A natural act

From an AEI article by Frederick Hess on the education wars:

At root, teaching and learning are intuitive acts. Kids are naturally curious; they’re natural learners. The human mind is hard-wired to ask questions and seek out knowledge. And adults are predisposed to share knowledge, interests, and skills. When one feels confounded or overwhelmed by the challenges of educational improvement, it’s worth keeping in mind that teaching and learning aren’t the product of some mysterious alchemy—they’re deeply natural acts. Systems, structures, and bureaucratic rules designed to support and promote learning need to be scrutinized with an eye to whether they respect that truth.

We can all do a lot better to steer clear of words that have been stripped of meaning. School reform is filled with such words: “consensus,” “best practices,” “differentiation,” “21st century skills,” “rigor,” “effective teaching,” “accountability,” “empowerment,” and so on. Most of the time, it’s not clear what any of these placeholders really mean. They’re often just a way to skip past complicated questions. The problem is that mushy language leads to fuzzy thinking. When I use these words, I frequently realize that even I don’t know exactly what I’m saying.

I was lucky to have many first-rate teachers. One thing they avoided was buzzwords and empty process. They knew how to keep order (and were not undermined in this by their institutions), they knew their subjects, and they cared about nothing but making the intellectual contact necessary to get their knowledge and skills across. Some did this warmly and personably, others with a cool, demanding style. Some were didactic, others collaborative. They gave and demanded respect. They believed that what they had to teach was valuable and showed that they cared whether I got it.

The bad teachers were checking off boxes, warming benches, picking up paychecks, perpetuating fads, using their desks as a soapbox. If they knew their fields at all, they didn't get much of a charge out of communicating its content.

I honestly don't know what's supposed to be going on in education colleges.  There must be some training going on there that circumvents the thick fog of buzzwords; I'm sure some of my good teachers--the ones from public schools--had made it through without being ruined.  At worst they had some of their time wasted.

Scots-Irish Music in America

A documentary.

Falsification

My neighbor who lurks here reports that her niece can't hear arguments against man-made climate catastrophe; she fends them all off with the assumption that they're funded by the Koch brothers.  If she could listen, this would be a good place to start:  a fair-minded fellow who tries to make basic, non-threatening points to a group of nice college kids.  The Q-and-A session afterwards suggests that not much got through, but you never know.  For every well-meaning question posed with a confused lack of rigor, there may have been several kids quietly wondering if the whole thing makes as much sense as everyone's been telling them it does all these years.

It's very discouraging to me that it's so difficult to concentrate anyone's attention on the failure of our climate models to make verifiable predictions, let alone on more difficult questions like "Even assuming you're correct about the probable severity of the problem, is the policy you're proposing to cure it actually likely to cure it?" and "If so, at what cost, and how does that cost compare to the benefit?"

ERB: Teddy versus Churchill

It's worth comparing this with the recent Tolkien vs. Martin post by Thomas, if you're interested in the format. (Language warning.) They both feature an English legend against what is presented as a blowhard American. The effect, however, is quite different.



I'm curious as to why, given the political leanings of ERB, they treated the Spanish American War as kind-of glorious, and outright ignored Churchill's contributions to Britain's colonial wars.

I think they think that Churchill won this one as convincingly as they set up Tolkien to win over Martin (which of course he should have done, were the thing real). I'm pretty sure that's not true. The Bull Moose looks to me like he came out well on top, given the way that Churchill presents his argument.

Bierdna

Aristotle Generally Has A Point

Glenn Reynolds responds to an article in the Washington Post in a way I find is not uncommon, but is ill-advised. The article cites a passage from Aristotle's Rhetoric, which I'll give in full in a minute. Reynolds responds:

Given the change in military technology and the state since Aristotle, I’m not sure the quotes are apposite.

That is doing Aristotle poor justice. He is not talking about military technology or the state here. He's talking about persuasion, and in particular in persuasion by example. So here's the citation:

The “example” has already been described as one kind of induction; and the special nature of the subject-matter that distinguishes it from the other kinds has also been stated above. Its relation to the proposition it supports is not that of part to whole, nor whole to part, nor whole to whole, but of part to part, or like to like. When two statements are of the same order, but one is more familiar than the other, the former is an “example.”

The argument may, for instance, be that Dionysius, in asking as he does for a bodyguard, is scheming to make himself a despot. For in the past Peisistratus kept asking for a bodyguard in order to carry out such a scheme, and did make himself a despot as soon as he got it; and so did Theagenes at Megara; and in the same way all other instances known to the speaker are made into examples, in order to show what is not yet known, that Dionysius has the same purpose in making the same request: all these being instances of the one general principle, that a man who asks for a bodyguard is scheming to make himself a despot.

A position I've long defended in this space is that this kind of reasoning is analogical. It would be easy to read this as a kind of logical reasoning instead. "Instances of one general principle" sounds like there is a single thing of which this is an instance; a type of which this is a token, to put it in the way contemporary philosophers prefer.

But that isn't Aristotle's point. Here's what he says next:

There is an important distinction between two sorts of enthymemes that has been wholly overlooked by almost everybody-one that also subsists between the syllogisms treated of in dialectic. One sort of enthymeme really belongs to rhetoric, as one sort of syllogism really belongs to dialectic; but the other sort really belongs to other arts and faculties, whether to those we already exercise or to those we have not yet acquired. Missing this distinction, people fail to notice that the more correctly they handle their particular subject the further they are getting away from pure rhetoric or dialectic.

As a point of pure rhetoric -- which is what he was talking about -- the charge by example that a bodyguard implies tyranny is an effective tool. As a point of understanding the real world, that is not the case. The more correctly you understand your subject, the less you're doing rhetoric, and the more you're doing arts and science, certainly to include military and political science (which are more properly sciences on Aristotle's terms than on the contemporary understanding of what a "science" is).

The thing about analogies is that they always break. The question about analogical reasoning -- which includes all forms of the example -- is whether the breaking point comes before or after the thing you're talking about. If you're using rhetoric to try to understand the world, that's the thing to keep in mind.

If you're just trying to persuade someone of a point you'd like them to adopt, well, this is a perfectly good rhetorical argument. It's not that Aristotle didn't understand enough to give you good guidance. It's that even the people who read him rarely read him closely enough to understand what he was talking about. Here he's just talking about persuasion, creating the impression that a single real principle is governing disparate events. In fact, that is never the case: analogies always break. It is my contention that Aristotle knew this perfectly well, and defends it as a governing principle of ethics and politics in the early Nicomachean Ethics. (1094b12-28, for those who are serious about following along.)

Gratitude for 2016

Though it is quite common to view 2016 as a particularly bad year, I found that it contained a number of very high moments. Of course, my list of what was good about it matches other people's list of what was bad about it in part. Still, overall there are some things about the year that were unexpected and good.

I'll list them in chronological order, where the chronology is 'as I remember it' rather than me looking it up to confirm I have the dates right.

1) The end of the Bush family dynasty in Republican politics: nothing against the Bush family, but everything against family dynasties in our Republic.

2) Brexit, which offers many reasons for hope.

3) The discovery that the Republican party was not really controlled by the elite that tried to run it, but that it was a genuinely small-d democratic party that would live with the will of its voters. That was quite surprising and unexpected.

4) The absence of violence at the RNC in spite of predictions.

5) The revelation of the corruption of the DNC, not because it was good that it was corrupt, but in the hope that it might be a corrective in the future. There is a minority element of the party, centered around Bernie Sanders' supporters, that is committed to such reforms because they are still young enough to genuinely believe in democracy. Maybe they'll win. Even if they don't, maybe they'll break some of their chains. Their naivety may finally fail, and their starry-eyed leaders become corrupted by power -- but on the other hand there's little power left, outside California, so there's a chance that their idealism may succeed. Who would want to corrupt them, outside California, where they have nothing to offer in return?

6) The end of the Clinton family dynasty, which is an unalloyed good for America.

7) The survival of the United States Constitution as a document that might possibly limit government powers, rather than as a document that licenses the government 'to do good things.' The conservative view of the Constitution would have passed away forever with a 5th progressive vote on the Supreme Court.

8) Suddenly it became important to be concerned about the health of our democratic forms, and limits on executive power, and other things that some of us have been talking about this whole time.

9) A revival of interest in Federalism, although nascent, as a means of controlling a Federal power that is suddenly frightening to the American left.

10) Some of these potential cabinet appointments look good -- especially Mattis, but not only Mattis.

11) A chance to revisit and reform numerous Federal policies and agencies. So far it's just a chance, and it may be squandered or it may fail in spite of diligent effort. Nevertheless, there would have been no chance at all otherwise.

There's a lot to do now, but these things were good things from my perspective.

Civil Rights and Terror

A historical parallel:

Thousands attend their rallies, claiming widespread discrimination. They wrap themselves in displays of “interfaith” cooperation. National, state, and local officials pay them heed. Words that “offend” them are removed from movies, newscasts, and even official government reports. All the while, the men who lead this organization have appeared extensively on FBI wiretaps and are known to federal law enforcement to be involved in a national criminal conspiracy.

You could be forgiven for thinking this describes the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)... But no. The year is 1971, and the pressure group is the Italian American Civil Rights League (IACRL). Its founder, Joe Colombo, is known to federal law enforcement as the head of New York’s Colombo crime family...

It may seem like a punch line now but, in the 1970s, the effort by gangsters to don the mantle of activists and wrap themselves the flag of “civil rights” was taken semi-seriously. Many prominent Italian-American elites (prominenti in Italian) endorsed the call, throwing their influence behind the grievance-mongering.

There's a line to walk here, as groups that legitimately exist to protect civil rights are often co-opted into going along with groups like these. That provides an additional complication, as it is necessary to disaggregate the legitimate groups from the ones that exist to provide cover for dangerous organizations. It wouldn't do to run the Anti-Defamation League out of business along with CAIR, even though they frequently end up going along with CAIR. That makes it more difficult, but still necessary, to criticize effectively.

A lengthy aside, that may serve as an example: ADL has other conceptual problems, too, such as listing the Celtic Cross as a "hate symbol," along with Anglo-Saxon and Norse runic writing. The Celtic Cross is one of the most common expressions of Christianity in much of the United States, as well as of course in Ireland. Runic writing is of great interest not only to neopagans, but to lovers of J. R. R. Tolkien and medieval history in general. The fact that somebody somewhere used a symbol in a hateful way does not make the symbol itself a form of hate.

In fairness, ADL does clarify a few cases in which "interpretation" is important. I would say they understate the case, and that such a symbol should only be taken as an expression of hate if no interpretation is required to see that it is intended as one -- it's not as if the KKK or the Aryan Brotherhood are shy about what they think. The attempt to ban or constrict speech and expression is not desirable, nor is it wise to yield up powerful symbols to the hateful. Far wiser would be an effort to reclaim those symbols, by contesting that the legitimate use of them is the one fully proper use. I raise that criticism of the approach, however, without wishing to undermine the cause of rejecting Anti-Semitism.

To return to the main point, it can be difficult to disentangle the group you want to expose as a front group -- CAIR -- while not undermining the legitimate group that has adopted exactly similar rhetoric, and that appears at some of the front group's events. Likewise, when prominent people are suckered into playing along, you can't help but frame your criticism of them in a way that is going to make them look foolish (at best). The alternative is to let bad actors get away with disabling necessary security work.

Our outgoing administration has erred significantly in the one direction. It remains to be seen if the incoming administration will get the balance right, or if it will err in the other direction. At the moment we've gone so far down the one road that even an error in the other direction would be corrective. Still, it would be best by far to get the balance right.

"DID YOU REMEMBER TO VOTE?!?"

A Deadly Few Weeks

We are entering into a dangerous passage, a period of great uncertainty that will last several weeks. You're doubtless aware of the transitional period between administrations with very different world views, which is one problem. But another problem is that, for the first time since World War II, we will have no carriers deployed at sea anywhere in the world.

As former President Bill Clinton said, one of the first questions that comes up in a crisis, from a tsunami to an invasion, is "Where is the nearest carrier?" The answer for a little while is going to be: "There isn't one."

Auld Lang Syne

Performed by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards.

UPDATE: Congratulations on surviving 2016, those of you on the East Coast. Now for 2017.

Iceland Ends the Year with No Government

REYKJAVIK (AFP) - 
 
Iceland is ending an eventful year in a political quagmire, left without a government for two months after the Panama Papers scandal and a snap election reflecting deep divisions in the island nation.

"In recent years we thought we were seeing the craziest, but we were proven wrong every time -- Iceland found ways to be even crazier," a parliamentary assistant from the Icelandic opposition said on April 6, seeing a government in tatters hesitate on its next move.

Iceland, getting even crazier. Finland has some work to do.

Apparently, the Pirate Party made a run at it, but ultimately failed to take the ship of state.

Update: The AFP article doesn't tell us this, but according to the Wikipedia article linked above, the Pirates actually won 23.9% of the vote and are the largest party in Iceland right now.

But it's not all bad:

Its economy is flourishing with growth expected to reach five percent, after 4.2 percent in 2015. Unemployment has virtually disappeared. Incomes are rising fast. Construction is booming.

Iceland has become a hot spot for tourists from Britain, the US, Asia or Germany, at almost any time of the year, fuelling the creation of thousands of jobs and generous spending.

Cause? Effect?

Hogmanay

One of these years, I have to get out to Edinburgh for this festival.

The Chronicles of the Black Company (and More Rogue One)

In the Rogue One thread (where, BTW, douglas has now weighed in) I brought up a series of military fantasy novels that I think many at the Hall would enjoy, Glen Cook's The Chronicles of the Black Company. (Ignore the cover art on that edition. Please.)

Cook himself, I believe, was a corpsman for a Marine Recon unit and fought in Vietnam, and the books read that way, although the Black Company is a medieval-style free company and instead of all the high-tech support Marine Recon gets the Company has their own section of sorcerers.

If you've ever wondered what a Vietnam-style counter-insurgency would look like in a sword & sorcery world, here it is. In the first novel, the Company is hired by the sorceress queen of an empire to root out and destroy a troublesome insurgency that seems to keep growing despite her own army's victories. Prophesies of the White Rose, a messianic figure, give many of the queen's subjects a religious fervor for the insurgency, and so the Company is tasked not only with fighting the insurgents but disproving the prophesies. There is some good military cloak-and-dagger work in that. Of course, the queen's own generals grow to hate the Company as she increasingly relies on it to do the job her  native regiments don't seem to be able to accomplish, so the Company is always watching its back as well. It's a great story.

Epic Rap Battle: J. R. R. Tolkien vs. George R. R. Martin

Pretty funny, though there's some foul language.

I Mean, I Suppose Illiteracy Is A Problem

[The former head of Obama's faith-based outreach] once drafted a faith-outreach fact sheet describing Obama’s views on poverty, titling it “Economic Fairness and the Least of These,” a reference to a famous teaching from Jesus in the Bible. Another staffer repeatedly deleted “the least of these,” commenting, “Is this a typo? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Who/what are ‘these’?”

Possibly the staffer was from another religious tradition, of course. Still, that points out another problem. The American literary tradition is awash in Biblical references -- just consider Moby Dick. Even granting that Jefferson et al were followers of a Deist line of thought that is closer to secularism than Americans often appreciate today, drifting completely out of the Christian tradition means drifting away from much of the founding thought of the American ideal. And the best thought, too: Jefferson spoke of a separation of Church and state, but also of the rights granted by a Creator inalienably. The nation was founded in a tense relationship with the institution of slavery that it inherited, but the Abolitionists were also the most intensely Evangelical Christians of their age. Dr. King's oratory doesn't make sense outside of the Biblical tradition.

I wonder what they think the answer to that problem is, or if they recognize it to be a problem?

Top ten top tens from 2016

From ChrisTheBarker:

That link was via Jonah Goldberg's newsletter, whence also these:

The Year in Memes:  I got through the first ten and discovered I'd never heard of any of them.

2016 Internet Slang:  No, never heard of these, either.  Was I even present during 2016?

The Year in Space:  OK, a few of these.

Top Ten Top Ten Lists:  A complete bomb on all of them, even the books, which I had some tiny prayer of recognizing in principle.

I'm going to stop now.  This is too alienating.

How Not To Be Wrong and other book reviews

I have discovered the pleasures of "Audible," which is an Amazon-related service that allows you to download audiobooks.  It's a great thing for beadworking, gardening, jogging, and driving.  If you hate the book, you can even return it and download a replacement for free.  I wasn't tempted to return "How Not To Be Wrong," by Jordan Ellenberg, a book about probability, statistics, and generally reliable analysis written by a guy with an engaging style and a good sense of anecdote.  I wish I could quote from it, but that's the disadvantage of an audiobook.  This L.A. Times interview gives you a good flavor.  The anecdote that deserves quoting at length concerned a spoofed research article about detecting emotional responses to photographs by scanning the brain activity of deceased fish.  The deadpan introductory sections of that paper are priceless, setting out the relatively little difficulty the researchers had in ensuring that the fish did not alter their positions while in the scanning machines.  There is also an explanation of the pitfalls of "regression to the mean" analysis that I found very helpful as a layman lacking any systematic training in statistics.

I hated Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind"--too snide and preachy--so I exchanged it for Sean Carroll's "The Big Picture," which I'm still on the fence about.  It's interesting, but I have almost no patience for extended philosophical discussions in the "what if it's all just an illusion" vein.  He does have a nice exposition of what he calls "poetic naturalism," which tries to bridge the gap between fine-grained mechanistic explanations of scientific processes and humanistic treatments of concepts like personality and duty, which he groups in the "emergent order" category.  It's a good shot at avoiding absurd reductionism.

Nick Lane's newest book, "The Vital Question," was as terrific as Nick Lane books always are; they call for re-reading.  Because "The Vital Question" is about the origin of life, I hoped it would address my favorite mystery, the origin of the DNA code.  Sadly, it did not, but the treatment of the origin of metabolism, eukaryotes (that's everything from yeast to us), and multicellular life is nevertheless mind-blowing for a non-specialist like me.  It's remarkable what people have figured out since I was in school.

"The Crash Detectives" by Christine Negroni was OK as far as it went, but read like a well-constructed brief magazine article that didn't quite get expanded to book length and trailed off towards the end instead.  Michael Foley's "The Age of Absurdity" was not bad but a trifle forgettable.  Tim Harford's "Messy" was quite good in many spots, an entertaining listen for times when you can't concentrate your full attention.  The anecdote I remember best from this book concerned a traffic circle in the Netherlands, which an oddball thinker made safer by removing a lot of traffic signs and making the segregation between foot and auto traffic more ambiguous; this had the paradoxical effect of causing slightly confused drivers to slow down and pay more attention, with the result that traffic accidents decreased.  After reading "How Not To Be Wrong," I'm skeptical whether this story holds water, but it's entertaining nevertheless.

I get a new download every month on my subscription plan, but my next new one isn't available until January 17, and I haven't found a new title irresistible enough to inspire me to fork over another $20 yet.  When I find a good one, I really look forward to quiet times when I can listen, like running errands in the car.  These downloads would be terrific for long solo car trips, if I had any of those planned, but I have no sick relatives in distant cities at present.

I call this a good sign

Yes, the press makes no real effort to hide its bias, and it's troubling to think how many people get their information from it.  Nevertheless, when the press goes full-tilt bat-nuts on a subject that, for once, people care about and can check on fairly easily, I can't help thinking the result is going to be that a big new group of voters will have learned what's up.  To the minor degree that I can claim to understand the recent election, it seems to have been about a turning point of sorts in the PC machine I previously feared might be unstoppable.  The press has revealed itself as ridiculous and may now find it difficult to recover much of its position as arbiter of the truth.

Letter to the Editor

Something I published locally:

Last spring, Aransas County voters defeated a proposal to create a county Groundwater Commission by a vote of 8 to 1. The proposed Commission's directors continued to hold public meetings, which a number of citizens dutifully attended, continuing to express concerns and reservations though they seemed to be falling on deaf ears; the directors held out the hope of submitting their issue to yet another public election. More than half a year later, the Commission's directors finally listened to their public and have tendered their resignations to the County Commissioners.

This is the right result, but I want to make a point about how it happened. Lots of us showed up at tedious meetings and read tedious documents to try to understand what the County Commissioners were proposing for us and why. We got the word out to voters before the election at a time when there was practically no other information circulating publicly about what the proposed Commission was about and what kinds of powers it might have. While we were doing it, we complained among ourselves that our elected leaders weren't telling us what we needed to know and weren't listening to us. We all agreed it was no fun spending our evenings in public meetings. We certainly didn't feel like running for office ourselves!

Most of us won't ever run for public office. There is one thing we can do, though, as responsible voters. We can set our voting default switch to "no." Does that sound negative? Well, it is, but in a good way. If our elected leaders have to submit something to a public vote before they have the power to enact, we should be thinking, "There's a good reason for that." If it were routine and unimportant, they wouldn't have to ask us. If we don't know exactly what they're proposing and why it's a good idea, we shouldn't be writing a blank check just so we won't have to feel "negative."

Nor is it the voter's job to track down a county official, back him up against a wall, and interrogate him. If a proposal is important enough to hold an election for, there should have been lots of public discussion about it. Not just a couple of articles in the newspaper, but real discussion that got real people invested in the notion, so they'd talk to their neighbors and get them on board, too. Meetings, letters to the editor, social media, the whole nine yards.

We should all be thinking about this the next time the County puts a bond proposal out for our vote. Do you know why they need to borrow more money? Do you understand what they want to spend it on? If not, that's a good time to vote "no." Maybe the next time a County Commissioner wants to hold an election to get you to sign off on something, he'll know he has a lot of preliminary work to do first, getting the public to make an informed decision about it. Elections are a lot of trouble and expense. They shouldn't be called if they're not important enough to get our support for them. But no one's going to bother to convince you of much if you've made it clear you'll instinctively vote "yes." That's called being taken for granted, and it's no way to keep your government limited.

People who don't govern themselves get governed. You can't count on government just to "leave you alone" if you don't consistently stand up for yourself.

The chairman of the proposed commission's chairman's letter of resignation was a real piece of work: a petulant screed about the unwillingness of the public to be educated about his unimpeachable mission. These guys hid behind the Open Meetings Act to argue that they couldn't discuss anything with us at public meetings, because it wasn't on the agenda. And it wouldn't be on the next agenda, either, or the one after that, but they never gave up on the excuse.  I was gratified to see the depth of the public revulsion over these tactics, but I still thought I should publish my letter, because the voters of this county tend to rubber-stamp every bond proposal the County Commissioners or the school board throws out there.  It's such a dangerous habit of complaisance.

The odd thing is, a Groundwater Commission is something it wouldn't normally be that hard to get me to support.  Despite my skepticism of central-government solutions, protecting an aquifer is one of those areas that seems tailor-made for an exception.  In this case, though, the facts just didn't add up.  Our aquifer is a belt of below-sea-level sand in a coastal county.  To the extent its borders can be defined at all, they don't extend beyond our county boundaries.  The state environmental commission considers our risk of groundwater contamination, overharvesting, and subsidence minimal.  The water is so meager and brackish that it takes quite a stretch of the imagination to fear a water company's plan to sink a huge, thirsty well to sell our water to the distant city of Lubbock and run all the neighbors' wells dry in the process.

On the other hand, many of us could quite easily imagine how unpleasant a little board of self-righteous, thin-skinned tinpot dictators could be once they got the power to tax us, hire a bunch of consultants, start metering our wells, and dream up new groundwater extraction rules for our own good.  They did say they planned to protect household wells with grandfathering provisions, but frankly they lost all credibility after the first meeting or two.  Then, after they were ground into the dirt in last spring's election, they sealed their fate by announcing superciliously that they planned to hold another election in a year or so instead of packing up and going home.  At this point, you'd be hard-pressed to find a citizen of this county who supports their proposal to regulate the groundwater.  I'm pretty sure the one voter out of nine who supported them last spring amounted to themselves, their families, and their office staff.