"Warming Hole Delayed Climate Change Over Eastern United States," declares the headline at Science Daily, describing the results of new studies from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). It seems that particulate pollution in the late 20th century created a regional "warming hole," a/k/a a cold patch, a/k/a a place where the global warming model was an abject failure for many decades.
It seems to me you could as easily say "we found a large area where global warming didn't happen, thus confounding our expectations and making us question our causation theory." Or you might say "particulate pollution appears to be a stronger driver of climate change than the oft-reviled CO2, and in the opposite direction, so now we're really confused about that positive-feedback assumption on which most of our alarming predictions are based." You might even say "particulate pollution paradoxically acts as a benign umbrella to protect industrialized regions from global warming," but what fun would that be? A "Warming Hole" sounds a lot scarier and more interesting. Who wants to crucify industry barons who are only spreading a lovely parasol? And what respectable science journal wants to run a story about counter-evidence for global warming causation theories?
Like most of the announcements in this area, the new report is based on re-jiggered models, in this case a "combination of two complex models of Earth systems." That's terrific. The only thing that inspires more confidence than a complex model is two of them jammed together.
In Washington, It's Always 1945
Another good American Enterprise Institute review, courtesy of Maggie's Farm (which by the way is also the source of my last two posts). Nick interviews Jim Manzi about his book "Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial and Error for Business, Politics, and Society," in which he laments public policy that has not been subjected to controlled experiments. Manzi argues that our political leaders can't shake the mindset they acquired after World War II, when the U.S. had half the world's GDP:
Our almost casual disregard for the erosion of the foundations of our political economy — endless talk but little successful action on internationally uncompetitive K-12 educational results; a widely touted university system that produces more visual and performing arts graduates than math, biology, or engineering graduates; an immigration policy that all but ignores the need to upgrade our human capital; underinvestment in certain kinds of infrastructure, science, and technology; the relentlessly rising tide of social dysfunction among the majority of the American population that does not graduate from college; somehow convincing ourselves that we are uniquely responsible for maintaining global order, when we represent only about 25 percent of global economic output; a continuous trade deficit for more than 30 years; federal government debt of 70 percent of GDP, without any real prospect of achieving fiscal balance, never mind running the budget surpluses that would be required to pay it down, and so on — is shocking and profligate. . . . The United States can thrive in this new world, but is not destined to do so.Manzi doesn't oppose reform; he merely advocates federalism:
My argument is not that we should avoid reforms. To the contrary, it is that we should attempt many more potential reforms by trying them out on a small scale to see how they really work.
Cash Now!
The problem, of course, is that it's not your money. It's not even money. It doesn't exist at all. So on that basis, heck, I'd take 10 cents on the dollar and feel like a successful bandit.
The limits of scientism
John Gray, emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, has an interesting review of Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" in The New Republic. He admires the book in many ways, but argues that Haidt suffers from provincialism (he's hung up on American notions of the left/right split in politics) and from the usual limitations of a faith in scientism. In Gray's view, Haidt's newest work is a sophisticated example of "attractively simple theories that [are believed to be] invested with the power of overcoming moral and political difficulties that have so far proved intractable."
Gray gives Haidt credit for overcoming the recently voguish "primitive type of rationalism" that so often ignores the strength and value of our irrational or extra-rational nature; he acknowledges that the conscious mind is like a rider on a strong, beautiful animal. Still, he faults Haidt for his emphasis on group morality:
Gray gives Haidt credit for overcoming the recently voguish "primitive type of rationalism" that so often ignores the strength and value of our irrational or extra-rational nature; he acknowledges that the conscious mind is like a rider on a strong, beautiful animal. Still, he faults Haidt for his emphasis on group morality:
Understanding morality as a group phenomenon neglects the fact that human groups are complex, historically shifting, and internally conflicted. Tribes and nations are not natural kinds of things like genes and blood types. They are historical constructions whose existence depends on human recognition. Human beings rarely, if ever, belong to only one group. One of the tasks of morality is to arbitrate the clashing loyalties that regularly arise from the many group identities that human beings possess. In some cases, morality may lead people to put aside group loyalties altogether.Gray also argues that Haidt's functionalist definition of morality leaves him in a number of unresolved difficulties:
There is a slippage from “is” to “ought” in nearly all evolutionary theorizing, with arguments about natural behavior sliding into claims about the human good. It may be true—though any account of how precisely this occurred can at present be little more than speculation—that much of what we see as morality evolved in a process of natural selection. That does not mean that the results must be benign.Gray cautions against Haidt's naive confidence that evolutionary psychology can resolve the conflict between utilitarianism and pluralism:
Issues such as abortion and gay marriage are not bitterly disputed because legislators have failed to apply a utilitarian calculus. They are bitterly disputed because a substantial part of the population rejects utilitarian ethics. . . . . Haidt appears not to grasp the importance of the fact that intuitionism and utilitarianism are rivals, and not only in moral philosophy. They are also at odds in practice. Making public policies on a basis of utilitarian reasoning requires a high degree of convergence, not diversity, in moral intuitions. Such policies will not be accepted as legitimate if they violate deep-seated and widely held intuitions regarding, for example, sexuality and the sanctity of human life. . . . Once again seemingly unaware of the depth of the problems he is addressing, Haidt tells us that such conflicts will not arise, or else they will be soon overcome, as long as people are brought together in the right way.A good review should either warn you not to waste your time, or inspire you to acquire the book and spend time ploughing through it. This review is tipping me toward the investment of time and effort.
An Article for Eric Blair
Via Arts & Letters Daily, a review of a new book on Rome. As always, I'll defer to Eric for a read on the quality of the thing; Rome is his bailiwick.
"The Better Half"
Here's a cheerful song about finding the good in a hard life, built around friendly lyrics and a playful arrangement.
"Suicide Doors"
Popular Mechanics has a delightful article called "The 13 Most Dangerous Car Interiors in History." Runner up is the Lincoln Continental with suicide doors.
"Suicide doors" got their name for a reason. Many early cars didn't have locking doors, door latches opened by pressing downward, and a downward-opening latch often served as an armrest. It was a recipe for catastrophe. Without a seatbelt, anyone chilling in the back of a car with rear-swinging doors could easily fall out, especially since the wind would catch the door and blow it open. The gorgeous 1961 Lincoln Continental had suicide rear doors, harking back to a much earlier era of coachbuilt luxury cars of the 1920s.That happens to be the subject of a pretty great rockabilly song by the Reverend Horton Heat.
Women & World Peace
Foreign Policy has an article that claims that the best predictor of a state's stability is how it treats its women.
Stability as such isn't much of a goal, if what is being stabilized is injustice. Thus, to some degree, you would think it would be a good thing to see that states that are fundamentally unjust were also unstable: that's just what we might think we would want to see.
On the other hand, growing instability doesn't seem to improve the situation for women much: in fact, it seems to worsen it.
It seems probable that they have their causality exactly backwards. Good treatment for women does not cause political stability; it seems to result from it. It is in a stable atmosphere that women have often done best in human history, because it is in such an atmosphere that the traditional male advantages are minimized: size, strength, and a mental structure that evolution has shaped for war. In a stable environment, it is development of long-term relationships rather than combat that tends to shape society: and these are traditional female strengths. It's the periods of long-term prosperity and stability in which women have advanced their political and legal position.
This suggests that if you want to see women's treatment improve, you should work to stabilize society; but you will almost certainly be stabilizing an oppressive environment for the women when you do it. The goods that come for women will come from their own work and their own natural strength, over time, not because of external efforts.
Nevertheless, there are some counterexamples to the theory that occur to me. It would have been true during the height of the instability of the industrial age, for example, that women had greatest equality (if not best treatment) in the places rendered most unstable by the revolution; and likewise, in WWII, it was the instability that created the opportunity for large-scale female migration into factory work.
This set of data suggest that creating instability is a great thing to do insofar as it gives women a greater hand in the means of production, which may only be possible in industrialized or post-industrial societies. It was certainly true that many Marxist revolutions promised women this very good if they would join the revolution and help overthrow the government, which is why many third-world Marxist leaders were women. However, after the revolution the promised goods rarely materialized.
If this is the truth, though, then there's no general rule about correlation or causation to be made here. The fact that stable states are correlated with female rights is true only just now; it was not true before, and might not be true later.
The authors would like it to be true that the correlation (and even the causation) ran in their direction, because it could allow us to avoid making a value judgment between stability and freedom for women. In fact, I suspect we will often have to make such judgments: and I am as ready to strike a blow for freedom today as I ever was, though experience has made me less hopeful about how much we can actually achieve in our own historical moment.
What's more, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are as insecure and unstable as nondemocracies.
Our findings, detailed in our new book out this month, Sex and World Peace, echo those of other scholars, who have found that the larger the gender gap between the treatment of men and women in a society, the more likely a country is to be involved in intra- and interstate conflict, to be the first to resort to force in such conflicts, and to resort to higher levels of violence....
It's ironic that authors such as Steven Pinker who claim that the world is becoming much more peaceful have not recognized that violence against women in many countries is, if anything, becoming more prevalent, not less so, and dwarfs the violence produced through war and armed conflict. To say a country is at peace when its women are subject to femicide -- or to ignore violence against women while claiming, as Pinker does, that the world is now more secure -- is simply oxymoronic.Well, Pinker's argument is one I don't think much of myself (we discussed it here); nevertheless, I'm not sure what to make of this argument.
Stability as such isn't much of a goal, if what is being stabilized is injustice. Thus, to some degree, you would think it would be a good thing to see that states that are fundamentally unjust were also unstable: that's just what we might think we would want to see.
On the other hand, growing instability doesn't seem to improve the situation for women much: in fact, it seems to worsen it.
It seems probable that they have their causality exactly backwards. Good treatment for women does not cause political stability; it seems to result from it. It is in a stable atmosphere that women have often done best in human history, because it is in such an atmosphere that the traditional male advantages are minimized: size, strength, and a mental structure that evolution has shaped for war. In a stable environment, it is development of long-term relationships rather than combat that tends to shape society: and these are traditional female strengths. It's the periods of long-term prosperity and stability in which women have advanced their political and legal position.
This suggests that if you want to see women's treatment improve, you should work to stabilize society; but you will almost certainly be stabilizing an oppressive environment for the women when you do it. The goods that come for women will come from their own work and their own natural strength, over time, not because of external efforts.
Nevertheless, there are some counterexamples to the theory that occur to me. It would have been true during the height of the instability of the industrial age, for example, that women had greatest equality (if not best treatment) in the places rendered most unstable by the revolution; and likewise, in WWII, it was the instability that created the opportunity for large-scale female migration into factory work.
This set of data suggest that creating instability is a great thing to do insofar as it gives women a greater hand in the means of production, which may only be possible in industrialized or post-industrial societies. It was certainly true that many Marxist revolutions promised women this very good if they would join the revolution and help overthrow the government, which is why many third-world Marxist leaders were women. However, after the revolution the promised goods rarely materialized.
If this is the truth, though, then there's no general rule about correlation or causation to be made here. The fact that stable states are correlated with female rights is true only just now; it was not true before, and might not be true later.
The authors would like it to be true that the correlation (and even the causation) ran in their direction, because it could allow us to avoid making a value judgment between stability and freedom for women. In fact, I suspect we will often have to make such judgments: and I am as ready to strike a blow for freedom today as I ever was, though experience has made me less hopeful about how much we can actually achieve in our own historical moment.
"Counsel, do you have any other arguments?"
These are not words a lawyer wants to hear from the bench, especially if his only honest answer is, "Your Honor, I got nuthin'."
Arguments before the Supreme Court this week on the Arizona immigration law went far worse than I ever imagined they would, in part because I haven't been playing close attention to the exact position of the federal government. I did not realize, for instance, that federal law already permits local police to check the immigration status of a person they suspect of being an illegal alien. Arizona's law merely makes such a check mandatory. The purpose of the change apparently was to permit the state authorities to override local preferences for annulling the federal immigration laws; in other words, this law works out a conflict between state and municipal authorities, not between state and federal authorities.
I also did not realize that the government stipulated at the outset that it was offering no arguments about the danger of profiling. The law itself is race-neutral, so any such argument from the DOJ would have to await the implementation of the state law and the application of the usual statistical tests. There may come a day when we have to endure "disparate impact" arguments on this subject, but today is not that day.
Remarks from the Justices amply demonstrated how badly the federal government's arguments were faring, but some of the worst came from moderate Justice Kennedy, from new, presumptively liberal Justice Sotomayor, and even from obviously liberal Justice Breyer. Breyer asked how a provision that would require policemen call to check immigration status can be said to conflict with a federal rule that allows policemen to call to check immigration status. Sotomayor got the DOJ to admit that the state would merely alert the feds that they'd discovered an illegal alien; nothing Arizona is doing (or could do) would require the feds to take the aliens into custody, if they didn't feel that doing so was a high priority or worth the expense. (I'd just expect the feds to set up an automated message system that no one ever checks. "Press one if you're wasting our time with more reports of illegal aliens, you red-state poster-children for hate crimes.") Justice Kennedy's question was even more devastating: "So you're saying the government has a legitimate interest in not enforcing its laws?" And as has been so widely reported, Justice Roberts stated, "It seems to me that the Federal Government just doesn't want to know who is here illegally or not." But none of the Justices was impressed by the argument that federal pre-emption means the states are prohibited from giving the feds information they'd prefer not to know.
I don't know of any precedent for this situation, where the feds want to keep a law on the books, then claim pre-emption over the issue whether it will be enforced as written. As Justice Scalia pointed out:
Arguments before the Supreme Court this week on the Arizona immigration law went far worse than I ever imagined they would, in part because I haven't been playing close attention to the exact position of the federal government. I did not realize, for instance, that federal law already permits local police to check the immigration status of a person they suspect of being an illegal alien. Arizona's law merely makes such a check mandatory. The purpose of the change apparently was to permit the state authorities to override local preferences for annulling the federal immigration laws; in other words, this law works out a conflict between state and municipal authorities, not between state and federal authorities.
I also did not realize that the government stipulated at the outset that it was offering no arguments about the danger of profiling. The law itself is race-neutral, so any such argument from the DOJ would have to await the implementation of the state law and the application of the usual statistical tests. There may come a day when we have to endure "disparate impact" arguments on this subject, but today is not that day.
Remarks from the Justices amply demonstrated how badly the federal government's arguments were faring, but some of the worst came from moderate Justice Kennedy, from new, presumptively liberal Justice Sotomayor, and even from obviously liberal Justice Breyer. Breyer asked how a provision that would require policemen call to check immigration status can be said to conflict with a federal rule that allows policemen to call to check immigration status. Sotomayor got the DOJ to admit that the state would merely alert the feds that they'd discovered an illegal alien; nothing Arizona is doing (or could do) would require the feds to take the aliens into custody, if they didn't feel that doing so was a high priority or worth the expense. (I'd just expect the feds to set up an automated message system that no one ever checks. "Press one if you're wasting our time with more reports of illegal aliens, you red-state poster-children for hate crimes.") Justice Kennedy's question was even more devastating: "So you're saying the government has a legitimate interest in not enforcing its laws?" And as has been so widely reported, Justice Roberts stated, "It seems to me that the Federal Government just doesn't want to know who is here illegally or not." But none of the Justices was impressed by the argument that federal pre-emption means the states are prohibited from giving the feds information they'd prefer not to know.
I don't know of any precedent for this situation, where the feds want to keep a law on the books, then claim pre-emption over the issue whether it will be enforced as written. As Justice Scalia pointed out:
Anyway, what's wrong about the states enforcing Federal law? There is a Federal law against robbing Federal banks. Can it be made a state crime to rob those banks? I think it is. But does the Attorney General come in and say, you know, we might really only want to go after the professional bank robbers? If it's just an amateur bank robber, you know, we're going to let it go. And the state's interfering with our whole scheme here because it's prosecuting all these bank robbers.
Religion & Science, Together
Chemistry World discusses a new technique for recovering the original beauty of Medieval illuminations. (Hat tip: Medieval News.) This is, of course, what the relationship between science and faith ought to look like: a beautiful partnership, each seeking truth according to its discipline.
Tom Sawyer's Friend:
...the Washington, D.C. bureaucrat.
The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.
Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”
That means "no milking the cows," as well as "no picking the corn," and "no carrying bales of corn that I picked," and "no going to the farmers' market on Sunday, in the hope that your smiling face might charm someone into buying our tomatoes."
It also means "No more 4-H" and "No more Future Farmers of America."
You can probably still whitewash the fence... at least until the next set of rules comes along.
Fixing Boys
Let's leave aside the question of whether there is a "war on boys" or a "war on women," or whether the system is stacked against one or the other. It's clear that, regardless of how "the system" is "stacked," boys have significant problems with school as currently structured.
A better question, then, might be: how can we structure school so that boys tend to excel?
Here are a few thoughts on structuring a program for boys, with a very small amount toward the end on how it would interact with a program for girls.
1) It would involve longer school days, but with more and longer breaks for physical activity. Boys at the elementary school level should be getting up for a good forty-five minutes' play at least three times during the school day. At elementary levels one of these play periods can be formalized, into sports or (especially) martial arts; the others should be free. At higher levels, first two and then periods should be formalized: as boys grow into teenagers they need more structure to keep them out of trouble.
2) It should assume that boys mature more slowly, and thus focus on topics earlier in their education that require less emotional maturity. Math and science are good subjects at early ages; history and emotionally-difficult literature should be pushed back. Stories that can be read to boys, or that have shown a long history of being interesting to boys, are good at this age -- adventure tales, Robin Hood, or books without emotional content like stories about airplanes and trains. Stories that require them to confront or examine complex emotional truths are for later. The technical skills of reading and basic composition do not involve much emotional weight, but advanced composition -- because it requires a mastery of content, which comes from emotionally laden things like history and literature -- should be pushed back as well.
3) This implies that boys and girls should usually be educated separately, although the implication is not rigid; and in addition, there are substantial benefits to having boys and girls working alongside each other from early life. It would be good to break school days into class periods for each subject, and the classes taught differently, so that individual accommodations can be made. A boy who matures unusually quickly may benefit from being introduced to more emotionally complex materials, so that he might go to a class mostly filled with girls for the literary period; a girl might not develop as quickly, and go to a class filled mostly with boys. Because boys will focus more on math and science early, those classes will probably advance faster; some girls who show especial aptitude may spend part of their days in boy-heavy classes.
These are just some initial thoughts; any or all of these thoughts may be wrong. The point is to think about the problem from the perspective of trying to construct a solution that will work for the boys. What do you suggest?
A better question, then, might be: how can we structure school so that boys tend to excel?
Here are a few thoughts on structuring a program for boys, with a very small amount toward the end on how it would interact with a program for girls.
1) It would involve longer school days, but with more and longer breaks for physical activity. Boys at the elementary school level should be getting up for a good forty-five minutes' play at least three times during the school day. At elementary levels one of these play periods can be formalized, into sports or (especially) martial arts; the others should be free. At higher levels, first two and then periods should be formalized: as boys grow into teenagers they need more structure to keep them out of trouble.
2) It should assume that boys mature more slowly, and thus focus on topics earlier in their education that require less emotional maturity. Math and science are good subjects at early ages; history and emotionally-difficult literature should be pushed back. Stories that can be read to boys, or that have shown a long history of being interesting to boys, are good at this age -- adventure tales, Robin Hood, or books without emotional content like stories about airplanes and trains. Stories that require them to confront or examine complex emotional truths are for later. The technical skills of reading and basic composition do not involve much emotional weight, but advanced composition -- because it requires a mastery of content, which comes from emotionally laden things like history and literature -- should be pushed back as well.
3) This implies that boys and girls should usually be educated separately, although the implication is not rigid; and in addition, there are substantial benefits to having boys and girls working alongside each other from early life. It would be good to break school days into class periods for each subject, and the classes taught differently, so that individual accommodations can be made. A boy who matures unusually quickly may benefit from being introduced to more emotionally complex materials, so that he might go to a class mostly filled with girls for the literary period; a girl might not develop as quickly, and go to a class filled mostly with boys. Because boys will focus more on math and science early, those classes will probably advance faster; some girls who show especial aptitude may spend part of their days in boy-heavy classes.
These are just some initial thoughts; any or all of these thoughts may be wrong. The point is to think about the problem from the perspective of trying to construct a solution that will work for the boys. What do you suggest?
Once More with Feeling:
Philosophy is being made obsolete by science, claims a theorist cited by The Atlantic:
It turns out that the New York Times ran a piece that we somehow missed containing a rebuttal on just the same terms as we have been making. The author was not me, though, but a better authority: a philosopher named David Albert, who also holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. I am gratified to learn that he raises substantially the same point.
There is a point he's trying to make here, though, and if we are patient with him we can almost see it. He clearly misses the philosopher's point, but that's because he wasn't listening. Let's not make the same mistake. Just what is he trying to say beneath all that sneering?
In January, Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and Director of the Origins Institute at Arizona State University, published A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, a book that, as its title suggests, purports to explain how something---and not just any something, but the entire universe---could have emerged from nothing, the kind of nothing implicated by quantum field theory.Well, yes, "the kind of nothing." This is just how we got started, though: this "kind of nothing" isn't nothing at all. It's the potential for something.
It turns out that the New York Times ran a piece that we somehow missed containing a rebuttal on just the same terms as we have been making. The author was not me, though, but a better authority: a philosopher named David Albert, who also holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. I am gratified to learn that he raises substantially the same point.
"The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields... they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story."The Atlantic decided to interview only Krauss, so you can read the rebuttal-to-the-rebuttal. However, having done so, I can't say that I find it enlightening or even interesting. He claims that philosophy doesn't advance while science does; the reviewer points out that the basis of computer science and artificial intelligence is based on recent work in philosophy of language. 'Well, I was just being provocative,' but the important areas of philosophy are being subsumed by other fields. What about the ones that continue to produce insight? 'Those will be subsumed.' Bertrand Russell? 'He was a mathematician.' (Also a philosopher! As Albert is both a philosopher and a physicist.) It would be better to read St. Augustine on physics than the people reviewing his book, who are 'morons' (with, in Albert's case, a pair of advanced degrees in quite difficult subjects).
There is a point he's trying to make here, though, and if we are patient with him we can almost see it. He clearly misses the philosopher's point, but that's because he wasn't listening. Let's not make the same mistake. Just what is he trying to say beneath all that sneering?
A modest proposal
My notion for a simultaneous attack on three problems: (1) uninsured free riders on the American healthcare system, (2) the unconstitutional individual mandate under ObamaCare, and (3) the problem of illegal immigration: limit the individual mandate to illegal immigrants, the penalty for non-compliance being immediate deportation. Check insured status automatically during all traffic stops, the same way we check auto insurance. Then abolish EMTALA for illegal immigrants.
I realize this doesn't address the problem of uninsured free riders under EMTALA who are American citizens, but at least the poorest of them are eligible for Medicaid, and they're not pouring over the borders. This proposal also assumes it's constitutional to deport illegal aliens who can't prove they have medical insurance, but since they're legally subject to deportation anyway, I don't foresee the Supreme Court objecting.
I realize this doesn't address the problem of uninsured free riders under EMTALA who are American citizens, but at least the poorest of them are eligible for Medicaid, and they're not pouring over the borders. This proposal also assumes it's constitutional to deport illegal aliens who can't prove they have medical insurance, but since they're legally subject to deportation anyway, I don't foresee the Supreme Court objecting.
A Culture of Arms
I personally believe that it is proper to carry arms openly whenever possible; the benefits of this are something we spoke of years ago, and I haven't changed my mind.
Nevertheless, for many people concealed carry is the only possible carry. The usual solution is to carry some sort of holster, but another option is to wear clothing designed for the purpose of carrying concealed weapons. The specialty industry built around this second option includes fine craftsmen like those at Coronado Leather, as well as larger-scale manufacturers like 5.11 Tactical.
Apparently, though, Woolrich has begun a line aimed at those who wish to carry a firearm in a fashionable way. Under Armor, which pitched a military-approved version of their undershirts to help soldiers and Marines stay cool in Iraq, is apparently also in this market.
Woolrich is the most interesting, though, because it's such an ordinary part of American culture. It was there nearly two hundred years ago when we were pushing West and needed warm things against frontier weather; these days, Woolrich products are available for sale in every Cracker Barrel by every interstate in the country.
It's encouraging.
Nevertheless, for many people concealed carry is the only possible carry. The usual solution is to carry some sort of holster, but another option is to wear clothing designed for the purpose of carrying concealed weapons. The specialty industry built around this second option includes fine craftsmen like those at Coronado Leather, as well as larger-scale manufacturers like 5.11 Tactical.
Apparently, though, Woolrich has begun a line aimed at those who wish to carry a firearm in a fashionable way. Under Armor, which pitched a military-approved version of their undershirts to help soldiers and Marines stay cool in Iraq, is apparently also in this market.
Woolrich is the most interesting, though, because it's such an ordinary part of American culture. It was there nearly two hundred years ago when we were pushing West and needed warm things against frontier weather; these days, Woolrich products are available for sale in every Cracker Barrel by every interstate in the country.
It's encouraging.
Shāh Māt
Shāh Māt, meaning king-kill in ancient Persian, or as we say today: checkmate. It seems the game of chess may have originated in India around the sixth century A.D., before spreading to Persia and thence to Europe via the Muslim expansion. Early on, it was called chaturaṅga, which translates as "four divisions (of the military)": infantry, cavalry, elephantry, and chariotry. (No hawks? -- and by the way, isn't it a shame that elephantry no longer figures heavily in our military traditions.) It's not too surprising that infantry and cavalry would become pawns and knights, but I wouldn't have guessed that bishops started out as elephants or rooks as chariots. The position now called a rook has been filled not only by chariots over the intervening centuries but also by boats, carts, and towers. The original pieces next to kings were viziers, but transmuted into queens by a thoroughly obscure process. Early queens, like early bishops, had much more limited moves.
The Cloisters in New York City are now featuring a traveling exposition of early chess pieces carved from walrus ivory, probably in eleventh-century Norway, which were discovered in 1831 on the Isle of Lewis off the western coast of Scotland. In this set, the rook takes a human form:
Among the warders (rooks) in the exhibition, who are represented as foot soldiers, one bites the top of his shield, barely containing his frenzied eagerness for battle. Scholars have identified such figures as berserkers (the soldiers of Odin from Norse mythology), known from the Heimskringla — the Chronicle of the Kings of Norway — of the poet Snorri Sturluson (ca. 1179–1241).H/t Maggie's Farm.
Immigration confusion
PollingReport.com consolidates polling from a number of sources over time. The link takes you to a summary of public attitudes to immigration, though other issues are addressed elsewhere in the site. One of the strongest messages is that voters favor Arizona's immigration bill and think the Obama administration should butt out. On most other immigration issues, public opinion is far less clear. Americans' support for amnesty, for instance, swings over all the place depending on how the question is worded. If you throw in enough words about ensuring that a new law will take account of work history, tax payments, and ties to the community, it will be popular. Other formulations of the question, however, can elicit a lukewarm response even if they refer generally to those same considerations. Similarly, if a question sticks closely to whether immigration is the primary responsibility of the federal or the state government, opinion will be mixed. But throw in the question of whether the state should be allowed to step up if the federal government fails, and Arizona wins hands-down.
For the most part, you can find the expected divergence of opinion between Republicans and Democrats, with Independents splitting the difference. Nevertheless, I was surprised to find that both Republicans and Democrats respond well to the statement "Do you favor or oppose allowing local boards [emphasis supplied] to determine whether illegal immigrants can stay in the United States based on factors such as how long the immigrants have lived here, if they have a family, a job and are paying taxes, and have other ties to the community?" while Independents do not.
Questions about whether immigrants contribute to or detract from American prosperity yield mixed results until you throw in the concept of balancing an immigrant's contribution against his drain on public freebies.
By far the clearest division of opinion appears when the answers are separated between Latino and non-Latino. This division dwarfs the disagreements among the parties generally.
For the most part, you can find the expected divergence of opinion between Republicans and Democrats, with Independents splitting the difference. Nevertheless, I was surprised to find that both Republicans and Democrats respond well to the statement "Do you favor or oppose allowing local boards [emphasis supplied] to determine whether illegal immigrants can stay in the United States based on factors such as how long the immigrants have lived here, if they have a family, a job and are paying taxes, and have other ties to the community?" while Independents do not.
Questions about whether immigrants contribute to or detract from American prosperity yield mixed results until you throw in the concept of balancing an immigrant's contribution against his drain on public freebies.
By far the clearest division of opinion appears when the answers are separated between Latino and non-Latino. This division dwarfs the disagreements among the parties generally.
The new slavery
What should we call it when taxpayers are forced to work to support other people? If we start calling it slavery whenever someone imposes a free-rider element on the system, let alone whenever we're forced to endure the company of people we disapprove of in public places, we're going to need a new word for real slavery. By this theory, the Jim Crow laws were an admirable anti-slavery measure.
*Updated to substitute a better link for the broken one above (thanks, Valerie!).
New horizons in tech world
Not all you younguns will remember these things, so come sit by Gramma's rocker while she reminisces about 1979 with the help of these old AT+T videos. One is a recruiting spot for the Bell Labs, showing earnest young tech geeks and their bad hair talking about good places to work and good communities for their families. These cutting-edge careers involved things like computer-to-computer communications that were about to revolutionize data transport. The young technicians are cheerfully brisk about their career opportunities, without imagining that they're the center of the world.
The other video shows the happenin' new designer telephones, the kind you used to plug into a wall -- some even had a dial. The featured homes all look more like something out of Dallas or A Clockwork Orange than what I remember of homes back then, when I was a new college graduate. The phones are fun to look at, but it's the clothing that cracks me up.
The other video shows the happenin' new designer telephones, the kind you used to plug into a wall -- some even had a dial. The featured homes all look more like something out of Dallas or A Clockwork Orange than what I remember of homes back then, when I was a new college graduate. The phones are fun to look at, but it's the clothing that cracks me up.
Word sleuthing
Here's something that's been bothering me lately. (I don't have enough real trouble.) What is the root of the past participle "fraught," as in "fraught with menace"? On the analogy of "thought" and "taught," I get frink or freach, which lacked a certain something. On the analogy of "wrought," whose root I imagined to be either work or wreak, I get fork or freak. Freak seems to hold real promise: when you're freaking out, you're fraught. Somehow the word "free" seems to be involved, as well, which is how you get the contrast between "barrier-free" and "barrier-fraught" architecture, but as far as I can tell no one thinks there's a true etymological link between free and fraught.
Today I finally tried to look it up. Most sources claim the root is the same as the participle, "fraught," but they admit that nobody says "to fraught" and that, if they did, its archaic meaning would be close to what we now suggest with the word "freight." I can accept freight. A situation is metaphorically freighted with some quality just as it can be fraught with that quality. So I'm glad we cleared that up.
The experts claim, by the way, that the proper past participle of wreak is "wreaked," while "wrought" goes only with "work." Well, I don't know. I always thought you wrought havoc.
Today I finally tried to look it up. Most sources claim the root is the same as the participle, "fraught," but they admit that nobody says "to fraught" and that, if they did, its archaic meaning would be close to what we now suggest with the word "freight." I can accept freight. A situation is metaphorically freighted with some quality just as it can be fraught with that quality. So I'm glad we cleared that up.
The experts claim, by the way, that the proper past participle of wreak is "wreaked," while "wrought" goes only with "work." Well, I don't know. I always thought you wrought havoc.
Efficient laundry
High-falutin' detergents add expensive enzymes, which break up stains. They really work, but when the wash cycle is over the enzymes go down the drain along with the cheap soap and dirty water. But wait a minute -- didn't they tell us in chemistry class that the whole point of enzymes is that they facilitate reactions without being used up?
Two bright fellows, C.S. Pundir and Nidhi Chauhan, reported to the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research that they had bound the four most common laundry enzymes to plastic surfaces (a bucket and scrub brush used in pre-washing) in a way that made the enzymes available for at least 200 re-uses over a three-month period. It's a cheaper approach, and a lot less junk in the wastewater, too. It's not commercially available yet, unfortunately.
Two bright fellows, C.S. Pundir and Nidhi Chauhan, reported to the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research that they had bound the four most common laundry enzymes to plastic surfaces (a bucket and scrub brush used in pre-washing) in a way that made the enzymes available for at least 200 re-uses over a three-month period. It's a cheaper approach, and a lot less junk in the wastewater, too. It's not commercially available yet, unfortunately.
Just-in-Time Structures
Imagine a bridge built with this system. You really wouldn't want to lose power to the control system while traffic was on the bridge.
Back to Part I
My apologies for dropping out of this discussion here - it deserved more time than I could give it 'til now, and Grim gave me a not-at-all easy reference to look over - which I quite failed to grasp. (I've read Part II and am joining in that one separately.) I want to return to a part of Part I.
Grim was reexplaining Kant's problem in terms of a believer, like Chesterton, who claimed to have pieced together evidence from throughout his life that brought him to believe in God.
I'm not in a world like that. The evidence I get runs the other way - within limits.[1] Yes it is possible that this is all a great self-consistent illusion of the brain-in-vat variety. But, I have to say, so what? What difference does this make to anything I have to do? Why paralyze myself by claiming, "This evidence isn't perfect; it could be all wrong without my knowing, so I'll declare all my knowledge completely nonexistent, without value, not knowledge at all?" It's the only evidence I've got and I'll take it as far as it seems to get me. Any map that I carry is not the same thing as the land it represents. It's only an indirect representation, and by its nature imperfect. Do I throw it away? Declare it's no map at all?
Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant - the protagonist of a few trilogies he wrote - was in a similar situation. He kept being transported to a fantasy world, which included a villain named Lord Foul, and (at least in the first two I, which I read) never seemed certain whether he was really visiting another world or dreaming the whole thing. But, he figured, whichever way it was - he was going to fight Lord Foul. I don't understand any other approach.
[1] I'm partly color-blind and accept there are things you can see that I can't; I can be fooled by optical illusions and know that what I think I'm seeing isn't always quite right.
Let's say that someone has encountered a number of phenomena that they believe demonstrate the existence of God. One counterargument to their reasoned belief in God would be to point out that they have misconstrued the causes of the phenomena...Yet he has come by his knowledge in the same way we come by knowledge of anything that is outside of ourselves in the world.Absolutely, boss. But the quality of that evidence is the thing I always want to examine. (Chesterton makes it impossible because, after a book of build-up, he won't even say what that evidence is. But that is another story.) Putting it that way blurs the distinction between evidence of different quality (per Chesterton again, between the kind of man who doubts the existence of God and the kind who doubts the existence of cows).
So your objection, and Tom's after a fashion, is that you want to say that 'well, we can't have perfect knowledge of things outside of us, but we can have approximate knowledge' -- knowledge on a scale, as Tom put it. The problem is that doesn't get off the ground. Everything you think you know about the outside world is phenomenal (Kant is arguing). Every experience, every sensation, every fact you think you know is actually just a fact about your own internal thoughts...Not so. The perceptions I get are evidence about the external world. "Direct" in the legal sense; "indirect" the way you say Kant's using it. The things I experience are consistent in such a way that they back each other up, and are evidence for each other. I see what looks like a fire; I feel the heat from it; I touch it and get burned by it; I hear and read about it. This is all evidence that such a thing as fire exists. It would be different if I lived in a world where I saw things that looked solid, but my hand passed through them when I tried to touch them; or things that looked just like fire sometimes burned and sometimes didn't for no apparent reason; or I felt my skin was crawling with bugs but everyone else said I was suffering from delusional parasitosis. Those situations would be evidence that my senses were not reliable and that the knowledge I got from them was not so useful.
I'm not in a world like that. The evidence I get runs the other way - within limits.[1] Yes it is possible that this is all a great self-consistent illusion of the brain-in-vat variety. But, I have to say, so what? What difference does this make to anything I have to do? Why paralyze myself by claiming, "This evidence isn't perfect; it could be all wrong without my knowing, so I'll declare all my knowledge completely nonexistent, without value, not knowledge at all?" It's the only evidence I've got and I'll take it as far as it seems to get me. Any map that I carry is not the same thing as the land it represents. It's only an indirect representation, and by its nature imperfect. Do I throw it away? Declare it's no map at all?
Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant - the protagonist of a few trilogies he wrote - was in a similar situation. He kept being transported to a fantasy world, which included a villain named Lord Foul, and (at least in the first two I, which I read) never seemed certain whether he was really visiting another world or dreaming the whole thing. But, he figured, whichever way it was - he was going to fight Lord Foul. I don't understand any other approach.
[1] I'm partly color-blind and accept there are things you can see that I can't; I can be fooled by optical illusions and know that what I think I'm seeing isn't always quite right.
Weren't We Just Talking About This?
A biologist writes about culture in terms that will seem quite familiar:
RICH AND SEEMINGLY BOUNDLESS as the creative arts seem to be, each is filtered through the narrow biological channels of human cognition. Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided about reality external to our bodies, is pitifully small.He gives a litany of examples, to which we might add: and all that's without the problems of apperception.
More on Bullies, From President Obama
Well, then-aspiring-author Obama, rather. Dr. Althouse is reading more around the dog-eating tract that has gotten so much attention.
Doubtless the President would agree with our advice, then: the way to deal with bullies is to teach them to fear your own strength, not to whine, and to learn to fight smarter and better than they do.The man pulled the blade across the bird’s neck in a single smooth motion. Blood shot out in a long, crimson ribbon. The man stood up, holding the bird far away from his body, and suddenly tossed it high into the air. It landed with a thud, then struggled to its feet, its head lolling grotesquely against its side, its legs pumping wildly in a wide, wobbly circle. I watched as the circle grew smaller, the blood trickling down to a gurgle, until finally the bird collapsed, lifeless.... Later, lying alone beneath a mosquito net canopy, I listened to the crickets chirp under the moonlight and remembered the last twitch of life that I’d witnessed a few hours before. I could barely believe my good fortune.Why does the boy — as remembered by the man — connect the killing of the bird to his own good fortune? Is it some elemental realization that simply to be alive is amazing, the bird being dead? Or is he excited to be in this new place with lots of thrilling new activities like beheading a bird and shortly thereafter eating it? Or is it the connection to the father figure, who's so eager to show the boy what life is really about and so easily overcomes the reticence of the mother? The next thing that happens in the book is that Lolo teaches him how to deal with bullies: Don't cry over the lump where he hit you with a rock; learn boxing. Lolo buys boxing gloves for him and teaches him to "keep moving, but always stay low—don’t give them a target." Good advice! And it's on the very next page that Lolo teaches him to eat dog (and snake) meat.... The point is: Life was a big adventure. And meat was part of the adventure — meat from real animals that lived and died.
Also, never to believe in clean hands.
Not your grandfather's DNA
If some science fiction writer doesn't pick up on this idea for a story about really alien forms of life, he's missing a good bet.
All life we know of on Earth depends on RNA or DNA, the long, ladder-like molecules that hold the sequences of three-letter words (each spelled with the four-base alphabet A-G-C-T) that serve as code for the 20 amino-acid building blocks of our proteins. No one knows how such a code developed in the first place, or why all earthly life uses essentially the same code. No one knows why all life strings the code along a ladder built of the sugar called ribose (the R in RNA) or its slightly altered cousin, deoxyribose (the D in DNA). Was it just the structure that fell into place first, like the QWERTY keyboard, and everyone kept using it from then on? There's no obvious reason why the ladder couldn't be built of other sugars. For that matter, there's no obvious reason why the alphabet employed by our genetic code for protein synthesis couldn't choose other letters from the unknown number of potential nucleotide bases of which our familiar A, G, C, and T comprise only four (five, if you count the U that substitutes for T in RNA). Further, there's no obvious reason why the code should limit itself to three-letter words and resulting vocabulary of 4 to the third power, or 64 words.
Obviously a 64-word vocabulary is sufficient to spell out some amazing complexity. There's no limit in principle to the sentences you can form with 64 words. You don't even need four letters to spell a lot of words, as binary computers attest. The point is, the code our DNA uses is not the only way to skin a cat. For instance, the amino acids that line up like pearls on a string to form our long-chain protein molecules number 22 in total, but of those only 20 are assigned a three-letter "code word" in our DNA. (The other two get added in by separate enzymes at a later stage in the protein synthesis process not directly controlled by a DNA transcription.) What's more, a number of other amino acids have specialized uses other than as beads in the protein string, such as for neurotransmitters or steps in metabolic pathways, but they are not assigned a three-letter DNA code word. So our genetic code has more words than it needs for the amino acids we use, but it uses up the redundancy in synonyms for some of them, while having no word for others.
So, back to the article I linked to above. The guys who fool around with this stuff are beginning to synthesize genetic molecules they call "XNA." These are still identifiable as nucleic acids, using a sugar and a phosphate for the ladder backbone and the familiar bases A, G, C, and T for the rungs, but they use different sugars from the usual ribose or D-ribose. Some of the alternative sugars turn out to be more structurally sound, standing up unusually well, for instance, under the stress of voracious enzymes and extreme pH levels.
Intrepid experimenters are even adding a couple of new bases to the usual A-G-C-T quartet, thus vastly expanding the code's vocabulary. I'll be very interested to learn how (and if) the surrounding cell mechanism learns to "read" the new words. I've never quite been able to understand even how the old words are read. Some sources I've read suggest that the shapes of the A-G-C-T code words are in some way physical cookie-cutter templates for the corresponding amino acids, but my impression is that that part is not well understood, and in any event I certainly don't understand it. It's one of my favorite mysteries.
All this work still sticks pretty close to Earth-style genetic molecules, of course, using a sugar-phosphate ladder backbone with bases for rungs. And yet sugars surely aren't the only way to construct a ladder, nor ladders the only possible structure on which to string a series of letters, nor a linear string of letters the only way to express and preserve a code. What works here needn't be what works best under different conditions. So I'm really curious to see how experiments in synthetic genetics come out. Because of my abiding interest in the origins of life, I'd love to find out more about how ordinary molecules could possibly have developed into active metabolism from dead-end equilibrium, and from there into replicating systems that take resources from the outside world and use energy to restructure them according to their own pattern. If nothing else, I'd like to see a better understanding develop of what kind of proto-molecules could possibly have developed into RNA, which, as primitive as it may be, is still an extremely complex structure and very, very far removed from the kind of chemical gunk you can generate from experiments designed to mimic primordial conditions.
I often hear casual statements to the effect that conditions on such-and-such a planet are "too extreme" to support life. I don't find a statement like that meaningful. Even on Earth in recent decades, we've found microbes thriving in extremely hot, cold, or poisonous conditions we'd confidently have called impossible until they were discovered. The assumption in the 1950s that life originated in shallow seas is giving way to the notion that it may have started in deep-sea thermal vents or in venues sporting other extremes of heat and pressure. We'd have to know considerably more about how life originated here before we could make any sensible statements about what it needs to get started universally, or about what sorts of forms life might take besides the ones we're used to.
All life we know of on Earth depends on RNA or DNA, the long, ladder-like molecules that hold the sequences of three-letter words (each spelled with the four-base alphabet A-G-C-T) that serve as code for the 20 amino-acid building blocks of our proteins. No one knows how such a code developed in the first place, or why all earthly life uses essentially the same code. No one knows why all life strings the code along a ladder built of the sugar called ribose (the R in RNA) or its slightly altered cousin, deoxyribose (the D in DNA). Was it just the structure that fell into place first, like the QWERTY keyboard, and everyone kept using it from then on? There's no obvious reason why the ladder couldn't be built of other sugars. For that matter, there's no obvious reason why the alphabet employed by our genetic code for protein synthesis couldn't choose other letters from the unknown number of potential nucleotide bases of which our familiar A, G, C, and T comprise only four (five, if you count the U that substitutes for T in RNA). Further, there's no obvious reason why the code should limit itself to three-letter words and resulting vocabulary of 4 to the third power, or 64 words.
Obviously a 64-word vocabulary is sufficient to spell out some amazing complexity. There's no limit in principle to the sentences you can form with 64 words. You don't even need four letters to spell a lot of words, as binary computers attest. The point is, the code our DNA uses is not the only way to skin a cat. For instance, the amino acids that line up like pearls on a string to form our long-chain protein molecules number 22 in total, but of those only 20 are assigned a three-letter "code word" in our DNA. (The other two get added in by separate enzymes at a later stage in the protein synthesis process not directly controlled by a DNA transcription.) What's more, a number of other amino acids have specialized uses other than as beads in the protein string, such as for neurotransmitters or steps in metabolic pathways, but they are not assigned a three-letter DNA code word. So our genetic code has more words than it needs for the amino acids we use, but it uses up the redundancy in synonyms for some of them, while having no word for others.
So, back to the article I linked to above. The guys who fool around with this stuff are beginning to synthesize genetic molecules they call "XNA." These are still identifiable as nucleic acids, using a sugar and a phosphate for the ladder backbone and the familiar bases A, G, C, and T for the rungs, but they use different sugars from the usual ribose or D-ribose. Some of the alternative sugars turn out to be more structurally sound, standing up unusually well, for instance, under the stress of voracious enzymes and extreme pH levels.
Intrepid experimenters are even adding a couple of new bases to the usual A-G-C-T quartet, thus vastly expanding the code's vocabulary. I'll be very interested to learn how (and if) the surrounding cell mechanism learns to "read" the new words. I've never quite been able to understand even how the old words are read. Some sources I've read suggest that the shapes of the A-G-C-T code words are in some way physical cookie-cutter templates for the corresponding amino acids, but my impression is that that part is not well understood, and in any event I certainly don't understand it. It's one of my favorite mysteries.
All this work still sticks pretty close to Earth-style genetic molecules, of course, using a sugar-phosphate ladder backbone with bases for rungs. And yet sugars surely aren't the only way to construct a ladder, nor ladders the only possible structure on which to string a series of letters, nor a linear string of letters the only way to express and preserve a code. What works here needn't be what works best under different conditions. So I'm really curious to see how experiments in synthetic genetics come out. Because of my abiding interest in the origins of life, I'd love to find out more about how ordinary molecules could possibly have developed into active metabolism from dead-end equilibrium, and from there into replicating systems that take resources from the outside world and use energy to restructure them according to their own pattern. If nothing else, I'd like to see a better understanding develop of what kind of proto-molecules could possibly have developed into RNA, which, as primitive as it may be, is still an extremely complex structure and very, very far removed from the kind of chemical gunk you can generate from experiments designed to mimic primordial conditions.
I often hear casual statements to the effect that conditions on such-and-such a planet are "too extreme" to support life. I don't find a statement like that meaningful. Even on Earth in recent decades, we've found microbes thriving in extremely hot, cold, or poisonous conditions we'd confidently have called impossible until they were discovered. The assumption in the 1950s that life originated in shallow seas is giving way to the notion that it may have started in deep-sea thermal vents or in venues sporting other extremes of heat and pressure. We'd have to know considerably more about how life originated here before we could make any sensible statements about what it needs to get started universally, or about what sorts of forms life might take besides the ones we're used to.
Bullies
Bookworm has a post up about bullying. I found myself trying to recall how it was handled when I was a kid, but honestly I can't remember a single example. Did I grow up in some kind of pacifist's paradise? Now and then kids would be mean to other kids, ostracizing them, forming nasty little cliques, but I can't remember anyone being beaten up or physically terrorized. Sometimes the outdoor play in the neighborhood got a little rough as kids experimented with projectiles and informal combat, but it seemed to be equally rough on everyone who got in the way, not directed at any special scapegoats or victims.
Did any of you grow up in similarly bully-free schools or neighborhoods? If you grew among the bullies I read about all the time, did people fight back? Get the adults involved?
Did any of you grow up in similarly bully-free schools or neighborhoods? If you grew among the bullies I read about all the time, did people fight back? Get the adults involved?
The Unity of Consciousness, Part II
In the first part, we discussed a problem about how we could know the world, which is related to another problem about how we can share knowledge (and therefore test its validity). Let's take a step backward to see how the problem arose. As mentioned, Kant's model came to him while he was crafting a response to Hume. Hume denied the Aristotelian model of knowledge, which had underlay scholarship for hundreds of years. Kant's problem was that Hume's attack was a challenge to the doctrine of cause and effect; but it also challenged the Aristotelian concept of what it meant to have knowledge. We're going to look at the Aristotelian model that Hume was challenging.
What we finally came to in our last discussion was an idea (from Tom) that knowledge isn't an internal mental state -- rather, it is a kind of relationship between you and the thing you know about. There's a contemporary school of philosophy that believes just that; but it is also true of the ancient position.
As Aristotle explains in De Anima and elsewhere, knowledge comes to be in us via a process that starts when we encounter the unknown thing. First we must perceive the thing through our senses. Either the sense itself or (in cases where more than one sense is involved) our "common sense" will present us with an image of the thing in our minds. This image in our minds is very similar to what Kant was calling our representation, but for Aristotelians it is not knowledge. Knowledge comes after we use our imagination:
At this point, we have knowledge. In Aristotle's terms, the final cause is normally also the formal cause -- that it, it is the form of the thing. The form of the chair or the bird comes to be in our minds. That is real knowledge, without mistake: we possess the form.
There are a couple of problems with this approach. It will jump out that Aristotle is using at least one and possibly two invisibles of the type that the West has come to fear since Ockham. "Form" isn't visible except when expressed in matter; the form in our minds is visible only as an image in our minds. Likewise, Aristotle puts all this down to the working of the soul. It seems like we could simply say that he's using "soul" where we would use "mind," but that's not right: the soul turns out to be another form. In fact it is our form, the organizing principle that makes us who we are and gives us our purpose (which, for Aristotle, is to seek understanding through rational activity; but you can take the more pedestrian view that our purpose, as with any animal, is merely to sustain ourselves and produce others like us).
The other problem is that Aristotle has a difficulty with how the form could come to be in our minds. In the Physics, he gives an account in which any sort of motion is a movement of a thing from potential to actual (or a falling away: a house can move away from being a house by collapsing, so that it is again only a potential house).
So if the form comes to be in our minds, it must have already existed there potentially. That's a very interesting claim, but it is a claim that makes sense of the idea that there is a relationship between us and the world. It's a much brighter picture than that which comes from Kant, because we really have knowledge -- the actual form of the actual things -- and it makes sense that we can convey that knowledge to others.
But then you realize that this means that all forms must exist in our minds potentially -- how could that be the case? (The claim is not as shocking as it sounds at first: if you think it through, you realize that it really must be true that, if we can have knowledge of X today, we must have had the potential to know X yesterday. Thus, it follows that you now potentially know everything that you could actually know.) It makes a kind of sense on something like an externalist picture: we are part of the world, not separate from it, and thus we are related to the world in certain ways. One of those ways could be having a mind shaped for knowledge of the world.
There is another problem, though, which is that we can also obtain knowledge through contemplation alone: for example, we can come to knowledge of mathematical truths simply by thinking. We are never encountering an actual form in an actual thing; yet we are coming to knowledge all the same. That means not only that we must have the potential for the knowledge in our minds, but that we need an account of where the actual form is that we are grasping.
Aristotle's solution is to posit an "Active Intellect," which is to say a kind of universal consciousness in which all human minds participate. This is a surprising solution, very much unlike Aristotle -- it's almost Platonic, and very similar to what the later neoplatonists will suggest. This Active Intellect contains all the forms in an actual way, and thus this explains how our minds can obtain knowledge through contemplation alone.
The modern urge is to do away with "forms" as invisible or mystical, but remember what forms are: they're organizing principles that structure matter in a particular way. These things certainly exist: this is what DNA does, for example; or, if you like, the difference between hydrogen and helium is the way in which its matter is ordered and structured. So forms are real enough; and they do exist in an actual way, and come to be in our minds when we grasp them.
Here the problem is the opposite one we had before. There are large parts of this picture that really work, and are highly satisfying; but there remain some troubles we have to sort out. Let's stop here and talk it through.
What we finally came to in our last discussion was an idea (from Tom) that knowledge isn't an internal mental state -- rather, it is a kind of relationship between you and the thing you know about. There's a contemporary school of philosophy that believes just that; but it is also true of the ancient position.
As Aristotle explains in De Anima and elsewhere, knowledge comes to be in us via a process that starts when we encounter the unknown thing. First we must perceive the thing through our senses. Either the sense itself or (in cases where more than one sense is involved) our "common sense" will present us with an image of the thing in our minds. This image in our minds is very similar to what Kant was calling our representation, but for Aristotelians it is not knowledge. Knowledge comes after we use our imagination:
To the thinking soul images serve as if they were contents of perception (and when it asserts or denies them to be good or bad it avoids or pursues them).... The faculty of thinking then thinks the forms in the images, and as in the former case what is to be pursued or avoided is marked out for it, so where there is no sensation and it is engaged upon the images it is moved to pursuit or avoidance. E.g.. perceiving by sense that the beacon is fire, it recognizes in virtue of the general faculty of sense that it signifies an enemy, because it sees it moving; but sometimes by means of the images or thoughts which are within the soul, just as if it were seeing, it calculates and deliberates what is to come by reference to what is present; and when it makes a pronouncement, as in the case of sensation it pronounces the object to be pleasant or painful, in this case it avoids or persues and so generally in cases of action.In other words, we take our initial image and use our imagination to add or subtract qualities. In this process, we sort out what it is that makes the thing that kind of thing -- the purpose, or function, which Aristotle calls the 'final cause.' The beacon can be lit or not; and in sorting out the difference we learn what it is that makes it a beacon and not just a fire (i.e., that it is lit only when the enemy is coming; and thus its final cause is to warn us of invasions). A chair can have two legs or three or four; or it can be blue or red. None of these things causes it to stop being a chair. However, if it is too small, or broken, it cannot be a chair (though it might, in the first case, be a toy chair). A bird can be bigger or smaller (and even flightless!), but it serves a purpose (its own purpose, that is: it sustains itself as a bird, and is involved in the production of more birds of that type).
At this point, we have knowledge. In Aristotle's terms, the final cause is normally also the formal cause -- that it, it is the form of the thing. The form of the chair or the bird comes to be in our minds. That is real knowledge, without mistake: we possess the form.
There are a couple of problems with this approach. It will jump out that Aristotle is using at least one and possibly two invisibles of the type that the West has come to fear since Ockham. "Form" isn't visible except when expressed in matter; the form in our minds is visible only as an image in our minds. Likewise, Aristotle puts all this down to the working of the soul. It seems like we could simply say that he's using "soul" where we would use "mind," but that's not right: the soul turns out to be another form. In fact it is our form, the organizing principle that makes us who we are and gives us our purpose (which, for Aristotle, is to seek understanding through rational activity; but you can take the more pedestrian view that our purpose, as with any animal, is merely to sustain ourselves and produce others like us).
The other problem is that Aristotle has a difficulty with how the form could come to be in our minds. In the Physics, he gives an account in which any sort of motion is a movement of a thing from potential to actual (or a falling away: a house can move away from being a house by collapsing, so that it is again only a potential house).
So if the form comes to be in our minds, it must have already existed there potentially. That's a very interesting claim, but it is a claim that makes sense of the idea that there is a relationship between us and the world. It's a much brighter picture than that which comes from Kant, because we really have knowledge -- the actual form of the actual things -- and it makes sense that we can convey that knowledge to others.
But then you realize that this means that all forms must exist in our minds potentially -- how could that be the case? (The claim is not as shocking as it sounds at first: if you think it through, you realize that it really must be true that, if we can have knowledge of X today, we must have had the potential to know X yesterday. Thus, it follows that you now potentially know everything that you could actually know.) It makes a kind of sense on something like an externalist picture: we are part of the world, not separate from it, and thus we are related to the world in certain ways. One of those ways could be having a mind shaped for knowledge of the world.
There is another problem, though, which is that we can also obtain knowledge through contemplation alone: for example, we can come to knowledge of mathematical truths simply by thinking. We are never encountering an actual form in an actual thing; yet we are coming to knowledge all the same. That means not only that we must have the potential for the knowledge in our minds, but that we need an account of where the actual form is that we are grasping.
Aristotle's solution is to posit an "Active Intellect," which is to say a kind of universal consciousness in which all human minds participate. This is a surprising solution, very much unlike Aristotle -- it's almost Platonic, and very similar to what the later neoplatonists will suggest. This Active Intellect contains all the forms in an actual way, and thus this explains how our minds can obtain knowledge through contemplation alone.
The modern urge is to do away with "forms" as invisible or mystical, but remember what forms are: they're organizing principles that structure matter in a particular way. These things certainly exist: this is what DNA does, for example; or, if you like, the difference between hydrogen and helium is the way in which its matter is ordered and structured. So forms are real enough; and they do exist in an actual way, and come to be in our minds when we grasp them.
Here the problem is the opposite one we had before. There are large parts of this picture that really work, and are highly satisfying; but there remain some troubles we have to sort out. Let's stop here and talk it through.
Continuing scandal dogs embattled Secret Service
This time they actually let someone get hurt. Investigations are underway to determine whether alcohol and underage hookers were involved. Speaking of which, I'm unable to give this image proper attribution because my husband got it off of some wargamers' site:
A Couple from Hoyt Axton
Not a well known name these days, but a man with a strong voice.
The Kingston Trio did some of his pieces.
The Kingston Trio did some of his pieces.
For The Women Who Love Us:
Waylon Jennings has a famous song about a good-hearted woman, who loves a man who may not be good enough for her. What isn't as well known is that he has another song on the subject, almost to the same tune but with a slower tempo: and a more intimate.
All of us who have been long from home will understand: and all of you, whose men have long been gone.
All of us who have been long from home will understand: and all of you, whose men have long been gone.
Setting the Bar:
It is very rare that a man should be at once under consideration for both the Medal of Honor, and sainthood.
There seems to be only one other example, which I owe to Deltabravo's posting in the comments of BLACKFIVE. Even looking outside the United States, to degrees on par with the Medal of Honor, there are perishing few. Joan of Arc, Alfred the Great -- him to only some Catholics -- perhaps Olaf or Edwin of Northumbria, perhaps St. George, and not many others.
It's a rare company.
There seems to be only one other example, which I owe to Deltabravo's posting in the comments of BLACKFIVE. Even looking outside the United States, to degrees on par with the Medal of Honor, there are perishing few. Joan of Arc, Alfred the Great -- him to only some Catholics -- perhaps Olaf or Edwin of Northumbria, perhaps St. George, and not many others.
It's a rare company.
On a Father's Love
We didn't say anything here about the infamous controversy of Ms. Samantha Brick, which probably most of you noticed a few weeks ago (I would guess since it pervaded even the parts of the internet that I normally visit). There wasn't much to say about it except that most of the negative reactions were unjustified, since no amount of inflated self-esteem could account for the regular buying of free drinks and other attentions that generally do accompany beautiful women. However she might have appeared to the multitude who wrote to insult her, to those men at those times she plainly was a joy, and her presence an honor to which they wanted to pay tribute.
She has written a followup piece, though, that probably deserves comment. It is about her father, and what his constant love did for her.
This piece, far more than the other, is a thing worth conveying to all who might hear it.
She has written a followup piece, though, that probably deserves comment. It is about her father, and what his constant love did for her.
This piece, far more than the other, is a thing worth conveying to all who might hear it.
A Moment of Unity:
I don't think we've mentioned Atrios here for most of the decade he's been blogging -- looks like once in 2003 and once in 2005 -- but he was significant to the left side of the blogosphere at the beginning. He's celebrating his ten year anniversary this week and, a few minor disagreements on tone aside, it's hard to take issue with him on this point. If there has been a less insightful and more overrated writer in the major media than Tom Friedman, I can't think who he would be.
Happy birthday, Duncan Black.
While we're celebrating this moment of comity, is there anything at all to object to in the following segment? The Breitbart boys are trying to blow it up, but generally I think there's a lot of sound advice in it. You can put that down to broken clocks and twice a day, or to whatever else you like, but all things considered there's a serious issue at work here.
I saw Richard Cohen say today, of Paul Ryan's budget, that it was:
Happy birthday, Duncan Black.
While we're celebrating this moment of comity, is there anything at all to object to in the following segment? The Breitbart boys are trying to blow it up, but generally I think there's a lot of sound advice in it. You can put that down to broken clocks and twice a day, or to whatever else you like, but all things considered there's a serious issue at work here.
I saw Richard Cohen say today, of Paul Ryan's budget, that it was:
...an Ayn Randish document whose great virtue is a terrible honesty. (We are indeed going broke.)If you think through the consequences of that, Mr. Farrakhan's warning has a different sound. If we have reached the days when the bipartisan blinders can't keep out that fact any longer -- that fact and all the consequences for our society that it portends -- he might not be too far wrong.
Modest WaPo Dislikes Spotlight, Wide Circulation
You know how it is. You just want to publish a newspaper to a few like-minded citizens, without all the fuss that comes from robust circulation numbers and other unwelcome attention. Then your news desk gets a story suggesting that the Affordable Care Act will increase the budget deficit by $340 billion (or even as much as $527 billion) instead of reducing it by $132 billion, as the President previously had claimed. Your editors get together and decide that it's sort of news, but it doesn't deserve to be highlighted; you put it below the fold on page A3. You make sure it is "prominent on the home page for only a short time."But the unruly public refuses to go along with your expert judgment of the story's unimportance. Brash bloggers turn on the high beams. Before you know it, Drudge links to it under the headline "ObamaCare Explodes Deficit." (You hate it when they call it "ObamaCare." It's "derisive.") Next thing you know, conservative and liberal bloggers are abuzz with citations to your story and arguments about how the budget impact should be calculated.
The wise old heads at your publicity-shy news desk all recognize a familiar futile attempt by the unwashed masses to determine truth and falsehood. With their superior sophistication, the new desk professionals grasp that
The truth is that every complex law change, every annual federal budget, is a risk. They’re all based on assumptions and forecasts that may or may not come true. And when they don’t, Congress and the president have to adjust.Just because someone points out that a vast budget impact, which was widely reported and heavily relied on in the process of getting the law passed, was transparently based on double-counting (the Medicare "doc fix"), and is off by the better part of a trillion dollars, doesn't mean it's news. It's just all part of the inevitable world of forecasts and assumptions that may not come true. Happens all the time. Nothing to see here. Move along.
But it's too late. The Washington Post's ombudsman sadly acknowledges that the paper gets a "frisson of pleasure" from the attention that a hot story attracts -- but they're above all that. They're more interested, apparently, in pushing their favorite agenda. So they really wish people would let them give unfavorable stories a quick, decent burial below the fold on page A3 after running for an eye-blink.
Something's really got to be done about making the new media shut up.
H/t Instapundit.
The Unity of Consciousness, Part I
Joseph W. asked for a separate and new thread to discuss this subject, which arose in our discussion of problems of creation.
Even a summary of this problem -- indeed, even a book-length summary -- would necessarily compress a massive amount of careful argument. What I am hoping to provide here is more like a sketch of a summary of the problem; to tackle the problem with the seriousness it deserves is the work of years, not a few hours. The basic problem is twofold: how can I have knowledge about the world, and how can I communicate regarding knowledge of the world with other minds in a useful way?
Note that this is different from the question of "how/why did communication between intelligent beings arise?" One can accept an evolutionary response to that kind of question: it arose because, when 'tried' by animals who happened into it, it proved valuable. This is a different question, which is about how (and indeed whether) it is possible for such a thing to be at all. If evolutionary utility were the only criterion, why do animals not teleport themselves or engage in other sorts of fantastic behavior? They do not because they cannot. They do this because they can: but why can they? It's a very difficult problem.
Let's start with Kant's idea of transcendental unity of apperception. He was responding to some difficulties raised by Hume -- Hume is still today a powerful source for difficulties -- about how the mind can work. Kant argues that when we take our sense perceptions -- sight, hearing, touch, and so forth -- we must mentally mold our various senses into a single object that can serve as an object of thought. This is called representation (that is, we are re-presenting the sense data as an object of thought rather than as data per se). It's not just the object that has to be represented as a whole, though: we must also represent all of our disparate experiences as a kind of unity, the unity we take to be ourselves (for what are we if not the sum total of our experiences?).
One consequence of this approach is that we end up being unable to have any knowledge at all about anything in the world. Those things are not what our minds represent to us: the unity imposed upon them is artificial, for one thing. Thus, what we have "knowledge" about is only our representations, not the things themselves. Kant calls these things "noumina" and our representations "phenomena," and argues that noumenon are completely unknowable by human beings.
That's going to be a problem for communication about the world -- for science, say. We think that we are engaged in learning about the world through the scientific method, which involves experiements, measurements, and then communication of our results to see if others can reproduce them. If Kant is right, no part of that approach works the way we think it does. Our experiments are not of the world, but of mental phenomena that are different from the world in ways we not only cannot know but cannot conceive. Our measurements are likewise. Our theories about the meaning of these results are thus doubly disconnected from reality, because they are theories about theories about what things are really like. That's problematic enough, but now I need to convey them to you for you to try to reproduce.
You've got your own set of representations. Since neither you nor I have access to the things in the world, but only our individually constructed representations, we have absolutely no way of knowing if we are talking about the same objects. When I communicate my ideas to you, what I think I'm saying to you is being filtered as sound impulses and then re-presented by your mind to you according to your own unity of apperception: thus, I have no idea what you're hearing when I tell you something.
We might be satisfied to say, "Well, my own unity will represent all input in a coherent way, so while I don't really know if you're agreeing with me or not, it will appear to me that we agree on the basic facts." That would make sense, but it doesn't explain why science appears to give us increasing new capacities to do physical things: we can work together to produce rockets that fly to the moon, for example. That's a capacity that suggests that we really are cooperating: there's nothing in our pre-existing unity that should suggest it. It is a capacity that arises from this cooperation, which suggests that the cooperation is real.
We might say, "Well, let's stick with the evolutionary explanation. Our brain structures are similar enough that we can 'understand' each other to a certain degree because similar structures produce similar representations." Even if this were fully adequate, which it isn't, it doesn't make sense of the problem of why we can understand things that aren't like us. I usually use horses as a model for examining the question of a unitary order of reason across species (an idea also rooted in Kant, via Sebastian Rödl's explorations); but we have a similar capacity with animals of any kind. We seem to be able to distinguish between animals that are reacting to a pre-programmed instinct versus those which seem to have a capacity to reason and learn, for example, even if we don't share much evolutionary history with them.
The explanation is also inadequate because it simply doesn't answer the depth of the problem. Kant's argument gives us a world in which we can have no knowledge whatsoever of the reality around us, including the minds of others. To argue that our brain structures are 'mostly similar' is thus to argue facts not in evidence. We can't know any facts about the structures of our brains, only about the phenomena of the structures of our brains -- and these are likely being represented according to a pre-existing internal order that makes them accord to some degree with what we expect from them.
It also just doesn't make sense to leap from "it is impossible to have any knowledge whatsoever about the things themselves" to "nevertheless, we seem to do a pretty good job." You can't jump from "impossible" to "a pretty good capacity" in the same way that you can't build a line out of points. The points have no extension, so no number of them added together will give you an extended line. Likewise, no amount of phenomena can be combined into a noumenon: no phenomenon contains any nouminal content.
This has led people to question, well, everything: it has led otherwise serious people to wander around speculating about Zombies (which set of arguments, by the way Joe, is very similar to the ones you cited to me re: whether AIs would have real consciousness); or mad scientists keeping our brains in a vat.
Or it has led people -- particularly practical-minded people -- simply to ignore the problem and pretend it doesn't exist. This science stuff seems to work; why worry too much about why it works?
I suppose I will stop here, and call this "part one," because there remains a great deal to be said about what I think the right way to resolve the problem happens to be. For now, though, maybe we should stop and take a moment to appreciate the problem.
Even a summary of this problem -- indeed, even a book-length summary -- would necessarily compress a massive amount of careful argument. What I am hoping to provide here is more like a sketch of a summary of the problem; to tackle the problem with the seriousness it deserves is the work of years, not a few hours. The basic problem is twofold: how can I have knowledge about the world, and how can I communicate regarding knowledge of the world with other minds in a useful way?
Note that this is different from the question of "how/why did communication between intelligent beings arise?" One can accept an evolutionary response to that kind of question: it arose because, when 'tried' by animals who happened into it, it proved valuable. This is a different question, which is about how (and indeed whether) it is possible for such a thing to be at all. If evolutionary utility were the only criterion, why do animals not teleport themselves or engage in other sorts of fantastic behavior? They do not because they cannot. They do this because they can: but why can they? It's a very difficult problem.
Let's start with Kant's idea of transcendental unity of apperception. He was responding to some difficulties raised by Hume -- Hume is still today a powerful source for difficulties -- about how the mind can work. Kant argues that when we take our sense perceptions -- sight, hearing, touch, and so forth -- we must mentally mold our various senses into a single object that can serve as an object of thought. This is called representation (that is, we are re-presenting the sense data as an object of thought rather than as data per se). It's not just the object that has to be represented as a whole, though: we must also represent all of our disparate experiences as a kind of unity, the unity we take to be ourselves (for what are we if not the sum total of our experiences?).
One consequence of this approach is that we end up being unable to have any knowledge at all about anything in the world. Those things are not what our minds represent to us: the unity imposed upon them is artificial, for one thing. Thus, what we have "knowledge" about is only our representations, not the things themselves. Kant calls these things "noumina" and our representations "phenomena," and argues that noumenon are completely unknowable by human beings.
That's going to be a problem for communication about the world -- for science, say. We think that we are engaged in learning about the world through the scientific method, which involves experiements, measurements, and then communication of our results to see if others can reproduce them. If Kant is right, no part of that approach works the way we think it does. Our experiments are not of the world, but of mental phenomena that are different from the world in ways we not only cannot know but cannot conceive. Our measurements are likewise. Our theories about the meaning of these results are thus doubly disconnected from reality, because they are theories about theories about what things are really like. That's problematic enough, but now I need to convey them to you for you to try to reproduce.
You've got your own set of representations. Since neither you nor I have access to the things in the world, but only our individually constructed representations, we have absolutely no way of knowing if we are talking about the same objects. When I communicate my ideas to you, what I think I'm saying to you is being filtered as sound impulses and then re-presented by your mind to you according to your own unity of apperception: thus, I have no idea what you're hearing when I tell you something.
We might be satisfied to say, "Well, my own unity will represent all input in a coherent way, so while I don't really know if you're agreeing with me or not, it will appear to me that we agree on the basic facts." That would make sense, but it doesn't explain why science appears to give us increasing new capacities to do physical things: we can work together to produce rockets that fly to the moon, for example. That's a capacity that suggests that we really are cooperating: there's nothing in our pre-existing unity that should suggest it. It is a capacity that arises from this cooperation, which suggests that the cooperation is real.
We might say, "Well, let's stick with the evolutionary explanation. Our brain structures are similar enough that we can 'understand' each other to a certain degree because similar structures produce similar representations." Even if this were fully adequate, which it isn't, it doesn't make sense of the problem of why we can understand things that aren't like us. I usually use horses as a model for examining the question of a unitary order of reason across species (an idea also rooted in Kant, via Sebastian Rödl's explorations); but we have a similar capacity with animals of any kind. We seem to be able to distinguish between animals that are reacting to a pre-programmed instinct versus those which seem to have a capacity to reason and learn, for example, even if we don't share much evolutionary history with them.
The explanation is also inadequate because it simply doesn't answer the depth of the problem. Kant's argument gives us a world in which we can have no knowledge whatsoever of the reality around us, including the minds of others. To argue that our brain structures are 'mostly similar' is thus to argue facts not in evidence. We can't know any facts about the structures of our brains, only about the phenomena of the structures of our brains -- and these are likely being represented according to a pre-existing internal order that makes them accord to some degree with what we expect from them.
It also just doesn't make sense to leap from "it is impossible to have any knowledge whatsoever about the things themselves" to "nevertheless, we seem to do a pretty good job." You can't jump from "impossible" to "a pretty good capacity" in the same way that you can't build a line out of points. The points have no extension, so no number of them added together will give you an extended line. Likewise, no amount of phenomena can be combined into a noumenon: no phenomenon contains any nouminal content.
This has led people to question, well, everything: it has led otherwise serious people to wander around speculating about Zombies (which set of arguments, by the way Joe, is very similar to the ones you cited to me re: whether AIs would have real consciousness); or mad scientists keeping our brains in a vat.
Or it has led people -- particularly practical-minded people -- simply to ignore the problem and pretend it doesn't exist. This science stuff seems to work; why worry too much about why it works?
I suppose I will stop here, and call this "part one," because there remains a great deal to be said about what I think the right way to resolve the problem happens to be. For now, though, maybe we should stop and take a moment to appreciate the problem.
Economics & Medieval Norwegian Coins
Studies of medieval coins in Norway suggest a more complex economy than is commonly pictured:
The trick is in the coins’ metallic body – a mix of copper and silver that makes them much less sturdy than coins from present times. Medieval coins were easily frayed by everyday use, and by studying the degree of this wear and tear, Gullbekk was able to come up with rough estimates of how many hands the coins have seen in their lifetime.
Gullbekk explains that if one knows the time period certain coins were used, one can make a well-informed guess of the coin’s circulation velocity in the years it was used as currency.
I bet this trick would work for the period of Anglo-Saxon coins in England, as the government was apparently successful in forcing everyone to turn in their coins to be melted-down and re-struck periodically. Thus, when we do find coins from a particular period, it's in hoards whose age can be estimated fairly precisely. You could take those coins and have a very reasonable estimate of their life in circulation. (The only problem is the relative rarity of such coins, since -- as mentioned -- the government was fairly successful at collecting up old coins and melting them down.)
H/t: Medieval News.
A Wise Notion
The Guardian describes Dr. Terry Eagleton's new position on literary theory. His old position was to declare that there was no quality or set of qualities that could define "literature."
Eagleton has not reneged on scepticism: he is just sceptical about it.That strikes me as very wise. There is nothing that should more stimulate us to be skeptical than skepticism.
Dangerous choices
Here's something I like to see: states trying something new with the public schools on a large enough scale that we might be able to draw some conclusions. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal handily won a second term with a campaign that leaned heavily on education issues. He put together impressive bipartisan support for an education reform bill that will put a lot more choice in parents' hands, using vouchers, additional charter schools, and tenure reform. These reforms expand on a tiny trend begun as a crisis response in the wake of Katrina:
Only in New Orleans, where devastation from levee breaches during Hurricane Katrina led to an extreme makeover of schools, have results been dramatic. Although there were bright spots, city schools as a whole were among the worst-performing in the state before the disaster.Grim and I sometimes argue about the value of the free market. He is skeptical of its tendency to monetize values that should be beyond monetization. I in turn am drawn to its way of putting choices in the hands of the recipients of goods and services. The advantage of competition is not that someone wins and someone loses. The advantage is that customers can gravitate to what succeeds and abandon what does not. The "losers" in this contest aren't doomed to bleak lives in hovels after their customers withdraw their resources and support. They can always adopt the winning strategies if they like, and quit losing. What they can't do is force their customers to keep coming back to hear a new set of excuses for failure. Parents don't have to agree or disagree with any of the excuses. They can simply go to another school, which is getting better results with a different approach.
Since the state took over most schools post-Katrina, that is changing. Recovery School District students, including charter and traditional campuses, posted their fourth consecutive year of improvement last year. The proportion of students scoring at grade level or above grew to 48 percent in 2011 -- more than double the percentage in 2007.
That progress has come as most city schools became public charter schools, a concept that the governor's legislation would expand statewide.
Some opponents of the reform legislation have tried to make charter schools seem like a questionable experiment and point to the failure of some schools. But there are highly successful, stable charter schools in New Orleans. And the fact that some unsuccessful schools have been closed down is a sign that the system is working.
Does this approach protect us against parents who make poor choices? Of course not. Making up for bad parents is beyond the capacity of a public school system, as failing schools are always telling us.
Engagement
From a not particularly snide N.Y. Times story about the famously combative Andrew Breitbart, an anecdote from his wife at his funeral: “I came home one day to our first apartment to find a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses,” she wrote, “trying to wrap up the conversation and get out.”
Stuffed with Stuff
Bookworm is talking this week about being oppressed with stuff. I have a few hoarding genes, nothing too extreme. Not like my poor aunt, who barely can stand to let me throw away a tissue when I visit the tiny, crowded hospital room where she still languishes, now quite close to the end, and who still obsesses over the possessions she had to leave behind when she moved into an assisted-living facility ten years ago. Certainly nothing like the sad souls who immure themselves into houses jammed to the ceiling in every room. I'm more a case of too much laziness to sort through and dispose of what I don't need or use. I do notice, though, that fatal internal message that says, "Don't throw this out, even though you haven't used it in five years. Someday you may want it," which is the siren song of the hoarder.
When I was young and unencumbered by possessions, I used to love it when relatives decided to shed their excess stuff. I had nothing but cheap, utilitarian, boring new stuff and coveted their funky old objects. When I could afford it, I would shop at antique stores for the same kind of thing. Every middle-aged or old person with too much stuff should have a niece like me, to accept and cherish their wonderful old things. My bedridden aunt doesn't so much miss possessing her old things as worry about them, as if they were puppies that need to be adopted into a loving and appreciative home. The problem is, these concerns extend not only to nice old furniture but to boxes of empty jelly jars. I can't even clear out her greeting cards unless I agree to take them to some church group that plans to cut them up and use them in crafts. Part of this is Depression-era thrift, of course, but the rest is just anxiety and alienation. She's about to cast off a lot more than her stuff. She's going through a door she can approach only empty-handed.
My taller half is considerably more orderly than I, and gradually has converted me to an appreciation of unclutter. Not that I achieve much unclutter, but now I do at least aspire to it and occasionally take lurching, partial steps in that direction. We managed to scrape off quite a few barnacles when we moved here six years ago. It's time for another wave. Anything that's still useful needs to go to the local thrift store, and the rest to a landfill.
Maybe I'll find my missing dulcimer.
When Galaxies Go Bad
Trying to find something amusing on TV while I crochet away the afternoon, I stumbled on a real gem of a "science" show on what we like to call the "Not If But When" channel. It wrapped up with some of the silliest anthropomorphizing I'd heard in a long time. The parts in quotations were spoken by people purporting to be real-live astronomers:Galaxies are home to stars, solar systems, stars, planets, and moons. Everything that's important happens in galaxies. Galaxies are the lifeblood of the universe. "We arose because we live in a galaxy. Everything we can see and everything that matters to us happens within galaxies."We were discussing recently the appropriate use of poetry in science writing. We also have been discussing the abiding human need to construct fables of meaning, but I prefer my fables more coherent than this. The producers of the show (and most of the "scientists" they were interviewing) needed to put down that doobie. If we had been somewhere else, we wouldn't be here. But as it is, no matter where we go, there we are. And I can feel my skeleton.But the truth is, galaxies are delicate structures, held together by dark matter [previously identified as the stuff that must be there because it accounts for the tendency of galaxies to stay together when otherwise we'd expect them to fling apart]. Now, scientists have found another force at work in the universe. It's called "dark energy." Dark energy has the opposite effect of dark matter. Instead of binding galaxies together, it pushes them apart. "The dark energy, which we've only discovered in the last decade, which is the dominant stuff in the universe, is far more mysterious. We don't have the slightest idea why it's there." "What it's made from, we don't really know. We know it's there, but we don't really know what it is or what it's doing." "Dark energy is really weird. It's as if space has little springs in it, which are causing things to repel each other, and push them apart."Far in the future, scientists think that dark energy will win the cosmic battle with dark matter, and that victory will start to drive galaxies apart. "Dark energy's going to kill galaxies off; it's going to do that by causing all the galaxies to recede further and further away from us until they're invisible, until they're moving away from us faster than the speed of light, so the rest of the universe will literally disappear before our very eyes. Not today, not tomorrow, but in perhaps a trillion years, the rest of the universe will have disappeared." Galaxies will become lonely outposts.But that's not going to happen for a very long time. For now, the universe is thriving, and galaxies are creating the right conditions for life to exist. "Without galaxies, I wouldn't be here, you wouldn't be here, perhaps life itself wouldn't be here." "We're lucky. Life has only evolved on Earth because our tiny solar system was born in the right part of the galaxy. If we were any closer to the center, well, we wouldn't be here." "At the center of the galaxy, life can be extremely violent, and in fact, if our solar system were closer to the center of our galaxy, it would be so radioactive that we couldn't exist at all."Too far away from the center would be just as bad. Out there, there aren't as many stars. We might not exist at all. "So in some sense, we are in the 'Goldilocks' zone of the galaxy: not too close, not too far, just right." . . .More and more scientific research is focusing on galaxies. They hold the key to how the universe works. "We should be amazed to live at this time: here, in a random universe, on a random planet, on the outskirts of a random galaxy, where we can ask questions and understand things from the beginning of the universe to the end. We should celebrate our brief moment in the sun."Galaxies are born. They evolve, they collide, and they die. Galaxies are the superstars of the scientific world, and even the scientists who study them have their favorites . . . . "My favorite galaxy is the Milky Way galaxy. It's my true home."We're lucky that the Milky Way provides the right conditions for us to live. Our destiny is linked to our galaxy, and to all galaxies. They made us, they shape us, and our future is in their hands.
Full Metal Jousting
Thought you all might find it interesting to know that the History Channel has a show about modernized jousting. I watched an episode last night and was impressed by the seriousness and skill demonstrated. The men were cute too.
Anytime something of the past can be preserved like this, it's a good thing.
Anytime something of the past can be preserved like this, it's a good thing.
Haidt's Surveys
Dr. Jonathan Haidt has a new book out, which Cassandra has recommended to me highly -- I have not had time as yet! -- and which is beginning to make ripples in the community. You may have seen the Hot Air piece on how conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives; or the New York magazine piece with the amusing illustrations that was featured on the always-interesting Arts & Letters Daily.
Dr. Haidt has updated his online quizzes, which you may enjoy taking for fun or edification; or just to help see the point he's trying to make. I was pleased to score perfectly on the scientific knowledge quiz, for example; it's not hard, and I expect all of you will do likewise. Both liberals and conservatives average over six out of seven total points.
The point he is making that gets the most attention comes from his "Sacredness Survey," where he's pushing the argument that conservatives and liberals share three value systems (fairness, avoidance of harm, and purity), but that conservatives have two more (authority and in-group loyalty).
I learn from this survey that Haidt's model ranks me as considering all but one of these values considerably more sacred than is normal for either liberals or conservatives; the exception is authority, for which I apparently have almost no respect whatsoever.
That helps me to understand Dr. Haidt's point, but it shows me that he doesn't quite understand my way of thinking about things. I have a great deal of respect for legitimate authority; but I run it in with in-group loyalty. That is to say, my view of legitimate authority is that it arises from a mutual and reciprocal bond of loyalty. Lacking such a bond, there is no legitimate authority. This is because authority must be earned and deserved.
You'll find the surveys interesting, and perhaps illuminating. I also have it on good authority that Cassandra will be writing about this book soon, so you'll get a head start on your homework!
Dr. Haidt has updated his online quizzes, which you may enjoy taking for fun or edification; or just to help see the point he's trying to make. I was pleased to score perfectly on the scientific knowledge quiz, for example; it's not hard, and I expect all of you will do likewise. Both liberals and conservatives average over six out of seven total points.
The point he is making that gets the most attention comes from his "Sacredness Survey," where he's pushing the argument that conservatives and liberals share three value systems (fairness, avoidance of harm, and purity), but that conservatives have two more (authority and in-group loyalty).
I learn from this survey that Haidt's model ranks me as considering all but one of these values considerably more sacred than is normal for either liberals or conservatives; the exception is authority, for which I apparently have almost no respect whatsoever.
That helps me to understand Dr. Haidt's point, but it shows me that he doesn't quite understand my way of thinking about things. I have a great deal of respect for legitimate authority; but I run it in with in-group loyalty. That is to say, my view of legitimate authority is that it arises from a mutual and reciprocal bond of loyalty. Lacking such a bond, there is no legitimate authority. This is because authority must be earned and deserved.
You'll find the surveys interesting, and perhaps illuminating. I also have it on good authority that Cassandra will be writing about this book soon, so you'll get a head start on your homework!
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