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Archives
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Self-Centered
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur
Books (etc.) I've read this month and
feel I can recommend (warning: I have no taste)
- Palani Mohan, Hunting with Eagles: In the Realm of the Mongolian Kazakhs
- Beautiful black-and-white photographs of, as it says, Mongolian Kazakhs hunting with eagles, and their landscape. Many of them are just stunningly composed.
Upcoming Talks
Upcoming Talks
- Statistics Department, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 13--17 and 20--22 March 2017
- A short course on "Nonparametric tools for statistical network modeling",
based on 36-781.
- Santa Fe Institute, Complex Systems Summer School, 20--21 June 2017
- Exact dates tentative.
|
July 31, 2023
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, July 2023
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on the sociology and industrial organization of intellectuals, political
philosophy, or American history. Also, most of my reading this month was done
at odd hours and/or while bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm less reliable and more
cranky than usual.
- Allison Brennan,
The Lost Girls,
Make Them Pay,
Breaking Point,
Too Far Gone
- Mind candy series mystery. As with many long-running series, the
soap-operatic elements keep piling up, and I honestly enjoyed those less than
seeing Lucy tackle the murder-or-kidnapping-of-the-week, but still fun. (Previously.) §
- Daniel Drezner, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas
- Popular social science. Drezner's main argument is as follows. He begins
by distinguishing between "public intellectuals", who are critical and
multi-sided, and "thought leaders", who have One Big Idea (if not One Weird
Trick), which they push relentlessly. (I don't think the phrase
"policy entrepreneur" appears in the book; the old-fashioned but apt
term "projector"
definitely doesn't.) Recent changes in the societies of the rich democracies
have increased the sway of thought leaders, and reduced that of public
intellectuals.
- One of these is rising economic inequality ("plutocrats"): rich people are
constitutionally more inclined to pay for advocacy, especially flattering or
self-serving advocacy, than for critique. Here Drezner advances, without much
fuss, some sensible-sounding notions about the relations between material
interests and ideology. (I actually wish he'd elaborate a theory of ideology
on this basis, but that would call for a different sort of book.)
- A second change is the rise of partisanship. This makes it easier to
ignore criticisms coming from the other side. (You will, after all, often
be right in thinking that those criticisms are made ignorantly, in bad
faith, or merely to posture before the critic's own side.) This is, of course,
bad for reason and democracy.
- The third change is the decline in trust in established institutions
("pessimism"). These have not been replaced by alternative gate-keeping
institutions, but rather by more of a free-for-all scrum for attention.
(Again: "Actually,
'Dr. Internet' is the name of the monsters' creator.") This exacerbates
already-existing tendencies in intellectual life
to highly-skewed,
winner-take-a-hell-of-a-lot outcomes. His descriptions of the temptations to
chase those rewards is vivid.
- Drezner does little to address why plutocrats, partisans, and the
plain people of the Internet should have such an appetite for intellectual
fare. It's probably impossible for social animals of our sort to conduct our
common lives without justifications and rationalizations
(cf. Mercier and Sperber). That those rationales should
be intellectual, that they should take
the form of culturally-transmitted abstractions, general ideas, appeals to impersonal principle,
appeals to evidence, attempts at logical argument, etc., is another matter
and evidently far more contingent. Here I personally would gesture at the
very high levels of education attained in all the countries Drezner is concerned with, and/or generations of the Flynn effect.
- Drezner is careful to explain that the changes and prospects are not all
grim. (There are real benefits to less gatekeeping, even for public
intellectuals in Drezner's sense.) He's also careful to note that in many ways
the social life of the mind has always been bad. (This is cold
comfort, but at least avoids catastrophizing.) But he leaves me convinced
that he's right about specific ways in which that social life has
recently become dysfunctional than it was, with little prospect of
improvement in the foreseeable future. §
- Disclaimer: Drezner is
a co-author
of a co-author, and a fellow relic of the
The Second Age of the
Web early '00s blogging. But I don't think we've ever met,
and I feel no obligations to read or to praise his books. (Especially not
years after they come out...)
- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West
- Re-read in memoriam. This is a strange but effective fusion of
truly ugly action and truly beautiful language. Revisiting after some decades,
I can see how it's influenced a lot of other, later books I've
read, some
for the better, some very much not.
(If it weren't for the dates, I'd think Stephen King's The
Gunslinger was in the former set.)
- Two thoughts: 1. As usual, it's a mistake to identify the opinions of
characters --- even ones who are given a lot of room to opine --- with the
opinions of the author. In particular, I see a lot of people quoting the
judge's speeches as though they were Cormac's views, but the action of the
novel makes it clear that the judge is a cunning, deceitful, possibly-inhuman
villain! He is not to be trusted!
(Reading is
hard.) 2. Something about the narration's frequent recourse to the
ancient, the primeval, to mysterious forces under the earth, etc., makes me
wonder about what Cormac thought
of Lovecraft.
- Disclaimer: I knew Cormac
through SFI; not well, but well enough to
call him Cormac.
- Tommie Shelby, The Idea of Prison Abolition
- This is a thorough and sympathetic, but ultimately very negative,
investigation of case for abolition of prisons, from a view point that tries to
meld analytical
Marxism with what's come to be called the "black radical tradition" [1].
Much of the argument here proceeds by way of exposition and critique of the
prison-abolitionist writings of Angela Davis [2].
- Many self-proclaimed prison abolitionists seem to merely be expressing
outrage at way we treat crime through hyperbole. But some of them mean it.
(Some of them, I suspect, have
been swayed
by their own hyperbole.) In any event it's a morally serious issue, which
deserves to be examined with some care, whatever one might think of some of its
advocates. This Shelby does.
- Shelby outright dismisses the idea that society might have a legitimate
interest in meeting out
retribution for crimes [3], but accepts interests in deterrence [4], in
rehabilitation, and (I think) in incapacitation. He further explains that
consequences for anti-social behavior will only deter if they are, in
fact, unpleasant. This does not mean that those consequences need to be
horrors, but unless people would rather not experience them, they simply will
not work. Even if one wishes to emphasize gentler means that might better
serve the aims of rehabilitation and (perhaps) incapacitation, those will need
to be back-stopped by some kind of deterrence of those who are neither
rehabilitated nor incapacitated.
- Shelby tries his best to be fair to Davis's claims that the legitimate
social functions of prisons can be better served without imprisonment,
but ends up having to admit that there just isn't very much substance to those
claims. I honestly doubted whether he was really being fair to Davis here, so
at this point read her Are Prisons Obsolete?, and concluded that
Shelby was being, in fact, far too generous.
- To sum up, Shelby pretty convincingly demolishes the arguments for prison
abolition, i.e., for thinking that prisons have no place in just societies. He
is very careful to say that none of his arguments imply that current
American prisons, or our criminal justice system more generally, are
acceptable. §
- Disclaimer: I met Shelby years ago at a workshop, where I was
impressed by his presentation, and he was generous with his time in offering
suggestions on
work-then-in-progress. This
contributed to my picking up his book.
- [1]: Shelby elaborates
on his conception of his own "Afro-Analytical Marxism"
in this
2021 essay. Like most analytical Marxists, he seems more interested in
fairly orthodox historical materialism and political economy --- the sort of
topics someone shaped by the Second International, like Kautsky or Trotsky or
Luxemburg, would've recognized --- than in the
Frankfurt
School. (Davis, of course, as Marcuse's student, owes more to Frankfurt.)
Thus I think can continuing to view
Joseph
Heath as the world's leading, because only, rational-choice critical
theorist. ^
- [2]: Certain
episodes in Davis's career go (tactfully?)
unmentioned. ^
- [3]: The dismissal is
forthright, but perhaps a bit hasty. Those who are wronged by others, or their
family and friends, will tend to seek retribution from those who have wronged
them. In fact they will tend to seek disproportionate and intemperate
retribution. Such excessive retribution is both unjust itself, and apt to set
of a vicious cycle of feud and revenge. To prevent this, punishment of
wrong-doers by the state must include, and be seen to include, reasonable and
proportionate retribution. --- To be clear, I'm not saying this is
unanswerable, just that I wish Shelby hadn't dismissed retribution so swiftly.
^
- [4]: There is a
disconcerting possibility about deterrence which Shelby doesn't discuss, but
which his arguments do not, so far as I can see, foreclose. This is that
punishing people for crimes they didn't commit would have much the same
deterrent effect as punishing the guilty, so long as most
people thought that they were guilty. Someone has to suffer
in order to fulfill the legitimate public function of deterring
wrong-doing [5], but it's trickier than I'd
like to say why, ethically, it should be criminals who do the suffering. (Of
course, the task becomes easier if one believes in
retribution.) ^
- [5]: Conversely, I could easily make a case for
the authorities only convincingly pretending to punish anyone. But
such a deception would be very fragile, with bad consequences when it
unraveled; perhaps that's enough to rule it out. ^
- Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence
- A journalistic, but very thorough, history of violent left-wing radicals
from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. (Right-wing violence during the
same period is outside Burrough's scope, but it would make an interesting set
of comparison cases.) Many of the figures he discusses --- including Davis!
--- also show up in Shelby's book, albeit presented in rather different lights.
§
- Adolph Reed, Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
- If you like Reed's essays at nonsite.org
(and I usually do), you will enjoy this, and if not, not. The marketing
material from the publisher makes it seem vastly more ambitious than it really
is, but Reed's introductory remarks make the scope clear. §
- Simon Spurrier and Matías Bergara, Coda vols. 1, 2, 3
- Comic book mind candy fantasy. Superficially, this is a cynical,
post-apocalyptic subversion of the Matter of Middle Earth. In fact, the
hard-bitten surface merely conceals a core which actually believes in
epic fantasy, both in the content and in the classical form (a trilogy ending
in a eucatastrophe). §
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
The Beloved Republic;
The Progressive Forces;
Philosophy;
Commit a Social Science;
The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts;
Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
Tales of Our Ancestors;
The Commonwealth of Letters
Posted at July 31, 2023 23:59 | permanent link
June 22, 2023
On Shoggothim
Attention conservation notice: Self-promotion of a pay-walled piece which combines a trendy topic with what even I admit is a long-held semi-crank notion.
Henry Farrell and I have
an essay
in The Economist, riffing off the meme that
every
large
language model is really a shoggoth. Our point is that this
is right, because an LLM is a way of taking the vast incohate chaos of
written-human-language-as-recorded-on-the-Web and simplifying and abstracting
it in potentially useful ways. They are,
as Alison
Gopnik says, cultural technologies, more analogous to library catalogs than
to individual minds. This makes LLMs recent and still-minor members of a
larger and older family of monsters which similarly simplify, abstract, and
repurpose human minds: the market system, the corporation, the state, even the
democratic state. Those are distributed information-processing
systems which don't just ingest the products of human intelligence, but
actually run on human beings --- a theme I have been sounding
for while now.
The piece is paywalled,
but Henry
has a Twitter thread that provides a good summary,
and Brad
DeLong has excerpts, along with thoughtful commentary. (I agree
with Henry's
response to said comments.) Update, 7 July: Henry links to the longer, older version we cut down for The Economist.
Some things we didn't include:
- Thanks to the editorial staff at The Economist, both for the opportunity and for their very professional work.
- Thanks to Ted Chiang (!) for helpful comments on a draft.
- Any discussion of LLMs as artifacts, in the sense of Herbert Simon's Sciences of the Artificial. (I for one learned this way of thinking of markets and hierarchies as information-processing systems from Simon...) Update, 17 August: I endorse Maxim Raginsky's treatment of this topic.
- Any discussion of Dan Sperber's account of culture as "the precipitate of cognition and communication in a human population", the role in that process of chains of alternately private-mental and public-physical representations, and LLMs as public-representation-producing artifacts
- Any discussion of Arthur Stinchcombe's work on the positive role of abstraction and formalities in institutions
- "More is different": These things emerge from the massed results of human social interaction and individual intelligence, and therefore are very different from human minds. In particular, they tend to have their own intrinsic dynamics, which are usually not things anyone intends, and often things no-one wants. (Someday I will write that essay about blackouts and alienation.) That doesn't mean they can't be controlled; it means control is hard, and usually itself impersonal.
- An adequate discussion of monster-taming and its limits, which would necessarily include extended praise of social democracy (though see DeLong's post)
- Any mention of the the primal scene of AI.
- Henry's reflections on modern neo-Lovecraftian fiction, which I hope he will publish elsewhere. Update, 7 July: see.
Update, 23 June: Small wording tweaks and additions. More important: insightful and generous commentary from Daniel "\( D^2 \)"
Davies. (It's virtually a blogosphere reunion.) Incorporated (sorry) by reference: Beniger, The Control Revolution; Yates, Control through Communication; Ashby, "Design for an Intelligence Amplifier".
(I know I learned that the correct plural of "shoggoth" is
"shoggothim" from reading Ruthanna Emrys, but I cannot now locate the passage
--- it may just be in her Lovecraft Reread series with Anne
Pillsworth.) Update: and indeed it was (tracked down by Henry).
Self-Centered;
The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts;
Cthulhiana;
The Great Transformation
Posted at June 22, 2023 12:45 | permanent link
April 30, 2023
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, April 2023
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on the biographies of 20th century tyrants, or the impact of the Internet on
collective creativity. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd
hours and/or while bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm less reliable and more cranky
than usual.
- Wislawa Szymborska, Poems New and Collected, 1957--1997
- Donald Hall, Selected Poems
- I observe National Poetry Month by reading poets I really ought to have
read already. (I'd seen
Szymborska's "A
Word on Statistics", of course, IIRC from Thomas Lumley.)
- Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent
- Mind candy fantasy / campus novel, in which Yale is literally a gateway to
Hell. It's a sequel to Ninth House, and it'll
be much more enjoyable if you read that first, but there's enough cluing-in for the new reader that it's probably not necessary. Ends in media res. §
- Andrea Fort et al., Songs for the Dead: Afterlife
- Mind candy fantasy, comic book flavor. A satisfying conclusion to
the story. §
- Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
- Yes, I knew the story. No, I had never actually read it before. Yes, it's
really good. §
- Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, volumes I, Paradoxes of Power, 1878--1928 and II, Waiting for Hitler, 1929--1941
- Writing an adequately-contextual biography of Stalin means, for Kotkin,
pretty much writing a history of the world, as well as detailing the
ups and downs of Ioseb Barionis Jughashvili. I think this is right, and am
entranced at how well Kotkin tacks back and forth between different scales.
One of the themes those constant changes of scale let Kotkin explore is the
tension between large, structural forces or trends --- particularly the
imperative pressure on any state that wanted to retain independence to
industrialize
(cf.) --- and
fine-grained and contingent yet consequential facts of friendship and rivalry,
of personality, even of sheer accident. (These are very non-Marxist books,
which could only have been written by someone who had seriously wrestled with
Marxist thought.) I very eagerly await the next volume (or
volumes?). §
- Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
- Reading a 2010 book about the promise of the Internet for cooperation,
especially for intellectual collaboration, in 2023 is, well, rather melancholy.
Instead of carpooling, we have giant illegal taxi companies; instead of safe
couch-surfing, we have giant illegal hotel chains; instead of sharing
information about political violence, we have organizing political violence;
and instead of sharing information about rare medical conditions, we have
created multiple
new forms of
contagious hysteria.
- One conclusion I draw from this is that Shirky was
fundamentally right about how the Internet would unleash new forms of
collective creativity, but far, far too optimistic about the value of
that creativity.
("After all, to any
rational mind, the greater part of the history of ideas is a history of
freaks.")
- The other conclusion --- one I've been tending to for a while --- is that
as a teenager, I got caught up in a Utopian milieu, which somehow thought that
integrating the Internet, and especially the Web, into civilized life would
make things better. I spent my adult life in this environment, it was
very good to me (and I daresay to Shirky). But, thirty years later... Well, I
often find myself thinking on a passage
from Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas, reflecting on another such hangover:
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle --- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting --- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark --- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
- Shirky was offering a view from the crest of the wave. This one didn't
exactly break and roll back; it just left the same old rubbish as before in
its wake, only sodden and salt-rimed. This is, perhaps, the best a utopia
can hope to achieve. §
- Disclaimer: I'd forgotten, until I was
almost ready to post this, that back in
the Second Age of the
Web 2003--2004 Shirky and I were both parties to
a discussion
involving the
exact shape of the degree
distribution for weblogs. That dispute is irrelevant to the subject of
this book, and has no bearing on my views of it. (For the record: he was wrong
about the degree distribution.)
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Writing for Antiquity;
The Progressive Forces;
Linkage;
The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts;
Actually, "Dr. Internet" Is the Name of the Monsters' Creator;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
The Commonwealth of Letters
Posted at April 30, 2023 23:59 | permanent link
March 31, 2023
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, March 2023
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on African-American political psychology, opinion-survey research, medieval
Islamic Indology, or the history of the scientific revolution. Also, most of
my reading this month was done while recovering from foot surgery and/or while
bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm much less reliable and more cranky than
usual.
- Kel Symons et al., I Love Trouble
- Cecil Castellucci and Marley Zarcone, Shade, the Changing Girl
- Cullen Bunn et al., Harrow County, vols. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
- Philippe Thirault et al., Miss: Better Living Through Crime
- Kurt Busiek et al., The Autumnlands, vols. 1 and 2
- Ryan North et al., The Midas Flesh, vol. 2
- Comic-book mind candy, assorted. Autumnlands reminds me a
little of Zelazny from the 1960s or 1970s. --- Previously for Midas Flesh; previously for Harrow County.
- Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, Black Pride and Black Prejudice [JSTOR]
- The central question here is whether, among African Americans in the greater Chicago area circa 2000, higher levels of racial pride
lead to higher levels of prejudice against those not in the race,
especially (but not exclusively) against Jews. The authors addressed this
through opinion surveys, including some ingenious survey experiments *.
- On substantive grounds I have little to say here. What troubles
me about this though is that the authors (and their critics) seems content to
take few-level ordinal data and run it through linear regression after linear
regression, endlessly permuting which variable goes on the left hand side and
which ones are on the right. The ideas about validating measurements are
hopeless, along the lines of
the Zeller
and Carmines book which so disappointed me (unsurprisingly, since Sniderman
and Carmines collaborated). They are also prone to
the fallacy of confusing "this
regression coefficient is not statistically significant" with "this
relationship is unimportant" **, and they
never once look at their residuals to check their a regression specification.
To be clear, I have no doubt that the survey was done as well as
humanly possible; it's the analysis of the results which drives me nuts.
- At some point, I confess, I wanted to make them shut down their statistical
software, hand over the data set, and run the whole thing
through pcalg
myself, using the chi-squared test for conditional independence that works for
categorical variables. (This would assume all the systematically-important
variables are measured, but then, so do their regressions.) I would then hand
them back the inferred graphical causal model, and let them use it to address
their substantive questions. (This is of course a fantasy,
because pcalg didn't exist --- but not such a fantasy,
because TETRAD
was a thing in 2002.) The upshot of my fantasy would be a comprehensible,
reliably-constructed guess at how all their different variables inter-relate,
allowing one to draw real inferences. The way they actually proceeded instead
gave them an uninterpretable mush --- or, rather, a mush which demands
interpretation rather than supporting calculation. In all this, of course,
they
are no
worse than most quantitative social science. §
- *: Reassuringly, including
indicator variables for their experimental treatments makes no differences to
the coefficients of other variables in their regressions. They do not appear
to appreciate that this has to be true if the treatments were
successfully randomized (so the treatment indicator is linearly unpredictable
from the covariates). This would not be true if the treatment interacted with
the covariates, but they never consider interactions
anyway. ^
- **: To repeat a teaching example: "Imagine hearing what sounds like the noise of an animal in the next room. If the room is small, brightly lit, free of obstructions, and you make a thorough search of it with unimpaired vision and concentration, not finding an animal in it is, in fact, good evidence that there was no animal there to be found. If on the other hand the room is dark, large, full of hiding places, and you make a hurried search while distracted, without your contact lenses and after a few too many drinks, you could easily have missed all sorts of things, and your negative report has little weight as evidence. (In this parable, the difference between a large [coefficient] and a small [coefficient] is the difference between looking for a Siberian tiger and looking for a little black cat.)" ^
- Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, Alberuni's India: An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of India about A.D. 1030 (trans. Edward C. Sachau, 1888; online in two volumes)
- Biruni went to India in the wake of the armies of his
patron/captor,
Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, and stayed for a dozen years or so,
learning languages, studying the country, and assimilating Hindu learning.
This is his attempt at summarizing what he thought was most important about
Indian culture for a Muslim audience. It's encyclopedic, sympathetic,
admiring, sometimes exasperated, occasionally baffled. I can't find a more
recent translation into English, so this one from the 19th century had to do.
It's mostly readable, though there are quite a few places where the translator
calls for more research and this reprint, naturally, doesn't say whether it's
been followed up *. In any event,
I found this fascinating. One aspect which particularly struck me is
Biruni's concern with convincing the reader that educated Hindus are really
monotheists, drawing explicit analogies to Christian veneration of saints,
"idols", etc. I think the goal here is to get the reader to not
dismiss Indian thought as mere pagan superstition. (But might he be hinting
that Hindus are really a People of the
Book?) §
- *: Sachau does have the
odd habit of rendering some of Biruni's Arabic technical and philosophical
vocabulary as (English renditions of) Greek words. I found this vexing,
because he never explains whether this is because an Arabic term was itself
a translation
of a Hellenistic
original, or whether he just thinks Greek would be more familiar to a
Victorian audience, or what. I realize this is me tweaking a 19th century
Orientalist scholar for insufficient philological
exactitude, and can't wait to find out what form karma will take. ^
- David Wootton, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies
- For the most part, this is a very able, even exciting, biography of
Galileo, and a defense of him as a scientist and a natural philosopher from
criticisms by the likes of Feyerabend. There are, however, one or two passages
of truly wild psychoanalysis, so wild I can't begin to say whether Wootton
means those bits seriously. So: mostly what I expected from the
author
of The
Invention of
Science. §
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
Writing for Antiquity;
Islam and Islamic Civilization;
The Great Transformation;
Commit a Social Science;
Enigmas of Chance;
The Beloved Republic
Posted at March 31, 2023 23:59 | permanent link
February 28, 2023
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, February 2023
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on the economic of socialism (whether actually-existing or hypothetical),
political philosophy, the social organization and intellectual development of
literary criticism, or participatory democracy in social movements. Also, most of my reading this month was done
at odd hours and/or while bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm less reliable and more
cranky than usual.
- Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (1983)
- Alec Nove, Political Economy and Soviet Socialism (1979)
- Alec Nove, Socialism, Economics and Development (1986)
- Alec Nove, Efficiency Criteria for Nationalised Industries (1973)
- Alec Nove and J. A. Newth, The Soviet Middle East: A Model for Development? (1967)
- Nove was (as these titles
might suggest) a British economist, the child of exiled Mensheviks, who made a
specialty of studying the Soviet economy, and of advocating market socialism.
He's best known for two works: The Economics of Feasible Socialism
and An Economic History of the USSR. The former is a personal
touchstone which shaped me deeply; the later is merely very good. Looking up
something else, I happened to discover that a bunch of his books are now
available through our library electronically, so I plunged in.
- I'll start with the most important book first. The point of Feasible
Socialism is to advocate for, and sketch, a socialist economy "which
might be achieved within the lifetime of a child already conceived", i.e., not
in some distant post-scarcity future. The first chapter explains why Marxism
offers absolutely no useful ideas about how to actually run a
socialist economy. (Here Nove summarizes Soviet debates on this matter in the
early 1920s --- debates which have been little known since, and so often, in
effect, re-run from scratch.) The second chapter looks at the
entirely-negative lessons to be drawn from the Soviet experience, and the third
at the mostly-negative lessons to be drawn from Cold War-era Hungary,
Yugoslavia, Poland and China. The last two chapters lay out Nove's attractive
vision of a market socialism, with lots of public provision of many goods, and
workplace democracy where sensible and feasible. (He is sound on seeing that
there is a tension between democratic control of an enterprise by
its workers, and democratic control of that enterprise by the
people-as-a-whole.)
- On re-reading, I am relieved, chagrined, and exasperated. Relieved,
because I still think this book holds up, and has not been visited by the Suck
Fairy. Chagrined, because I've written a lot about socialism and planning over
the years, some of it
well-received, and on examination I have just been channeling a book I
first read as a teenager. Exasperated, because we keep having the same
conversations about the same bad ideas, without actually being able to retain
and build on the better ones, like Nove's.
(I have been making this
complaint on this blog for nineteen years now.)
- Since I have a weird completist tendency, I then proceeded to read the
other four books here, since I hadn't read them before, and they were available.
- The first two are collections of academic papers and essays; many of them
are effectively studies for Feasible Socialism, not always in very
obvious ways: Nove account of more-or-less self-inflicted economic crises
facing Allende's government in Chile (observed as visiting faculty in Santiago)
clearly informs his discussion of the transition to socialism. I also found
very interesting his series of papers on the economic thought of the Bolsheviks
(from before the revolution through the 1930s), and later Soviet economics of
the 1960s and 1970s
(i.e., Kantorovich and co.
versus traditionalists).
- Efficiency Criteria is a plea to think about why one would
want a nationalized industry in the first place, as opposed to just regulating
and taxing private firms.
- The Soviet Middle East looks at economic development efforts
in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The emphasis is on flows of money, machinery
and trained personnel from the center to these regions.
The environmental costs imposed go largely
unremarked. That this was
a project of
imperial domination is on the other hand made very clear.
- To sum up: go track down a copy of Feasible Socialism, if that
side of what I write interests you at all. The rest of these are now of
just-historical interest, though I'm glad I read them. §
- Joseph Heath, Cooperation and Social Justice
- This is an essay collection, loosely united by the theme that a
(functional) society is an on-going system of cooperation, which has
implications for what anything we might want to call "social justice" would
look like, and how it might be achieved. (Indeed, Heath would say that
principles of social justice are principles that help systems of
cooperation work better. [Cf.]) This supposed unifying theme is most evident in
chapters 1 and 5.
- Chapter 1, "On the Scalability of Cooperative Structures", is mostly a
response to G. A. Cohen's Why Not Socialism?, patiently pointing
out that modes of cooperation which work in a small group of friends on a
temporary camping trip do not, in fact, scale up to thousands or millions of
people over lifetimes. The logical weakness here is that Heath never really
explains why different modes of cooperation have the scales they do.
- Chapter 5 is about reasonable accommodation for immigrants: they
come to new countries because they want to join that country's
system-of-cooperation, so it's reasonable to mostly expect them to conform to
its ways, but reasonable accommodations for them are ones which don't, in fact,
impair the efficacy of the system. Turned around, this provides Heath with an
argument for border control, i.e., limiting who gets to participate in the
system of cooperation, in order to keep it going. I'm not sure why this latter
argument doesn't allow every city's current residents to restrict who can move
there, or indeed any neighborhood. Those are fragmentary systems of
cooperation, inter-dependent on larger ones, but so is any national economy.
- Chapter 2 argues that the fact that
corporations are only supposed to pursue profit doesn't lead them to
anti-social behavior; the problem isn't profit, but inadequate
regulation, and poor professional ethics. (He knows better than to suppose
courses on ethics lead to better behavior.) I sympathize, but don't think he
gives enough consideration to (people working for) corporations expending
effort to shape regulations in their self-interest.
- Chapter 3 is about the importance of status to our social lives, and the
dilemmas this creates for egalitarians, since status simply cannot be
equalized. Complex societies will have multiple status hierarchies (I once
knew someone highly esteemed among his fellow collectors of rare fruit-company
banana labels), but it strains credulity to imagine a situation where everyone
is at the top of a status hierarchy they find compelling.
- Chapter 4 defends stigmatizing bad behaviors, on the grounds that social
stigma is actually an important resource people can draw on when attempting
self-control. (This idea is briefly touched on, as I recall, in
Heath's Enlightenment 2.0.) The question of which behaviors
should be stigmatized is left open.
- Chapter 6, finally, is about the "dilemmas of US race relations", and our
attempts to "achieve Singaporean outcomes using Canadian methods" (p. 299).
This is thought-provoking, not least for trying to put our difficulties into
comparative perspective. (This chapter is an expanded, more scholarly version
of
a 2021
essay in a rather odd-seeming little magazine.) On the basis of these
arguments, Heath ought to endorse a sort of counterfacctual black nationalism: it'd be a good idea, if only most black
people were concentrated in one part of the US where they were numerically
predominant, like the Francophones in Quebec.
- As my remarks make clear, I didn't come away completely satisfied with Heath's answers or arguments in every case, but I always enjoyed the reading, and
found a lot more to chew over than I have time to itemize. §
- John Guillory, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of
Literary Study
- This is a wonderfully rich book, but I will just point to Merve Emre's
exposition
in lieu of writing my own. It makes me want to read Guillory's Cultural Capital from the 1990s. Thanks to Scott Newstok for recommending
this to me. §
- Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (2002)
- The usual knock on participatory democracy is that it doesn't scale to
large groups, and becomes increasingly ineffective as the group gets larger.
(I
have scribbled
out thoughts along these lines myself.) Polletta, who sympathizes very
obviously and strongly with participatory democracy, especially in its more
left-wing * forms, explicitly tries to counter this critique by looking,
primarily, at three mid-20th-century movements: pacifists in the 1950s,
the SNCC,
and SDS. (She's good on the historical inter-connections between
her three movements.)
- Polletta has extremely astute things to say about the way participants in
these movements imagined their relationships to each other, and used
those conceptions to help make participation work ** . She makes it absolutely clear that participatory
democracy does have
heuristic and strategic value.
Even more, when it's working, it has moral and morale value; her striking title
comes from an SDS members's recollection of what participation meant to her.
- Despite all this, Polletta completely fails to undermine the
it-doesn't-scale critique. In fact, when both SNCC and SDS did get
large, they famously flamed out into utterly dysfunctional wrecks, and Polletta
gives honest and insightful accounts of the beginnings of the disintegration in
both cases. (She doesn't follow SDS all the way into
the LaRouchies
and Weather Underground, but she
doesn't need to.) The 1950s pacifists, of course, never grew enough to have
such problems.
- The end of the book covers some contemporary-at-time-of-writing movements:
a surviving branch of the Industrial Areas Foundation in Texas, and anarchists around David
Graeber (who features as a native informant) who would go on to be key to
Occupy. By Polletta's own account, that branch of the IAF seems like a
perfectly ordinary class/ethnic political formation, dominated by the group's
clergy --- doing good work for its members, but not really a
direct or participatory democracy, whatever motions it might go through. As
for what became Occupy, again,
its career
hardly argues for the scalability of participatory democracy.
- To sum up, Polletta makes a strong case for the virtues and powers of
participatory democracy in small groups bound by strong ties of solidarity. (I
am tempted to
say: groups which have
'asabiyya.) She also has interesting observations on the forms those ties
can take. But beyond the small group, she is, if anything, underlining that
the Iron Law of
Oligarchy rules ok. §
- *: Right-wing political movements of the same vintage (e.g., Young Americans for Freedom) go undiscussed. Maybe none of them aspired to the same
sort of internal democracy as SNCC or SDS --- I honestly don't know enough about them to say --- but if any did, they'd make extremely informative contrast cases. ^
- **: She's returned to this theme
in later
work, which I am eager to read. --- If I were smarter, I would try to
connect this to John Levi Martin's mysterious-to-me claims
about the
need for social structures to be comprehensible to their members. ^
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
The Progressive Forces;
The Beloved Republic;
Commit a Social Science;
The Commonwealth of Letters;
Philosophy;
Afghanistan and Central Asia
Posted at February 28, 2023 23:59 | permanent link
December 31, 2022
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, December 2022
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on anti-discrimination law, early 20th century shock art movements, early 20th
century science fiction, or the Renaissance reception of classical mythology.
Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while
bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.
- Marie Mercat-Bruns, Discrimination at Work: Comparing European, French, and American Law (trans. Elaine Holt)
- A French legal academic interviewing distinguished American legal academics
about anti-discrimination law and related topics, with her commentary. (The
interviews close off around 2011,
so Ricci
vs. DeStefano is a big subject, and the idea of a Supreme Court
case instituting
gay marriage nationally is definitely beyond everyone's horizon...) In
between the interviews, Mercat-Bruns provides her own analysis, including a lot
of discussion of French and EU legislation, regulations and case law. Her
accuracy on those topics is (obviously?) not something I can evaluate, but I
found it notable that she's usually asking why European law can't be more like
American law. (Thus our soft-power conquest of the Old World continues.)
- I read this for
the inequality class,
because I was unhappy repeating "I know nothing about anti-discrimination
policy in other countries, sorry" in response to very reasonable questions from
students. I now feel entitled to reply "I know hardly anything about how
anti-discrimination law works in other countries, but...", which is
progress. §
- Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (1977)
- This is older, but it's still a really good book about the
Italian Futurists.
Indeed I can't think of a better one for a general audience with some
background knowledge of modern art. The chapters on Futurist painting and
sculpture, on music and performance, on women, and on politics are
especially good.
- I fell in love with Futurist painting as an undergrad, so like a freak I've
read far too much about them; this book is surviving the on-going purge of my
library. §
- Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)
- I
read Last
and First Men as a boy, and it warpped my mind forever, but I never
attempted any other Stapledon (aside from being left cold by A Last Man
in London, both as a child and as a grown-up). This was a mistake
I am glad I finally fixed.
- Star Maker is a very conscious attempt at creating a truly
cosmic modern myth, so the whole two-billion-year saga of humanities in
Last and First Men is a passing incident mentioned in a handful of
paragraphs. Rather this attempts to embrace the whole life of our universe,
and of the other universes which are all the work of the titular Star Maker.
- A few stray notes (avoiding spoilers):
- Some philosophical influences are very obvious: Hegel,
Spinoza, Leibniz's Monadology. The
Hegelianism is pervasive throughout; it leads me to wonder what
a Deweyan equivalent work of
science-fictional myth would be like. The Spinoza who comes through here is
that of the Ethics, in particular (but not just) the "intellectual
love of God", the life of the stars (and the way the order and connection of
their material bodies is the order and connection of their mental
lives, seen under a different aspect), and some of the presentation of eternity
in the climactic myth-within-a-myth. That last is also where Leibniz is felt.
- I will be surprised if Stapledon wasn't familiar with
Attar's The
Conference of the Birds, in which a group of travelers of various
species move through a visionary landscape which is also a series of spiritual
developments in search of a transcendent being, only to have revealed to them
that they collectively are that being. (The true Simurgh is the friends they
made along the way, as it were.) Just so here, with the growth of the
collective group of seekers. Indeed I'd not be surprised if Attar's seven
valleys map, in order, on to the stages of Stapledon's future history. (But see
Allen below...)
- Reading this now, with half a lifetime of consuming mind candy behind me, I
can see just how much it shaped subsequent science fiction, even when that has
contented itself with less ambitious and visionary, more all-too-human,
projects. There are places where Star Maker is dated (the
sequence of stellar evolution, the origin of planets, etc.), but it's still a
magnificent venture, and I recommend it highly. §
- Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (1971, 2020) [Open Access]
- For several centuries following the revival of classical learning, the
received theory among European scholars and intellectuals was that the
classical myths, especially as recounted in great poets like Homer, Virgil, and
Ovid, were actually elaborate moral allegories and/or symbolic depictions of
physical theories. These ranged from the you-can-kind-of-see-it (Circe turning
Odyssesus's men, but not Odysseus himself, into swine \( \simeq \) something about reason resisting temptation to which the appetites succumb) to the excruciatingly flimsy. (I will not attempt
to do justice to the elaborate encouragements to fussy virtue which were
supposedly encoded in, of all books, Ovid's Metamorphoses.) Of
course, the interpreters showed little agreement about exactly what a given
myth was allegorizing --- except when one interpreter borrowed from his
predecessors. None of the interpreters, moreover, seem to have really faced
the question of why great poets would go to such pains to create
elaborate allegories for rather trite morals.
- Just to add to the confusion, all this went along with also seeing
classical mythology as ripped off from, or a literally-demonic parody of, the
Biblical Genesis story, and/or distorted memories of various historical events
among the pagans (so Zeus was a king of Crete, etc.). As Allen explains, these
ideas all had their roots in antiquity --- in writings of later pagans looking
back at the myths (with more or less embarrassment), and in writings of the
Church Fathers trying to make their own kind of sense of those stories.
Medieval Christian practices of interpreting Biblical passages in multiple ways
fed into the mix.
- All of this was taken extremely seriously, and when Renaissance Europeans
learned about classical myths, they learned them with these interpretations.
Moreover, this complex of ideas helped shape how Europeans understood literary
interpretation in the first place, and how they composed their own literary
works. (Allen is especially good on Ariosto, Tasso
and Milton.)
This persisted, as Allen documents in great detail, for centuries, down through
the 1700s where he calls a halt *.
- From the modern perspective that began to appear in the 1700s, the idea
that the classical myths were composed as elaborate moral or cosmological
allegories is, of course, loony tunes. But the sheer distance between the
surface story of (say) Aphrodite and Ares getting caught in adultery by
Hephaestus and the ways that story was read allegorically over the centuries
tells us something about how good
people are at extracting meanings from anything **, about how unconstrained those meanings are by the
object being interpreted, about how much, and how little, tradition and
intellectual communities do to channel interpretation, and
about how much of the
history of ideas is a history of freaks. (Allen is more
polite.) §
- *: Stopping around 1750 is
actually a bit disappointing to me, because the Romantic era seriously revived
the idea that
the ancient myths
were full of hidden meanings, an idea which has persisted to this day. The
Romantic mutation, however, seems to lie in implying that the meaning is
personally transformative while being (strategically?) vague about just what
it is. (The Renaissance mythographers, by contrast, were ploddingly
explicit, and the morals were always very conventional.) It'd be very
interesting to know what (say) Novalis had read in earlier
mythographers. ^
- **: OK, maybe not
anything. I
have speculated that one
reason some stories last for so long is that they have a quality of suggestive
ambiguity: they seem like they should mean something important, but it's not
obvious what. Our surviving corpus of myths, and of renditions of myths, may
have been under selection for this
quality. ^
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Writing for Antiquity;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
Teaching: Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination;
The Beloved Republic;
The Commonwealth of Letters
Posted at December 31, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
November 02, 2022
Your Favorite DSGE Sucks
Attention
conservation notice: 1800+ words of academic self-promotion, boosting
a paper in which statisticians say mean things about some economists' favored
toys. They're not even peer-reviewed mean things (yet). Contains abundant
unexplained jargon, and cringe-worthy humor on the level of
using
a decades-old reference for a title.
Entirely seriously: Daniel is in no way responsible for this
post.
Update, December 2022: Irritatingly, there are some small
but real bugs, glitching all our numerical results. This is an even
stronger reason for you to direct your attention elsewhere. (Details at the end.)
I am very happy that after many years, this preprint is loosed
upon the world:
- Daniel J. McDonald and CRS, "Empirical Macroeconomics and DSGE Modeling in Statistical Perspective", arxiv:2210.16224
- Abstract: Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models have been an ubiquitous, and controversial, part of macroeconomics for decades. In this paper, we approach DSGEs purely as statstical models. We do this by applying two common model validation checks to the canonical Smets and Wouters 2007 DSGE: (1) we simulate the model and see how well it can be estimated from its own simulation output, and (2) we see how well it can seem to fit nonsense data. We find that (1) even with centuries' worth of data, the model remains poorly estimated, and (2) when we swap series at random, so that (e.g.) what the model gets as the inflation rate is really hours worked, what it gets as hours worked is really investment, etc., the fit is often only slightly impaired, and in a large percentage of cases actually improves (even out of sample). Taken together, these findings cast serious doubt on the meaningfulness of parameter estimates for this DSGE, and on whether this specification represents anything structural about the economy. Constructively, our approaches can be used for model validation by anyone working with macroeconomic time series.
To expand a little: DSGE models are models of macroeconomic aggregate
quantities, like levels of unemployment and production in a national economy.
As economic models, they're a sort of origin story for where the data comes
from. Some people find DSGE-style origin stories completely compelling, others
think they reach truly mythic levels of absurdity, with very little in between.
While settling that is something I will leave to the professional
economists
(cough obviously
they're absurd myths cough), we can also view them as statistical
models, specifically multivariate time series models, and ask about their
properties as such.
Now, long enough ago that blogging was still a thing and Daniel was doing
his dissertation on statistical
learning for time series
with Mark Schervish and myself,
he convinced us that DSGEs were an interesting and important target for the
theory we were working on. One important question within that was trying to
figure out just how flexible these models really were. The standard learning-theoretic principle is that the more flexible model classes learn
slower than less flexible ones. (If you are willing and able to
reproduce really complicated patterns, it's hard for you to distinguish between
signal and noise in limited data. There are important qualifications to this
idea, but it's a good start.) We thus began by thinking about trying to get
the DSGEs to fit random binary noise, because that'd tell us about
their Rademacher complexity,
but that seemed unlikely to go well. That led to thinking about trying to get
the models to fit the original time series, but with the series randomly
scrambled, a sort of permutation test of just how flexible the models were.
At some point, one of us had the idea of leaving the internal order of each
time series alone, but swapping the labels on the series. If you have a
merely-statistical multivariate model, like a vector autoregression, the
different variables are so to speak exchangeable --- if you swap series 1 and
series 2, you'll get a different coefficient matrix out, but it'll be a
permutation of the original. (The parameters will be "covariant" with the
permutations.) It'll fit as well as the original order of the variables. But
if you have a properly scientific, structural model, each variable will have
its own meaning and its own role in the model, and swapping variables around
should lead to nonsense, and grossly degraded fits. (Good luck telling the
Lotka-Volterra model that hares are predators and lynxes are prey.) There might
be a few weird symmetries of some models which leave the fit alone (*), but for
the most part, randomly swapping variables around should lead to drastically
worse fits, if your models really are structural.
Daniel did some initial trials with the classic "real business cycle" DSGE
of Kydland and Prescott
(1982), and found, rather astonishingly, that the model fit the swapped
data better a large fraction of the time. Exactly how often, and how
much better, depended on the details of measuring the fit, but the general
result was clear.
The reason we'd gotten in to all this was wanting
to apply statistical learning
theory to macroeconomic forecasting, to put bounds on how bad the forecasts
would be. Inverting those bounds would tell us how much data would be needed
to achieve a given level of accuracy. Our results were pretty pessimistic,
suggesting that thousands of years of stationary data might be needed.
But those bounds were "distribution-free", using just the capacity or
flexibility of the model class, and the rate at which
new points in the time series
become independent of its past. This could be pessimistic about
how well this very particular model class can learn to predict this very
particular data source.
We therefore turned to another exercise: estimate the model on real data (or
take published estimates); simulate increasingly long series from the model;
and re-estimate the model on the simulation. That is, bend over backwards to
be fair to the model: if it's entirely right about the data-generating
process, how well can it predict? how well can it learn the parameters? how
much data would it need for accurate prediction? With, again, the
Kydland-Prescott model, the answer was... hundreds if not thousands of years
worth of data.
Of course, even in the far-off days of 2012, the Kydland-Prescott model was
obsolete, so we knew that if we wanted anyone to take this seriously, we'd need
to use a more up-to-date model. Also, since this was all numerical, we didn't
know if this was a general problem with DSGEs, or just
(more) evidence that Prescott
and data analysis were a bad combination. So we knew we should look at a
more recent, and more widely-endorsed, DSGE model...
Daniel graduated; the
workhorse Smets and Wouters
(2007) DSGE is a more complicated creature, and needed both a lot of
programming time and a lot of computing time to churn through
thousands of variable swaps and tens of thousands of fits to simulations. We
both got busy with other things. Grants came and (regrettably) went. But what
we can tell you now, with great assurance, is that:
- Even if the Smets-Wouters model was completely correct about the structure
of the economy, and it was given access to centuries of stationary data, it
would predict very badly, and many "deep" parameters would remain very poorly
estimated;
- Swapping the series around randomly improves the fit a lot of the
time, even when the results are substantive nonsense.
The bad news is that even if this model was right, we couldn't hope to actually
estimate it; the good news is that the model can't be right, because it
fits better when we tell it that consumption is really wages,
inflation is really consumption, and output is really inflation.
Series swapping is something we dreamed up, so I'm not surprised we couldn't
find anyone doing it. But "let's try out the estimator on simulation output"
is, or ought to be, an utterly standard diagnostic, and it too seems to be
lacking, despite the immense controversial literature about DSGEs. (Of course,
it is an immense literature --- if we've missed precedents for either,
please let me know.) We have some thoughts about what might be leading to both
forms of bad behavior, which I'll let you read about in the paper, but the main
thing to take away, I think, is the fact that this widely-used DSGE
works so badly, and the methods. Those methods are, to repeat,
"simulate the model to see how well it could be estimated / how well it would
predict if it was totally right about how the economy works" and "see whether
the model fits better when you swap variables around so you're feeding it
nonsense". If you want to say those are too simple to rise to the dignity of
"methods", I won't fight you, but I will insist all the more on their
importance.
It might be that we just so happened to have tried the only two
DSGEs with these pathologies. (It'd be a weird coincidence, but it's
possible.) We also don't look at any non-DSGE models, which might be as bad on
these scores or even worse. (Maybe time series macroeconometrics is inherently
doomed.) But anyone who is curious about how whether their favorite
macroeconomic model meets these very basic criteria can check, ideally
before they publish and rack up thousands of citations lead
the community of inquirers down false trails. Doing so is conceptually simple,
if perhaps labor-intensive and painstaking, but that's science.
Update, December 2022: Bugs
After posting the preprint, people helpfully found some bugs in our code.
These glitch up all our numerical results. Since this is primarily a paper
about our numerical results, this is obviously bad. The preprint needs to be
revised after we've fixed our code and re-run everything. I am pretty
confident, however, about the general shape of the numbers, because as I said
we got the same kind of behavior from the Kydland-Prescott model and
(importantly, in this context) off-the-shelf code. Of course, you being less
confident in my confidence after this would be entirely sensible. In
any event, I'll update this again when we're done with re-running the code and
have updated the preprint.
*: E.g., in Hamiltonian mechanics, with
generalized positions \( q_1, \ldots q_k \) and corresponding momenta \( p_1,
\ldots p_k \) going into the Hamiltonian \( H \), we have \( \frac{dq_i}{dt} =
\frac{\partial H}{\partial p_i} \) and \( \frac{dp_i}{dt} = -\frac{\partial
H}{\partial q_i} \). A little work shows then that we can exchange the roles
of \( q_i \) and \( -p_i \) with the same Hamiltonian. But you can't (in
general) swap position variables for each other, or momenta for each other, or
\( q_1 \) for \( -p_2 \), or even \( q_i \) for \( p_i \), etc.
The Dismal Science;
Enigmas of Chance;
Self-Centered
Posted at November 02, 2022 14:51 | permanent link
October 31, 2022
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, October 2022
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on public administration, political philosophy, social
epistemology, or the aims and methods of sociology. Also, most of my reading
this month was done at odd hours and/or while bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm
less reliable and more cranky than usual.
- T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead
- Mind candy: a re-telling of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" as (is
this really a spoiler?) parasite-porn horror. Amusing, and pleasingly creepy.
§
- Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky, Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland: Or, Why It's Amazing That Federal Programs Work at All, This Being a Saga of the Economic Development Administration as Told by Two Sympathetic Observers Who Seek to Build Morals on a Foundation of Ruined Hopes
- I realize this is some sort of classic of the public policy /
administration literature, so I am very late to this party, but
it's really good. One way to expound this --- not Pressman and
Wildavsky's, except once in passing early on --- is by an analogy with computer
programming. When legislators (or dictators or executives, whatever) proclaim
a policy, they state objectives and resources, and provide a sort of sketch of
how they think the resources should be used to achieve the objectives. This is
like getting requirements for a program and maybe some vague pseudo-code. The
job of the programmer is then to implement, to actually come up with a
program that runs. In the course of doing so one may discover all sorts of
things about the original specification which will often call for it to be
revised. If multiple programmers need to implement different parts of the
specification, they will have to coordinate somehow, and may find this hard.
If the program has to rely on other programs, let alone on other systems, well,
good luck coordinating.
§
- (Link is to the 3rd edition of 1984, which is in print, though I read the
2nd of 1979, and haven't had a chance to compare the two.)
- Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell
- Horror mind candy; all six stories (the last two are really novellas) share
a common mythology. Usually-reliable sources had praised Ballingrud's work, so
when I ran across a cheap copy I picked this up. I understand the praise,
because these are skillfully written (with an exception I will get to below),
but I didn't love it, for some mostly-me reasons:
- While many of the props are Lovecraftian
(ghouls,
sanity-destroying
artifacts, subterranean
English cannibal cults), the underlying metaphysics is much more
Christian-heretical
--- "Hell" is meant very literally, and human laws and interests and emotions
have great significance (if not necessarily validity) in Ballingrud's
cosmos-at-large. As I
have said
before, I have standards for my cosmic horror, and the merely Satanic does
not cut it.
- I think it's fair to say that basically every human emotion is depicted as
a snare of Hell, love very much included. In some moods I could go along for
such a ride, especially if it were presented with a lot more satirical humor,
but as this went on I merely found it unpleasant.
- Ballingrud's endings here are generally abrupt and weak. ("Skullpocket"
is a notable exception.)
So: some real merits, but I will not be seeking out more.
§
- Olúfémi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)
- (Note: The e in "Olúfémi" should also have a dot accent underneath, but every way I've tried to generate this makes my antiquated blogging software produce gibberish...)
- I picked this up because I'd liked
one
of the essays it was was based on, but wished
Táíwò would elaborate on the argument. (I also had
hopes of using it in the inequality class.) I was,
however, disappointed. The book is no clearer than the essays about key
concepts, such as "elite", "elite capture", "rooms", and what
non-elite-captured institutions would look like. It's a short book, but there
are many historical anecdotes, which are all overly-intricate. (Some of them
are inspiring, but the details simply aren't relevant.) Abstruse
philosophy-of-language ideas about conversational "common ground" are invoked
to explain phenomena which a few pages later are also explained as mere
fear-of-the-consequences, without any recognition of the tension. (There is a
big difference between actually creating false consciousness, and merely
intimidating people into saying things they don't believe.) It was a mistake
to expand the essay to this length, at least in this way.
- Now, there is a core idea here which I find persuasive, namely that those
with existing advantages will tend to use those advantages to play a
disproportionate, even dominating role in
any situation, undertaking or movement and to steer it to their
advantage, unless pretty severely checked by strong, and enforced,
institutional constraints.
That's Jo Freeman's
"tyranny of structurelessness" (cited by Táíwò), as well
as Robert
Michel's "iron law of oligarchy" (not cited). So far, so convincing.
- But let me push a little. Unless one imagines that everyone in a
movement is equally influential, it's mathematically necessary that the most
influential members, the elite, are disproportionately influential.
(Just build
the Lorenz curve of influence.) I admit this pretends that "influence" is
a one-dimensional numerical variable, but that'll be true of all sorts of
proxies for influence, like time other members of the movement spend attending
to you. At what point does this disproportionate influence tip over into
"elite capture"? If this is a matter of degrees rather than thresholds, how
ought one trade off the bad of elite capture against other desiderata, like
actually getting anything done? (Imagine every member of a movement of even
1,000 people speaking for just a minute on a
decision, and
being listened to.)
- These are, of course, very old questions of democratic theory. Liberalism
has at
least evolved some
answers, by now boringly familiar: leadership through formal representation,
accountability of representatives to members through regular elections,
competition between rival factions of would-be leaders, etc. --- in short, the
threat of members throwing the bums out will keep the would-be bums in line.
These have their own issues (throwing the bums out can be
a collective
action problem, which must be preceded
by collective
cognition), but, at least here, Táíwò doesn't seem to
even dismiss the liberal-democratic stand-bys as inadequate, not
suited to progressive movements, or what-have-you.
- I realize this all amounts to wishing Táíwò had
written a different book, but I do.
§
- (On the question of "identity politics", which
actually gets comparatively little space in the book, I can't help boggling at
a line Táíwò quotes from
Barbara Smith, one of
the founders of
the Combahee
River Collective, explaining why they needed to introduce a new kind of
politics in the late 1970s: "We, as black women, we actually had a right to
create political priorities and agendas and actions and solutions based in our
experiences". The reason I boggle is that was a well-developed
political theory in the 1970s which stood solidly behind groups organizing
politically to articulate and advance agendas based on their common interests,
values and ascriptive identities, including allying with other groups likewise
pursuing their agendas. That theory was good old fashioned American
interest-group pluralism. If the leading advocates of pluralism lacked the
imagination to apply it to black women (or black lesbians, or...), that wasn't
a fault in the theory. To be fair, leftist political theory
at the time was coming from a place where the only legitimate group to advocate
for itself was the organized working class...)
- T. Kingfisher, The Twisted Ones
- Arthur Machen, The House of Souls
- Mind candy, seasonal. The Kingfisher novel begins with a middle-aged
person traveling from Pittsburgh to North Carolina to clear out a relative's
house and storage unit, a scenario I instantly identified with, and from there
builds the strangeness and tension very satisfyingly. It's the first Kingfisher I've read, but it certainly won't be the last.
- The Twisted Ones is avowedly based on Machen's short story
"The White People", collected in House of Souls, so I finally read
Machen. (I previously knew of him just as one of Lovecraft's influences, but,
well, there were many, of varying quality.) There's a lot of genuinely good
creepy stuff in here, but it's also often hard to tell whether, when Machen
mentions nameless abominations, he's talking about genuinely indescribable
cosmic horrors, or just being prudish about sex.
- Spoiler-y inter-textual commentary for The Twisted Ones: I strongly suspect that some aspects of the visit of our hero to the city of the white people are homages to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness: both feature series of murals depicting the history of the city as its population dwindles over the ages, and the city is ultimately taken over by servitors
of the original inhabitants, shoggoths for Lovecraft, and von Neumann-esque self-reproducing magical automata for Kingfisher.
§
- Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread
- Popular social science. The hook here is explaining what the hell has gone
wrong with our politics / culture / thoughts in general over the last decade or
so. What O'Connor and Weatherall actually do is explain, clearly but
carefully, a range of models of social learning and social influence, intended
to model how the social organization of a scientific community helps, or
hinders, that community's pursuit of truth. (They tend to be Bayesians, and so
presume that the truth is always an available option, rather than something
that needs to be actually discovered; but
I have a thing about this.) In
later chapters, they consider how these social processes can be manipulated or
subverted by interested parties, especially industrial propagandists. (The
last part draws on Oreskes and Conway's great Merchants of
Doubt, which I will review Any Year Now). Because of the authors'
institutional affiliations, this counts as philosophy of science, but you could
equally well see it as theoretical sociology (*). This is all skillfully done.
- The last chapter gestures at applying the models to explain why our
contemporary information environment is so awful, especially online. I say
"gestures" because they don't really try to establish any very serious results
here. I don't think they ever even try to document that, in aggregate, people
are more mis-informed now than in, say, 1980 or 1960. As I've said
before, I have a strong suspicion that the difference isn't
the quantity of craziness, but its condensation into blobs
of shared insanity. (The proverbial "tin-foil hat brigade" has indeed
become a brigade.) If that's true, models of network learning would
be a natural candidate to explain the development...
- While I have gone on at some length about the last chapter, I am inclined
to cut it a lot of slack as mere marketing. Two philosophers writing a
non-technical account of social learning in networks, even a very clear and
engaging account, might lead to a few course adoptions. (I myself would
be very happy to use those chapters in a class on social learning
or collective
cognition, following their verbal explanations with the technicalities.)
Claiming to explain "the misinformation age" will move a lot more copies, which
I can't begrudge them. And the phenomena they describe are probably
part of the story...
§
- *: I'd say "sociological theory", but that name is pre-empted by a sort of
hazing ritual, in which newcomers are initiated into the tribe by means of
textual ancestor worship, and the relative strength of different tribal
segments is reflected in exactly which ancestors get worshiped.
- Daniel Rigney, The Matthew Effect: How Advantage Begets Further Advantage
- This is mostly a rather pedestrian review of literature on sources of
cumulative advantage in science, the economy, aspects of democratic politics,
and education. There are places where the book is clearly trying to be popular
social science, but it just doesn't have the spark, or the clear lines of
argument. The one exception is actually the first chapter, on
how Robert Merton
introduced the term "Matthew Effect", and how it fitted into his larger
programs in the sociology of science and general sociology.
- I'll keep this around to mine for references, but even those will be
increasingly antiquated...
§
- John H. Goldthorpe, Sociology as a Population Science
- On the advice of readers, I have spun off my remarks into
a separate
review (and expanded them to 800-odd
words). §
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
The Progressive Forces;
Teaching: Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
Commit a Social Science;
The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts;
Networks;
Philosophy;
Cthulhiana;
Actually, "Dr. Internet" Is the Name of the Monsters' Creator
Posted at October 31, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
September 30, 2022
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, September 2022
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on political sociology or the history of the Second International. Also, most
of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while bottle-feeding a
baby, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.
- Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy [1911; translated by Eden and Cedar Paul, 1915] [full text via Library of Congress]
- I'd read a lot about this book, but the second-hand accounts
didn't do it justice. At one level, it's a study of the socialist parties of
the Second
International during their peak, with the thought being if they
couldn't manage to be effectively democratic, controlled by their members
rather than their leadership, what hope does any other organization have?
- His conclusion is, not much hope at all. And this is the other level of the book, and why it has had a life after 1914.
By a universally applicable social law, every organ of the
collectivity, brought into existence through the need for the division of
labor, creates for itself, as soon as it becomes consolidated, interests
peculiar to itself. The existence of these special interests involves a
necessary conflict with the interests of the collectivity. Nay, more, social
strata fulfiling peculiar functions tend to become isolated, to produce organs
fitted for the defense of their own peculiar interests. In the long run they
tend to undergo transformation into distinct classes. [Part 6,
ch. 2] This is the source for the famous "iron law of oligarchy".
Paraphrasing: Effective and efficient social groups must employ a
division of labor, and must create specialists. Those specialists
genuinely know more about how to make the group work than most of its members,
and to be effective they need to stay in their roles for extended periods of
time, and to be replaced by other specialists. They inevitably become leaders,
with different interests than others. Michels: "Who says organization, says
oligarchy" [pt. 6, ch. 4].
- In terms of what's to be done about this, Michels trembles on the verge of
advocating competition among would-be elites and their frequent rotation in
office, or at least the threat of their frequent rotation. (He
borrows the phrase "circulation of elites" from Pareto, but not quite in the
relevant way.) He also trembles on describing democratic control of elites as
a collective action problem --- though that's also the sort of thing which
people need to organize to solve.
- I am not convinced that there's no way out of Michels's dilemmas, that the
iron law of oligarchy is as iron as all that.
(I
have some thoughts.) My gut feeling is that it's like Malthus's iron law
of population, or the prisoners' dilemma, or Mancur Olson's ideas about
collective action, or Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" --- if you accept the
premises, the distressing conclusion does indeed follow. The questions of
interest then are when the premises hold, or the ways in which they fail to
hold. (Cf., and see
footnote *.) That is a major
accomplishment, and this is a deserved classic of political thought.
§
- (Michel's later personal political beliefs, like Pareto's, were deeply
unfortunate, to say the least, but are not implied by this book.)
- *: Thus Malthus is checked
by the industrial revolution and the demographic transition; the prisoners'
dilemma by a whole field of
the evolution of
cooperation; Hardin
by Ostrom. (Olson
himself emphasized that collective action happens, and the puzzle is
understanding how, when and why.) ^
- Linda Nagata, Needle
- Mind candy science fiction, latest in Nagata's "Inverted Frontier" series.
Someone online (name lost, sorry) said the plot outline could easily be that of
a Star Trek episode, and I can't quite unsee that (the
split-colony parts especially), but it's still very good. In particular it
benefits from Nagata's slightly detached and clinical view on these characters
and their emotions (which is not very Trek-y at all).
§
- Michel Talagrand, What Is a Quantum Field Theory?
- Talagrand is a probabilist who decided, at the end of a long and
distinguished career, that he was finally going to understand what
physicists are up to
in quantum field
theory, and in particular what on earth is going on with calculations that
produce infinities somehow being re-jiggered to
not produce infinities, a.k.a. "renormalization". This led to an
actual mathematician encountering what passes among physicists under the names
of "theorems" and "proofs", resulting in a great deal of confusion,
exasperation and (reading between the lines) moments of near despair. But it
also led to what must be one of the more interesting, and is definitely one of
the most personal, books on QFT ever written. Talagrand builds up
from scratch all the way to things like \( \phi^4 \) theory, though not
covering any serious theory of physical interactions like quantum
electrodynamics. But he does succeed in making mathematical sense of a huge
part of the framework of QFT, and is frank about where he just can't.
- I enjoyed this book tremendously, but I might as well have been
reverse-engineered to be its target audience --- I studied QFT as a physics
graduate student a quarter century ago
(before changing my specialty), and now
works in a discipline more affected, or afflicted, by mathematicians' notions
of rigor. Whether there are many others who will be similarly interested in
800 pages of careful math being used to do conceptual clarification on
one of the more recondite branches of natural science, I couldn't say.
§
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
The Progressive Forces;
Physics;
Mathematics;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
Commit a Social Science
Posted at September 30, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
August 31, 2022
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, August 2022
Attention
conservation notice: I have no qualifications to opine on early 20th
century Russian and Mongolian history, or even on crackpots.
- Craig Alanson, Columbus Day and SpecOps
- Mind-cotton-candy science fiction. I use the phrase "cotton candy"
deliberately: it's pure diverting fluff of no substance whatsoever. I
appreciated the diversion, but feel no compulsion to read any further in what
is evidently a long series. It did, however, inspire me to re-read William
Tenn's
magnificent "The
Liberation of Earth", which deserves to be retained as a precious part of
our common cultural heritage. §
- Richard Stark, Nobody Runs Forever
- Mind candy crime fiction. This is a Parker novel, which is to say coolly
detached competence porn set among professional criminals --- with emotional
amateurs providing contrast and heaps of Plot. I found it
refreshing. §
- James Palmer, The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia
- The life and times of an orientalist crackpot who rode the Russian Civil
War to enacting a reign of terror in Inner Asia checks so many of my boxes that
I have avoided reading this for years, lest it disappoint. Far from doing so,
it was a treat. The subtitle is a bit inaccurate (as Palmer explains clearly,
there was a
khan, and he was a
Mongol). But the book itself is clear, amused (when appropriate), humane,
learned (when appropriate) and lively.
§
Constant readers (if I have any left) will notice that this was not a lot of
books. This is because I am now engaged in a very time- and attention-
consuming project which will occupy me for the foreseeable future. My
collaborator in this endeavor requests that I not blog about it, but I am
allowed to describe it
by linking to
an emblematic image. I like to imagine that the satyr is playing the pipes
because he and the nymph have learned that it is, paradoxically, actually the
only way to get their baby to sleep.
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime;
Afghanistan and Central Asia;
Psychoceramica;
Writing for Antiquity;
The Running-Dogs of Reaction
Posted at August 31, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
July 31, 2022
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, July 2022
Attention conservation notice:: I have no taste, and no qualifications to
opine on the Italian Renaissance, political philosophy, intellectual history,
or even game theory.
- Niccolò Machiavelli, Selected Political Writings: The Prince, Selections from The Discourses, Letter to Vettori (edited and translated by David Wootton)
- I have, of course, no qualifications to opine on translations of
Machiavelli, but having worked my way through a fair number of versions
of The Prince over the years, this is easily the most-readable one
I've run across. (Wootton's introduction, in particular, is a remarkable
production in its own right --- I'd say more but I don't want to spoil the
effect!) It would be easy to treat these works as mere documents,
artifacts illustrating a dead past, of merely-historical relevance. This
translation makes them feel remarkably like a part of arguments we could be
having right now, maybe are having right now.
- Admittedly there is a cost to this --- when Wootton has Machiavelli use
contemporary expressions like "political mechanism" or "social structure", I
for one am curious about what the actual phrasing was. (If it really was
"political mechanism", that'd be very interesting for
the history of mechanism, so I suspect it wasn't.) But
if I truly cared about that, I could consult other translations,
or for that matter the original text. And the difficulties of trying to
be more word-for-word literal are well-illustrated by Wootton's practice of parenthetically marking every place where Machiavelli used virtù (or one of its derivatives --- on p. 191 alone this has to be translated as, variously, "skill", "effect" and "will-power".
- One thing reading this leaves me pondering is how to interpret
The Prince: when (if ever?) was he speaking sincerely; when was he
being ironic; when was he unmasking hypocrisy by plainly describing what his
contemporaries were doing* (in a spirit I might characterize as somewhere
between "I learned it from you" and "you say you want results,
I'll tell you how to get results"); when was he using
coded, "Aesopian"
language to talk safely about dangerous matters; and when was he trying to make
himself appear useful
to dangerous
gangsters
and blasphemous grifters
in the hopes they'd give him a desperately-needed job? (These are not mutually
exclusive and I can well imagine him being especially pleased with himself when
passages worked in multiple ways at once.)
- The Discourses, by contrast, seem much more straightforwardly
sincere. (Unless: maybe that's just what he wanted us to think!) But I will
just mention two things which intrigued me. (1) I presume it's well-known to
scholars, but new to me, that the famous opening to Gibbon's Decline and
Fall about the age of the Antonines is clearly
ripped off from elaborating on book I, chapter 10 of
the Discourses. (Except for the bits in Gibbon about religion,
which are from Machiavelli's book I, chapter 11.) (2) Has anyone written a
good comparison between Machiavelli
and ibn Khaldun,
especially their ideas about institutions, personal character, and cycles of
political founding, decay and re-formation? It's very interesting to see two
inheritors of ancient political philosophy trying to found a generalizing
science of politics based on historical examples, and I'm equally intrigued
by the similarities and the differences. (Virtù is not how you say 'asabiyya in Italian, and neither is arete, but...)
- This concludes this episode of my nattering about books I am not entitled
to judge. §
- ObLinkage: Previously on Wootton on Machiavelli.
- *: Thus on Ferdinand of
Aragon, ch. 21 begins "if you think about his deeds, you will find them all noble", but by
the end of the paragraph, "exploiting religion, he practiced a pious cruelty,
expropriating and expelling from his kingdom the Marranos: an act without
parallel and truly despicable" (pp. 67--68).
- Alain Bensoussan, Jens Frehse and Phillip Yam, Mean Field Games and Mean Field Type Control Theory
- Mean field games are ones where each player's payoff depends on the
distribution of states (or actions) across the other players, not on what any
particular individual does. There are some interesting mathematical questions
which arise when we consider the limit of an infinitely large population.
(Each finite-dimensional individual then confronts the results of their joint
actions as an alien and infinite-dimensional force.) In particular, the way
large-but-finite-population games converge on infinite-population
limits is related to some convergence issues in a long-simmering project, so I
have been trying to educate myself about this topic. As part of that
self-education, I have tried to explain my current understanding of
mean field games more fully in another place.
- This short book from 2013 is intended as a sort of crash course in mean
field games (and the related mean field control problems). It presumes a lot
of familiarity with
mathematical control
theory, partial differential equations
and stochastic
differential equations, but less with
(e.g.) convergence
of stochastic processes or even conventional game theory. In common with,
it appears, most of the literature, it limits itself to settings where agents'
internal states and exterior actions are all continuous, but it does consider
both a single homogeneous population of agents, and the setting where agents
are separated into a fixed number of discrete types (with the population of
each type going to infinity together). It was useful for my purposes, which
was giving me some orientation to the literature, but I imagine there must be
better introductions now available.
- If you are the sort of person who finds
this intriguing, the odds are very good that you have access to
the electronic version
from the publisher, which is honestly probably all you
need. §
- Don S. Lemons, An Introduction to Stochastic Processes in Physics
- This is very much intended as a first book on probability and
stochastic processes for physics undergrads, and as such I imagine
it'd work pretty successfully. I stopped being a physics undergrad 29 years
ago, and will review the book for teachers of this material, not learners. (I.e.,
I won't explain common jargon.)
- Lemons starts with very basic discrete and continuous distributions, spends
a lot of time on Gaussians and moment generating functions, including a sketch
of using moment generating functions to derive the central limit theorem. He
then tries to describe continuous-time Gaussian processes, specifically the
Wiener process and the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes. The viewpoint is
essentially: take a deterministic ordinary differential equation, of the kind
we know and love from physics courses,
and throw a
random-variable term into the right-hand side, i.e., more or less the way
Langevin proceeded Back in the Day.
(Langevin's key paper
is included in translation.)
- Lemons does a remarkable job of "solving" such stochastic differential
equations by assuming that the solution is a Gaussian process, so all that's
needed are the first and second moments as functions of time; getting ODEs for
those moments; and solving those ODEs. It is, in short, a heroic attempt to
act as though the theory of stochastic processes stopped
with Chandrasekhar
1943. (The
name "Ito"
does not appear anywhere in the text.) Now, in deriving his solutions, Lemons
pulls off some tricks which make me think that (unlike some physicists writing
about stochastics) he does know Ito calculus, but doesn't mention it
explicitly
lest he be prosecuted by his less enlightened fellow
tribesmen so as to not frighten off the children. I hesitate to say
that this is unwise --- I presume that it's worked pedagogically for Lemons ---
but what is unwise is not letting the reader know that there is a more
advanced, i.e., both more flexible and more internally consistent, theory of
SDEs, a theory which is certainly within the ability of physicists to master.
(Cf.) In fact, I think that if
Lemons had tried to teach Ito calculus to larval physicists, he'd have
done a good job, which exaggerates my disappointment.
- Over-all, if I had read this when I was in the intended audience, it would
probably have done me a lot of good, but now I think my main use for this will
be to mine it for examples to use as homework problems the next time
I teach
SDEs. §
- Steven Cassedy, What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning?
- I have struggled with the expression "meaning of life" for as long as I can
remember, because I can't understand how "life" can be something like a message
or a sign that means anything (outside of
some very special
circumstances). Cassedy is similarly puzzled: the way he puts it (I
paraphrase a little) is that if someone could say "the meaning of life is X"
(not that most people ever fill in X), one should be equally able to say "life
means X", and, well, life is not a message or a sign. By a slight extension of
this original sense, "meaning" also conveys "intention, purpose", and one could
make sense of "the purpose of life is X" or "life is intended to do X", though
it raises the question of whose intention or purpose.
- What Cassedy does in this book is try to trace the history of how the
phrases, and the ideas, of "the meaning of life" and "a meaningful life" became
so ubiquitous in English and other languages. The starting point is
Greco-Roman and Hebrew antiquity, where, he argues, there is simply no such
concept. He then traces its pre-history, through the Christian fathers
(especially Augustine) and the early modern period. "The meaning of life", he
argues, first emerged in German, in the Romantic period, and spread from there,
into English, French and Russian. (He has a convincing-to-me discussion of the
German word involved, Sinn, but since my knowledge of German mostly
relates to linear algebra and public transit, I am not competent to judge.)
The phrase got further popularized in English through translations of the great
19th century Russian authors, especially Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, who were of
course influenced by the German usage. (Again, Cassedy goes over the history
and usage of the Russian words translated as "meaning", but I know no Russian
at all.)
- Finally, he locates the real tipping point in post-war America, in the
writings of the immigrant German theologian Paul Tillich, where "meaning"
became a way of talking about God without having to affirm, or even explicitly
mention, traditional supernatural dogmas --- but also without denying them,
either. At the present, he concludes, it is the very slipperiness of "meaning"
which makes it so ubiquitous: if people had to spell out exactly what they
were trying to say, it would be less effective (and they might realize they
don't know themselves what they're saying).
- I found this fascinating and drily funny, but then I'm
philistine
anima-blind reconciled to living in a blind, purposeless universe, the fortuitous product
of the concourse of atoms and void, where I get to be one of those safely on shore watching storms at sea
lucky enough to not need this particular analgesic. §
- Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York: Knopf, 1979)
- This is a learned and gracefully written book which goes into a lot of the
details of how Italian city states --- mostly but not exclusively north of Rome
--- formed, struggled, were run, and eventually got absorbed (for the most
part) into larger polities. I learned a lot about the internal political
machinations, especially about institutional devices which, whatever their
republican intentions, ended up helping to perpetuate oligarchy. Thus the
"power" part.
- The "imagination" is the high culture, especially art and humanism.
Martines, for his part, sees this as ideology, and ideology in the service of
upper class interests. While a lot of that is convincing, there do seem to be
two gaps in his argument there. One is that he never grapples with
why this art continues to be meaningful to people all over the world,
centuries later, in ways which earlier and later art, equally in the service of
related upper classes, just isn't.
(Cf.) He does, to be fair,
raise the parallel issue with humanistic scholarship, and says that
the humanists made some "objective" discoveries of lasting value, but doesn't
address how that was possible in a basically-ideological enterprise. The other
defect, which I suspect is related, is that he doesn't really explain why
serving upper class interests in this time and place should have required such
an astonishingly large amount of innovation in technique. He's
certainly aware of it: his first two pages of illustrations contrast
a Florentine painting
from the 1270s (basically still Byzantine)
with one from
1426 (that might as well be from another world), and he has perceptive
things to say about the development of artistic and literary styles. But these
two issues --- why there was so much artistic and intellectual
innovation, and why we still value the results --- are just not things he
really tries to explain.
- In the end, Martines gives the impression that he thinks of his subjects,
the upper classes of the Italian city states, extraordinary but also horrible,
and I can't help think that by the last chapters he was somewhat sick of
them, and that in describing the Italian wars that began in 1494 he was (as the
saying goes) "rooting for injuries". If so, it's hard not to sympathize. §
- (I have not seen the paperback edition [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988], but I can't find any indication of revisions.)
- Fernand Braudel, Out of Italy: Two Centuries of World Domination and Demise (translated by Siân Reynolds from Le Modèle italien [Paris: Éditions Arthaud, 1989], but first published in Italian {Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1974])
- I picked this up because I ran across a cheap copy and
had been
impressed by my earlier exposure to Braudel. This is wide-ranging and
amiable, but I ended it with no clear idea of what Braudel was trying to argue,
and very confused by what, exactly, he meant when he referred to something as a
historical "problem" --- and he talks about problems incessantly. (And he's
weirdly confident about what he knows are exceedingly tenuous estimates of
economic conditions.) I half suspect the key to the book is a seemingly
throw-away remark in the last chapter that "Everyone thinks for instance that
'France under the Sun King,' Louis XIV, was 'greater' than Francce under de
Gaulle, but the 'inferior' France of the 1960s had a population two or three
times greater and was many times richer". In conclusion: maybe worth reading
if you are studying Braudel himself (or mid-20th-century historiography, etc.).
Yes, I fully realize just how presumptuous it is of me to say such a
thing. §
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Writing for Antiquity;
Philosophy;
Enigmas of Chance;
The Dismal Science;
Physics
Posted at July 31, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
June 30, 2022
Book to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, June 2022
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on the (linked) decay of our infrastructure and our institutions, or to evaluate
books on pregnancy (but then neither does that author).
- Walter Jon Williams, Lord Quillifer
- Mind-candy fantasy, competence-porn division. I very much enjoyed the
latest installment in Quillifer's adventures and mis-adventures, but you
really need to have read the previous books (1, 2) to get anything out of this. §
- Emily Oster, Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong --- and What You Really Need to Know
- There are two hooks here. (Neither is that the "conventional pregnancy
wisdom" is all wrong.) One is Oster bringing the clarity
of decision
theory to pregnancy: let the doctors tell us the probabilities of outcomes
under various contingencies, then let pregnant women come up with their
utilities for those outcomes and decide which risks are worth it. The other
hook is that Oster actually understands study design, and pokes at the medical
literature on pregnancy and child-bearing to see which bits of it can support
any weight. I am much more persuaded by the second part than by the first, if
only because I had independently read a bunch of the same studies Oster and
came to similar evaluations. The medical literature isn't all on a
level with the Journal of
Evidence-Based Haruspicy, but a surprisingly large part of it comes
shocking close. I'm sure there are real obstacles to doing better, but it
wouldn't hurt the medical system to admit how little confidence
they ought to have.
- As for the decision theory, well, I just defy anyone to actually implement
that ideal. To repeat a favorite
anecdote from the great
Persi Diaconis:
Some years ago I was trying to decide whether or not to move to
Harvard from Stanford. I had bored my friends silly with endless discussions.
Finally, one of them said, "You're one of our leading decision theorists.
Maybe you should make a list of costs and benefits and try to roughly calculate
your expected utility." Without thinking, I blurted out, "Come on, Sandy, this
is serious." That said, I did appreciate Oster's efforts
at providing actual estimates of various probabilities, however imperfect. §
- ObLinkage1: I am
sure this
will cause all kinds of awkwardness at the farmers' market. I find the
criticisms of Oster in that essay unfair, despite agreeing that public
policy is needlessly mean and has, in many ways, grown meaner over my lifetime.
The flaws of public policy around parenting, pregnancy, etc. are not Oster's
fault; they're not even the economists' fault collectively; it seems fine
to not go into policy in a book of advice to prospective
mothers, even if you think policy is very important.
- ObLinkage2: This puts many of Oster's anecdotes about her own mother in a different (and more impressive) light.
- NoLinkage: I am vaguely aware that Oster has made herself controversial
with ideas about how to respond to the pandemic. I haven't followed that, I
have no opinion on it, I don't see how it's relevant (one way or the other)
to this book, and I don't intend to learn anything about this matter, if I can
help it.
- Chris Raschka, Charlie Parker Played Be Bop
- I thank Dmitri Tymoczko for bringing this to my attention.
- Chris Ferrie and Marco Tomamichel, Blockchain for Babies
- I blame Dmitri Tymoczko for bringing this to my attention, and will
not dignify it with a purchase link.
- Thomas Thwaites, The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch
- What it says on the label: an art student tries to build a toaster, from
raw materials sourced from Great Britain. Whether he succeeds is a matter of interpretation, but
many valuable lessons about technology, knowledge, materials, the division of labor in
society, and the nature of the built environment are learned along the way.
Recommended if you can enjoy, or even just tolerate, wry, self-deprecating,
Very British humor. §
- Anna Clark, The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy
- I think it's fair to say that this is the standard account of the Flint
disaster, and it should be: it's well-written, impassioned, meticulous without
being overwhelming, and provides a lot of important context. That said,
there are a few points where I want to push back a little on some things
Clark seems to imply.
- In Flint, when ordinary people complained that their water was bad, blamed
it for all sorts of mysterious medical complaints, and disbelieved official
reassurances, the plain people of Flint were, in fact, right. But when
ordinary people complain about MMR or Covid vaccines, blame them for all sorts
of mysterious medical complaints, and disbelieve official reassurances, they
are very, very wrong. (Anyone taking this as an occasion to send me anti-vax
rubbish will be piped to /dev/null.) I don't expect Clark to give us the tools
to differentiate between these two cases, in a principled way which could help
readers going forward --- she's a journalist, not a prescriptive social
epistemologist! But I do wish her writing showed some awareness of this
pitfall of celebrating the wisdom of the common folk.
- Relatedly, "hundreds of protesters bang[ing] on the locked doors of the
ornate capitol building, shaking its wood panels" as the legislature tries to
go about the ordinary business of democratic self-government (p. 167) --- well,
that registers a little differently now, doesn't it?
Let me re-iterate that this is a really good book, which I strongly recommend. §
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Natural Science of the Human Species;
The Beloved Republic;
The Continuing Crises;
The Great Transformation;
Scientifiction and Fantastica
Posted at June 30, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
June 21, 2022
Upcoming Talk: "Matching Random Features"
Attention
conservation notice: You have better things to do with an hour of your
precious, finite life than staring at a screen while an academic tries
to give a hand-wavy summary and advertisement for
technical work on abstruse problem you don't care about.
I will be talking on Random-Feature Matching to
the One
World Approximate Bayesian Computation Seminar at 8:30 am Eastern time (=1:30 pm UK time) on
Thursday, 23 June. If you are interested in simulation-based inference
but have not (oddly) read my paper, or if you just want to marvel at how bad
someone can be at giving a Zoom talk, two years on, please join. (Details on getting access to the Zoom session can be had by
following that last link.)
Let me take this opportunity to thank the organizer both for the invitation,
and for not insisting on the usual seminar time of 9:30 am UK time.
Self-centered;
Enigma of Chance
Posted at June 21, 2022 14:11 | permanent link
Course Announcement: "Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination" (36-313)
Attention
conservation notice: Advertisement for a course you won't take, at a university you don't attend, in which very human and passionately contentious topics deliberately have all the life sucked from them, leaving only the husk of abstractions and the dry bones of methodology.
In the fall I will, again, be teaching my class on inequality
36-313, Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination
9 units
Time and place: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:25 -- 2:45 pm, in Wean Hall (WEH) 6403 (tentatively)
Description: Many social questions about inequality, injustice and unfairness are, in part, questions about evidence, data, and statistics. This class lays out the statistical methods which let us answer questions like Does this employer discriminate against members of that group?, Is this standardized test biased against that group?, Is this decision-making algorithm biased, and what does that even mean? and Did this policy which was supposed to reduce this inequality actually help? We will also look at inequality within groups, and at different ideas about how to explain inequalities between groups. The class will interweave discussion of concrete social issues with the relevant statistical concepts.
Prerequisites: 36-202 ("Methods for Statistics and Data Science") (and so also 36-200, "Reasoning with Data"), or similar with permission of the instructor
Last year was the first time I got to teach it, and it was a mixed
experience. The students who stuck with it were, gratifyingly, uniformly very
happy with it (and I am pretty sure they learned a lot!). But it also had the
biggest "melt" of any class I've taught, with fully half of those who initially
signed up for it eventually dropping it. The most consistent reason why --- at
least, the one they felt comfortable telling me! --- was that they were
expecting something with a lot more arguing about politics, and a lot less math
and data analysis. I have taken this feedback to heart, and decided to do
even more math and data analysis.
Tentative topic schedule
Slightly more than one week per. A more detailed listing, with related readings, can be
found on the class
homepage.
- "Recall": Reminders about probability and statistics: populations, distribution
within a population, distribution functions, joint and conditional probability;
samples and inference from samples.
- Income and wealth inequality: What does the distribution of income
and wealth look like within a population? How do we describe population
distributions, especially when there is an extreme range of values (a big
difference between the rich and poor)? Where does the idea of "the 1%"
wealthy elite come from? How has income inequality changed over recent
decades?
Statistical tools: measures of central tendency (median, mode, mean),
of dispersion, and of skew; measures of dispersion (standard deviation etc.); measures of concentration and inequality (ratios between percentiles, the Lorenz curve, Gini coefficient); the concept of "heavy tails" (the largest
values being orders of magnitude larger than typical values); log-normal
and power law distributions; fitting distributions to existing data;
positive feedback, multiplicative growth and "cumulative advantage" processes.
- Speed-run through social and economic stratification: Reminders (?) about social concepts:
ascriptive and attained social statuses, and qualitative/categorical vs. more-or-less dimensions of differentiation. Important forms of differentiation, including (but not necessarily limited to): sex, gender, income, wealth, consumption, caste, race, ethnicity, citizenship, class, order, education. The legal notion of "protected categories".
- Income disparities: How does income (and wealth) differ across groups? How do we compare average or typical values? How do we compare entire
distributions? How have income inequalities by race and sex changed over recent decades?
Statistical tools: permutation tests for differences in mean (and other
measures of the average); two-sample tests for differences in distribution;
bootstrapping;
inverting tests to find the range of differences compatible with the data;
the "analysis of variance" method of comparing populations;
the "relative distribution" method of comparing populations
- Explaining, or explaining away, inequality: To what
extent can differences in outcomes between groups be explained by differences
in their attributes (e.g., explaining differences in incomes by differences
in marketable skills)? How should we go about making such adjustments? Is
it appropriate to treat discrimination as the "residual" left unexplained?
When does adjusting or controlling for a variable contribute to an
explanation, and when is it "explaining away" discrimination? What would it
mean to control for race, sex or gender?
Statistical tools: Observational causal inference; using
regression to "control for" multiple variables at once, with both linear
models and nonparametrically (by means of matching or nearest-neighbors);
using graphical models to represent causal relations between variables; how
to use graphical models to decide what should and what should not be
controlled for; the causal model implicit in decisions about controls.
- Detecting discrimination in hiring, admissions, etc.: Do employers discriminate in
hiring (or schools in admission, etc.)? How can we tell? When are
differences in hiring rates evidence for discrimination? How do statistical
perspectives on this question line up with legal criteria for "disparate
treatment" and "disparate impact"?
Statistical tools: tests for differences in proportions or
probabilities; adjusting for applicant characteristics (again)
- Inequalities in health, disease and mortality: Quantifying differences in the incidence of diseases, in death rates, and in life expectancy. The "deaths of despair" controversy.
Statistical tools: differences in proportions and probabilities again; survival analysis and survival curves; some of the elements of demography.
- Mobility and Transmission of Inequality: What does it mean to talk about social mobility? Conversely, what doe it mean to say inequality can be transmitted from one generation to the next? What are the mechanisms this happens through? What are the large-scale patterns about mobility and transmission, over the last few decades?
Statistical tools: correlations; conditional probability modeling;
Markov models.
- Measuring segregation: What do we mean by "segregation"? Segregation in law ("de jure") and
segregration in fact ("de facto"). Different ways of measuring de facto
segregation. Trends in de facto racial segregation since the end of de jure
racial segregation. Why different measures of segregation give different
results. Segregation by income. Segregation by political partisanship.
Consequences of segregation. Inter-generational transmission again.
Statistical tools: Standard measures of segregation; more
recent measures of segregation based on information theory; spatial correlation; how do we make adjustments for changing distributions?
- Algorithmic bias and/or fairness: Can predictive or decision-making algorithms be
biased? What would that even mean? Do algorithms trained on existing data
necessarily inherit the biases of the world? What notions of fairness or
unbiased can we actually implement for algorithms? What trade-offs are
involved in enforcing different notions of fairness? Are "risk-prediction
instruments" fair?
Statistical tools: Methods for evaluating the accuracy of predictions;
differential error rates across groups; decision trees; optimization and multi-objective
optimization.
- Standardized tests: Are standardized tests for school
admission biased against certain racial groups? What does it mean to
measure qualifications, and how would we know whether tests really are
measuring qualifications? What does it mean for a measurement to be biased?
When do differences across groups indicate biases? (Disparate impact
again.) Why correlating outcomes with test scores among admitted
students may not make sense. The "compared to what?" question.
Statistical tools: Predictive validity; differential
prediction; "conditioning on a collider"
- Intelligence tests: Are intelligence tests biased? How do
we measure latent attributes? How do we know the latent attributes even
exist? What would it mean for there to be such a thing as "general
intelligence", that could be measured by tests? What, if anything, do
intelligence tests measure? What rising intelligence test results (the
Flynn Effect) tell us?
Statistical tools: correlation between test scores; factor
models as an explanation of correlations; estimating factor values from
tests; measurement invariance; alternatives to factor models; item
response theory
- Measuring attitude and prejudice: How do we measure people's feelings about different groups? Why do different measures give different results? Do "implicit association tests" measure
unconscious biases? What, if anything, do implicit
association tests measure?
Statistical tools: More on measurement; the distinction between
reliability and validity; why it's much easier to quantify reliability than
validity; approaches to "construct validity".
- Evaluating inequality-reducing interventions: If we try to do something to reduce inequality, how do we know whether or not it worked? How do we design a good study of an intervention? How do we pool information from
multiple studies? What can we do if only bad studies are available? Do implicit bias interventions
change behavior? Does having a chief diversity officer increase faculty
diversity? What does, in fact, seem to work?
Statistical tools: Design and analysis of studies; experimental design: selecting measurements
of outcomes, and the importance of randomized studies; meta-analytic
methods for combining information
- Policing and crime: When do differences in traffic stops, arrests, or police-caused deaths
indicate discrimination? How do we know how many traffic stops, arrests and
police-caused deaths there are to begin with? Does "profiling" or "statistical
discrimination" make sense for the police, whether or not it's socially
desirable? How can the same group be simultaneously
over- and under- policed?
Statistical tools: test for differences in proportions; signal
detection theory; adjusting for systematically missing data; self-reinforcing equilibria
- Self-organizing inequalities and "structural" or "systematic"
inequalities: Models of how inequalities can perpetuate themselves
even when nobody is biased. Models of how inequalities can appear
even when nobody is biased. The Schelling model of spatial segregation as a
"paradigm". How relevant are Schelling-type models to actual, present-day
inequalities?
Statistical tools: Agent-based models; models of social
learning and game theory.
- Statistics and its history: The development of statistics
in the 19th and early 20th century was intimately tied to the eugenics
movement, which was deeply racist and even more deeply classist (but also
often anti-sexist). The last part of the course will cover this history, and
explain how many of the intellectual tools we have gone over to document, and
perhaps to help combat, inequality and discrimination were invented by people
who wanted to use them for quite different purposes. The twin learning
objectives for this section are for students to grasp something of this
history, and to grasp why the "genetic fallacy", of judging ideas by where
they come from (their "genesis") is, indeed, foolish and wrong.
Statistical tools: N/A.
- How do we know what we do about inequalities?
Social data-collection systems and institutions. Measurement again, and
measurement as a social process. Difficulties in reducing social reality to
data; the case of race in the US census as an example. What systematic data
collection leaves out.
Evaluation
There will be one problem set per week; each of these homeworks will involve
some combination of (very basic) statistical theory, (possibly less basic)
calculations using the theory we've gone over, and analysis of real data sets
using the methods discussed in class. There will also be readings for each
class session, and a short-answer quiz after each session will combine
questions based on lecture content with questions based on the readings.
There will be no exams.
My usual policy is to drop a certain number of homeworks, and a certain
number of lecture/reading questions, no questions asked. The number of
automatic drops isn't something I'll commit to here and now (similarly, I won't
make any promises here about the relative weight of homework
vs. lecture-related questions).
Textbook, Lecture Notes
There is, unfortunately, no one textbook which covers the material we'll go
over at the required level. You will, instead, get very detailed lecture notes
after each lecture. There will also be a lot of readings from various books
and articles. (I will not agree with every reading I assign.)
Teaching: Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination;
Corrupting the Young;
Enigmas of Chance;
Commit a Social Science
Posted at June 21, 2022 13:45 | permanent link
May 31, 2022
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, May 2022
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on the archaeology of the Southwest, the pre-history of diversity training, or
trends in American economic inequality.
- Walter Jon Williams, Metropolitan and City on Fire
- These are two novels Williams wrote in the '90s about intrigue and
machinations in a world-spanning city, where the geomantic forces generated by
covering the planet in concrete, metal and plastic are carefully harvested and
metered, and our heroine longs to smash it all. They're some of the best stuff Williams has ever done,
which is saying a lot. Strictly speaking, they are fantasy, even "urban
fantasy", but very much in the manner of well-thought-through science fiction.
- As a character, Aiah has something in common with
Williams's Caroline
Sula and even (when it comes to learning to lie and
manipulate) Dagmar
Shaw, but she is her own, vivid and plausible, person.
- I last read these in 1999; I re-read them because
Williams recently
said that the long, long delayed third volume will finally happen. I am very eager. §
- John Kantner, Ancient Puebloan Southwest
- This is a well-written, semi-popular account of the archaeology of the
American Southwest, focusing on the period from the rise of Chaco Canyon to the
early years of Spanish rule. The writing is mostly smooth and expository
(*), and I learned a lot of
fascinating-to-me details from it. Kantner does do the usual archaeologist
thing of making very confident-sounding assertions about social organization
which he must know are far more conjectural than he makes them
sound. (**) But this is par
for the archaeological course. If you have a non-expert interest in the
subject, and can handle the lack of a definite article in the title, this is a
worthwhile book. I would read a second edition. §
- *: Though inconsistently so;
he explains "inference", but not "dendrochronology" or "palynological". --- On
a different plane, Kantner persistently writes "inequity" (an evaluative,
qualitative judgment) when he should write "inequality" (a descriptive and
quantitative comparison). Unless, that is, he regards every
inequality as inequitable, which is his right but not something to be just
assumed... ^
- **: To paraphrase, he
does things like assert that a division of such-and-such a community into
"moieties" can be inferred from the construction of a wall dividing a building
in two. Or, again, there are assertions that a one community couldn't
have politically dominated another because the latter kept making pots
in its old way. This sort of thing just shows a failure of imagination. (I
used to part-own a house that had been built for one large family around 1900,
and later split with a wall down the middle. While Pittsburgh has some
peculiarities it does not divide duplex residents into two endogamous groups,
so that I am expected to regard all North-Halfers as some kind of kin.) It
also, I think, betrays a failure to check this sort of inference against cases
where much more is known about society and politics from written
records. ^
- Elisabeth
Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity
Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution
(2001)
- This is, obviously (?), a work of cultural criticism, but it's done with
the tools of a serious historian who is trying to excavate where
things like diversity training came from, and why they both emerged when and
where they did, and how they survived that initial context. To oversimplify
and exaggerate: the late 1960s/early 1970s were a weird time, when plenty of
people on the fringes of psychology felt entitled to make stuff up because it
sounded good and vibed with their politics, with very little reality-testing.
Add the "triumph of the therapeutic" and of self-esteem, plus corporate
concerns to ward off liability by claiming to do something (however
ineffective), plus the continuing attraction of racialist thinking under
another guise (*), and we get a mess.
- There are, equally obviously, some political and ethical commitments
animating this book, but they are transparent, and honestly ones I have a lot
of sympathy for, even if I suspect she and I would often disagree on concrete
policies. I would pay very good money to read Lasch-Quinn writing seriously
about 2020; unfortunately this is not the kind of work which can be done that
quickly, and anyway she seems to have moved on to other topics. §
- *: Lasch-Quinn does not use phrases like
"reinscribing an essentialized racial binary", but they would actually fit her
argument.
- Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
- A collection of journalistic essays. The formula each time is Kolbert
visiting some place --- an electrified anti-invasive fish barrier on the
reverse-flowing Chicago river, the mouth of the Mississippi, a cave in the
Nevada desert where a unique native fish species is being quixotically
maintained, the Great Barrier Reef, a carbon-sequestration site in Iceland ---
where she can see (as the saying went) "the Earth as transformed by
human action", and talk to the workers. Often enough, the reason these efforts
are necessary are dealing with side-effects of earlier efforts at
control, which Kolbert presents as ironic but unavoidable; we've gone too far
down this path to turn back now. (Though she doesn't say
so, we'd gone too far when
Gilgamesh was king in Uruk.) Stewart Brand is quoted, aptly; so is John
McPhee's classic The Control of Nature.
- Speaking of McPhee: this is one of the most New Yorker-y books
I've ever read. It has all the characteristic virtues: easy prose, lively (but
not startling) intelligence, an eye for detail expressed through original (but
not outlandish) metaphors, judiciously-chosen historical anecedotes,
sympathetic if amused pen-portraits of interesting characters; you come away
feeling like you've understood something, without having been taxed. I realize
my description may sound a bit barbed, because it is. On the one
hand, I want to acknowledge how hard such writing is to pull off ---
being scholarly and exhaustive actually takes much less effort and skill ---
and record my admiration, indeed my envy. But on the other hand, the reader
puts the book down feeling like they've understood something, without
necessarily having done so. On the topics where I know enough to think I
could judge (mostly having to do with climatology), Kolbert seems accurate,
which increases my confidence in the rest of her work. But somehow I was more
conscious of the art, and more suspicious of its effects, than I normally
am.
- This was the first book by Kolbert I've read; I will certainly read more.
§
- Gino C. Segrè and John D. Stack, Unearthing Fermi's Geophysics
- This is a perfectly nice little introduction to geophysics, suitable for
third- or fourth- year physics majors. (That is, you are expected to have
forgotten undergraduate classical mechanics, thermo, and E& M; fluid
and continuum mechanics are introduced here as needed.) The hook
here is that this is based on the notes for such a course which Fermi taught,
and which Segrè discovered in the archives. Of course it has been
vastly fleshed out (the authors reproduce selected pages from Fermi's notes,
and "telegraphic" hardly does it justice), and there are a few places where
it's been brought up to date, primarily by comparing Fermi's numerical figures
with modern measurements. There is thus no discussion of continental drift or
of climate change, to name just two important topics. Still, I
enjoyed the gimmick, and it's a nice introduction to interesting and important
topics in physics. I would imagine that it would suffer, in terms of classroom
use or even serious self-study, from lacking exercises. (It would be very
interesting to see Fermi's idea of good homework problems!) §
- Rebecca M. Blank, Changing Inequality
- This is essentially a huge exercise in comparing the American Community
Survey's economic statistics in 1979 with those in 2007. The headline is that
households at (almost) every level had substantially higher incomes in 2007
than in 1979, even after making all kinds of allowances for changes in the cost
of living (*). There was also vastly more inequality, particularly but
not only towards the top.
- The thing which makes this book more interesting than that sounds is the
way Blank does very careful comparisons --- she calls them "simulations" ---
why try to tease out the factors which have contributed to these shifts
(**). Thus she tries to work out how
much of the changes in typical incomes and in measures of inequality can be
explained by changes in family structure, by changes in labor-force
participation, by changes in income by education level, etc., leaving other
factors at their 1979 values. Thus she can give answers to questions like "How
much richer-but-unequal would we be just from our being more educated,
if salaries and marriage patterns still looks like 1979?" Or, rather, she can
give reasonable but still conjectural answers to such questions; any sort of
counterfactual assertion rests on untestable hypotheses.
- To summarize, much of the increase in typical household incomes comes from
increased female labor-force participation. Some of the increase
inequality is related; it comes from the increased tendency of highly educated
men to be married to highly educated women who also work in well-paid jobs.
But lots of the increasing inequality, which takes the form of higher
household incomes increasing much faster than those at the median (or
even the 80th percentile...) can't be explained in these ways. These findings
in turn let Blank say some sensible things about how different policies
might reduce inequality. (One finding, at first startling, is that bringing
every poor household up to the poverty line would actually do very little
to reduce inequality by any of the usual metrics.)
- This isn't a scintillating read, but it's serious, sober and (as we used to
say) reality-based. I read it in part as fodder for my inequality class, and I
am seriously considering having The Kids do (simplified) versions of Blank's
comparisons. If you have a serious concern with economic inequality, or social
change in America since the 1970s, this is very worth reading. §
- *: One important limitation to this conclusion, which Blank duly acknowledges, comes with this
data. Because the ACS doesn't track households from one year to another, it
doesn't let us saying anything about the stability or security of income. In
particular, it doesn't let us say whether a household at the median in 1979
could be more confident of staying at the median than their
counterparts in 2007. There
is evidence that incomes fluctuate
more now than they used to, which, if you believe standard economic theory,
would reduce the value of any given level of income. ^
- **: Mathematically,
I think what she does amounts to a piece-wise constant approximation
of
Handcock and
Morris's "relative distribution" method, which was
also invented for studying shifts in
inequality. But I haven't ground through the algebra and there might be
subtle differences. ^
- A. M. Stuart, Singapore Sapphire, Revenge in Rubies, Evil in Emerald
- Mind-candy historical mysteries, set in Singapore, mostly among
just-barely-genteel Britishers, in the years immediately before World War I.
Enjoyable period color, though family tradition requires me to make dark aside
about British imperialism as I read. §
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Scientifiction and Inequality;
The Dismal Science;
Writing for Antiquity;
Commit a Social Science;
The Progressive Forces;
Teaching: Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination;
Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime;
Tales of Our Ancestors;
Physics;
The Great Transformation;
Biology
Posted at May 31, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
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