For The b(n)erds

You know how when you get only one hit on google search (including any hidden results), the corresponding search phrase is refered to as a "googlewhack?"I hereby introduce the logical successor to the googlewhack, the "blogwhack."

Everyone who has a blog takes a pride in seeing their site come up on a search engine. When your site comes up high in the search results, especially when it is number one, it is especially rewarding. Since for the majority, the only conceivable way of attaining this status is for the search to turn out a single result, the "blogwhack" is a vital commodity for any blogger's self-esteem.

The blogwhack is any search phrase that lands the user at your site, and ONLY your site. I will leave it to the more nerdily-inclined to come up with a scoring system. I leave as a suggestion that it take into account, along the lines of the googlewhack, the 1) commoness of the individual words as measured by the number of search hits they produce individually, 2) the number of words (the fewer the better). In addition, I think it should somehow take into account context (not sure how).

New Format

From now on, the format of my posting will be that short, succint, or topical posts will be posted with bold post headings, to indicate that they should be read as blog posts. Longer more involved posts, or posts on topics that are not typical to blogs will be posted without a heading, to indicate that they are to be read more as essays.

Stick to Foreign Policy

Nicholas Kristof has written an editorial demonstrating, with scientific precision, why New York Times writers should just not write about science. Actually, I would tell the paper to just stop trying to write on science altogether, and that there is no good reason for them to, but their science page can sometimes have impressive photos of other galaxies and things...

Let's start here:

Genes that promote spirituality may do so in part by stimulating chemical messengers in the brain like dopamine, which can make people optimistic and sociable - and perhaps more likely to have children.

The sentence that follows it, however should really be read in the original print so that the full impact of its absurdity can be appreciated:

(Dopamine is very complex, but it appears linked to both spirituality and promiscuity, possibly explaining some church scandals.)

Let's forget the fact that priests, and nuns, swear an eternal marriage to God, and have no sexual outlets. Like maybe that explains it a little more easily.

Anyway, the suggestion of the article, it seems, is that spirituality may be genetically determined.

One bit of evidence supporting a genetic basis for spirituality is that twins
separated at birth tend to have similar levels of spirituality, despite
their
different upbringings. And identical twins, who have the same DNA, are
about
twice as likely to share similar levels of spirituality as fraternal
twins.

Let me just give a quick version of my take on theories which assert the genetic determination of high-order social and psychological phenomena, and while it may be too ambitious for a simple blog entry, take it or leave it as it is.

Genes code for simple things. In particular, every gene codes for a specific protein which, when the gene is activated, is constructed in accordance

with the rules in the genetic code. This is true for every gene, no matter

what it codes for, no matter how complicated. Proteins have differing

target effects, and whatever their general effect on behavior is ascertained to

be, we ascribe that as the "function" of the gene. The key thing that must be

realized is that the things for which the manufactured protein has the most

direct effect, are the things for which we can say with most confidence that the

gene is "coding" for something. This is a simple matter of what we mean by

coding.

In popular parlance, it is said that such and such is a "gene

for autism" or a "gene for obesity." This is convenient usage, but it must not

be forgotten that what is really happening is that genes are coding for

proteins, which then have whatever effects they are going to have in the body.

It would be more correct to say that this gene codes for a protein which plays

as a factor in this bodily state. This may seem overly picky and unecessary,

when refering to things for which the route from the protein to the final bodily

effect observed is direct, such as simple physical traits. In many of these

cases, there can be isolated a single protein, and hence a single gene,

responsible for the observed phenomenon. For instance, blue eyes are the result

of a single pigment, whose production is moderated by a single gene (this result

is ficitious, but is provided for illustration). However, it is absolutely

essential to remember when dealing with complex and multifactorial traits the

true meaning of the process being refered to when one talks about this or that

gene.

Consider the factors that go into the creation of a complex

psychological and sociological phenomenon like spirituality. An astute response

to this challenge may be that the question is too broad, and that it only can be

answered in any partially satisfactory manner if some level of description is

specified. So consider the factors that go into the creation of this phenomenon

at the psychological or sociological level, the level most immediate to the

phenomenon of spirituality itself. For one, a person becomes spiritual if there

is a certain need in the person's life which can be fulfilled by spiritual

activity. A person may be seeking answers to large questions, may be seeking

comfort in some way, or may have the unfulfilled need for larger human

connections, all of which can be satisfied by spiritual life. Another factor is

the liking of the person for the spiritual experience in its worldly

incarnation. The person who is turned off by gatherings of large groups of

people which last for relatively long periods of time will tend not to gravitate

to going to church, and this may in turn influence their feelings towards

spirituality. Psychologically, you have many discrete, individually unrelated

factors which contribute to the making of spirituality. A person's ability for

abstract thought can predispose him to be able to understand the kind of

thinking that goes on in spiritual contexts, and conversely, a person who is not

able to grasp abstract thought can feel alienated from spiritual discourse, or

like it all appears meaningless so why bother. A person's sociability can

determine how willing he is to engage with large communities, which is a

prominent aspect of religious experience. Then on top of those you have social

factors, such as how able one is to get any of the aforementioned factors

fulfilled by activities other than religion. The need for meaning can be

fulfilled by finding an interesting field of study and engaging in that. The

need for social connection can be fulfilled by the presence of a close group of

good friends. If person finds fulfillment for a need via other outlets, that is

one less factor available to contribute to the development of spirituality.

In relating these first-order social and psychological factors, which

obviously are quite numerous by themselves, to the concept of the gene, the

chain of factors has to be continued into more and more basic levels of analysis

and causation. Hence, any given complex psychological factor such as, say,

sociability, can be reduced to its own set of more basic psychological factors,

such as disposition, extroversion, mood, conformism, etc. At some point,

presumably there is a threshold at which immaterial things such as psychological

and social considerations can begin to be reduced and attributed to material

things. Mood is reduced to the presence of certain neurotransmitters, activity

in certain parts of the brain, the presence of proper nutrient and energy

levels, the existence of certain hormones in the blood. The entire point of this

is to establish the role of causation of the genes. The chain continues for as

many levels as are necessary until the level of the encoded protein and its

function is reached, at which point it can be said meaningfully that a

particular gene takes is a factor.

The point is that for each additional

level in the chain of factors that can be attributed to a particular trait, the

causation becomes more indirect and more multifactorial, spread thinner over

more factors. For each additional level, the contribution of any given more

basic factor is less and less. This is not to say that all genes are not

determinative of behaviors. In theory, some may be. It is to say that, even though

they may be determinative in the development of certain behaviors or traits,

their determinative influence becomes increasingly indirect and manifold.

There is a certain philosophical issue that becomes relevant here. The

postulation of free will, depending on at which level of causation it is

posited, becomes a large and perhaps fatally complicating factor. Say that the

causal chain of factors, from protein up to prayer, is interupted by the fact

that so and so specifically wants to become a religious person. Maybe

it became a goal because that person read about a scientific study in which

religious people are purported to live longer and be healthier. There is no way

of accounting for this action, by the very definition of free will! It occured

independently of any kind of material cause. In fact, free will seems to mean

that it occured independently of any conceivable law. Therefore if you believe

in free will, it's hard to see that you should believe in genetic determinism

for any other than the most basic traits.

It should be obvious what therelation of this all to religion is. Religion is one of the most complex, higher-order things that exist. It's one of the most difficult things to relate directly to genetics. So, there comes a point when it's meaningless to say something is genetically caused.

However, this doesn't prevent it from making for a fascinating and important and

inspirational-sounding editorial... "It turns out that our DNA may predispose humans

toward religious faith" is a fascinating, but ultimately empty statement. Like

saying that DNA may predispose us to ride bicycles, or DNA predisposes us to

have friends. Of course DNA predisposes us to these things! In a sense, DNA predisposes us to do everything we do. But the farther away that thing is in causation from the actual activity of DNA, which is, basically encoding proteins, the less meaningful the statement becomes.

Blogged Her Hard

There's a new entry into the growing niche-blog scene. My classmate Dave Gottlieb has started a blog that consists entirely of "momma jokes." But be careful: everything is copyrighted under intellectual property laws.

The Other Side Of The Academic-Freedom Coin

In defending the right of Larry Summers to suggest that maybe there are innate differences in the cognitive strengths of men and women, I suppose that I am also beholden to defending the right of this guy, who is a tenured professor at the University of Colorado, to compare 9/11 victims to "Nazis."

In an essay, Churchill wrote that workers in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who ensured the smooth running of the Nazi system. Churchill also spoke of the "gallant sacrifices" of the "combat teams" that struck America.

It's cases like these that make the free speech issue really tough. On the one hand, people invoking the free speech clause usually do so under the assumption that their message is valid, and the truth is somehow being repressed. On the other hand, not everyone agrees on what constitues "valid" or "true," and so the right to free speech cannot be defined on these grounds. It seems that in order to function, the right to free speech must be absolute. Hence, when Noam Chomsky chooses to defend the French Holocaust Revisionist, he has every right to. (Actually, this case is a little more complicated, because Chomsky is actually defending someone else's right to free speech.) The repulsiveness or downright innaccuracy of the thing whose right to be publicized he is defending does not affect his right to defend it.

However, the way I see it, there is a countervailing factor here. And that is the force of public (or professional, or community opinion). Everyone has a right to say what they want, but complimentary to that, everyone else has a right, and even an obligation, to assign creedence as they see fit. The law does not dictate that people have to listen. This system strikes me as good because it allows for unfit statements or conclusions to be weeded out democratically, according to the opinion of the public, or the relevant community.

The problem here is that there is a distinct difference in the ability of communities of people to reach a consensus on the credibility or validity of a claim in the scientific communities versus the humanitarian communities. This is because scientific hypotheses are specifically constructed to be falsifiable, so that if they do not live up to a pre-agreed burden of proof, they are not considered as valid theories. Claims in the other half of academia, the humanities, are not subject to the same standards of rigor. Although something may not seem agreeable, perhaps to many people, there is no way to definitively say it is false. Anything conceivably can pass as "intellectually admissable." Hence there is potential for people to say many outlandish, offensive, or harmful things with no inborn mechanism by which the statement is automatically weeded out.

The real problem here is not that this professor is saying this, but that there are people listening. Ward Churchill is a tenured professor, and the chair of an entire department at a major university. Either he changed his modus opperendi dramatically since being hired, or some tenure committee made a really bad decision. Why are thousands of people attending his talks? The professor has the right to free speech, but this also means he has the right to take an extremely stupid comment back when he realizes how off-base it is. The fact that he's not, and he's standing by it, is extremely troubling. Even Larry Summers apologized for his remark. Our professor has pledged "I'm not backing up an inch."

Perhaps it is somewhat indicative of the current state of affairs in academia today that a scientist who suggests innate differences in the sexes might explain some factual data gets walked out on in disgust, and a tenured professor who compares the victims of a terror attack to genocidal exterminators is rewarded with audiences numbering into the thousands, and defended by the ACLU for his right to free speech.

Oren Cass must be beside himself on this one...

Attention - Public Service Announcement

I don't know what to say in response to that last entry, except for the fact that absolutely no one reads my blog so the message is bound to be wasted, and that the cause might be better served by reporting it to the Better Business Bureau.

Sad to see that Jung won't be blogging for a while. This makes blogging less fun for me, and I'm inclined to take a break until the summer as well. Note, though, that I'm exercising the proper courtesy here in clearly indicating that there won't be much updating going on in the next few months, so as to minimize inconvenience. It seems to me that standards of etiquette are hugely underappreciated in the blog world, and in the computer world in general. How hard is it to leave a short post so people will know you won't be posting for a while and not to check your blog? A partial explanation for this phenomenon is the anonymity factor. That is, the presence of standards of etiquette is inversely related to the degree anonymity. If you wanted to further the ethical analysis, you could draw the conclusion that this shows that etiquette - which is supposed to be an impersonal imperative - is actually very much dependent on personal factors.

But Adam, readers of this blog will undoubtably retort, you're an incredibly rude person online. This is true. I am guilty of impersonating other people, typing in annoying fonts, sending cryptic messages and generally annoying people at times. I am well aware that there are numerous people who treat me with much affection in real life who refuse to talk to me online for this very reason. Hopefully this is something that will go away with maturity, or with getting beyond seeing AIM as an inherently ironic medium. (Interesting side question: would I respond a similar way to the introduction of the telephone if I was alive for that era?)

I guess it would be appropriate to leave with a series of links to blogs that I read on a regular basis, in case anyone should land at my blog, looking for something to do.
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/
http://oxblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.andrewsullivan.com/ (sometimes)
http://yglesias.typepad.com/
http://athameblade.blogspot.com/
http://dfmoore.mu.nu/
http://www.orencass.com
http://www.amherst.edu/~dmgottlieb/

PC-Patrol, PC-Patrol

Everyone on the college circuit has been hearing about Lawrence Summers' recent controversial remark on innate differences in the sexes. The exact incident and statement are hard to reconstruct, but we can make a reasonable estimate as to what transpired. Summers was giving a speech at a meeting of economists adjourned for the purpose of researching issues relevant to women and minorities in science and engineering and, according to event organizers, "was asked to be provocative." He was invited to speak as a scientist and economist, not as a Harvard official. Therefore, his words are correctly interpreted as being stated within the interest of science by a scientist. In this light, you can do a fairly good job of reconstructing what was said and in what context. According to cnn.com, Summers suggested that "innate differences between the sexes could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers...[and] also questioned how great a role discrimination plays in keeping female scientists and engineers from advancing at elite universities." Additionally (all from CNN) he also cited the "possible factor that he cited was mothers' reluctance or inability to work 80-hour weeks."

The thing is, no one knows what the cause is. It's a hypothesis, stated by a scientist, at a conference of scientists, to discuss science. Although I'm personally inclined to disagree, lots of people speculate that it may be true, and no one has done enough research on it yet, so is it wrong to suggest that this area of scientific research be explored? Physical differences exist between men and women in the body, is it so unreasonable to suggest that they exist in the brain as well?

The reaction from inflamed PC patrollers is predictably absurd. "It is so upsetting that all these brilliant young women (at Harvard) are being led by a man who views them this way," says Nancy Hopkins of MIT.

Summers' own explanation is perfectly explanatory. From CNN:

I apologize for any adverse impact ... on our common efforts to make steady progress in this critical area.

I suppose the offended people would prefer that researchers not make progress in this area. But what makes this different from people trying to stop stem cell research for religious or political reasons? In this case I'm going to have to come down and say Summers did the honorable thing of putting his being a scientist before his being a University president in a politically-hypersensitive culture. I personally am extremely happy to see that someone like Summers as the head of a prominent university, because hopefully his example of putting fact before political correctness will make college culture a less annoying and unendurable thing for future generations of college students.

Update: Noted Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker (via Andrew Sullivan) says "First, let’s be clear what the hypothesis is—every one of Summers’ critics has misunderstood it. The hypothesis is, first, that the statistical distributions of men’s and women’s quantitative and spatial abilities are not identical—that the average for men may be a bit higher than the average for women, and that the variance for men might be a bit higher than the variance for women...Second, the hypothesis is that differences in abilities might be one out of several factors that explain differences in the statistical representation of men and women in various professions...Look, the truth cannot be offensive. Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is “offensive” even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don’t get the concept of a university or free inquiry." With the additional great line, "Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa."

Second Update: Here's a really interesting link to a "Ph.D" blogger who humbly has chosen to remain anonymous. "Well, I've got news for you, Larry. My son, whose father took him to see the first X-Prize launch, calls SpaceShipOne the 'Mama Plane' and the 'Baby Plane.' So I think maybe a little more research needs to be done on this topic before your darling daughter--who I'm sure was raised in a completely non-sexist environment (not)--can really serve as definitive proof that girls can't do math and science. Dumbass."

Reader Feedback

I got an interesting comment on my quick post on the gay marriage debate and I've been meaning to respond to it. It comes from a self-proclaimed evangelical who agrees with my speculation that the religious majority opposing gay marriage and other issues of interest to the gay community are doing so out of animus to the concept of homosexuality:

First, I think you are accurate when you suggest that a lot of people react to any advancement of the "gay rights" agenda out of sheer animus. I am an evangelical Christian, unashamed to say so, but it grieves me when I see this kind of thinking. I supported, for instance, President Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell"--unlike most of my evangelical friends, because to me it hit the right balance: why should homosexuals not be allowed to serve in the military if a structure is put into place whereby military readiness will not be compromised thereby? If you are homosexual, but no one knows it, it's hard to see how the military is compromised, such as studies have suggested it might be in the event this were known.

...

I think that evangelicals have lost credibility by opposing anything/everything that might in some way benefit homosexuals; I for one do not think that that is right or wise.

I can actually think of reasons why having even undisclosed homosexuals in the armed forces could compromise operational effectiveness. If part of the idea of keeping women out of the armed forces is to eliminate the distractions that come with the presence of romantic relationships among the soldiers (and I think this is a good reason) then the same can be said for homosexuals in the military. But I guess the "don't ask don't tell" policy presumes that the sexuality of the soldiers will be subsumed enough in service-type situations that the issue of any kind of relationships among soldiers, heterosexual or homosexual, will be non-existent.

The reader brings up the common issue of legislating morality, as it is called. He writes,

Further, I don't think it ought to be illegal for people to engage in homosexual sex. The fact that I consider it immoral doesn't mean it ought to be against the law. There are many things that are NOT immoral that are illegal (driving on the left side of the road) and others that are clearly wrong (lying to your boss) which shouldn't land you in court. Most evangelicals are against removing laws that prohibit homosexual sex, but I am not.

This brings to mind that there are possibly two ways that something can be "immoral." Something can be immoral on a personal level. Thus I may see someone as immoral because he eats dairy products with bacon, doesn't shower, and doesn't believe in a god. Usually, immorality in this way seems to derive from failure to live up to some kind of pre-conceived standard of personal behavior or criteria for the Good life. It lies in the individual failing to live up to a code of good behavior usually designed to ensure individual well-being. Then something can be immoral on a social level. Murder, theft and basically any kind of crime fall under this category. In this case the thing is immoral, or perhaps you could loosely translate as "bad," because of the way it is harmful to other people. Looked at this way, social immorality can be seen as a coercive social construct designed to ensure optimal social conditions.

What kind of morality should we legislate, if any? My gut feeling is that only morality that is based in social well-being is the kind of morality we should legislate. Without a doubt, many thinkers have mulled this very question over for ages. Perhaps Jung can give us a primer on the various philosophical attempts to answer this question.

Even using the assumption that morality of social consequence is the only thing we should ever legislate, the issue of gay marriage is not settled. My guess is that a good number of people who support legislation like the Marriage Ammendment do so not out of policy considerations or legal prudence, but rather as a moral reaction to homosexuality. Others, however, have genuine concerns about the social byproducts of something like gay marriage. A libertarian point of view would say that whatever people choose to do in the privacy of their own bedroom is free game, because as long as there is active consent involved it doesn't hurt anyone or anything else. A more institutional thinker can find ways in which gay marriage can affect the integrity of our society overall, whether it's via homosexuals seducing other people into their sinful lifestyle, contributing to the demise of family structure and familial values, or lowering the assessment of the human race in the eyes of God...any number of things. Conservative blogger and outspoken advocate for gay issues Andrew Sullivan has framed his entire argument for gay marriage around the issue of systemic social effects, and how instituionalizing gay marriage would actually be beneficial. He argues that instituting gay marriage will encourage the gay couples out there to be more monogamous and form stabler family structures, and that the lack of ability to marry is currently a big obstacle in the way of stability, family values, and moral values for the gay community. I tend to think that he's right, and that marriage would help to ameliorate some of the socially troublesome aspects of the gay community.

Other people foresee that the opposite would occur, and that legalizing gay marriage would diminish the strength of the institution of marriage. In one way or another, all these arguments seem to boil down to something about demeaning the fundamental sacredness of the covenant of marriage. If gays are allowed to marry, the argument goes, people will find the bond of marriage less sacred, and will be less willing to enter into marriage themselves, thus undermining the whole purpose of the institution. Of course for some people, homosexuality is fundamentally unsanctified. It's an unholy and depraved social phenomenon and its existence is an intrinsic social problem, end of story. If you suppose this, then it's inevitable that you would oppose legalization of gay anything, and I think the comment I received confirms that this is a very real rationale for a substantial portion of the country.

People can debate whether or not there is a personal moral failing in homosexuality, but of course this shouldn't dictate legislation. These matters are for good reason left to the religious institutions and the individual to decide. The Declaration of Independence says that every man should be free to pursue happiness, as long as he is not hurting anyone else. In philosophical terms, this means to me that government powers in the United States are intended to be limited to those issues with direct social ramifications. That is, I can't use the law against someone because they are a "bad person" but only because they have done something bad, in the sense of done something socially harmful. In practice, will this result in an any less moral world? Are we losing the opportunity to uphold morality? I don't think so. I mean, if someone is really a bad person, any social circle they encounter will shun them, the teachings of their religion and religious figures will attempt to correct them...there are plenty of ways for misguided people to "get the message" other than through government mandate.

Adam's House Of Whiskey And Jass Music

It's been a long time since I updated - I know. Fear not readers - this blog is still alive and kicking. So vacation is over. We're back in the school grind once again, which is interesting if you own a blog because of all the random hits coming in from frenzied students on some random last-minute research spree. Apparently, I've now become an "information source" (so all appropriations of information contained within this site must be formally cited) on turn-of-the century psychologists, along with some "Continental" (not sure if that's the correct terminology...) philosophers thanks to Jung (i.e. Arendt, Hegel, Locke). I've also learned that misspelling commonly misspelled words is an extremely good way to find a market niche as a struggling blogger, since search engines don't correct spelling automatically in their searches, only suggest alternattive spellings (I'll probably get ten additional hits for that misspelling alone.)

I've gotten into listening to jazz again (jass - it's authentic Creole, and it will score you some bonus hits -- pub ), and might begin to play it again somewhat seriously, which means playing with the express goal of getting better, not just to have fun. I took out a whole bunch of jazz CD's from the public library to blatantly illegally burn them onto my computer. Which reminds me of the following public service announcement: libraries are quite amazing and everyone should use them instead of bookstores. But back to the message. I picked up some Dizzy Gillespie big band, Dave Brubeck, and Wynton Marsalis. Anyone who knows anything about my personal opinions knows that picking up a Wynton ( how about 'Winton' - there's no standard spelling for "Wynton" anyway right?) Marsalis CD strongly violates my musical ethic, because Wynton is an annoying person, at least when he's speaking.

Among some of the more annoying things he has done was his work as the main musician interviewee and designated "creative consultant" for the PBS Ken Burns Jazz series, which ended up biasing the whole thing towards a) black people b) people who have never experimented with electronic instruments c) himself. Let's be fair. Black people should obviously get the large majority of the coverage in a documentary on the origin of jazz, since their cultural contribution is undoubtedly more than fifty percent of the art form. However, many whites made great contributions to jazz, including George Gershwin, Bill Evans, and Chick Corea (who's actually Hispanic...), although these greats were hardly mentioned. The project was essentially a statement on black oppression and slavery, which is a good and important message to emphasize in a development on the origins of jazz, but not as much as they did. On many occasions, jazz was referred to as "great black music," or something to that effect. I know this is a Ken Burn's documentary; therefore it is dumbed down a little bit. In fact I really wouldn't care if it were not for the fact that this kind of thinking is entirely consistent with Marsalis's very outspoken view of jazz as an ethnically supremacist music, if one can use the term.

Marsalis has cast himself as the protector and guardian of pure jazz, which is floundering amid all the experimentation with unholy forms of music and white people (Ok, I'm exaggerating the last part a little.. On numerous occasions in the documentary, he literally says only black people can play jazz. He routinely regards himself and possibly also his brothers as the greatest hope jazz has to "stay alive" in this terrible age of crisis. He discards entire branches of development in jazz as illegitimate.  Hence his personal and professional vendetta against Herbie Hancock, the far superior musician and artist, and his getting less than a minute coverage in the documentary. The great thing though is that, despite his tendency to deviate from orthodox jazz at times, at the end of the day Herbie Hancock is the one who has written scores of enduring jazz standards. Wynton is a good musician, great performer, questionable commentator, but he has contributed little to the art form creatively. In fact, even his albums are virtual recyclings of other musicians' arrangements of various songs.

The truth is he really has become, more than many other superior musicians, the face and voice of contemporary jazz, and he has filled the role quite effectively. At first glance it seems odd that someone with only modest contributions to jazz at best has arrived as it's most prominent public figure. But there are a few reasons I can think of for why this is:

• The first explanation comes from an observation that I've made repeatedly over time while playing with jazz musicians: for some reason, as a breed, jazz musicians are seriously inarticulate. I have no idea why this is. Wynton is highly verbal, articulate, and erudite, so he fills the void for spokesmen left in jazz quite nicely.

• The second is that good musicians would rather spend their time working on their art than talking about it. I'm sure he still gets some playing in there, but it's true that Marsalis has a kind of second job of professional spokesman for jazz. Other musicians either have different priorities or don't see that as the role for a musician.

• The third explanation is that jazz has deteriorated in some sense to the point where so little is going on creatively that a guy who talks a lot about how great jazz used to be becomes the modern day prophet. This is possible.

One other major thing that Wynton has going in his favor is his family name, of course. His father and several siblings are all respectable musicians and jazz figures in their own right. His brother the saxophonist Branford, is at least as good a musician in my opinion, and almost as well-known.

Anyway, I say all this because I just listened to a few of Wynton's latest CD's, and can recognize for the first time that he is really good. He's not very original, and doesn't write many good songs from what I can see, but his technical and musical skils are considerable. His music is probably the best example of what good contemporary jazz that hasn't changed style or done anything innovative in the last forty years should sound like. There's something about straightforward jazz with no frills that's easy on the ears and appealing. He definitely has something to teach about how to play so it's listenable.

...As a fairly bizarre aside, has anyone ever noticed how artists are always in the most unnatural poses on the cover of albums? It's like, they're either wearing absurdly reflective glasses and staring out into the distance in some direction, or looking at the camera with their arms in the most contorted, unnatural position, or something. If I ever made an album, I would just be staring right into the camera and smiling. Like Pee Wee Herman, but one level more cool. But it's not nearly as strange as most of the other album covers out there, if you really look at it...

Super Bowl Champs!

I know I'm three weeks early but that's the point. This way I get to take credit for correctly predicting that the Patriots will in fact be Super Bowl Champs.

Note: My personal affiliations and geographic location have nothing to do with my prediction. Absolutely nothing.

Not Self-Promotion

I'm on a kick of promoting HBO lately. If you don't get HBO, you can probably still download a fair number of these shows from somewhere.

If you watch any TV this year, make it "Da Ali G Show." Why? Because of lines like this:

"People has been reading books for millions of year. But did you know that, thanks to new techmology, they is now able to write them as well?"

"Is you so against abortion because you yourself were aborted?"

"Does you know how much money the film 'Lord of the Rings' has made? Literally, thousands of dollars."

"I is going to write president Bush's autobiography."

"Ain't fur coats the way out of the ghetto for some aminals?"

"So how many times is aminals really sick and how many times is they just faking it so them can get a day off work?

Let's Talk About Sex

I want to make this blog about more than just theory, and lately there has been a lot of it, so. I want to keep this blog accessible to the masses ("the masses" don't read your blog yet -- pub). More to the point, this post is a shameless attempt to get more girls to read and be interested in this blog. If you're a girl and reading, then this is your day (thanks to reader Jennifer [who is too cool to get her own blog] for her expert input on this subject). Even guys know about the show "Sex and the City." Even if you haven't watched it, chances are you are subjected to quotes from it on a fairly regular basis courtesy of your female friends who happen to be really big fans. I've watched the show. Not in a weird, "I'm obsessed with it" kind of way, just a few times out of curiosity. I mean, I don't like the show. I find it offensive, it's completely geared towards women, the morals it promotes are horrible, it does a better job objectifying men than Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition does objectifying women. All the guys are tools. The only things that are purported to matter are the stereotypical things a female would care about: how "successful" he is, is he an "eligible bachelor," does he have a big d*ng. It plays shamelessly to all kinds of stereotypes. But still, it's such a cultural phenomenon that you have to give it credit and wonder how it got to be so successful. Obviously I'm going to be getting most of this stuff wrong but...There a few things I can think of that account for this show's catastrophic success:

• It engages girl viewers with their sexual selves through its storylines telling of the sexual adventures of the main women characters, and as such is highly liberating. The premise of the show, which is women empowering themselves by having sex, offers a big escape from the usual stigma that says that for women to be interested in sex, they have to be slutty. This is the "why women like to watch it" theory.

• Alternatively, it gives men a window into women's sexual lives. This is the "why men might like to watch it" theory. On a purely sexual level, as a piece of...I don't know the word, pornography, erotic arts...the show is pretty pathetic. If you get the show at all, then that means you get HBO, which means that you might as well get Skinemax, which would be much better if that's what you're interested in. And its not as if the characters are "real," so no one's getting a voyeuristic kick out of it. But there is good reason to think that if so many women follow the show so religiously, how far from the truth in terms of the female psyche can it be?

• It's a good show. And by this I don't mean to say I like it. I mean to say it's well-written, well-cast, well-acted, well-shot. I'm no literature major, but I would be so bold as to say the characters seem well developed. The characters' parts are written very plausibly and realistically. The characters visibly go through changes on screen. The four different types of person embodied in the characters do a good job of representing the variety of female "types" out there. The acting is good. Personally, I think the Samantha character is hilarious. The actresses have a great on screen rapport.

• The message: it seems to be: "at the end of the day, your friends are who will be most important." Kind of the opposite of the "bros before hoes" doctrine. It's a very sweet message. That is all I have to say about that.

• It is somehow culturally very apposite at this point in time. I don't live in the big city so I don't know, but are good men hard to find in the city? Are gorgeous, successful women endlessly cycling through one-night stands? Have the women in New York City become so cynical romantically that they are going around indulging in meaningless and excessive sex with multiple partners on a (weekly) basis? If true, then perhaps I should reconsider my living arrangements. If partially true, then it would have great resonance with people out there if you made a show about it.

Any girls out there who would like to share their thoughts / feeling /experiences feel free to chime in. (No Jung, you don't count).

How To Succeed In Getting A Really Good Workout Without Even Trying

Interesting experience today. So I decided to go cross-country skiing up in a local forest right around the time it was starting to get dark, around 4:00 or so (bad idea -- pub). Halfway along the trail, to my surprise, I saw another person walking on the trail a few hundred feet ahead of me. Now at this point I was becoming a little cautious because he might have been someone sketchy, and it is kind of strange to see someone just walking alone in the snow in the woods. But I hopefully assumed that it was just some old guy going out for a stroll or something.

But not only was he a sketchy townie type (long hair, unshaven, hunting jacket, crazy expression in his eyes), but he was also carrying a clearly real and presumably loaded gun. I was more than a little concerned, for one because this isn't hunting season, so I just nervously asked him what he was hunting, and he told me he was looking for coyotes, but didn't expect to find any. Then he reassured me that he "wouldn't shoot [me]. Or anyone else for that matter." Not exactly the most comforting reassurance. But I was just as civil as I could be and then hauled ass with this potentially psychotic guy carrying a loaded gun at my back. Needless to say, it was a great workout getting to a place where the trail split so I could get out of there.

On a more serious note though, being alone with your back to someone you don't entirely trust holding a loaded gun gave me a taste, however minute, of what it's like for these soldiers in Iraq who are faced with the prospect that the guy next to them on the street could be an enemy who's going to shoot them or blow them up. It's a tough situation to be in and I respect all those who are putting themselves in harm's way to serve.

Here's An Answer

Apparently the top-grossing Christmas Day film of all time is "Meet the Fockers" (which I in fact also went to see on Christmas Day; review unavailable). In typical journalistic fashion, Msnbc offers a few possible explanation for why this is.

• "'Meet the Fockers' succeeded in part because of an aggressive ad campaign..."
• "[it coincided with] the release of the DVD of the original 'Meet the Parents...'"
• "[it features] the return of Streisand to the big screen after an eight-year absence..."
• "It captured the clash between families, which resonates at the holidays..."

However, I believe there is a simpler explanation. "Meet the Fockers" was about the clash of families from two different religious backgrounds, and Ben Stiller's whole family was jewish. Seeing that Jews compose the major component of the market for going to the movies on Christmas Day, I think that this fact is the most obvious explanation for why the movie grossed so highly. And it is clear that releasing "Meet the Fockers" on Christmas day was quite a smart move on the part of the movie's producers.

More Philosophy

I want to do a post clarifying what I said earlier about the intellectual arcaneness and sometimes outright obfuscation that is found in many so-called "academic" or "intellectual" pieces of writing, notably philosophy. I also want to resond to what Jung said: "It's nearly impossible to make any progress in thinking while trying to make everything accessible and clear," and "it's just that it's unbearably stifling to the process of thinking to explain the history behind every word they use before they use it."

First of all, the problem with many so called "intellectual" works is not so much that the authors don't explain the full relevant history of every word used, or for that matter that they do explain the history of words they use, or that they write words in shorthand for concepts that have been elaborated much more thoroughly elsewhere. The problem is using strange words or phrasings that no one but a few philosophers or scholars of philosophy would know or care to know, writing in interminable run-on sentences, using semicolons every few lines. Let's face it. Philosophy is often written in a very obscure style that's just plain hard to read.

But Jung argues that such presentation is necessary, given the nature of the task and subject. Fair enough. I can evaluate that claim on its face. There are two reasons why I could see this would be true. One is that the concepts are so abstract and difficult that attaining a solid grasp of them is impossible. The second is that the concepts are so abstract and difficult that even when understood, expressing them in consise and simple form is impossible - that is, something is lost conceptually in the translation. The first case is plausible. No one "knows" what justice is. People can only speculate about it, or when trying to define it, conceive it in the most vague and abstract terms. But it still isn't clear to me that the kind of obscurity you see in philosophy comes from a fundamental fuzziness about the underlying ideas. The second case seems to me to be a case of plain pretension. It's saying "Oh, look at me. I'm so smart that ordinary language can't even do justice to the exquisite, subtle complexity of my thoughts." It's a well known fact that entire schools of philosophy developed the habit of writing in abstruse prose as a kind of badge of intellectual heft. On the other hand, plenty of good philosophers wrote simply and clearly. William James is one. Nietzsche is another. I think it's only honest to face the fact that for all its merits, philosophy has a problem, and that problem is elitism and intellectual obscurantism.

I can already hear the counterargument saying that philosophy needs its own jargon because it is a specialized subject dealing with specialized issues. I think it's important to make a distinction between jargon and pseudo-jargon. It's true that in proper discursive fields, terminology is inevitable. New terminology is necessary to represent and communicate unique ideas. Some fields really are so distinct from anything else that they require their own whole new language to facilitate communication. A good example is something like, say, the hard sciences. There is no colloquial correlate to "vector" or "proton." Hence the new word is created to serve a fundamental purpose. Then there are other branches of learning that seem to like to define things that have already been defined because they want to be a science too! To take psychology as an quite fertile example: did you take care of your conatative self today? Conatative happens to be nothing more than the psychological word for "emotional," so why do we need it? I don't know. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, but I can't think of them, probably because they're insubstantial.

To relate this to philosophy, take Kant's "Categorical Imperative," for example. Would anything have been lost if he had simply called it the "Golden Rule," especially considering that the very idea of the Golden Rule existed long before Kant came into existence? Feel free to argue with me on this, but I'm going to venture nothing would be different. For every philosopher I'm sure there are multiple examples similar to this one. I'm not faulting Kant, or philosophy for being this way, and here's what I wanted to clarify about my other post. We look to philosophy for great intellectual acheivements, and as such, we expect philosophy to be highly intellectually charged and formidable pieces of work. Philosophy provides the intellectual world the equivalent of the fine arts. In addition to what they say, we appreciate great works of philosophy simply because they are great and they exist. They are intellectual showpieces, or momuments of human acheivement. Asking philosophy to write in layman's terms would be like asking an orchestral composer to write a symphony for kazoos. For this reason, I can appreciate philosophy for what it is: sometimes profound, most of the time just inspiring. Like fine art, philosophy takes a certain highbrow approach that will require you to rise up to its level. There's nothing wrong with a highbrow approach, and some of these works of philosopher are great masterpieces. But just don't go thinking that every piece of philosophy has the most profound, useful, thoughtful answers of anything in the world. And don't be fooled into thinking that expositions of thought need to be written in an obscure, inaccesible fashion.

Just A Thought On An Ongoing Debate

Just a quick thought that may have something to add to the ongoing debate on gay rights. This thought just went through my head, so for what it's worth, I'm going to take a minute to write it down here.

Let me begin by saying I honestly don't know what I think the right answer is to many of the current debates involving gay rights, i.e. legalized marriage, civil unions etc.

But I wonder how many people opposing any measures that would afford civil gains for homosexuals and homosexual couples oppose it out of a kind of reflexive sense of justice. What I mean is the kind of thing where somebody has done something wrong, and you don't want to do anything that would benefit or make life more pleasant for them. Opposing something because it benefits a party you deem as reprehensible is sound ethics, in principle. As an example, most people would be against providing convicted criminals with lavish and luxurious living arrangements, and are repulsed whenever stories to that effect are exposed, because criminals don't deserve these things. I, for one, am against providing convicted criminals with comforts and luxuries such as golf courses and TVs in their cells, not for fiscal reasons, but because I think criminals don't deserve to live as comfortable a life in prison as they would be living in the real world had they not been convicted of a crime.

Some people, and a fairly substantial number I would assume, oppose the advancement of certain gay rights causes on the basis of law, policy, or principle (although the latter is hard to define). All these considerations are valid and should be freely debated. On the other hand, how many people oppose gay rights causes because they oppose homosexuality and see any kind of concession as capitulation to it? There's something wrong with this position in my mind. It scares me that there may be a real religious (or perhaps just profoundly ethically driven) majority that opposes all these gay rights causes simply because they feel it in keeping with just principles of punishing (or at least discouraging) a vice.

When Bush was asked if he thought homosexuality was a choice in the third debate he answered that he didn't know. I thought this was a great answer, because I myself don't know the answer, and I don't think anyone knows the answer. But here's the thing, if no one can say whether it's a choice or not, how can you at the same time definitively say it is wrong? This may seem unclear, but let me make a parallel to an aspect of our criminal justice system. If someone is accused of a crime, they are generally considered culpable UNLESS they can prove that their actions were not a choice. This can be established under many guises. They may have been acting in self-defense, and hence it was not a choice but a matter of live or death. They may have been insane at the time and not able to make choices. They may have been acting out of passion, and the criminal justice system is significantly less harsh in dealing with these criminals.

If homosexuality ISN'T a choice, that it is something that someone is either born with, fated to develop, in their makeup etc., then all (or at least some major) arguments that it is wrong lose their foundation, and this in turn invalidates any opposition to gay rights causes that is based on the rationale of vice punishment. Moreover, it's important to realize that a fundamental function of retributive policies is that they are coercive. That is, someone who is likely to experience negative consequences for doing something is less likely to choose to do that thing. Yet if homosexuality is fundamentally not a choice, a retributive policy, or perhaps put a little more mildly, a policy that makes being homosexual less attractive, will not prevent people from becoming homosexuals. That is, it won't work.

This doesn't settle the debates. As I said before, there are legal, social, and religious factors and arguments that have a legitimate place in the debate, and should not be discounted. I myself am not fully decided on many of the issues yet. But I think this analysis might have something to contribute

On (Permanent) Vacation

Here's a quick thought. One of the good things about being on a computer late at night is that you get to have first dibs on the soap-opera that is currently the New York Times editorial page. But today the editorial page is telling me that David Brooks, who of all the columnists has the greatest potential to produce something entertaining, is on vacation. Two questions: what exactly is Mr. Brooks doing that necessitates taking a vacation? Writing a 300 word column twice a week? Second, what exactly is Mr. Brooks doing on his vacation that prevents him from writing and turning in a 300 word column? It might be that either he has to be in his office to produce his column for some reason (which is kind of strange), or that he spends so much time on his column that it would seriously cut into his vacation time to produce it (which is kind of pathetic). I guess all that defending your "conservative" viewpoint can get pretty tiring after a while...

Don't Say I Didn't Warn You

People who know me know I'm not a big literary analysis type, and even less a poetry type. But I just started getting back into Billy Joel and, for the sake of promoting my own personal tastes, which let's face it is what a blog is for right, I want to share my excitement while engaging in a very crude and possibly incorrect lyrical analysis during the next few days.

I've always felt that if something needs to be said, then the most effective way to communicate it is in plain language. I'm still not big on indirect forms of communication, but some songs are just good. Now that I've been personally introduced to good singer-songwriter music through the music of my friend Dan and this new Billy Joel phase, I'm beginning to see that a good song is good because of the way it encapsulates a state of mind, and so almost comes to form its own little temporary world that the listener can enter into. This I feel is how the best vocal music comes about, across a wide range of genres, and it is notably missing in today's pop vocal music.

I've never given much creedence to interpretive or lyrical analysis and it's a skill I'd like to develop some more, this blog being the appropriate place to do it. So expect me to post some song lyrics and a few comments on why I think they're so good relatively soon.

On topic, there's a song lyric-style op-ed today by Maureen Dowd, so why don't I start with some commentating on that:

On the first day of Christmas,

my Rummy sent to me

a Saddam pigeon in a palm tree...

That's the beginning. There are ten more verses...you get the idea. Now this would be terribly cute if it weren't for that fact that - and maybe I'm wrong on this... it sucks. Oh well.

Rest In Peace

I was deeply saddened to hear today that David Brudnoy, host of the David Brudnoy Show on WBZ radio, died yesterday. I was personally a big listener on his program, and loved every minute of it. He was the most humane, intelligent, candid talk show host out there. I was also greately impressed by the strength with which he faced and battled his HIV infection and cancer. I hope this won't be too insufficient a tribute to a fine man.

101 Ways of Rumsfeld

If anyone's ever seen the "Rumsfeld Fighting Techniques" comedy site you'll know what I'm talking about; I think this photo, taken from today's Times, would make a worthy addition:

Of course the official name is up for debate, but I like "Demolition Lobster!"

Procrastinating With Fake Polls

It's finals time, and as everyone knows, it can be stressful. A student health awareness packet I picked up off the street told me that doing things that I enjoy can be helping in relieving stress. For me, one of those things is shooting ideas off the top of my head. In an earlier post, I left as an intellectual exercise to the reader coming up with a list of poll questions as intellectually bankrupt as possible. I'm going to take a shot at coming up with my own here; the reader is warned they will be of varying degrees of funniness.

Where is Osama Bin Laden right now, Pakistan or Afganistan?

follow-up poll next day: Where is Osama Bin Laden right now, Saudi Arabia or Iran?

In your opinion, according to Barry Bonds' doctors, is Barry Bonds taking steroids, yes or no?

In your opinion, according to Barry Bonds' conscience, is Barry Bonds taking steroids, yes or no?

In your opinion, is the universe expanding, yes or no?

Is it your opinion that evolution is true, yes or no?

In your opinion, does the hypotenuse of a right triangle squared equal the first leg squared plus the second leg squared, yes or no?

Is Osama Bin Laden responsible for the 9/11 attacks, or not?

In your opinion, does George Bush give a crap about political opinion polls?

Anyone reading this should leave their own suggestions in the comments section.

Finally Telling It Like It Is

I'm officially off-duty on this blog, but let me just peek my head in and make note of something that bears repeating. Timothy Burke, an academic, writes "The same forces that help academics to produce knowledge and scholarship are the forces which produce unwholesome close-mindedness and inbred self-satisfied attitudes." Ah, so refreshing to finally hear someone say it. And an academic no less.

He gives a bit of a justification for specialization in academia, though in my view this misses the point:

If tomorrow I persuaded my colleagues that the next job that opened in the humanities in Swarthmore should not be dedicated to any particular discipline or research specialization, but thrown open to the most interesting, fertile intellect we could recruit, I would be persuading my colleagues to join in an impractical catastrophe that would involve trying to winnow a field of 25,000 applicants down to a single person.

The real reason I would argue is that there's so much knowledge out there that specializing is simply a matter of efficiency. But the question reveals something important by the way it is phrased. The idea of awarding an academic position on the basis of having an interesting, fertile intellect is posed as a sort of absurd hypothetical. This is very revealing. Because it's true, in many institutions of higher education, positions aren't filled on the basis of intellect at all but rather on the basis of who is best able to supply the desired specialized credentials, or who fits the narrow, often arbitrarilly drawn disciplinary mold best. I'm not saying humanist scholars shouldn't specialize. That's like saying we shouldn't have specialized professionals in our economy - this of course would be hugely inefficient. I'm saying that if you choose to fill positions based on who can best specialize, you're going to get...a bunch of people who can only communicate with specialists.

The peer review that instructs me to come inside a canon so that I can be understood by an audience of comparable specialists quickly becomes the peer review that cracks the whip to force me inside a political orthodoxy.

More accurately, I would say, it's the peer review that demands that any piece of new knowledge or research produced by academics be so arcane and provincial that only another specialist in the same sub-sub-pseudo-discipline would be capable of understanding it or caring about it, and which would brand anything else as "unscholarly" or "queer." This problem of overspecialization and provincialism is particular to the humanities. I'm not saying the science academy isn't quite specialized these days either - it is. The difference is that scientists need to specialize because only a few people are capable of understanding the work (due to issues including aptitude, differences in scientific terminology / methods that are necesitated by the wide variations among scientific domains) whereas humanities academics specialize because they want to feel like only a few people can understand their work. In other words, science basically has an excuse for when it is accountable to only itself because of the considerable learning curve associated with acquiring the fundamentals of most modern scientific specialties. Moreoever, even the most arcane science becomes relevant whenever its findings contribute to the betterment of our society, technologically, medically, or ecologically (which is often) - REGARDLESS of how arcane the actual science involved may be. Can arcane humanities disciplines claim any kind of similar contribution? If the mainstream of humanities academia wants to contribute anything meaningful to society it out to rethink its entire orientation and consider producing ideas, concepts or analyses of general - not just academic -value, social, intellectual or moral.

It's An Old Book But It Still Applies

I've been reading this book online recently written by a pyschologist in the early 1900's. It's a devastating review of the whole system of education of the time, but I think some of it still applies today. Here are some passages of interest, but really you should read the whole thing.

There are a lot of passages of general insight:

WE are stock-blind to our own barbarities; we do not realize the enormities of our life and consider our age and country as civilized and enlightened. We censure the faults of other societies, but do not notice our own. Thus Lecky, in describing Roman society, says: "The gladiatorial games form indeed the one feature which to a modern mind is most inconceivable in its atrocity. That not only men, but women, man advanced period of civilization,―men and women who not only professed, but very frequently acted upon a high code of morals―should have made the carnage of men their habitual amusement, that all this should have continued for centuries with scarcely a protest, is one of the most startling facts in moral history. It is, however, perfectly normal, while it opens out fields of ethical inquiry of a very deep, though painful, character."

Interesting to think about... Another interesting insight which relates the education of individuals to the previously accumulated progress of the species actually touches on the view I came up with and wrote about in an earlier post about culture:

The well known biogenetic law may, with some modifications, be applied to mental life. The development of the individual is an abbreviated reproduction of the evolution of the species. Briefly put: Ontogenesis is an epitome of Phylogenesis. This biogenetic law holds true in the domain of education. The stored-up experiences of the race are condensed, foreshortened, and recapitulated in the child's life history.

A good point on the fear of elitism which currently exists in our schools, thereby branding gifted programs as politically incorrect, while at the same time putting huge allocations of funds away for special education programs:

In levelling education to mediocrity we imagine that we uphold the democratic spirit of our institutions. Our American sensibilities a-re shocked when the president of one of our leading colleges dares to recommend to his college that it should cease catering to the average student.

There's also lots of great, admirably ascerbic alarmist rhetoric:

I ASSUME that as liberal men and women you have no use for the process of cramming and stuffing of college-geese and mentally indolent, morally obtuse and religiously "cultured" prigs and philistines.
...
The savage compresses the skull of the infant, while we flatten the brain and cramp the mind of our young generation.
...
We trust our unfortunate youth to the Procrustean bed of the mentally obtuse, hidebound pedagogue. We desiccate, sterilize, petrify and embalm our youth in keeping with the rules of our Egyptian code and in accordance with the Confucian regulations of our school-clerks and college mandarins. Our children learn by rote and are guided by routine.
...
We piously sacrifice our tender children and the flower of our youth to the greedy, industrial Moloch of a military, despotic, rapacious plutocracy.

I'm pretty sure that the situation is not as bad in most places today as the one he describes. Still I have to admit to finding a lot of truth in what he writes.

Not long ago we were informed by one of those successful college-mandarins, lionized by office-clerks, superintendents and tradesmen, that he could measure education by the foot-rule! Our Regents are supposed to raise the level of education by a vicious system of examination and coaching, a system which Professor James, in a private conversation with me, has aptly characterized as "idiotic."
Our schools brand their pupils by a system of marks, while our foremost colleges measure the knowledge and education of their students by the number of "points" passed. The student may pass either in Logic or Blacksmithing. It does not matter which, provided he makes up a certain number of "points"!

Now, obviously it's very difficult to think of a practical alternative to running schools by giving examinations, awarding grades, and counting credits...But I've always felt the system is imperfect because it does nothing to encourage initiative in learning, aside from whatever advantage having initiative in learning could confer in the way of earning good grades. What's rewarded is not how well you can apply what you know in an original way, which is in reality what leads to productivity outside of the classroom setting, school being quite unique in the context of larger life in rewarding narrow learning and memorization. The system probably needs to be structured as it is for practical reasons, but the saving grace is when individual teachers work independently to inspire students to see the world of inquiry and original application associated with what they're teaching beyond the books, assignments and pedagogy. There are a lot of good, inspiring people with an understanding of the individual aspect of learning at the teaching level. Or at least I've been fortunate to have encountered many throughout my education.

I have to say I pretty much totally agree with the following description of the purpose of education, provided at the very beginning:

I also assume that as men and women of liberal education you are not limited to the narrow interests of one particular subject, to the exclusion of all else. I assume that you are especially interested in the development of personality as a whole, the true aim of education. I also assume that you realize that what is requisite is not some more routine, not more desiccated, quasi-scientific methods of educational psychology, not the sawdust of college-pseudogogics and philistine, normal school-training, but more light on the problems of life.

Indeed. I don't know why it's so hard to find a coherent statement to that effect (ok, maybe not as ascerbic...) put out by the leading educational institutions or educational authorities of the day.

Listen! Buy!

I would like to direct my readers to a new album put out by my friend Dan. If I had to compare it to anything I would compare it to Stevie Wonder, but you should listen to the samples yourself. I would be surprised if anyone who likes music doesn't like this album.

What Kind Of Equality?

Swarthmore professor Tim Burke asks the important question "what kind of equality?" There is equality in the sense of equal opportunity, which may of course end up resulting in actual economic inequalities, or a reduction of the distance between rich and poor, or a more absolute rigid egalitarianism.

Disregarding the normative natural right justification as pseudo-religious and just generally unsound, there are still reasons why inequality is desirable. I would never wish for absolute equality. As I said before, a certain amount of inequality provides positive incentives for risk-taking and provides a healthy social outlet for the expression of ambition and competitive urges.

However, I think that common sense tells us that the effect is subject to highly diminishing returns. Someone ought to do a real psychological study testing the effect of different levels of incentive on effort, ambition and productivity. But without even having access to the study, I think it's clear what the results would be, and why they would turn out that way. Productivity can't be a linear function of incentive. For one, the conclusion is preposterous because it presumes that the workers have unlimited capacity to work harder as wealth disparities grow ever greater. Is this realistic? Does the average worker even have the ability to produce at 5, 10 or greater times an observed baseline level, which would represent the ratio of highest to average wealth roughly? If resources are in fact limited, not only would there be an upper ceiling beyond which a person simply cannot respond with increased productivity, the productivity function will almost certainly have diminishing returns. This is not a matter of incentive, it's a matter of resources - psychological or economic. Consider the following thought experiment:

Assume that x times the disparity in wealth equals x times the incentive - though in reality it's probably less. Psychologically, how would you expect someone with limited resources working relativity close to capacity to respond to a doubling of the (internal) incentive? I think the intuitive answer is that it would take into account how close to capacity the person is. That is, the response will be to increase their utilization of resources by some fixed fraction of their remaining resources.

To put it a little more formally, say M is the maximum level of resources, or the total reserve of resources. Presumably people start working at a reasonable fraction of their total capacity, say B. Then, the total increase in resource utilization corresponding to a doubling of incentive is f(M-B) where f is some fixed fraction. Any value of f could correspond to a given multiplication in the incentive; I guess you could say it reflects the sensitivity of a person in responding to incentives. The next doubling of incentive will result in f(1-f)(M-B), the next f(M-B - f(1-f)(M-B) - f(M-B)) = f(1- f(1-f) - f)(M-B) = f(1-f)^2(M-B). Or, for n doublings of incentive, the marginal contribution to productivity will be f(1-f)^n(M-B), which gets very small very quickly.

Perhaps you don't like this model because you think that how people respond to incentives does not depend on how close to their maximum working capacity they are. This is a psychologically plausible position. Then you have a situation where people exhaust their resources, presumably after a short period of time. The practical implications of this are that there will be a definite ceiling beyond which increases in incentives do not lead to any corresponding increase in productivity. If this is the case, beyond this point there wouldn't be any utilitity, in terms of motivation, in having greater inequality of wealth at all. In the first case, there would be greatly diminishing reason to promote greater inequality of wealth as it gets higher. Either way it seems like a losing policy.

This seems to mean that great differences in wealth have no motivational function; the motivational rationale for economic inequalities becomes null very quickly. So this would lead me to believe that some degree of inequality is beneficial, but only in small amounts.

Equality of opportunity is a harder thing to work out on its own. People who have more resources naturally are going to have an advantage over people with less resources in a capitalist system. There are actually a whole bunch of "scientific" justifications for supporting policies that perpetuate economic advantages through families. Suffice it to say that I think they're all bad, in both senses. So I think equality of opportunity is something we should strive for. The answer to me seems to be that in keeping actual inequality to a minimum, the playing field of opportunity will stay level also. Radicalization of starting points, aside from being prohibitively impractical, would probably not even be desirable, because it probably would lead to a situation little different from the current one. This is not to say that we are doing a perfect job ensuring equal opportunity, just that an equal opportunity scheme would also probably lead to great inequalities if left untempered.

Manifesto Continued

I know you've been anxiously awaiting the rest of my manifesto loyal readers. Here it is, in all it's humble glory:

Partisanship should be the means not an end. What do I mean by this? Generally, the more people consider themselves beholden to a particular party, the more the members of the party adhere to a kind of groupthink which is governed by the rules of mob psychology rather than rationality. I know that sounds rather alarmist but let me explain. When there is absolute conformity, conditions become especially conducive to autocracy. When conformity is a given, arbitrary forces or a single influential leader can sway entire bodies of followers whichever way and they will not dissent. Entire well-developed and respectable nations have made disastrous choices this way because of singular allegiance to a bad idea in the name of country, ideology, even science. The genius of the constitution is that it allowed free speech and dissent to flourish so that autocracy, whenever and wherever it may appear, can be freely dissented. On the other hand, there's nothing systematic about fascism (total conformity) that necessitates an autocrat, yet ever major instance of fascism in history has been accompanied by a dictatorship, which should tell you something.

If you believe in the wisdom of self-correcting systems you naturally think this prospect is terrible. The real value of partisanship, as it was actually explained to me by one of my peers, is in enhancing one's personal political influence through coalition-building. If you're willing to support multifold agendas within a party, it's more likely that the ones you care about will come through also. Compromise is going to have to happen at some point, whether it's at the individual or the group level. As far as I'm concerned, this is the origin of good partisanship.

I've been thinking a little more on the inequalities of wealth thing, and another argument that could be made for it occured to me. That is, it is a natural right for me to make more money than you; it is the natural right of every person to make as much money as they want and are able to even if it means making much more than the next guy.

Natural rights are always very fuzzy concepts. For instance, couldn't the case just as persuasively be made that it is everyone's natural right to be treated as an equal? There are various religious / ethical lines of thought that could justify including some form of equality as a natural right. On the other hand there are solid philosophical and scientific underpinnings to claiming that the opposite is a natural right - or perhaps it could be put a bit more neutrally, a natural law. Any scientific findings that support the conclusion that there are differences among people in terms of abilities are absolutely devastating to the natural law case for equality, and there is very much such evidence. People differ in terms of aptitude, and even in a non-economic setting, inequalities in ability, status, hierarchy are going to exist. Furthermore, the theory of evolution is predicated on the existence of inequalities. The fit flourish while the unfit are selected out, and the result is a net good, considered from the perspective of the species as a whole, taking this as the assumed operative unit. So there is much in nature that reflects an unegalitarian scheme.

But here's why I'm not convinced by this argument: for every argument that humans should do something or be allowed to do something because it is natural, there is a corresponding argument of a very different nature, that humans should not behave a certain way, or conduct affairs a certain way, because it is primitive and is fit for the brutes, not a species as elevated and refined as humanity. And the second argument is always equally compelling. For instance, would anyone argue that humans should strive to govern in the same way as a pack of wolves? Should instant violent retribution without due justice process be allowed because it is exhibited in various species of beasts? Everyone would argue that these things shouldn't be permitted precisely because they are characteristic of the lower animals.

When it comes down to it, the natural right and negative natural right arguments seem so evenly weighted that I'm inclined to ignore the rationale altogether and say the categorization of natural is inconsequential to how things should be. And I think this makes sense for any rational person. It essentially involves a leap of faith to make the jump from a descriptive scheme to a normative arugment. Who's to say that just because something occurs naturally, that means it should be. There is no logical connection there, only a faith in an falsely santified entity that can be refered to as Nature. Blind faith isn't how rational people should make decisions.

Welcome Jung!

I'll be taking a break for a month so because I have both schoolwork and planning-related issues and don't want to be tempted to procrastinate as much. But taking over for me will be Jung, who I'm sure has an interesting perspective on lots of topics. I may post a thing or two after this, but enjoy the break and expect me to be back at the end of the semester.

If A Tree Falls In A Forest...

...does an arbitrageur care? Or something like that. I've been big on the academic-style posts lately, and this post is no exception. Today's topic is economics. Here's a question from the MA exam in economics given at George Mason University:

You can't take it with you. A private owner of a natural resource, like a forest, therefore, will want to clear-cut the forest before he dies in order to maximize his consumption stream (assume the owner has no children or other bequest motive). True or False. Explain.

A George Mason professor provides the answer as follows:

False. The owner can sell the forest. As a result, the owner of a forest has an incentive to continue to seed it even if seeds planted today won't produce trees until after the owner is dead. The same idea applies to any long-lived productive asset. I think this insight is very beautiful. It's precisely the fact that the forest is owned that gives the owner an incentive to take into account how other people value the forest.
The basic logic doesn't require perfect competition or fully efficient markets but if these assumptions do hold then the private owner will choose investment decisions exactly as would a "social planner."

I think I understand why the author chose a natural resource like a forest to illustrate the principle he was trying to get across (because it's tragic when forests are cut down! [pub -- he's expressing his sincere feelings here]), but I don't think it's the best choice of example for this question.

But first, there's an interesting aside to this question that I want to ask: does the logic imply that the forest will always be reseeded in the interests of enhancing its value to the next owner, or will it eventually be cut down by one of its owners? This has important consequences because no one likes it when forests are destroyed! (pub -- better - much more convincing.) I think the answer is that the forest will eventually be clear-cut by an owner, or in other words, there exists a circumstance in which the owner has incentive to clear-cut the forest rather than maintain it. Here's why I think this is:

The essential insight of the answer is that the value of the forest to the owner equals its value on the market (or to the highest bidder among future owners of the forest). Since future owners will be able to produce much more profit out of the forest over the course of their lives than an owner near the end of his life will, it will be worth more to them than to the owner, and thus the owner has an incentive to maintain the forest rather than harvest it for his own profit. Normally, the productive potential of the forest to a future owner will be greater than the actual saleable value of the forest to the current owner who has limited time left in which to transform the forest's product into profits.

But say that its value on the market is declining because, say, the demand for houses has decreased (there will be a natural delay between a decline in the demand for wood and a decline in the value of the forest because of imperfect information and the time it takes information to be transmitted). If the rate of decline in the value of the product of the forest is sufficiently great, and is expected to stay that level for the lifetime of the next generation of owners, the profit to be derived from harvesting the entire forest right now will be greater than the potential profitability of the forest to the future owner (or arbitrageurs or series of arbitrageurs, etc.) This makes sense because:

1) It takes time for the purchase to be completed and for the forest to change owners, time during which the value of the forest will further decline.

2) A steadily declining value for the forest takes away a major incentive for purchasing it: that is purchasing it for its continued profitability over an extended period of time.

Put another way, if the forest's greatest value is projected to be the value of its produce right now, why would anyone want to purchase it?

Such an answer assumes that long-term information is not perfect, which is a realistic assumption for the real world I think. If long-term information were perfect (long-term meaning for the purposes of this problem: knowledge of the future value of the forest beyond the lifespan of a single owner), then arbitrageurs would be willing to buy the forest in the intermediate term, even when the price is declining rapidly, with the aim of selling the forest back to forest industry people when demand for wood goes back up. I'm assuming that this is not possible, so that when the profitability of having a forest goes down, people assume that it's going to be down for the forseeable future, and are unwilling to pay higher for it than its current profit potential. Is this a reasonable assumption? I'm not sure, but I would think that 40 years or so is a reasonable span of time beyond which future demand for a product and market conditions would not be predictable.

So all this would suggest that, in the cold world of profit-maximizing forest owners, the will come a time when every forest is leveled. It's interesting to note that the forest is clear-cut when demand for wood goes down. Just something to think about...

Now back to the original reason for the post: I wanted to take issue with the professor's assertion that "the private owner will choose investment decisions exactly as would a 'social planner'." As I said before, I can understand why the creator of the question chose a forest as the asset, but in particular with a forest, I think, the market outcome will not be the same as the socially optimal outcome.

If the asset was, say, a stock of tree seedlings, and the choice was between preserving them and using them to spawn more tree seedlings, and selling them to nurseries, then it's true that the investment decisions of the owner will coincide exactly with what a social planner would do. But a forest is different because one of the principal benefits of the forest, recreation, is enjoyed by people who are not in the market for purchasing forests. Thus a large part of the social utility of forests is not represented by the price of the forest. I suppose you could construct a reality in which private owners of the forest also charge admission to individuals, but that's a stretch. Thus, the behavior of owners of the forest will only represent the interests of other potential-owners of the forest, which is a small segment of the people who have a use for the forest. Additionally, a forest has environmental value, which will be ignored by the decisions of profit-driven owners. So I don't think the market for forests is a particularly good example of socially-optimal market outcomes.

Ok, enough of this post. It's time for me to do real academics.