Three-Toed Sloth

The Union Makes Us Strong

Three tokens of solidarity for May Day:

• Joseph Stiglitz tells us about Democratic Development as the Fruits of Labor;
• Paul Berman, who really is very good when he's chronicling the fortunes of social democracy, reviews the state of the left in Latin America and calls for a new socialism;
• and in a victory just down the street, the Lecturers' Employee Organization wins its election to represent the University of Michigan's non-tenture track faculty by nearly six to one. This is good news not just for adjuncts here, but elsewhere, and in a small way for everybody in the academic world. (Sadly, post-docs are not included in the bargaining unit.)

The Revolution Will Be Securitized

Robert "Irrational Exuberance" Shiller, one of the leading scholars of behavioral finance, has a new book out, The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century; the introduction's online. I should really be writing about hidden Markov models rather than reading it, much less blogging about it, so I will only say that I can't decide if Shiller's a genius, or mad, or both, but he must be the first person in history to put forward a Utopia in the grand tradition based on completely new kinds of financial markets.

Just Be Afraid, and Everything Will Be OK

Duncan Watts, a friend from Santa Fe days, shows up in Slate, advancing the paradox that if it weren't for what we've done in an unjustified panic over SARS, we'd have reason to panic about SARS. "Our real concern ought not to be that we are too easily scared, but that we are too easily reassured." Further to this topic, SARS prompts John Holbo to reflect on how Singapore manages to be an honest police state (which I hasten to add, should anyone there be reading this, is not how he phrases it).

Silence = Content

Blogging will be light to non-existent over the next week, while I write another twenty pages on "Methods and Techniques of Complex Systems Science: An Overview". What was I thinking when I agreed to do this?

Cleaning the Stove

John Holbo blogs the site run by admirers of the late Australian philosopher David C. Stove. I've been exceedingly fond of Stove's philosophical essays for years --- I vividly remember chancing upon The Plato Cult, and Other Philosophical Follies in the Berkeley undergraduate library, in the spring of my freshman year, and sitting down to browse it on one of the hideous orange couches, and continuing read through the afternoon and into the night. I bought a copy of my own the next day, and probably re-read it five or six times of the next few years, along with the rest of Stove's then-published books. Stove was a relentlessly, and consciously, destructive writer, and the great thing about him as a stylist was his always-astonished impatience with the thought that anyone could be that stupid, that (to use a word he'd never have touched) clueless. (The appeal of a such a style to an over-clever seventeen-year-old boy needs, I trust, no elaboration.) You can see this near its best in "What Is Wrong with Our Thoughts?", the closing essay of The Plato Cult.

About many philosophical topics, I think Stove was dead right (see, e.g., "Idealism, a Victorian Horror Story" in The Plato Cult, or "What Is Wrong with Our Thoughts?" again). In others, I find his defenses of unfashionable positions entertaining and refreshing, but often find he's not being fair to his opponents. (E.g.: he can be rather misleading about what Popper actually thought. And his work on probability and the reliability of induction assumes, crucially, uniformly and without even seeming to realize it's an issue, that all samples are independent and identically distributed. This is, of course, a very strong version of the "uniformity of nature" assumption he claims to be trying to undermine!) Since these tend to be areas where I know the material a lot better, I find this a bit disturbing, but only a bit.

Then there are the topics where I long to be able to pour Stovian contempt down upon his head for being so stupid, so in the grip of invincible ignorance: to name two, Darwinism and feminism. On the first, he was, sadly, on the same level as creationist drivellers, though at least many of them have the excuse of being too stupid to grasp the elementary facts of life, which Stove manifestly was not. (See his "So You Think You Are a Darwinian?", and the reply by Blackburn, which really doesn't go far enough --- it would be easy, but tedious, to construct an essay which matches every charge Stove makes against evolutionary biology with a parallel, and equally baseless, charge against classical mechanics.) On women, his claims are (to steal a line from Hume) "so absurd, as to elude the force of all argument" --- compare his "The Intellectual Capacity of Women" with Jenny Teichman's "The Intellectual Capacity of David Stove" [PDF]. Now, the simple fact is that politically Stove was a dreadful reactionary: which is to say, he had an unwavering committment to what he imagined was the society of his grandfathers' day. (See his bathetic essay "Cricket and Republicanism", which I can't bear to link to.) So it's easy to see why he'd think such dreadful nonsense about women, and even easy to see why he'd occasionally take his accumulated discharged bile, give it a tincture of philosophy, and put it in an essay-shaped bottle. Reactionaries are often very hostile to Darwin, because they think that if evolution is right, then we live in a Godless, purposeless universe, which does not underwrite anyone's values, much less those of the imaginary grandfathers. But Stove thought we lived in such a world anyway, so his anti-Darwinism must've been sheer folly: a sad and disturbing thought.

Since his death, Stove has been taken up by the culture-warrior crowd around Commentary and New Criterion --- reactionary, to be sure, but also, supposedly, defenders of the tradition of Great Thoughts which Stove held in such contempt. The result is that his worst productions, like "The Intellectual Capacity of Women", have been vigorously pushed and republished; evidently our conservatives feel that they can overlook vicious, well-written attacks on faith, if the same source also produces vicious, well-written attacks on equality and fairness. For my part, I wholeheartedly recommend reading Stove, especially The Plato Cult, for the wonderful style, the lessons by example in rhetoric, and the attacks on cluelessness. His ventures beyond philosophy are valuable, too, for reminding the reader that you may be gifted with eloquence, intelligence, learning and spirit, and none of them will help if you're determined to make a fool of yourself.

Small Worlds and Morbid Amusements

My lovely and talented wife is a statistics graduate student, currently employed as a research assistant to Professor Susan Murphy, of our statistics department over in the next building. Susan's speciality is theoretical statistics as applied to social policy, and as part of that she happens to sit on a National Academy of Sciences panel on ... firearm data. Yes, that panel. (Kris works for her on a completely different project, namely adaptive sequential decision processes.) Actually, I learned Susan was on the panel when, one of the first times I talked with her socially, I asked her if she'd heard of John Lott's infamous survey, which was amusing the blogs at the time. Watching the unfolding of the Lott/Kopel/Reynolds/Levitt/Rosh/Lambert affair with malicious glee is common enough; but there is a special satisfaction to the knowing that it has led Glenn Reynolds to denounce my wife's boss, though not, sadly, by name.

How to Be a Responsible Physicist

A nice profile of Philip Morrison in the Chronicle of Higher Education. If you want to be a socially and politically responsible scientist, I cannot think of a better model. Morrison was one of my childhood heroes, and with adult appreciation he is, if anything, even more admirable. This piece made go back and re-read his Reason Enough to Hope, which in turn makes me want to bang my head against the wall at our collective stupidity and lost opportunities. (Via Arts and Letters Daily, who provide a typically-misleading teaser.)

How Not to Be a Responsible Physicist

Daniel Amit is a well-regarded Italian-Israeli statistical physicist, author of an excellent book on the physics of neural networks on the shelf beside me as I write. Recently asked to referee a paper by Physical Review E, he refused, on the grounds that he "remembers 1939" and so is boycotting all American institutions. This led to an exchange with Martin Blume, PRE's editor, which is on-line online, and circulating by email. Thus Amit:

What we are watching today, I believe, is a culmination of 10-15 years of mounting barbarism of the American culture the world over, crowned by the achievements of science and technology as a major weapon of mass destruction.

We are witnessing man hunt and wanton killing of the type and scale not seen since the raids on American Indian populations, by a superior technological power of inferior culture and values. We see no corrective force to restore the insanity, the self-righteousness and the lack of respect for human life (civilian and military) of another race.

I think our war in Iraq is stupid, and our policy fills me with apprehension, but this is so multiply wrong-headed as to be a hydra; Amit must be reading the news from some hitherto-unknown planet out beyond the orbit of Saturn. To pick on a mere point of fact: Slaughter unprecedented since the Indian Wars? Are the total deaths, military and civilian, from all our wars over the last ten years (by my count: Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia) even within an order of magnitude of civilian deaths in the Yugoslav civil war? Would Amit have refused to referee papers for Serbian journals? If not, why not? (If it comes to that, our total deaths-inflicted for the last decade might just be within two orders of magnitude of the slaughter we visited on Indochina in enterprises which can only be called criminal. I don't see this as a sign of our becoming less civilized.)

The exchange is worth reading, though, for Blume's entirely correct defense of the idea that the scientific community ought to transcend national and political differences. (Found via Cris Moore.)

Chomsky and Zinn on The Fellowship of the Ring, or, "Can't you see the violence inherent in the subcreation?"

As channeled by Marvin Appelbaum and Ian Pinkner, in McSweeney's:

Chomsky: We should examine carefully what's being established here in the prologue. For one, the point is clearly made that the "master ring," the so-called "one ring to rule them all," is actually a rather elaborate justification for preemptive war on Mordor.

Zinn: I think that's correct. Tolkien makes no attempt to hide the fact that rings are wielded by every other ethnic enclave in Middle Earth. The Dwarves have seven rings, the Elves have three. The race of Man has nine rings, for God's sake. There are at least 19 rings floating around out there in Middle Earth, and yet Sauron's ring is supposedly so terrible that no one can be allowed to wield it. Why?

Chomsky: Notice too that the "war" being waged here is, evidently, in the land of Mordor itself --- at the very base of Mount Doom. These terrible armies of Sauron, these dreadful demonized Orcs, have not proved very successful at conquering the neighboring realms --- if that is even what Sauron was seeking to do. It seems fairly far-fetched.

There are a few false notes, but otherwise it's pretty funny (at least, if you've had to deal with acquintances in the first flush of having read What Uncle Sam Really Wants). --- Found by Bill Tozier.