How to make America more like Scandinavia . . .

. . . without killing economic growth.

Also, how to fund a nonfiction book.

Both involve from-the-bottom-up processes.

Is Google making us stupid or smart?

Neither.

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)

Ray Bradbury has died at age 91.

Here's an interview with him (undated, but uploaded in 2008).

A thing that begins when you're 3 and 6 and 10 and 12 winds up in your fictions when you're in your 30s. . . .

The reason why my books are popular: because they know I'm a lover. . . .

Love what you do, and do what you love. Don't listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. . . .

I'm going to have a t-shirt made — it says: "Stand at the top of the cliff, and jump off, and build your wings on the way down."

We are all the sons and the daughters of time. So I thank the universe for making life on earth and allowing me to come alive here.

"The 25 Most Beautiful College Libraries in the World"

Here they are.

And #18 has brought back a flood of memories.

The problem with books, according to Sam Harris

First of all: they're too long. Harris explains:

I love physical books as much as anyone. And when I really want to get a book into my brain, I now purchase both the hardcover and electronic editions. From the point of view of the publishing industry, I am the perfect customer. This also makes me a very important canary in the coal mine—and I’m here to report that I’ve begun to feel woozy. For instance, I’ve started to think that most books are too long, and I now hesitate before buying the next big one. When shopping for books, I’ve suddenly become acutely sensitive to the opportunity costs of reading any one of them. If your book is 600-pages-long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?

The honest answer to this last question should disappoint everyone: Publishers can’t charge enough money for 60-page books to survive; thus, writers can’t make a living by writing them. But readers are beginning to feel that this shouldn’t be their problem. Worse, many readers believe that they can just jump on YouTube and watch the author speak at a conference, or skim his blog, and they will have absorbed most of what he has to say on a given subject. In some cases this is true and suggests an enduring problem for the business of publishing. In other cases it clearly isn’t true and suggests an enduring problem for our intellectual life. . . .

[W]riters and public intellectuals must find a way to get paid for what they do—and the opportunities to do this are changing quickly. My current solution is to write longer books for a traditional press and publish short ebooks myself on Amazon. If anyone has any better ideas, please publish them somewhere—perhaps on a blog—and then send me a link. And I hope you get paid.

Did Harris find my blog post called "6 ways blogs are better than books," specifically #1 and #6, and steal my idea (which I, of course, took from other people)? Probably not. Most readers have had the same realization. The question is who has the courage to publicly admit it, and act on it.

I'm currently reading a book that has done both: Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. It was originally released exclusively as an eBook, and was later released as a dead-tree book. One of the blurbs is by Matthew Yglesias, calling it "a great innovation in current affairs publishing — much shorter and cheaper than a conventional book in a way that actually leaves you wanting to read more once you finish it."

In the book's introduction, Cowen makes an odd argument for his decision to release it in exclusively digital form:

I meant for [the ebook version] to reflect an argument from the book itself: The contemporary world has plenty of innovations, but most of them do not much benefit the average household. (2)

So, publishing it as a digital book only (until it became so successful that the dead-tree version was a no-brainer) made sense because it didn't help many people! OK. That argument is even more innovative than the book's short length.

But then Cowen realized that eschewing paper was a problem. He writes:

Some readers . . . were frustrated with the Digital Rights Management systems embedded in nearly all published electronic content. These systems mean that you can't pass around an eBook like a paper book. Libraries don't necessarily own eBooks forever; it's possible for the publisher to flip the switch and literally take them back — debate on this topic is raging. Paper books are easier to give as gifts and easier (sometimes) to use in the classroom. On top of all that, Amazon.com, B&N.com [Don't try typing that into your browser. He meant bn.com. — JAC], the iBookstore, and related services do not yet reach into every corner of the globe. Paper books can get to remote places a little more reliably. Personally I like reading books on trips and dropping them somewhere creative, in the hope they will be picked up by a surprised and delighted future reader. (2-3)

I'm convinced by those and other reasons to keep paper books around for good. So I hope Sam Harris is wrong to say that "[t]he future of the written word is (mostly or entirely) digital." I see little reason why authors and publishers can't heed Harris's advice to make books shorter while still publishing paper books. Harris says readers won't be willing to pay for a 60-page book. Well, I paid for Cowen's book, which is 109 pages. It's just 89 pages without the endnotes and index. I think Harris is underestimating people's willingness to buy a reasonably priced, well-supported nonfiction book that gets to the point in 100 pages, as opposed to a 300- or 400-page book that might be even more rigorously supported but also includes more repetition — and will be much less likely to be read in its entirety. As my mom, Ann Althouse, more succinctly put it in her message to writers (particularly one writer who scolded her for not reading every word of her book):

You pad. I skim.

IN THE COMMENTS: My dad, Richard Lawrence Cohen, says:

I don't follow Harris' argument about pricing. Long books are the pricing problem, because they cost much more to print and readers are reluctant to pay an equivalent percent extra to make up for it; thus the tendency of long books to have small, light print and thin paper. Meanwhile, if a book is only 100 pages, you can still charge almost as much as for a 150-page book and save a lot of the printing costs. The relatively higher price on the short book creates perceived value in the reader's mind, justifying the expense. We're all accustomed to paying $15 for a paperback anyway, and page-counting isn't a top priority; the page range consumers accept at that price is pretty wide. It's a mistake to assume that the reader is glad to have more pages for the money; the extra pages are a chore. It's a welcome relief to be able to get the message fast.

The inventor of the eBook and founder of Project Gutenberg, Michael S. Hart, dies at 64.

Project Gutenberg reports (via):

Hart was best known for his 1971 invention of electronic books, or eBooks. He founded Project Gutenberg, which is recognized as one of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects. He often told this story of how he had the idea for eBooks. He had been granted access to significant computing power at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On July 4 1971, after being inspired by a free printed copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he decided to type the text into a computer, and to transmit it to other users on the computer network. From this beginning, the digitization and distribution of literature was to be Hart's life's work, spanning over 40 years.

Hart was an ardent technologist and futurist. A lifetime tinkerer, he acquired hands-on expertise with the technologies of the day: radio, hi-fi stereo, video equipment, and of course computers. He constantly looked into the future, to anticipate technological advances. One of his favorite speculations was that someday, everyone would be able to have their own copy of the Project Gutenberg collection or whatever subset desired. This vision came true, thanks to the advent of large inexpensive computer disk drives, and to the ubiquity of portable mobile devices, such as cell phones.

Hart also predicted the enhancement of automatic translation, which would provide all of the world's literature in over a hundred languages. While this goal has not yet been reached, by the time of his death Project Gutenberg hosted eBooks in 60 different languages, and was frequently highlighted as one of the best Internet-based resources.

A lifetime intellectual, Hart was inspired by his parents, both professors at the University of Illinois, to seek truth and to question authority. One of his favorite recent quotes, credited to George Bernard Shaw, is characteristic of his approach to life:

"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people." . . .

The invention of eBooks was not simply a technological innovation or precursor to the modern information environment. A more correct understanding is that eBooks are an efficient and effective way of unlimited free distribution of literature. Access to eBooks can thus provide opportunity for increased literacy. Literacy, and the ideas contained in literature, creates opportunity.

In July 2011, Michael wrote these words, which summarize his goals and his lasting legacy: “One thing about eBooks that most people haven't thought much is that eBooks are the very first thing that we're all able to have as much as we want other than air. Think about that for a moment and you realize we are in the right job." He had this advice for those seeking to make literature available to all people, especially children:

"Learning is its own reward. Nothing I can say is better than that."

Lorrie Moore on language for sale

There's a whole body of First Amendment law on "commercial speech." This is a weird grey area: the First Amendment isn't irrelevant, but it doesn't confer the full protections you think of when you hear the phrase "freedom of speech." That's why the law can prohibit false advertising and require companies to say certain things, e.g. to put nutrition labels on food.

But isn't "commercial speech" vs. "noncommercial speech" a false dichotomy? Isn't most speech commercial?

My mom, Ann Althouse, embeds a short video clip of Lorrie Moore (who, as another full disclosure, is a family friend) saying:

It's important to get language that isn't commercially mediated, and increasingly, we don't have that. . . .

I sometimes think: is reading a book itself a value? . . . It doesn't matter what book, as long as you're reading a book? And I go either way on that. . . . It's not valuable because it's a book. It would be better to spend time watching a good movie. . . .

Most language that we encounter is trying to sell us something. And that's really unfortunate, and it degrades the language, and it degrades encounters with language.

I agree with all that.

At one point, she starts to say that fiction writers are "presumably" an exception — but she immediately catches herself and points out that they're also working for money.




Once the 2-minute segment is over, the embedded video switches to a black background with the word "PREMIUM" in a gold rectangle. The screen urges us:

Get full access to this premium program: http://FORA.tv/premium

If you click on that link, you'll see a list of "PREMIUM EVENTS." To the right, there's an explanation in fine print:

FORA.tv Premium Events offer pay-per-view programming from the world's top conferences, universities, and public forums. Now, you can enjoy many of the benefits of these exclusive gatherings without the costs and hassles of travel, and at a fraction of the ticket price. We offer flexible access plans to suit your interests including annual and monthly subscriptions, and full event and single program passes. . . . We invite you to watch Previews of our premium programming to take in a big idea and sample the panel, presentation, or debate.

So, when Lorrie Moore said, "Most language we encounter is trying to sell us something," those words were part of a teaser for a website that's trying to sell us more words (including more of her own words). On that same webpage is a list of titles in gold type (with the color gold signaling, "This is worth spending money on").

One of the more attention-getting titles is "Hollywood, War Crimes and the Search for Love," which is accompanied by a photo of a blond-haired woman wearing sunglasses, a revealing shirt, a jeans skirt, hot-pink stockings, and high heels that are mostly blue but have pink heels to match the stockings. She's writing on a pad of paper while lying on her stomach, legs crossed, in classic lying-on-the-bed-writing-in-a-diary pose. It isn't immediately apparent what any of that has to do with war crimes, but that doesn't matter because the image got us to stop and look.

Each of these visual elements was meticulously selected in order to persuade people (male and female) to spend money in exchange for language.

Speech is always going to be commodified — we're never going to solve that problem. As consumers/readers, the best we can do is to keep this in mind: when you're reading a text that seems strikingly authoritative or persuasive, remember that the words are so powerful because the person who wrote them was trying to make a living. If we're skeptical of the statements we see on food packages in the supermarket, we should be just as skeptical of statements we read in a book. It's all "commercial."

Why it's a good thing if people are losing interest in reading books

"If books are more boring than before, it is because one sees the new ideas more quickly on the web." — Tyler Cowen

Books that haven't influenced me the most

Now that I've taken stock of which books have most influenced me, I also want to look at what kinds of books haven't been as influential.

Most people would find the most striking omission from my list to be fiction. But I've gotten used to this. Fiction just doesn't reach me the way nonfiction does. Even when nonfiction tries to be engaging by using personal narratives, I often lose patience with the details and just want the writer to get to the abstract point.

What stands out most to me is the lack of history books, even though I own a lot of them. I've enjoyed reading these books and learning about history. In retrospect, though, I'm not sure they've fundamentally changed my views. I even wonder if anyone really "learns lessons" from history, or if we just interpret everything to fit our preconception of the world.

There's also nothing in my list about a huge interest of mine, music (except for parts of Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow). I have read illuminating books about music, but the reading process is subordinate to the everyday listening process. On the other hand, I can't say that the books in my list are subordinate to the everyday thinking process; it's often the opposite.

Challenging the premise of "the books that have influenced me the most" meme

Ezra Klein challenges the premise of the "books that influenced me" blog meme (which I picked up today), saying books haven't influenced him much:

I've written this sort of thing before. The mainstays on my list are John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," Tom Geoghegan's "Which Side Are You On?," Abraham Joshua Heschel's "Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity," Richard Ben Cramer's "What It Takes" and maybe a handful of others.

But I always feel like a fraud.

These books meant a lot to me, but they were much less influential in my thinking -- particularly in my current thinking -- than a variety of texts that carry consider less physical heft. Years spent reading the Washington Monthly, American Prospect and New Republic transformed me from someone interested in politics into someone interested in policy. So, too, did bloggers like, well, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum and Tyler Cowen. In fact, Cowen, Brad DeLong, Mark Thoma and a variety of other economics bloggers also get credit for familiarizing me with a type of basic economic analysis that's consistently present in my approach to new issues.

Much of my emphasis on the institutions of American government and the processes by which they work (or don't) came from my relationship with Mark Schmitt, first through his blog and then through his editorship at the American Prospect. . . .

So much as I love my favorite books, the biggest influences in my thinking have been the continuous intellectual relationships I've had with blogs, periodicals and other people.

One of the bloggers Klein cites as an influence, Matthew Yglesias, responds:

[I]f I look back at my list of books that influenced my thinking . . . these aren’t books that influenced my thinking “on the issues” the way blog posts and magazine articles do nearly so much as they’re books that influenced my thinking about my thinking. Like: What’s important? What’s it worth doing in life? What questions are a waste of time? What kinds of mistakes have I been making?

I feel like this is going to be the kind of thing books are still important for, simply because they’re more intense experiences. A solo encounter with a major work is a big deal in a way that sporadic engagement with blogs isn’t. Which is just to say that I hope and think digital media will mostly crowd out relatively low-value book-reading experiences and still leave room for some of the big deal reads.

Well, I agree with Yglesias. Klein seems to want to extend his reach as little as possible. Klein, Yglesias, Schmitt, and Drum share similar vocations (journalist-bloggers), and the same time period (right now), and the same country, and mostly similar worldviews (most of them are liberals; Cowen is a moderate libertarian). It may be comforting to draw your influence from this close by, and it hasn't stopped Klein from writing a top-notch blog. But his attitude seems cramped and a bit sad.

It's not that I'm surprised that Klein would have been more influenced by blogs and magazines than by books in writing his Washington Post blog about economic policy. But the question isn't "books that influenced my blog"; it's "books that influenced me." It's important to not just be your blog or your job but to be a complete person. That's hard to do if you're not willing to immerse yourself in worldviews that are far removed from your own.

The 12 books that have influenced me the most

Tyler Cowen started this meme, in response to "a loyal reader" who told him:

I'd like to see you list the top 10 books which have influenced your view of the world.

Will Wilkinson, Matthew Yglesias, and many others have given their lists. There's no required number of books, but most people seem to be giving around 10.

Some of the recurring authors are Plato, Nietszche, John Stuart Mill, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Hannah Arendt, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Michael Walzer, Thomas Kuhn, Derek Parfit, Paul Johnson, and Thomas Sowell. This is all slanted by the fact that the meme was started by a libertarian economist, so the people who pick up his meme are going to be disproportionately libertarian.

Here's my list:

1. The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel. (Previously blogged by me and also my dad.) He looks at many of the classic philosophical problems (knowledge, free will, the meaning of life, etc.) in order to illuminate the frustrating interplay between the objective and the subjective, both of which are inescapably real. 

2. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume.
3. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. Kant's book is famously badly written, while Hume's book is pretty clearly written for the 18th century. Both of them have to be confronted by anyone trying to understand the limits of understanding. They didn't create enduring theoretical frameworks, but they still made progress by waking us up from our "dogmatic slumbers" (as Kant said Hume had done to him).

4. Upheavals of Thought by Martha Nussbaum. Emotions aren't the opposite of reason — they contain intelligent thoughts and allow us to rationally interact with the outside world.

5. What's It All About? by Julian Baggini. An argument that the standard solutions to the meaning of life don't work.

6. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (Blogged.) How to structure all the activities in your life to maximize happiness.

7. The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell. (Blogged.) You could file this under philosophy or self-help.

8. The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. (Blogged.) I'm sure there are more recent books on evolutionary psychology that are better supported (at least because more research has been done since 1994), and Wright himself admits that the theory has its shortcomings. But this book offers a compelling explanation of human behavior.

9. Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel. He applies his dryly, lucidly analytical style to the kinds of questions that continental philosophy more often approaches with overwrought extravagance and obscurantism. The famous "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is one of many highlights; others include "Death" (blogged), "The Absurd" (blogged), "Sexual Perversion," and "The Fragmentation of Value."

10. The Mysterious Flame by Colin McGinn. Why we haven't, and aren't going to, solve the mind-body problem.

11. Rationality in Action by John Searle. A refreshing look at the problem of free will. (His shorter follow-up, Freedom & Neurobiology, deals with similar themes but also extends his analysis into political philosophy.)

12. Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. As the back cover says, he makes the case for a revolution in our concern for animals by reasoning from beliefs most people already hold. This is the one book about which I can say it has affected my life every single day for the past 20 years.

Looking over the list, I seem to have been most interested in thinking about thought and its place in our lives, with more emphasis on the inadequacy than the power of rational thought. This emphasis is rather awkward since any such analysis is itself an attempt to think rationally. The View from Nowhere captures this awkwardness explicitly.

Feel free to post a comment either listing the books that have influenced you the most, linking to your blog post with your list, or linking to other people's lists that you've found especially interesting.

Should children be medicated to deal with their psychological issues?

In this book review that's probably a more worthwhile read than the book, Alison Gopnik writes:

Within the past few years more and more children have been given powerful brain-altering drugs to deal with a wide range of problems. . . .

You can sympathize with the impulse of parents to do something, anything at all, to help their children. But that doesn't alter the fact that the scientific evidence just isn't clear about what to do. On balance, though, the evidence suggests that we should be conservative about prescribing drugs to children, and much more conservative than we actually are. Even the scientists who advocate some use of drugs acknowledge that they are overprescribed and badly managed. Brains are complex enough, children's developing brains are even more complex, and determining the long-term effects of drugs that alter those brains is especially difficult. Children are different from adults, often in radical ways, and many childhood problems resolve just as part of development.

On top of that, each generation of doctors discovers that the last generation was disastrously misguided in its medical interventions, from lobotomies to estrogen replacement, at the same time that they assure the patients that this time is different.

I'm also glad to see that the review highlights the importance of compatible "levels of description":

[Judith] Warner's book [We've Got Issues] also reflects a common confusion in popular writing about psychology. She writes as if there are just two kinds of explanations for human behavior. Either the everyday narratives are right—so that children are unhappy because their parents don't care about them, or they fail at school because they are lazy. Or else the right answer is that the children's problems are the result of "something in their brains." Warner's logic seems to be that since the parents do care about their kids, the problem must be in the children's brains and therefore drugs will fix it.

But everything about human beings, cultural or individual, innate or learned, is in our brains. Loss and humiliation change our serotonin levels, education transforms our brain connections, social support affects our cortisol. Neurological and psychological and social processes are inextricable. The work of psychological science is to identify causes at many levels of description—social, cultural, individual, and neurological.

There was a very insightful blog post (on Psychology Today's website) that makes a similar point about evolutionary psychology: "Is it evolutionary, or is it . . . ?" (That post speaks of "levels of causation," which is the same thing as the "levels of description" in the above block quote.) I've also blogged this concept before: "Can you give a neurological or evolutionary explanation of love without debunking the whole idea of love?"

By the way, that book review has several points that could be added to my list of ways blogs are better than books. The bias in favor of conclusions that come from riveting stories is huge.

6 ways blogs are better than nonfiction books

I'm glad someone (Henry Farrell) has finally put into words what's been bothering me for years about nonfiction books (via):

[1.] I would estimate that about 80% of the non-academic non-fiction books that I do not find a complete waste of time ... are at least twice as long as they should be. They make an interesting point, and then they make it again, and again, padding it out with some quasi-relevant examples, and tacking on a conclusion about What It All Means which the author clearly doesn’t believe herself. The length of the average book reflects the economics of the print trade and educated guesses as to what book-buyers will actually pay for, much more than it does the actual intellectual content of the book itself.

A major defect of nonfiction books is that they're not blogs. (I'm obviously biased in making this statement because I'm not a book author but I am a blogger. On the other hand, I have good reasons for choosing to blog but not to write a book.) Ezra Klein points out one fairly obvious advantage blogs have over books:

[2.] It's possible to follow an issue in real time. People who really wanted to understand the health-care reform conversation were better off reading Jon Cohn's blog than any particular book or magazine. Did those people spend more time reading Jon and less time reading books? Probably. But it was time well spent.

Penelope Trunk's advice to people who want to write a book includes a couple further points, which complement Klein's:

People ask me all the time how they can get a book deal. ... But really, I'm telling you, you probably don't need to write a book. Every time I ask someone why they want to write a book, they have a terrible answer. ...

People who have a lot of ideas need a blog, not a book.

[3.] A blog is more immediate, so you’ll get better feedback. And getting feedback as you go is much more intellectually rigorous than printing a final compendium of your ideas and getting feedback from the public only when it's too late to change anything.

[4.] Many people think they have a ton of ideas and they are brimming with book possibilities when in fact, most of us have very few new ideas. If you have so many ideas, prove it to the world and start blogging. There is nothing like a blog to help you realize you have nothing new to say.

To rephrase point 4, a blog is an efficient and flexible test of the richness of a writer's ideas. A book also tests the richness of a writer's ideas, of course, but without the same efficiency and flexibility. A blogger has immense freedom to put out a mishmash of ideas that don't cohere to form a beautifully unified whole but nevertheless contain valuable insights. The author of a nonfiction book, in contrast, has to devote so much time to supporting a single thesis in the same time a blogger could have disseminated 10 (20? 50?) ideas on a variety of loosely related or even unrelated topics.

This tradeoff for the book author may be worth it if the result is the rare nonfiction book that thoroughly supports a ground-breaking thesis and is written lucidly enough to engage the minds of a general audience. (Flow, Stumbling on Happiness, The Moral Animal, In Defense of Food.)

[5.] But even this idealized scenario has another downside: The pressure on a nonfiction-book author to support a single, clear thesis means that the author has a stubborn bias in how they view the world. The author shines a spotlight on the facts that support the thesis, meanwhile sweeping inconvenient facts under the rug. Even the best nonfiction books suffer from this bias. Bloggers are biased too -- no one is objective -- but a blogger is likely to be far less invested in any particular thesis.

Of course, some people who have nothing new to say are going to disregard Penelope Trunk's advice and write nonfiction books anyway. And then what happens? My mom's answer to this question underscores point #1:

[6.] I just paid $25+ for a 300+-page book that was an expansion of an article from The Atlantic. I did that for a Bloggingheads diavlog, and — you'll see when it's up — the author scolded me for skimming. Did that open the door for me to scold her for padding? Readers and writers — we all have our tactics and must guard our own interests. You pad. I skim.

Yet, defenders of books will argue that the internet, with its relentless flood of free content that can be accessed as rapidly and vapidly as flipping channels on TV, diminishes the quality of our reading experience and thought processes. Nicholas Carr, in his widely linked article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," said:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with "content," we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

Carr is right about the value of not just reading books but "any other act of contemplation." What Carr glosses over is that, in 2010, blogs as well as books can lead to "contemplation" that helps us "make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas." In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, on any given day, more of the thinking being done in the world is spurred by a blog post than by a nonfiction book.

Anyway, who knows? This doesn't have to be a competition. All of the content we're talking about is just human thought expressed in words. We should accept it in whatever form it happens to present itself to us.

Dreams From My Father, by Tripp Johnston

The memoir about his gradual discovery of his lost father, Levi Johnston, circa 2056.

A proposal to reduce errors in books

This article neatly explains the problem (via Arts & Letters Daily):

How bad is the problem of printed errors? Well, start with newspapers. In 1936 a study of Minneapolis papers found that about half of all articles contained mistakes, and most studies since then have shown very similar results -- not just in Minneapolis. An analysis of such surveys, produced by the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association in 1980, concluded that half of all printed news stories included some sort of error. ...

Book publishers mostly rely on their authors to ensure accuracy; dedicated fact-checking departments now rarely exist except at some magazines. The New Yorker’s checkers are justly renowned for their tenacious scepticism, but even they err sometimes. One reader was annoyed to find himself described as dead, and requested a correction in the next issue. Unfortunately, by the time the correction appeared, he really had died, thus compounding the error. This tale illustrates not only the drawbacks of printed media, but also the role that readers can play in overcoming them -- even if things did not quite work out in this instance.

The author's solution:

Earlier this year Amazon caused an outcry by deleting electronic copies of some books from its customers’ Kindle reading devices when it emerged that the editions were illegal bootlegs. But would anyone object if electronic copies were replaced, by remote control, with corrected versions? Such updating would be far less expensive than printing and distributing a new physical edition, though no publisher has yet announced plans to do any such thing.

The article ends with this sentence, in all seriousness:

An error in the printed version, and in an earlier online version, of this article has been corrected online.

Is Wikipedia the worst offender in ruining the Rorschach test?

The New York Times lets us know that the Wikipedia entry for "Rorschach test" includes reproductions of all the ink blots (which aren't copyrighted). And watch out -- the whole thing is really dramatic and exciting, as the Times makes sure you're aware by telling you how angry everyone is:

[I]n the last few months, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been engulfed in a furious debate involving psychologists who are angry that the 10 original Rorschach plates are reproduced online, along with common responses for each. For them, the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year’s SAT.

They are pitted against the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia’s users, who share the site’s “free culture” ethos, which opposes the suppression of information that it is legal to publish....

“The only winners seem to be those for whom this issue has become personal, and who see this as a game in which victory means having their way,” one Wikipedia poster named Faustian wrote on Monday, adding, “Just don’t pretend you are doing anything other than harming scientific research.”

What had been a simmering dispute over the reproduction of a single plate reached new heights in June when James Heilman, an emergency-room doctor from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, posted images of all 10 plates to the bottom of the article about the test, along with what research had found to be the most popular responses for each.

“I just wanted to raise the bar — whether one should keep a single image on Wikipedia seemed absurd to me, so I put all 10 up,” Dr. Heilman said in an interview. “The debate has exploded from there.”

Wow! OK, I understand the psychologists' point. I do think they should consider seeing a psychiatrist about their explosive anger.

But they shouldn't pretend that this is anything new. I've had a book called Big Secrets, by William Poundstone, since the mid '90s. Now, that book isn't as bad as Wikipedia -- it's worse. See, the Wikipedia page gives extremely sparse descriptions of potential answers, like this:

Plate 2 (two humans)

That's Wikipedia's entire description of Plate 2 (aside from reprinting the plate itself). In contrast, the Big Secrets book says this about the same plate:

It is important to see this blot as two human figures -- usually females or clowns. If you don't, it's seen as a sign that you have trouble relating to people. You may give other responses as well, such as cave entrance (the triangular white space between the two figures) and butterfly (the red "vagina," bottom center).

Should you mention the penis and vagina? Not necessarily.... You may not say that the lower red area looks like a vagina, but psychologists assume that what you do say will show how you feel about women. Nix on "crab"; stick with "butterfly."

The book gives similarly revealing analyses for all the plates.

Oh, but isn't it disingenuous of me to suggest that Big Secrets and Wikipedia are equally important? Come on -- Wikipedia is on the internet, and we all know that's what people read these days, right?

First of all, I wish people would be more explicit about their assumptions. If we're supposed to know that intelligent people are more likely to turn to Wikipedia than books for information, then fine -- let's say that openly. But let's also remember that point when it comes time to debate whether Wikipedia is a second-class or first-class source of knowledge.

But anyway, Big Secrets actually is available on the internet -- on Amazon. You can find it by searching for [rorschach], and it's the first result if you search for [rorschach secrets]. From there, you can read all the salacious details about the ink blots, since Amazon allows you to search the book's full text. So let's see the psychologists channel some of their rage against William Poundstone and Amazon.

Robert Wright's self-contradictory attack on the "new atheists"

Robert Wright, who has a new best-selling book out called The Evolution of God, explains his problem with the "new atheists" -- an unfortunate term that presumably includes Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris (see below for the video version):

I think now it is more acceptable for intellectuals to openly ridicule religion than it was 15 years ago. But anyway, whatever the case . . . this bothers me, and it is part of the motivation for my writing th[e] afterword [in The Evolution of God]. And here's one reason it bothers me. In a way, at the root of that afterword is the belief that . . . being human is hard. . . . I think even harder is trying seriously to lead a moral life and be human.... If somebody is really making an earnest effort to lead a moral life, in the face of all the obstacles ... and really moral by our lights: they're decent, gentle people. They're trying to help. They're not going on jihads and killing people. It makes me just almost nauseous when someone walks up to them and say: "Don't you understand, the basis for this noble struggle is just not as intellectually sophisticated as I am?" OK? That just makes me sick. . . . But John, you do that! [He's talking to John Horgan. -- JAC] You're anti-religion! You want to wipe religion out!

I think that "nauseous" statement is wrong on a few levels.

First, I don't see how Wright could reconcile it with his comments in a diavlog between him and Joel Achenbach (again, scroll down for the video):

Achenbach: Is it not a fact that I asked you a straightforward question, I said -- these are the exact words -- "Bob, is there a God?" And you came up with this sort of Clintonesque answer ... "Depends on what the meaning of 'God' is," or something like that.

Wright: Well, don't you think it kind of does, Joel? I mean, for example, if you defined God as a laptop computer we could both just look around us and go, "Yeah, God exists." So it does depend on the definition.

Achenbach: First of all, it's the entity that's accountable for everything. OK? Has created everything and, ideally, cares about us.

Wright: No, wait, let me read exactly what you said on your little blog -- I mean your blog. You said: "We all know what we mean by God, which is someone who cares about us and has unlimited power." Now, I can tell you right away, that kind of God doesn't exist.

Achenbach: How do you...

Wright: Because if God cared about us and was omnipotent, could do anything, we wouldn't suffer as much as we do, Joel! So that one's easy: no, that kind of God doesn't exist.

Achenbach: OK, I'm glad we cleared that up.

Wright: For crying out loud! But you know, most gods that people have believed in for most of history have not been those kind. They have not been omnipotent. That's, like, this Judeo-Christian, this Abrahamic hang-up.

(Previously blogged here.)


Note that he doesn't just deny the Christian/Jewish/Islamic God's existence, but he also takes a distinctly pugnacious tone (it's "obvious"; the Abrahamic religions have a "hang-up," etc.).

He makes a similar statement in the same diavlog where he makes the above "nauseous" statement:

Horgan: Bob, let me just ask you, right to your virtual face: do you believe in a loving god?

Wright: Do I believe in the sense of having confidence that one exists?

Horgan: Just answer the question, Bob!

Wright: Well, the answer to that is no.*

* I've left in more discussion in the video below. If you watch the video, do you think he accurately characterizes what atheists necessarily believe about morality?





Now, Wright has publicly stated that he was raised devoutly Southern Baptist and rejected the religion. He's said he doesn't strictly follow any religion but is, at most, a "bad Buddhist." If he really believed that Abrahamic religion were essential to being good, presumably he'd still believe in it. But actually, he says that his sense of right and wrong comes from thinking about concrete facts in the world within a utilitarian framework.

Wright doesn't seem that different from Sam Harris, one of the "new atheists" he excoriates. (I don't think Harris is very concerned with disproving the existence of God, hence the scare quotes -- but that's how Wright and others refer to him.)

Both Sam Harris and Bob Wright reject Christianity/Judaism/Islam and prefer a vague Eastern mystical alternative. They both view the world through a modern/secular framework in which science tells a lot about the physical world but doesn't provide everything you need to live a meaningful life. They both recognize that a lot of evil has been done in the name of religion, and that Christian/Jewish/Islamic sacred texts include a contradictory mix of good principles (don't kill, don't steal, give to charity, etc.) and bad ones (advocating or at least condoning violence, slavery, prejudice, etc.).

The main difference I see is that Harris tends to see religion as the cause of things like the Crusades and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Wright thinks that's ridiculous because those conflicts were actually motivated by land disputes. Both of them are being far too confident that they know what would have happened in a world without religion. We'll never know what that counterfactual would have looked like. So I think it's futile to try to point to human behavior -- whether it's war or donating to charity or anything -- and say: "Aha, this was caused by religion! Gee, isn't religion good/bad/___?" Harris and Wright have each decided to adopt a posture -- Harris's being more anti-religion, Wright's being more pro-religion -- and they'll relentlessly interpret the facts to fit this stance.

I also take issue with Wright's language (in the first clip in this post) about how the "new atheists" hold themselves out as being on such a lofty intellectual level that the commoners should defer to their superior intellects. Maybe this is a fair critique of Dawkins's The God Delusion. But I don't think Harris (in The End of Faith) or Hitchens (in God Is Not Great) say anything of the sort. You don't even get that sense from reading between the lines of their books. Those books actually aren't written on an especially high intellectual level. They're easy, fast reads. (I say this as a very slow reader.) The M.O. of both authors is to collect a bunch of facts -- many of which are readily accessible and will be familiar to the average reader -- and make common-sense observations about them.

Another undertone to Wright's "nauseous" comment -- with its vivid language about the new atheists "walking up to" religious people and so on -- is that Harris and Hitchens are simply rude to write their books. (I'm picking on Wright, but many others have made this argument.) Well, the content of most nonfiction books that make persuasive arguments would be rude if you repeated it in the wrong company. If you've noticed that your co-worker has a lot of anti-war bumper stickers on their car, you probably won't tell them about all the great arguments made in the book you just read by Robert Kagan -- but Kagan still writes smart books about foreign policy that are worth reading.

I think it's quite common for people to have blunt discussions about what they like and don't like about this or that religion (or about those who don't subscribe to any religion). You might not choose to talk about it, say, at work, or even with certain close friends or family members, but maybe you'll have the conversations with other close friends or family members. I don't see what's wrong with writing books about these issues that people are going to think about and talk about anyway.

It's also too easy to forget the fact that criticizing religions -- even in a harsh or over-the-top way -- isn't unique to the "new atheists." It's done all the time by people of all religious stripes. The adherents of one religion will regularly criticize those of other religions. People within a religion will even criticize other followers of the same religion. And when there are criticisms being made out there in the world, they're probably going to be reflected in books if they're on enough people's minds. Whether you like it or not, Christians (for instance) are going to write books supporting their Christian views, secular humanists are going to write books supporting their secular humanist views, and so on.

Now, the fact that secular humanists enjoy this kind of freedom of expression along with religious people hasn't been true for most of human history. But we're not in most of human history; we're in 2009. It's inevitable now.

And I'm not too worried about the possibility that Hitchens/Harris/Dawkins might hurt religious people's feelings. People who are easily offended by criticisms of religion aren't likely to read those books anyway. But to many people -- including people who are kept up at night wondering if they're evil for disagreeing with the faith of their family, and including gay people who wonder if they're going to go to Hell, and even including devout believers who simply enjoy reading an honest polemic from the other side -- the books might be quite welcome.

So, go ahead and criticize the "new atheists" for making specific points you disagree with. But don't criticize them just for harshly criticizing religion -- unless you're also going to criticize everyone else who does so. That includes a whole lot of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. And it certainly includes Bob Wright.

What we did on our trip to NYC

Danielle and I went on a little vacation in New York last week, which is why I wasn't blogging. What were the most noteworthy things we did in the city? Here's our list.

1. Live music — classical
a. New York City Opera performing a variety of crowd pleasers on Pier 17 (free)
b. Escher Quartet playing Brahms, Bartok, and Haydn at Barge Music in Brooklyn (free chamber music every Sunday at 3 pm)

2. Live music — jazz
a. Anat Cohen paying homage to Benny Goodman at the Village Vanguard [UPDATE: Here's what it was like.]
b. random free jazz shows around town



(Part of a jazz group playing in Washington Square Park.)

3. Parks
a. The High Line (opened just last month, running along 10th Ave. from about 12th St. to 20th St.)
b. Washington Square Park
c. Socrates Sculpture Park (Astoria, Queens)

4. Cafes with good food
a. Cafe Brama (East Village)
b. Dumbo General Store (Brooklyn) [UPDATE: Both of those cafes have now gone out of business]



(Dumbo General Store.)

5. Bars
a. Lillie's (just opened last year on 17th St.)
b. 5 Ninth (West Village)
c. Lolita (Lower East Side)



(Danielle at Cafe Brama.)

6. Movie: Away We Go at Clearview Cinema in Chelsea [UPDATE: Here's what we thought of it.]

7. Bookstores
a. Strand* (the beloved institution on Broadway at 12th St.)
b. Three Lives (West Village)
c. The Powerhouse Arena in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn (emphasis on photography)
d. Rocketship on Smith St. in Brooklyn (alternative comics)

* I originally wrote "The Strand" but changed it following some discussion in the comments.



(Me at the Dumbo General Store.)

8. Chelsea galleries
a. DJT Gallery
b. Basil Wolverton exhibit at the Gladstone Gallery (more images here) (till Aug. 14) [UPDATE: I respond to the New York Times' response to the exhibit.]

9. Bronx Zoo



(Socrates Sculpture Park. All photos in this post are by me, except the one of me, which is by Danielle Pouliot.)

UPDATE: See the comments over here for more NYC ideas. People are going wild over Wolverton!

How Amazon can turn Kindle into a book charity

My friend Ben Wikler offers this "idea for a charity project":

Charity makes a deal with book publishers and Amazon. If you donate a book to the charity, the charity gives it to a library in a school or a prison -- and the publisher gives you that same book on your Kindle.

I approve!

Kitchen quip

While I'm chopping garlic in the kitchen, my girlfriend, Danielle Pouliot, says:

I should make an all-vegetable children's book and call it Shallot's Web.

Just before I post this, I search and find out there's already a website: Shallots Web.

She says:

Dammit!

But they didn't use an apostrophe!