might explain why we feel bored not only when we’re doing something that isn’t what we’d like to do best (like when I have to clean the house instead of writing or reading), but also when we’re doing something we’d like to do but hasn’t absorbed our full attention and has to compete with other things (like when I try to read or bake with a toddler in the house).

She notes that people perform less well on critical tasks if they’re bored.  This suggests that discovering the causes and signs of boredom is important for preventing damaging mistakes.

Konnikova also reviews some earlier theoretical views on boredom. The traditional Freudian view is that we get bored when we’re not doing what we really want to do. Therefore, being bored with an algebra class might not be seen as caused by its involving lots of tedious drill, or by its lack of obvious connection, as yet, to any eventual use, but by a deep need to do something very different than algebra—maybe even a sign of an incipient realization that pre-med is the wrong track. Sartre’s explanation for boredom was different, but similarly far from our current everyday use. He thought boredom is a sign of the ultimate meaningless of what we’re doing: thus, even though algebra does have a connection with some eventual, practical use, that practical use has no real meaning in the final scheme of things. These explanations are so far from what we now think boredom could be that it seems possible that Freud and Sartre were never actually bored themselves, and were describing some other emotion. A more behaviorist understanding of boredom might see it as, simply, not doing anything meaningful. Whether writing out party invitations by hand, studying algebra, or making cold calls to sales prospects is boring might depend on the end that will be met once that’s done.  However, it doesn't feel that way.

36 Arguments For the Existence of God, a novel by Rebecca Goldstein

This will be another post about Boston-based novels that I read over this past summer (more here and here): about 36 Arguments For the Existence of God, the most recent book by the novel and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.

36 Arguments For the Existence of God has a single main protagonist, Cass Seltzer.  He’s a professor of psychology at a university west of Boston, obviously modeled on Brandeis (the school’s Jewish foundation and the details of the town it resides in, based on Waltham, give it away).  The plot meanders back and forth through time, exploring Seltzer’s career and the important people in his life.  These are depicted sharply, as are the minor characters.  First is Lucinda Mandelbaum, a fellow psychology professor and a famous game-theoretician.  Lucinda is in the vein of Goldberg’s cold, rationalist female philosophy professors, like Eva Mueller in The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind, but with greater passion and taste for luxury.  While she’s away at a conference, Cass receives an offer from Harvard.  He’s already been scheduled for a debate on the existence of God at Harvard’s Memorial Hall.  And he receives a visit from his first graduate-school girlfriend, Roz Margolis.  In between negotiating with the Frankfurter University president over what to do about the better offer he received, he recollects his past: what brought him to the study of psychology of religion and to the writing of his now notorious book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion.

Cass had been pre-med, at Columbia, until he took a single, fatal lecture course with the charismatic professor of literature, Jonah Elijah Klapper: whereupon he applied to graduate school and followed the great man to Boston.  Also moving to Boston were every one of Klapper’s graduate students: among them, Gideon Raven, who’d already been working on his Ph.D under Klapper for more than a decade, and eventually Cass’s mentor and friend.

Cass’s mother had been born in a Hasidic community in upstate New York, named New Walden, and had returned only occasionally, to allow Cass and his brother to get to know his grandmother.  When Jonas Elijah Klapper discovers Cass’s heritage, he insists on an invitation to visit New Walden in Cass and Roz’s company.  This triggers a crisis in Klapper’s career, and consequently in the careers of the graduate students.  Cass switches his subject to the psychology of religion and eventually writes the book against God that, by the beginning of this one, has made his reputation.

The novel circles around the question whether religion is important to human happiness, or whether it is inherently ridiculous, and possibly pernicious.  Its answer is equivocal.  Roz is a humanist who wants to find the cure for death.  Lucinda is a rationalist who bases her most personal decisions on the cold calculations of logic, game theory, and ego.  The Valdener Hasidim stake everything on the hope that their way of life will never, ever change in any essential feature.  Klapper and Gideon are—if not overtly religious—susceptible to its call, and vehemently opposed—if not to science itself—to “much of what passes for science” (including Darwinism).  Yet Cass, Klapper’s newest disciple, is a science major who’s never before thought about these questions very much.  The plot itself, to the extent it’s centered on the history of his connection to his earliest academic advisor, circles around his bewilderment at what he seems to have gotten himself mixed up in.

It seems necessary to mention that large dollops of the depiction of Jonas Elijah Klapper seem drawn from what’s known publicly of the persona of Yale professor Harold Bloom.  The eventual fascination with Kabbalah would have settled it, if nothing else did.  Nobody who knows even a little about Bloom will be able to read this book and not think of him.  On the other hand, nothing essential about the character depends on his being based on Bloom.  He’s simply an exaggerated version of a professor of a certain kind, whose traits could have been drawn from any number of different people.

The ending of the novel invites comparison with the author’s earlier novel Mazel.  It also invites a reinterpretation of that novel, because each book ends in the protagonist’s apparent reconciliation with traditional Judaism.  Yet sometime between the writing of that novel and the writing of this one, apparently, the novelist left Orthodoxy and identified herself (if I understood correctly) as a nonbeliever.  I don’t think it’s necessary to have a taste for gossip to wonder whether Goldstein’s previous book, a biography of Spinoza, was written before or after the switch; a biography of Spinoza, an apostate and involuntary excommunicate, by an Orthodox Jewish woman, surely is a very different thing than a biography by someone who herself has left the fold.  (Harold Bloom reviewed the biography for the New York Times Book Review, for what that’s worth.)

For me, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God is not among Rebecca Goldstein’s very best books.  Those, I think, are Mazel and Properties of Light (about a physicist with ideas similar to those of David Bohm.  Goldstein has never settled into a single form for her novels; each one is different, depending, presumably, on the needs of the content.  Unfortunately, though, the result is sometimes a book that seems too long or ununified to hold the attention of someone reading mostly for the story.  36 Arguments is brief enough, and close enough in form to a typical mainstream novel, for this not to be an issue, but at times—the inclusion of what feels like the entire debate over the existence of God is one, the unusual chronology is another—the philosophical elements bog things down in a way that didn’t seem satisfying.

Someone who’s very interested in arguments for atheism or for the existence of God will probably find that debate, between Cass and a noted religious apologist, worth the effort.  Readers who aren’t interested as much in ideas may very well skip it, without appearing to miss too much.  Those looking for a campus novel about disillusionment with advisors may find the novel amusing (I don’t know enough to say whether it’s dead-on or unfair).  Goldstein’s characters, especially her women characters, are sharply and wickedly drawn: types, but types I’ve never seen “done” elsewhere.  The unusual structure of the book, on the other hand (together with the longish digressions into academic subjects), will probably make it unsatisfying for many readers who are looking for a straightforward romantic story.  It has such a story embedded in it, but the reader has to think a bit to see how the romance and the ideas link up together.

I said in an earlier post that 36 Arguments is a “woman’s novel,” and that’s true, in part.  The novel is mostly about relationships: Cass’s with the women in his life (Lucinda, his ex-wife Pascale Puissant, and Roz), and with his mother and grandmother.  The bulk of the plot revolves around these women, with how his work affects his relationships with them, and with what they think about it.  On the other hand, most of the interest is focused on the evolution of Cass’s ideas, and significant space is given to his relationships with his graduate school mentors, Jonas Elijah Klapper and Gilbert Gideon Raven.

It’s a bit difficult to get at one of the book’s other major themes without giving away the ending, but it could be labeled “the question of genius.”  If you’re familiar with The Chosen, which I mentioned in the post in which I mentioned this book earlier, you’ll have some idea what I mean.  Moreover, Jonas Elijah Klapper is entirely obsessed by the question of genius (in a much cruder way than the way in which Harold Bloom, with his ideas of the “strong poet,” might be said to concern himself with the topic): how to interpret the genius of others, and ultimately the question of his own.  It’s possible to do this theme very badly, and Goldstein avoids these problems adroitly, but the topic itself seems to me to be of questionable interest.  After finishing the novel, I still didn’t understand how “genius” fit in among the novels other themes, or why it was included.

The book (like Cass Seltzer’s best-seller) ends with a lengthy appendix, detailing thirty-six actual arguments, given by recent or historical figures, purporting to prove that God exists, along with thirty-six refutations.  It’s implied, though not stated outright, that this appendix is taken in some form from the fictional Cass Seltzer’s fictionally notorious book.  These may be interesting in themselves for some readers, especially the probably very many readers who’ve never encountered these arguments before.

Does Economic Value Derive from Demand or Difficulty?

This, from about a week ago, probably will only be meaningful for those who already know about the roots of current “libertarian” thinking in the writings of the mid-twentieth century economists, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek (apparently non-libertarian conservatives are also influenced by them), and in fact I don’t know enough about economics myself to understand all of it, but I thought these paragraphs from economics professor Brad de Long were interesting:

The point of view underlying von Mises's—and von Hayek, and Marx, and Ron Paul—complaint against Fiat money in general and monetary management of the business cycle in particular is this: that value comes from human sweat and toil, not from being clever. Thus it is fine for money to have value if it is 100% backed by gold dug from the earth by sweat and machines and muscles (even if there is no state of the possible future world in which people actually want to exchange their pieces of paper for the gold that supposedly backs it). But it is not fine for money to have value simply because it is useful for buying things. There is, von Mises—and Marx, and von Hayek, and Ron Paul—think, something profoundly wrong on an economic and on a moral level with procedures that create value that is not backed by, in Marx's case, human labor, and in von Mises's and von Hayek's case human entrepreneurial ingenuity. And in its scarier moments this train of thought slides over to: "good German engineers (and workers); bad Jewish financiers".

Note that this does not just apply to fiat money produced by a government.

This applies to all financial market asset valuations in excess of capital cost of production (or perhaps the value of the inventions of the gigantic Krell-like brain of John Galt). They are, to von Mises, all cheats.

This (which, as de Long points out, also applies to Marx’s labor theory of value), does say that because “value comes from human sweat and toil,” the price of edible dandelion roots foraged from a meadow should always be less than the price of a big boulder that was dug out of my yard so a sewer line could be put in place.  It doesn’t, however, imply that it is somehow cheating to ask a neighbor or friend for help, even with trivial things like opening a package or fastening a necklace, which would just be silly.  Though I’m not sure why “value comes . . . not from being clever” isn’t supposed to remove the real value from “the inventions . . . of John Galt.”

But I thought of this again when I read, recently, an essay by Martha Nussbaum, a professor of philosophy, law, and religion, on the objectification and harassment of women on the Internet (in The Offensive Internet, a volume she co-edited).  She discusses

the tendency of some societies to define the ideal adult as self-sufficient, independent, lacking in deep needs with respect to others.  In many societies, such pictures are held out to young people—but far more often to males than to females.  The idea of the "real man" as someone who is never weak, never dependent, always in control, is a very common feature of developmental patterns in countless societies, but certainly in ours, which so strongly valorizes the lone cowboy who can provide for himself without the help of any others. 

Even though, even taken to an extreme, the point of view Brad de Long attributes to people like Marx and Ron Paul and Ludwig von Mises applies only to economic theory, not to the details of ordinary people’s mundane lives, it does sound as though this economic theory supports—since Ayn Rand has already been brought into the discussion—what her novels’ villains condemn as “rugged individualism,” and what Nussbaum suggests is, in some places and at some times, considered appropriate for all men but for no women.

Is Changing Rules by "Nudging" People Undemocratic?

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler wrote a well known book called Nudge (not “noodge”), arguing that various social policy should be set up in a way that “nudges” people towards doing things that policymakers thing they should do.  For example, if policymakers think more people should invest in 401K plans, employers should be required to make 401K contributions a default.  People would have to opt out of their employer’s 401K plan if they didn’t want to make contributions, rather than (as now) having to opt in if they did want it.  It does make sense to arrange defaults appropriately, both to decrease the amount of work people have to do (human resources workers as well as employees), and to encourage or discourage certain actions (modifying a thermostat to encourage energy savings, might be another example, or setting printer defaults to minimize paper use).

On the other hand, the way Sunstein and Thaler discuss “nudging” can sound a bit nanny-state-ish.  Henry Farrell, a political science professor, and Cosma Shalizi, a professor of statistics, have written an article in the New Scientist (via Crooked Timber) criticizing their views.  I agree with their argument, but there is, I think, a problem with the “nudge” theory that I have never seen addressed.  Farrell and Shalizi write:

…[T]he key problem with “nudge” style paternalism [is] presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct, the technocrats’ prescriptions.

Nor will they ever be able to.  “Nudging” is nonverbal.  It doesn’t give people the ability to understand their situation better.  It doesn’t give people the ability to discuss their situation better.  It doesn’t give people the ability to provide the nudgers with extra feedback.

Worse, it lessens people’s ability to deal with the real world.  Before the nudge was implemented, people were at least somewhat able to discuss policies, like compensation, on their merits.  Afterwards, everything ordinary people suggest will mess up the nudging part of the policy.

Anyone who’s worked in a reasonably large organization will recognize what’s likely to happen next: any suggestion for improvement will be met with objections along the lines of: that’s not what’s really at stake here.  But it is what’s really at stake!

It would become impossible to discuss or decide anything except at the topmost levels.  There, presumably, are personnel who know how to discuss both aspects of policy and can take account of nudging as well as ordinary practices.  But before the nudge, those people delegated a lot of that work to lower-level personnel, who afterward will have slipped out of the loop.  And the nudge, in the first place, was implemented by people outside the organization, not those within it.  So how this could possibly work is far from clear.  What’s more likely is total sclerosis, as nothing changes significantly at a policy level, and things either fall apart or rules are modified surreptitiously and unofficially, day to day.

The idea of the “nudge” seems, on paper, to presuppose that organizations work by choosing (or falling into) a set of rules that define every decision ahead of time, at a very detailed level.  If this were literally true, then, we would expect to find a group of architects, highly educated, well aware of everything that needs to be known (practically, theoretically, politically, strategically), who think about policy; and also a group of workers who don’t think about any of this at all.  For the latter group of people, presumably, it would be an exaggeration to say that they do what they’re told or that they make decisions by applying rules; they would have to make decisions unconsciously on the basis of rules they’ve somehow internalized but can’t actually articulate.  Yet their rules could be changed—by the nudge—on a fairly short timescale.  But that isn’t much like what really happens, and isn’t especially plausible.

Most people, most of the time, are a combination of the former and latter groups.  “Nudging,” as Farrell and Shalizi show, is undemocratic because it makes it more difficult for them to carry out the former functions.  But more than that, it seems to assume an extremely implausible picture of society.

(Now if I could only nudge my three year old to sleep past 6:30 AM now that we’ve moved the clocks back an hour.)

Gettysburg and the Modern Military (The Killer Angels and Game Theory)

In The Killer Angels, a novel about the battle of Gettysburg, General James Longstreet—generally, the hero of the book—is enormously struck by the changes in military tactics that he is in the middle of.  Longstreet is, himself, a protagonist of these changes.  He has seen, in the battles of the Indian Wars in the North American West, that traditional methods of combat are bound to result in unnecessary deaths, and ultimately in the loss of the war.  A single artillery gun in a good location, or even a single rifle wielded from behind a tree, will simply massacre any army that tries to capture it.  Longstreet’s solution is to emphasize defense, and to deemphasize honor.  He prefers to abandon a hard-won battleground rather than defend it at the expense of a more likely victory elsewhere; to withdraw in the face of greater force rather than attack simply in order to be first to strike; to cut off the enemy’s supply lines rather than confront them face to face in battle.  And he prefers to find a defensible location and dig in rather than lead a glorious charge.

Robert E. Lee, who happens to be Longstreet’s commanding officer, is a soldier of the old-fashioned school.  It may well be that Lee is losing the war because the needs of the age are for mechanism, not for honor, but Lee will not change.  Shaara presents his determination as a kind of virtue, in line with the (now usually poorly thought of) view that the South deserved to win the Civil War in some kind of “higher” or actually moral sense, regardless of the immorality of slave-ownership and racism.  And Longstreet does come to doubt himself.  He is fighting the war because he is a soldier and his commanders have ordered him to do so, not because he believes in the cause, and he recognizes the advantage of having the kind of cause he lacks.  Regardless, the predictions and views which Shaara presents as Longstreet’s are more correct than those he presents as Lee’s.  And even so, Shaara describes the old-fashioned kind of battle as more “human,” in some way, than an artillery charge, or even a careful trench-based defense.

It isn’t surprising to see a Rebel cavalry charge complete with Rebel yell (the “inhuman screaming of the onrushing dead”) depicted as glorious, if also primitive, even as those troops ride straight into the face of modern artillery and hidden riflemen.  What is more surprising is to see the advance of a mile-long line of infantry described as beautiful and as noble.  The sight of thousands of men in brightly-colored uniforms marching slowly forward under constant artillery fire must surely be impressive in some way, even sublime, but it is hardly one of the greatest expressions of the human spirit.  Yet Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a Yankee college professor turned officer, with little combat experience, immediately thinks in just those terms.  Chamberlain has been learning to see battle as his fellow soldiers do, to see it in its gritty details as it really is, and what this classicist and professor of theology discovers about the dying art of Napoleonic battle array is that it was a triumph of human will.  The horror of so many men bound to die does not appear to enter his mind.  By contrast, Chamberlain’s reaction on experiencing his first artillery barrage from behind his own line is to dive to the ground, stunned, and fall into unconsciousness (having failed to give his troops any orders).  The repeated violent shaking of the earth under the impact of machinery is, for him, is what registers as true horror. 

Does Shaara—in this book, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975—intend to make a comment about modern military practice?  What, exactly, does he have in mind when he mentions the modern, mechanized military?  I’ve been reading about game theory and wonder if it might provide some hints.

On page 64 of Luce and Raiffa, Games and Decisions, a military strategist named Haywood is quoted on the “American” decision theory for battle.  It is striking.  He says that the US military commander bases his strategy not on the intentions of the enemy, but on the capabilities of the enemy.  This is a little chilling.  It calls, logically, for building up capacity even in the face of the fact that the enemy has no plan to attack, on every possible battleground even when the enemy cannot possibly attack on all of them at once.  This kind of talk rightly gave Cold War hawkish thinking a bad name, and tarred much of the field of game theory along with it.  (The result, in part, was an emphasis by doves on the limitations imposed on game theory’s having restricted itself to the narrowest range of human motivations, those associated with the purest self-interest.  An example is research, publicized by Douglas Hofstadter and others, on the absurdities that result whenever a game-theoretical example is brought down to earth and put into effect.)

Less dramatically, however, it also calls for a rather mechanistic view of the army itself (both ours and that of the enemy), as questions of intention are set aside.  All that matters is a tallying up of the numbers of weapons of various sorts, of their capacities (probably expressed in numerical terms), of their geographic placement, and of the numbers of soldiers deployed to make use of them.  Old-fashioned strategical thinking—trying to get into the mind of the commanders on the other side—goes by the board.

Thus, all opportunities for finesse have dissipated.  The military strategist is no longer a strategist in the old sense; he no longer needs the skills of a chess master.  Instead of pitting himself against an enemy who is human and his equal, he submits troop numbers to a computer.  A concern about the potential replacement of human decision-makers by computers would explain Longstreet’s regret more plausibly than would a simple distaste for prudence and defensive strategy.  It doesn’t make the idea that the South was some kind of glorious lost cause any more persuasive.  It does, however, turn Longstreet into a character with whom late twentieth-century audiences may be more likely to sympathize.

Are Political Independents as Mythical as the Unicorn?

Henry Farrell at The Monkey Cage (via LFC and a few clicks) links to an article at Columbia Journalism Review that refers to The Monkey Cage, and to a months-old controversy over whether political journalists disrespect political scientists, but that’s not important right now.  The CJR article also links to a post at Jonathan Bernstein’s A Plain Blog about Politics, in which Bernstein links back to The Monkey Cage and an old post there, “Three Myths about Political Independents.”  The nub of the argument is that many widely shared beliefs about independent voters (John Sides at The Monkey Cage cites David Brooks and Charles Blow, both at the New York Times) actually are not true.  Sides says, “This has been known in political science since 1992, with the publication of The Myth of the Independent Voter.”

Political scientists look at polls (among other things).  Sides says people who poll as independent actually say they are not independent if you ask them a follow-up question.  If pollsters ask the follow-up question, and remove those who identify themselves as either partisans of one of the major parties, or leaning towards one of the major parties, the percentage of voters who are “independents” drops from about 35% to about 10%.

I don’t take polls of my friends and acquaintances.  However, I do know people who say they are independents.  I don’t usually pester them with “follow-up questions,” but often they follow up themselves.  They may go on to say that, for example, they could conceivably be persuaded to vote for either candidate—it’s just that at the moment they think there are strong reasons not to vote for, say, the Democrat.  They may say that they think there needs to be health care reform—it’s just that they happen to know lots of small business owners, and their friends invariably say that every health care reform law ever passed has either hurt their business or virtually compelled them to hurt their employees.  I also know people who call themselves independents and almost always find reasons to vote for the Democrat.  In either case, they seem very seriously to be willing to consider both sides of the issues, they seem very seriously to be willing to reject even the party they lean to strongly if the issues fell out that way, and it may well be that their sense of an “independent” view of the issues just happens to fall pretty far from what other people might consider the center.

It seems easy to say that people are independents, or only weakly partisan, because they are “low-information voters.”  (Matt Yglesias seems to harp on this idea a lot, though I may have got his version of it wrong here.)  But “low-information” doesn’t seem to describe these people well.  They care enough to be informed on the issues and to try to inform other people.  (In a sense, they can be categorized as Gladwell’s “Mavens.”)  They care enough not to settle for a position just because some organization tells them to.  In other words, they are actually high-information voters: in fact, they tend to be among the highest-information voters in the group, if my subjective observations (of an admittedly smallish number of anecdotal situations) are to be trusted.  Now, polls or smaller scale studies might show that they are actually lower-information than they appear, and thus that my subjective observations are wrong (but on the other hand, I don’t think polls would usually make observations at a level of granularity that would enable political scientists to compare voters perceived as high-information in specific environments with voters who actually are high-information in precisely the same environments).

So there is one disconnect.

And, then, how should we define “high information”?  How about with reference to these “myths about independent voters” themselves?  Sides’s old post says, “This has been known . . . since 1992.”  Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the information has been available since 1992?  I’d guess that at John Sides’s department, his results are accepted, and nobody would be allowed to get away with an argument that ignored those results.  Sides’s post gives me some good reasons to accept those results if I want to make an argument Sides will take seriously, but not necessarily if the people I need to take my argument seriously are in a different department or in at some newsroom’s editor’s desk.  Maybe Bruce Keith’s work was accepted even more quickly than Albert Einstein’s was, but based on my (admittedly limited) knowledge of academia, I would be very surprised if there were no significant critiques (or even attacks) on Keith’s work published in the past twenty years.  Not enough time seems to have passed for the contents of a groundbreaking academic monograph to have become the basis of all the work being done in the field everywhere in the world.  The likelihood that there is some other research out there, which I will not be able to dismiss out of hand, contradicting the work Sides relies on, makes me reluctant simply to accept Sides’s assertion that this has been known since 1992.  I would lean towards accepting his word, but I’m not sure (as a non-expert) about repeating it as gospel truth.

For example, it makes me uncomfortable to say that a layperson is simply wrong who happens to think that there are more voters in the US who identify themselves as independents than identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans, who does not know that this, though superficially plausible on a naïve reading of the evidence, has been shown to be a myth.  On a purely empirical level, I can read a graph as well as anybody else, and the chart clearly shows that the “myth” is actually an accurate representation of the polling data.  I’m reluctant to say that somebody who has gone to the trouble of reading the graph, of reading John Sides’s argument, and of concluding that they will continue to use “independent” in a sense that agrees with the myth and with common usage, is “lower information” than someone who doesn’t read The Monkey Cage but heard about the myth over lunch one day at work.  I’m also reluctant to say that someone who may have asked an actual academic at a different department from the one Sides teaches at, and was told the “myth” is true, is ignorant from an academic perspective.  What if this latter person is a journalist?  His blogger friend accepts the authority of Sides and his 1992 book, but the journalist’s own source tells him Sides is wrong.  The journalist publishes what his source has told him.  In what sense, then has “[T]his . . . been known since 1992,” when newspapers say otherwise?  At best, surely, the idea is contentious.

Sides probably takes it for granted that a certain amount of an academic’s argument rests on, well, his authority as an academic (his placement in a network of other academics, his publication history, and so forth), but not everybody will.  I’m actually less concerned about people who dismiss everything academics say (if they exist) than with people who feel vaguely that everything published has gone through some thoroughly rigorous vetting process that prevents untruths from getting through.

The same issue comes up in a letter to the editor of the New York Times Sunday Book Review this week, responding to Alan Wolfe’s review of Diane Ravitch’s new book, in which she repudiates the positions she has been defending for nearly thirty years.  Ravitch—who, in spite of her taking a position in the second Bush administration, derives much of her authority from her reputation as an open-minded liberal—for years has supported education policies pushed mostly by the right (for example, by the National Review).  Now she is convinced that the data shows those policies are wrong.  But, the letter writer points out, the empirical data has been available for twenty years already.  Yet they did not determine Ravitch’s position when they first became available.  She waited for some time, it seems, before allowing new research to influence the position she ought to take.  So, unless I’m missing something, I don’t see how it can be the case that groundbreaking academic publications mark the time from which something ought to be considered “known.”

Brief Links About Literature

Who would have thought that if you want to do journalism, there’s a book to tell you how to do it . . . unless the kind of journalism you want to do is reporting on the arts.  (Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes)

This seems absurd to me. If a theater catches fire in the middle of a performance and kills everybody inside, there is no shortage of guidance on how to write the news brief covering the fire for the next day’s paper; how to write the extended story about the investigation a few days later; how to write an obituary about an individual victim on deadline, and how to write on the victims collectively for a Sunday-magazine thumbsucker a few months later; how to write a formal editorial condemning the lax building codes that helped accelerate the fire, and how to write the emotional column or op-ed piece demanding more out of our neglectful civic leaders; how to use public records and the Freedom of Information Act to background the parties responsible; how not to libel any of those people; how to decide where to place the story; how to photograph the story and how best to visualize data related to it; how to blog, video, podcast, tweet, Facebook, and SEO the bejesus out of the story; and, after all that’s done, how to have a tedious discussion about the ethics of handling every last one of those things. But nothing on how to write a review that might have persuaded people to do something better with their time that fateful evening.

This sounds so familiar.  Don’t we have a word for it by now?  (Jonathan Raban, LRB)

Red Tory is like a 300-page Sunday sermon, preached by an autodidact country parson whose shelves are stuffed with old blue and white Pelican books on subjects like modern psychology, literature, sociology, government and economics, which the parson (in civilian life, Blond used to be a lecturer in theology) believes must hold the key to the alien and ugly civilisation he encounters on his parish rounds. We have sunk, Parson Blond says, into a condition of ‘rootless cultural relativism’, godless and cynical, in which there is ‘a pervading lack of daily joy’. He blames the Bloomsbury Group, especially Lytton Strachey; the disillusioned war memoirs of Graves and Sassoon; the ‘self-hating cultural elite’ of John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; the libertarian narcissism of the 1960s; Paul Watson’s 1974 BBC series about the Wilkins clan, The Family, ‘reality television’ in general and Big Brother in particular; the Bloomsburyite economist J.M. Keynes (whose name Blond revealingly pronounced as ‘Keens’ in a televised debate that I watched on the internet) and the pernicious laissez-faire doctrines of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is said to examine “the riddle of atavism”: the racist fear of biologically inferior human specimens living among us.  But, arguably, it’s actually about cocaine addiction, as this suggests (h/t Andrew Sullivan).  If so, the argument that late Victorian horror fiction like Jekyll/Hyde, Dracula, The Time Machine, and Dorian Gray expressed society’s ingrown and irrational racism falls apart.  Could this fiction instead be expressing an entirely rational wish to suppress drug abuse and fight addiction?  And, then, why did the scientifically minded (such as Galton and Lombroso) believe the issue was race?

Canine Linguistics

At Language Log, commenter “anon” (who I'd guess is British) says:

Many years ago, some Army combat engineers tried to teach dogs to sniff out explosives. They taught the dogs to bark once for a land mine, twice for an unexploded bomb, and so forth. Unfortunately, when the dogs encountered explosives for which they had not been taught barking and growling patterns, the dogs ignored the explosives, and some of the dogs and their trainers were blown to bits.

The engineers concluded that the dogs' ability to detect explosives depended on the words for explosives in the dogs' language.

This is called the Sapper-Woof hypothesis.

(Explanation: here or here).

Statistics and Homicide Rates

UPDATE: I thought I had saved my changes and posted this on Thursday, but apparently not.  I posted it Friday before noticing the errors, then took it down so I could make the corrections offline.

Boston homicide detectives’ record is below par. Only 44 percent of 2009 homicides were solved, compared to a national average of 55 percent. (Stranger killings, including gang-related homicides, have been particularly difficult to solve.) A Globe editorial Thursday suggests ways the department might be improved in order to fix the problems.

Another possibility, of course, is that Boston homicide detectives are more scrupulous than detectives elsewhere, less inclined to plant evidence and do all the other nasty things “necessary to get the job done” that we’re familiar with from TV crime dramas. It would take more data, and some kind of in-depth study, to find out for sure. But I’m sure that if the detectives in the Boston PD feel they’re being criticized unfairly, they will let their supervisors know, and loudly.

An anecdote near the beginning of The Tipping Point raises a similar question. The frequency with which homicides occurred in New York City declined dramatically between the early 1980s and mid-1990s. Malcolm Gladwell attributes the decline to gradual, global changes that for some reason that nobody has ever been able to explain, in New York City alone resulted in a sudden drastic drop in crime rates. Gladwell describes the case in such detail that he raises questions about what he is arguing. Is what he describes really plausible? Does it square with our preexisting knowledge about how human beings behave? Could the decline have been due to people giving up and failing to report crimes?

Reviewers have been extremely harsh on Gladwell’s most recent book, Outliers, while his earlier books were met with apparently unnuanced enthusiasm. One might assume that Gladwell, Tom Clancy-style, has been getting sloppy and that his editors are permitting him to get away with a lot more than they did when he was just starting out. At the same time, the flaws in Outliers were already apparent several years ago when The Tipping Point appeared. Why have they been noticed only now?

Revolutionary Road - III

In today’s New York Times Judith Warner has a column taking off from some thoughts about Revolutionary Road, and by coincidence she discusses some of the same points I’ve been thinking about.

In my earlier post, I guessed that the only reason anyone would want to watch the film version of Yates’s novel was “voyeurism”: a desire to observe the suffering of others with whom one has no personal or emotional connection, and to take pleasure in such observation.  Warner comes up with another possible reason: we might want to view the novel (or the film) through the lenses of the social sciences.  To an anthropologist or a sociologist, Revolutionary Road has something to say about the values and the social practices of a specific time in history.  To a psychologist, Revolutionary Road exemplifies how -- in certain situations -- people generally think; in particular, it illustrates a kind of pathology that occurs under adverse conditions typical of the Eastern suburbs of the United States in the middle of the twentieth century.  And to a historian (my own preferred lens most of the time, if I had to pick from among this one group), it is, simply, evidence: one source among others, though an important source.

Of course there is an important distinction, a moral one, between the scientific worldview and that of the voyeur.  It has to do with their motives.  The scientist wants to learn about the world, both to increase humanity’s intellectual understanding and in order to make the world a better place: he has a place in society and a defined role.

The artist also studies people and writes about them: in this he is much like the scientist.  And like the scientist, he as a defined role in society.  However, the artist can’t claim to be benefiting the world in anything like the way the scientist does.  Social science is the objective observation of other people, supporting the generation and elimination of theories about how people generally think or behave.  The social scientist cannot have an emotional involvement with the people whom he studies (or his observations would fail to be objective), and the social scientist most definitely cannot be studying himself.  When we enjoy art, however, we do get emotionally involved.  And when we enjoy art most deeply, what we are “studying” is in a very real sense actually ourselves.

The late philosopher Richard Rorty, in his excellent book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, suggested dividing novels into two categories: those that provide readers pleasure of an aesthetic sort, and those that make readers aware of injustices in their own society.  Drawing on the writings of the best novelists, critics, and philosophers of art, Rorty concluded that a novel can belong to one of those categories, or it can belong to the other category, but it never can belong to both.

Now, Warner suggests that the novel Revolutionary Road has value for us readers because it is the second kind of book.  She may be right.  However, the best critics and novelists in recent decades have praised it for the opposite reason: they say not only that Yates’s novel belongs in the first category, but that the book is especially notable because of the level of aesthetic craftsmanship its author displays by his having written it.  I think it is probable that they are right.  I think, if we cannot see why they have the opinions that they do, we are most likely missing some piece of information that they were using in order to come to the conclusions that they did.

But that’s the novel and I was discussing the film.  There’s no doubt that the film promised us by the trailer (which again is all I have seen of it) looks very pretty.  But that’s not all there is to a film.  Certainly, most people, including me, do not go to the movies just to admire the cinematography -- any more than we go to the movies as anthropologists, considering Hollywood and its fans as providing us with case studies.  We want a story and we want a kind of emotional involvement.

But we don’t want that kind of involvement.  At least I don’t.

Was Nazi Science Not Really Science?

One of the worst things you can say to someone in a university is that their work or their ideas are the same as something promoted in Nazi Germany. (Unlike the Internet, in academia there is nothing like Godwin's Law. Such accusations are perfectly well within bounds.) The idea that what the Nazis called "science" was altogether unlike what we know to be science is, thus, important to maintain. Recently, in the London Telegraph, historian Richard Evans argues that this is not the case. In fact, he says, when he looked into the most heinous, disreputable experiments German scientists carried out in the National Socialist era, he found that they were astonishingly "similar in form, if not content, . . . to the research of today."

He did find some differences. This is not surprising. However, it does not necessarily reflect moral differences between Germany's culture and society under Nazism and the rest of the world. Many of the institutions we take for granted simply did not exist until after the Second World War. Evans appears to focus on peer review as the reliable sign of decent research. He correctly notes that one characteristic of Nazi medicine was to try to improve the average level of healthiness in society -- not only by studying very healthy people in order to discover the factors that contribute to their good health -- but also by trying to eliminate the people on the low end of the healthiness scale. What is truly revolting about, for example, Mengele's experiments, however, was their inattention to any kind of ethics around the study of human subjects -- the protocols surrounding which were instituted after the war, in large part as a direct result of those abuses.

It is also not surprising that in most respects German science at the time should have greatly resembled science in other Western nations. Germany was in a sense actually the hub of scientific research at the time. Many discoveries were made in other countries, but they were often developed to their full extent only in Germany. It is important to remember to what extent Western-style science has always been an international activity.

There is a great desire to divide science into "good" science that evil people like Nazis somehow could not even have contemplated, and "bad" science that can be recognized at first glance. A look at the historical sources, unfortunately, shows unequivocally that such a division is impossible.

East Wind Rain

Recent research seems to vindicate US leaders against the charge they knew about the Pearl Harbor attack before it happened. The accusation seems to have been made by people who knew (or who claimed they knew, after the fact) that Japanese messages, signaling the attack was imminent, had been successfully and completely decoded by the US military, and that the decoded messages had been tramsmitted to Washington.

From what's reported, it does seem that the code was successfully broken and the system for decoding individual messages worked just fine. There are two ways a claim that a secret message is hidden in a text might be false. There might be no real evidence that a message is present. The distribution of colors in a pattern is unlikely to conceal a message if they are distributed evenly. Or, there might be no way to prove a meaningful interpretation of the text or whatever is the true one. "No cats are grue" can mean anything.

One somewhat well-known example is the engraving at Shakespeare's burial site. Some people believe it contains a hidden message to the effect that Shakespeare's real identity was someone else, for example, Shakespeare's contemporary and fellow playwright, Christopher Marlowe. However, the argument that it does rests on the assumption that certain words in the inscription can be interpreted in certain ways, hundreds of years after they were composed, with absolute and conclusive certainty. A decent argument against that idea was put forward by William and Elizebeth Friedman in their book The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined. The Friedmans, incidentally, were involved in the effort to decipher those same Japanese codes. (And be warned: Their discussion, while well-argued and probably enlightening for a general audience unfamiliar with the subject matter, doesn't make use of the latest research.)

Then again, there is the possibilty that a real message is insignificant. It sounds like this is what happened with the Pearl Harbor message: the message was deciphered successfully, and interpreted successfully, but it was considered meaningless, and therefore the message was more or less thrown away.

This Blog Has Unquiesced

Mark Liberman at Language Log wonders about the origin of the unusual verb "quiesce," and gets some reasonable sounding feedback.

I suspect Liberman's colleague Arnold Zwicky is right -- in a sense -- that it's a backformation from the noun "quiescent," but I'm not sure this kind of formation is as unusual as he makes it sound.  I'd speculate the invention of the word could have happened something like this: the state machine for the protocol being used had a state for "quiescent"; it had a state transition to "quiescent" from some other states; a descriptive label was needed for the state transition; and the obvious label was then "quiesce."

A few commenters on the original post suggest this is somehow really, really weird.  One likens the invention of something useful by a computer scientist to an out and out miracle.  Another guesses that the invention of new technical terms is practically unique to only one corporation on the planet.  You get the sense that in the view of most people who read the blog, the way computer scientists normally work, think, and use language is psychologically extremely peculiar and probably even horribly ungrammatical (after all, everybody knows computer science is as far from "warm and fuzzy" fields like English as you can get).

How many people have to do a thing, and for how long, before it's not seen as pathological?

Science and Politics

David Frum recently published a letter sent to him by James Charles Wilson, an engineering professor at the University of Denver, on the politicization of science by Republicans.  (Yesterday he added a handful of responses sent to him by other conservative-identified scientists.) Professor Wilson suggests that at one time, when he was starting out, it was possible to be a “conservative scientist,” but that today, conservatives and Republicans are undermining science for illegitimate political purposes.

But what could it mean to be a “conservative scientist”? Individual scientists might be Democrats or Republicans, might run their office in a “conservative” or “progressive” manner, but as scientists they have no politics. Any particular lab or department will have both Democrats and Republicans working in it, just like any other workplace.

It’s understandable that some scientists who are conservatives feel their political beliefs are one with their work. When they advocate for science, they think of themselves as conservatives advocating on behalf of conservatism. They think of their opponents -- “the opponents of science,” whatever that means to them -- as “liberals.” But that’s culture war thinking. Not every conflict is a liberal/conservative conflict.

Here is what matters: Which party has more sensible policies with regard to the funding of science and to science education? Which party has more respect for the findings of scientists and for the consequences of science on policy in general? Which party has the kind of leadership that can encourage popular respect for science and for education generally? Frum’s Republican correspondents all suggest that party is the Democrats.

Frum has announced his plans to leave the National Review and to start a new site, presumably taking advantage of President-Elect Obama’s promise of bipartisanship. But I have to guess Frum’s real goal is to bring the Republican Party back from the brink within a decade or two. So I’d also guess he thinks (1) the Republicans can become the party I’ve just described, and (2) people who want to vote for this party can be won over from the Democrats. Maybe he’s right, but I don’t think so.