John Lennon (1940 - 1980)

John Lennon died at age 40, 40 years ago today.

I did this blog post 12 years ago, linking to both of my parents' memories of being in the same city where he died on December 8, 1980.

Both of their posts mention that they named me John when I was born 99 days later. Now I'm almost 40 and I'm living on the Upper West Side, not far from where it happened on West 72nd Street by Central Park. I've walked by there many times, always thinking about it, never quite believing it really happened here.

(Photo from John Lennon's Instagram.)

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.

Resigning by Twitter haiku, or senryu

A CEO resigns with quirky dignity by posting this on Twitter:

Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku.

Financial crisis
Stalled too many customers
CEO no more

That was all one tweet, but I've added the line breaks so it's in proper haiku form. The CEO is Jonathan Schwartz, and he resigned from Sun Microsystems.

I sent this to my dad, and he responded with (1) a correction:

These poems are senryu, not haiku. Same structure, but haiku are about nature and include a seasonal reference, while senryu are about human experience.

. . . and (2) a senryu of his own:

CEO only
of myself, if I resigned
who would take over?

My dad reports from a Rwandan genocide site, "including as few details as I can."

"The memorial rooms stink of death, still."

Clicking on the photograph of "a mother holding her child" goes to the full-size version. Sitting here in the comfort of our rooms, it's impossible to appreciate the full horror contained in that photo.

Oblivious anti-consumerism

My dad spotted these:

Left rear bumper: "Consumption Will Not Fill the Void."

Right rear bumper: "Black Star Pub Brewery"

And that's not the only thing that makes the left bumper sticker ironic. What's that thing attached to the bumper sticker? Oh yes, a car. You would think that such a vocal critic of consumerism would think twice about having one -- or at least about decorating it with unnecessary plastic.

I'm reminded of the New York Times article that reported, with a straight face, on the family (a married couple with kids) that was purporting to give away its possessions. (Coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, both the family and the car with the bumper stickers were in Austin.) I blogged the story and said:

They're also going to give away their current cars ... and get new cars ... and drive all the way from their current home in Texas to Vermont (where they've never been) to start a new life. I'm not sure how driving across the country -- which is to say, using up the world's resources and unnecessarily contributing to carbon emissions, just to give a partial list of the evils of driving -- is part of simplifying your life and returning to nature. Americans are so obsessed with our car culture that using a car doesn't even register as something that goes against the ideals of simplicity, counterculture, anti-consumerism. Thus, the Times write-up never mentions their car situation, and I doubt that the writers had a second thought about this. Or if they did, it was quickly dismissed: "Come on, you have to have a car!"

I don't mean to attack people who feel that they need a car. Maybe they do. But if so, they should think twice about whether to hold themselves out to the world as paragons of monastic counterculturism.

"No one in our family can ever say anything obvious."

A quote by "John Althouse Cohen, age 8, c. 1989."


UPDATE: A commenter responds:

The obvious thing is usually the most important thing.

Well, I thought that went without saying.

3 beautiful discarded things

Look.

Happy Father's Day

(Photo of me and my dad, by my mom.)

"Nothing ... but it has something to do with white powder."

So that's what the kids are doing these days.

My parents are arguing about what the best way to blog is.

"Wild and outrageous" or "finely tuned"?

My favorite quotes from a year of blogging

The following are my favorite quotes by other people that I've blogged in my first year of blogging (April 12, 2008 to April 11, 2009).

For the sake of readability, I've removed all formatting (italics, etc.) and alterations (ellipses and brackets). If you happen to need a more exact quote, just click the attribution link and look for it in the original post.


LIFE

"My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it." -- Daniel Gilbert

"Don't confuse simple, reasonable honesty with radical silliness. There is no reason to try to articulate blurry feelings or over-explain every detail. The point is to be honest instead of internalizing, not to try to extract juicy confessionals out of everyday life." -- Summer Anne Burton


WORK

"Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the skepticism of the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie and forget the cold outer world. The man of science has no need of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his colleagues. The artist, on the contrary, is in the painful situation of having to choose between being despised and being despicable." -- Bertrand Russell

"One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to 'do what you love.' If you tell yourself that your job has to be something you'd do even if you didn't get paid, you'll be looking for a long time. Maybe forever. So why set that standard? The reward for doing a job is contributing to something larger than you are, participating in society, and being valued in the form of money. -- Penelope Trunk


ENVIRONMENT

"You might declare that global warming and energy insecurity, not to mention urban sprawl and pollution, have intensified the sin of indulging one's motoring desires. And I would not argue with that point. You're right. I am a bad man. But over the long term, if you want to develop a new transportation and energy policy, you'd probably want to err on the side of assuming that people won't change much. And it is human nature to like to be empowered." -- Joel Achenbach

"If you're a progressive, if you're driving a Prius, or you're shopping green or you're looking for organic, you should probably be a semi-vegetarian." -- Mark Bittman

"On the one hand, we are told that our overconsumption is polluting and cluttering up the earth with garbage, using up resources and showing insensitivity to all the needy people in the world. On the other hand, we are told that until we start buying more goods and services, the economy will be in the dumps and we will leave many of our fellow citizens jobless, homeless and hungry. Something is wrong with that picture." -- Ina Aronow


THOUGHT

"We have grown terribly -- if somewhat hypocritically -- weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace -- as their predecessors did -- big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth -- however provisional it might be." -- Cristina Nehring

"Is Mount Everest more 'real' than New York? I mean, isn't New York 'real'? I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out! I mean, isn't there just as much reality to be perceived in the cigar store as there is on Mount Everest? You see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think there's nothing that different." -- Wallace Shawn

"Complexity and obscurity have professional value -- they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery." -- John Kenneth Galbraith


DOUBT

"It is an odd fact of evolution that we are the only species on Earth capable of creating science and philosophy. There easily could have been another species with some scientific talent, say that of the average human ten-year-old, but not as much as adult humans have; or one that is better than us at physics but worse at biology; or one that is better than us at everything. If there were such creatures all around us, I think we would be more willing to concede that human scientific intelligence might be limited in certain respects." -- Colin McGinn

“Instead of explaining why this recession (or depression) is just like the others, we should attend to what is new and especially problematic about the current downturn and why it may not respond to policies modeled on avoiding the errors of the past. To speak of a crisis of financial epistemology may sound abstract, but it has had very concrete and disastrous consequences.” -- Jeffrey Z. Muller

"And this is the point in which I think I am superior to men in general, and in which I might perhaps fancy myself wiser than other men -- that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know." -- Socrates


RELIGION

-- "Is life in general more rewarding if you are spiritual, and a real believer? Does someone who truly believes that God is watching my every step, God is taking care of me, whatever happens to me is somehow approved by or helped by God, does that person live a richer, fuller life than someone who thinks: we're on our own here?"
-- "It depends on your specific conception of God, because belief can equally well leave you with this constant sense that you're coming up short and you're being judged and you're not doing quite the perfect thing. You know, I was brought up very religiously, and I never totally lost that sense, you know, that I'm screwing up." -- Joel Achenbach and Robert Wright

"Our general repression of matters disgusting prevents us facing up to a serious health problem. If we are the 'god that shits,' then we are in full flight from ourselves. I even wonder whether religion itself and the whole idea of a god is produced by our self-disgust." -- Colin McGinn

"Every religion I know of has changed its views with respect to concrete controversies over long periods of time. People's views about the morality of homosexuality are likely to undergo some change, even though they're making judgments based on their religious beliefs. Because in fact, religion is an extremely durable, and yet flexible, way of trying to apprehend what's good and what's bad in the world. In fact, its durability comes from its flexibility. Now, speaking from inside a religion, it's hard to talk that way." -- Jack Balkin


SCIENCE

"It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning, rather than any special scientific doctrine, that makes science and religion look like competitors today. Scientism emerged not as the conclusion of scientific argument but as a chosen element in a worldview -- a vision that attracted people by its contrast with what went before -- which is, of course, how people very often do make such decisions, even ones that they afterwards call scientific." -- Mary Midgley

"If a psychological Maxwell devises a general theory of mind, he may make it possible for a psychological Einstein to follow with a theory that the mental and the physical are really the same. But this could happen only at the end of a process which began with the recognition that the mental is something completely different from the physical world as we have come to know it through a certain highly successful form of detached objective understanding. Only if the uniqueness of the mental is recognized will concepts and theories be devised especially for the purpose of understanding it." -- Thomas Nagel

"We're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)" -- Robert Wright


GOVERNMENT

“Something that’s unsustainable, like a dysfunctional relationship, can go on longer than you expect, and then end faster and messier than you think.” -- President Obama's budget director Peter Orszag, as quoted by David Leonhardt

"The confidentiality of the judicial process would not matter greatly to an understanding and evaluation of the legal system if the consequences of judicial behavior could be readily determined. If you can determine the ripeness of a cantaloupe by squeezing or smelling it, you don't have to worry about the produce clerk's mental processes." -- Richard Posner

"And that was an unedited interview with the secretary of state taped earlier this morning from Jordan. We appreciate Secretary Powell's willingness to overrule his press aide's attempt to abruptly cut off our discussion as I began to ask my final question." -- Tim Russert


ANIMALS

"I'm not a vegetarian. Now, don't get me wrong -- I like animals. And I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. But there's no way to treat animals well when you're killing 10 billion of them a year. Kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. Let's get the numbers of animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left." -- Mark Bittman

"If you eat meat, something like that is going on in the background for you too." -- Ann Althouse


GENDER

"Back then, it was better to be a man because before a woman and an animal were considered the same thing. Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men, and are even more powerful." -- Pashe Keqi, as reported by Dan Bilefsky

"No matter how bad things get for boys/men, well, they're men, so they can look after themselves. Women, on the other hand, need a Presidential Council to make sure they're doing all right, even if by many metrics they are outperforming men." -- "Sofa King"

"[quoting this New York Times article:] 'Women's desire is dominated by yearnings of self-love, by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.' A lot of feminist writing would say that the culture has oppressed women by presenting them as the object of male desire. What if that originates in the woman? Well that would shake the foundations of feminism!" -- Ann Althouse

"From the moment of conception on, men are less likely to survive than women. It's not just that men take on greater risks and pursue more hazardous vocations than women. There are poorly understood -- and underappreciated -- vulnerabilities inherent in men's genetic and hormonal makeup." -- Marianne J. Legato


RIGHT and WRONG

"We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters." -- Ed Hickling, as reported by Gene Weingarten

"Those subject to capital punishment are real human beings, with their own backgrounds and narratives. By contrast, those whose lives are or might be saved by virtue of capital punishment are mere 'statistical people.' They are both nameless and faceless, and their deaths are far less likely to be considered in moral deliberations." -- Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule

"Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part." -- Bertrand Russell


ART

"The devaluing of the visual goes along with the theory that there is no such thing as quality, i.e., good versus bad, a theory that inevitably comes to parody itself as a prejudice against the beautiful." -- Richard Lawrence Cohen

David Brooks on moral reasoning vs. moral instincts

David Brooks's latest column claims that we're undergoing a revolution in how we think about morality. The whole column is well worth reading, though I have a lot of disagreements with it.

Here's a basic outline of his argument:

1. Philosophers have traditionally assumed that "moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation: Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it."

2. But "[t]oday, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. . . . Moral judgments . . . are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong."

3. "The question then becomes: What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there’s an increasing appreciation that evolution isn’t just about competition. It’s also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history. We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions."

4. Brooks (who's normally referred to as a conservative) says this new understanding represents "an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning." (In a clever twist ending, Brooks explains how it should even "challenge the very scientists who study morality.")


Here's my response (these numbers do not correspond to the above numbers):

1. The column seems derivative of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink ("rapid intuitive decisions ... snap moral judgments"), and shares one of its main drawbacks. As Gladwell himself concedes, it's problematic to hinge everything on gut feelings. If those, and not deliberative reasoning, are the best guide to truth, then how can you confidently say that racism, sexism, or homophobia are immoral? After all, many people's instincts are bigoted.

Brooks seems to recognize this when he says:

There are times, often the most important moments in our lives, when in fact we do use reason to override moral intuitions.

So he's saying that our emotions and instincts have moral validity except when they don't. That's limitedly helpful.


2. Brooks lists about 10 or 20 different values and, following the fashion among present-day intellectuals, announces with a flourish that they're all rooted in evolution. There's reason -- but also emotions! There's competition -- but also cooperation! Individuals -- community! And to make sure you remember that Brooks is a conservative, he lists "loyalty, respect, traditions, religions."

Well, if you list enough different facets of human behavior and attribute all of them to "evolution," it's almost a foregone conclusion that you can find moral goodness somewhere in evolution.

But Brooks isn't just taking nature as he finds it. Even assuming he's correct in everything he describes as evolutionary, there are also lots of evil behavior that are easy to explain in evolutionary terms (a few examples spring to mind: theft, rape, murder, war). One way or another, he has to sift through the good and bad in order to isolate what he considers good.

How can he do that if he doesn't have some preconception of what's good?

For instance, he says:

The evolutionary approach ... leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself.

Now, in that sentence, he's clearly viewing morality as much more than just a bundle of "aesthetic" reactions. He has a set of fundamental concepts ("individual responsibility," "goodness . . . as an end in itself"), and he's using them to analyze what kind of behavior counts as morally good.

Isn't there a term for that approach? Isn't it called "moral philosophy"? Or "moral reasoning"?

As much as he might like to draw a clear line between his view of morality vs. what "philosophers" do by using "reason," he himself is doing philosophy and relying on reason.


3. His premise that "psychologists" and "cognitive scientists" have corrected our previous view of morality is highly suspect. Even if you have perfect empirical information about how people form moral views, that doesn't necessarily tell you whether the views are right or wrong. But it's hard for me to say much more about this without seeing the specific studies he's thinking of.

[UPDATE: Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings makes the same point and goes into much greater depth than I've done here. Sample: "the research Brooks cites does not show what he seems to think it does, since the question how we make moral judgments on the fly is not, and does not answer, questions about the role of reasoning in morality."]


4. Brooks predictably caricatures the "new atheists" without engaging with any of their actual arguments. As with his general attack on moral philosophy, this critique is painted with such a broad brush that the result is analogous to one of those huge paintings that's just a solid color. We're told they rely too much on "reason" -- but where exactly has their reasoning gone wrong? It's hard to imagine that Brooks has actually read Hitchens's God Is Not Great, which explains how atheists can have the "feelings of awe [and] transcendence" that Brooks describes, or Sam Harris's The End of Faith, which embraces spirituality and acknowledges that a world filled with nothing but "reason" would be a cold and barren place.


UPDATE: More critiques of Brooks's column by John Schwenkler (The American Scene), Will Wilkinson, and PZ Meyers (Pharyngula). Meyers says:

I strongly urge that Mr Brooks try using his cerebral cortex in addition to his brain stem and hypothalamus when writing — that's another of those areas where emotional prejudices need to be supplemented with reason and knowledge.

And here's a cartoon about it! (Via Language Log.)

IN THE COMMENTS: My dad and I try to figure out what was really going on with Brooks's column.

How to tell if you're listening to a smart person

I had never thought of this ad hoc intelligence test -- Stephen Dubner on the Freakonomics blog says:

As a writer, I enjoy listening to people speak and, when they’re in the middle of a particularly interesting sentence, I try to imagine how I’d like to see it finished.

Usually I am disappointed. But with some select people, the payoff is far greater than I could have imagined. They have something to say that’s remarkably insightful or unexpected or even just articulate in a way that takes your breath away.

I could do without the overstated "takes your breath away" rhetoric, but aside from that, it seems like a useful test, though there's an obvious risk of becoming overly judgmental.

Dubner gives 3 examples: President Obama, classical pianist Glenn Gould, and some sports guy who wrote a book about some other sports guy. Click the above link if you're interested in the specific explanations.

Dubner adds:

In each case, the subject spoke with what I can only characterize as total intelligence — a lot of mental horsepower, to be sure, but also nuance, precision, conceptual and practical elements combined in the same sentence, and psychological astuteness.

I guess, therefore, that if I were asked to define what it means to be “smart” in this day and age, those are the characteristics I’d list. I know a lot of super-brainy people who don’t express themselves well; I know a lot of psychologically astute people who haven’t a whiff of organization or precision about them; I know a lot of articulate people who can’t see the big picture. But if I were friends with either Obama, [that sports guy], or Gould, I’d have to say that they were the smartest people I know. (Sadly, I’m not.)

I don't understand why he focuses on "President Obama's first press conference" (the prime-time address in early February where he pitched the economic stimulus plan). I'm fine with Dubner using Obama as an example of a smart person. But as for that specific press conference, I agree with this review — it was unusually long-winded and meandering. ("Obama seemed like he was channeling a particularly loquacious combination of Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and the ghost of Hubert Humphrey. . . . Obama radiated the sense of a leader who has digested too many economic briefings and memorized too many talking points in preparation for his primetime rendezvous with the public.")

It's also weird that he starts out equating intelligence with finishing your sentence with unexpected insight, but he never gives any example of a sentence by any of those 3 people (or anyone else) that ended unexpectedly. So I was disappointed with how he finished his blog post.

As for Dubner's analysis of what makes someone intelligent — "nuance," "precision," "conceptual"/"practical," and "psychologically astute" — I'm not sure. Someone who had all those qualities in their conversation would probably be interesting to listen to. But do they add up to "intelligence"? Maybe they add up to "how to sound intelligent."

UPDATE: My dad has a good intelligence test:

whether a person, if asked to explain himself, is capable of doing so in different, clearer terms than he used the first time.

Unfortunately, it's all too common to see people trying to project intelligence through precisely the opposite approach: persistently explaining things in obfuscatory terms. I keep coming back to this passage from an essay by John Kenneth Galbraith (previously blogged):

Complexity and obscurity have professional value—they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.

What's so bad about dying languages?

This Washington Post article reports on "endangered languages":

[H]alf of the world's almost 7,000 remaining languages may disappear by 2100, experts say.

A language is considered extinct when the last person who learned it as his or her primary tongue dies. Last month, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched an online atlas of endangered languages, labeling more than 2,400 at risk of extinction.

Languages typically die when speakers of a small language group come in contact with a more dominant population. That happened first when hunter-gatherers transitioned to agriculture, then during periods of European colonial expansion, and more recently with global migration and urbanization. The spread of English, Spanish and Russian wiped out many small languages. ...

Extinct languages can be revived, especially when they have been recorded.

"But when you skip a generation, it's hard to pick a language back up again," said Douglas Whalen, president of the Endangered Language Fund, which gives grants to language-preservation projects. "You need a community that is really committed and will bring children up from birth in the second language, even if they themselves are not the most fluent speakers." ...

The Living Tongues Institute recruits youth who are not fluent in their traditional tongue to become "language activists," using digital equipment to document their elders' voices and learn the language themselves. This creates a record and builds pride in the language.

But wait a second — what's the point of all this? What exactly is so bad about thousands of languages becoming extinct?

The most concrete argument for preserving languages seems to be that you can preserve esoteric knowledge that's exclusive to these languages. This may be a general familiarity with the culture that speaks the language, or it may be more specific — the WaPo article talks (somewhat credulously) about secret medicinal remedies passed down from generation to generation.

But if that's really our concern, does it apply only to the past? What about the future? If more people speak a larger number of obscure languages, doesn't that make it more likely that useful information will remain confined to tiny subcultures, depriving the rest of the world of the benefits? So doesn't this concern actually cut against putting moribund languages on life support?

I'm with John McWhorter, who says:

The language revivalists yearn for — surprise — diversity. What they miss is that language death is a healthy outcome of diversity.

If people truly come together, then they speak a common language. We can muse upon a "salad bowl" ideal in which people go home and use their nice "diverse" language with "their own." But in reality, almost always the survival of that "diverse" language means that the people are segregated in some way, which in turn is almost always due to an unequal power relationship — i.e., precisely what "diversity" fans otherwise consider such a scourge.

Jews in shtetls, for example, spoke Yiddish at home and Russian elsewhere because they lived under an apartheid system, not because they delighted in being bilingual. The Amish still speak German only because they live in isolation from modern life, which few of us would consider an ideal for indigenous groups to strive for.

In the end, the proliferation of languages is an accident: a single original language morphed into 6,000 when different groups of people emerged. I hope that dying languages can be recorded and described. I hope that many persist as hobbies, taught in schools and given space in the press, as Irish, Welsh, and Hawaiian have.

However, the prospect we are taught to dread — that one day all the world's people will speak one language — is one I would welcome. Surely easier communication, while no cure-all, would be a good thing worldwide. There's a reason the Tower of Babel story is one of havoc rather than creation.

IN THE COMMENTS: Slippery slope.

Also, my dad says:

If people confined themselves to their "traditional" languages (and what does that mean? proto-Indo-European?) I'd be wearing today a long black coat, a felt hat, long curly earlocks, and a fringed garment, and speaking English haltingly, with a heavy accent, as a second language. I wouldn't like that. John wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't like that either.

The worst article on the environment I've read in a long time

Slate has published this bizarre article: "When Green Is Another Word for Cheap: Hotels' linen-reuse programs get me fuming."

It's about hotels that place signs in their rooms saying things like:

"Save Our Planet … Every day millions of gallons of water are used to wash towels that have only been used once … Please decide for yourself."

The author, Jill Hunter Pellettieri, says she likes to spite these signs by "request[ing] fresh towels and sheets every day."

So, what does Pellettieri have against hotels encouraging people to reuse towels? She says:

I'm all for saving the environment. But I don't want to be guilt-tripped into going green.

Now, she's right that it's guilt-tripping. But what's wrong with "guilt-tripping" if it's actually useful in making people more aware of the environmental effects of their actions?

One thing wrong with it is: guilt-tripping can backfire. So it's not always a smart tactic. You have to weigh the benefit of encouraging people to do good things against the potential for making them feel resentful. But she's not making that argument; she seems to have a problem with it in principle. But if it's the principle of the thing, well, consumers should feel guilt-tripped.

She says it's "your right when you pay for the room" to use a new towel every time. Well, the whole problem is people like her who think it's their "right." You may have the "right" in a narrow, contractual sense: you've paid for full hotel service, and you can do what you want and expect the hotel to continue serving you. But the hotel also has the right to encourage (not force) you to exercise that right responsibly.

Pellettieri actually objects to the whole notion of consumers taking responsibility:

In the service industry, it's the business that should take responsibility for being environmentally sound, not the customers. There are a number of ways hotels can do this: installing water-saving toilets and showers, replacing light bulbs with CFLs, using solar energy, eliminating Styrofoam coffee cups, substituting room key cards made of plastic with those made of recycled paper.

Why is this either/or? Shouldn't it be both? Customers (at hotels or anywhere else) have an enormous responsibility not to excessively use up resources.

You know, Slate is normally a publication you read if you want to have your preconceptions challenged with clear thinking that's not afraid to make the reader disturbed or uncomfortable, including about the environment. (Slate has a long-running weekly column on environmentally smart consumption, a striking contrast from this article.) Pellettieri, in contrast, assumes there must be an easy way out. We shouldn't need to give up the tiniest luxury. Big businesses should make their products "green" so we can use them guilt-free.

I'm all in favor of "green" products, and her specific suggestions along those lines might all be fine. But changing the characteristics of products is an intrinsically limited way of approaching environmental conservation. Green products may be better than the alternative, but they're not magical. I never know how much good supposedly green products are really going to accomplish, and it's hard to even know which products are greener than others, whatever that means. But I know that using only what I need is a whole lot better than using, say, three times what I need with barely any pay-off for myself.

Her own examples of things she'd like businesses to take care of just accentuate this fact: "installing water-saving toilets and showers, replacing light bulbs with CFLs, using solar energy, eliminating Styrofoam coffee cup." Water, cups, energy, and light are all consumer resources that we should be using just as much as we need, not wasting.

She does have a reasonable proposal:

If hotels really can't do without these opt-in laundry schemes, at least they could be transparent about their motives and reward the guests for their sacrifice. "Reusing your towel not only saves our precious natural resources; it also helps us save money. By participating in our linen-reuse program, we'll knock $10 off your room stay per night."

Now, I think offering a specific discount as an incentive is a fine idea. The problem is that she seems to think this is the only way a business could legitimately encourage its customers to conserve. If doing less washing saves businesses money, as she says, then we should expect that to eventually be reflected in lower prices (all other things being equal). That would be, in principle, the same sort of discount she's advocating. It would just be more diffuse and less visible, but that's no reason to disregard it.

IN THE COMMENTS: My dad makes that last point more concrete:

If she pays $200 for a room, maybe that already incorporates the hotel's savings from linen reuse. Maybe they'd have to charge $210 without it.

Can you tell good art from bad?

Achenblog (Joel Achenbach) says:

Just hit the art gallery on M street with all the Obama art. I can't tell good art from bad, but I did discern a heavy "Obama" theme, as these pictures attest.

The honesty of the boldfaced phrase is refreshing. We need more of that.

As for me, I do have some ability to distinguish good art from bad. I certainly agree that this art the New York Times promoted last summer was "incredibly bad." I seriously question the taste of whoever chose to highlight it.

But then, I also know there are plenty of people who are better at judging art than I am. If I go to an art museum, I feel lucky if I get something out of maybe half the works there, while not seeing the point in the other half.

In contrast, I almost always have an opinion about music. I always trust my own opinion and don't worry if it deviates from some supposed consensus. (That doesn't mean I always have a firm opinion on first listen.)

I'm worst with poetry. I can recognize plenty of bad poetry, but I cannot read good/great poetry and honestly say things like, "Hm, that's pretty good but could be better," or simply, "That's great poetry." I've read T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson in classes, and I've tried to convince myself that I perceive their greatness, but I'd be lying if I said I did.

I like Bertrand Russell's theory, even though it might seem to contradict some of this blog post:

Suppose one man likes strawberries and another does not; in what respect is the latter superior? There is no abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good, to the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both must live. . . . Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days.*

Of course, the same applies to art, music, poetry, and a lot more.

* That's from pp. 125-6 of The Conquest of Happiness.


IN THE COMMENTS: My dad says:

The sickness of contemporary gallery art is that it is no longer about visual content. It is about a) the artist's self-dramatizing gestures, and b) the "ideas" that the work is proclaimed to signify by the artist's statements, symposia, colloquia, grant and commission applications, pitches to dealers, etc., where the artist shares the stage (literally or figuratively) with critics and curators, who are considered the true custodians of the art spirit. The devaluing of the visual goes along with the theory that there is no such thing as quality, i.e., good versus bad, a theory that inevitably comes to parody itself as a prejudice against the beautiful. Work that is visually appalling and emotionally juvenile is considered "interesting" . . . if it makes gestures of tagging along with fashionable ideologies, gestures that are offered and accepted as manifestations of the creative intellect. These offerings are dues paid to the guild of academic artists. The upshot: galleries are no longer where the visual art is.

IM on fatalism and time, ideas and plain language

An IM conversation (as always, this is quoted with permission from the other person):

what do you think of this sentence as an example of something in philosophy

gah

can't send it

["] Let Φ (a physical possibility structure) be a set of distinct but intersecting paths ji–jn, each of which is a set of functions, L’s, on ordered pairs <t, w> (<time, world situation>), such that for any Ln, Lm in some ji, Ln R Lm, where R is a primitive accessibility relation corresponding to physical possibility understood in terms of diachronic physical compatibility. ["]

there

obviously it's pretty cryptic because of all the symbols.

yeah but do you suspect intentional screwy cryticness

yes.

or do you think it's expressed cryptically for a good reason

that's possible.

there's legitimate philosophy that uses symbols.

yeah and i think you'd need to see the whole thing... did he work up to that

but if it's any philosophy area other than logic,
that makes me wonder:

why exactly was it so important for you to express it like that...

when you must know that drastically
narrows your potential audience?

“Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality”

and you can apply the same observation to
garden-variety philosophical prose that's
less layperson-friendly than it could be.

it's an academic thesis written by David Foster Wallace when he was a student

["] Wallace became troubled by a paper called “Fatalism,” first published in 1962 by a philosopher named Richard Taylor. The fatalist contends, quite radically, that human actions and decisions have no influence on the future. ["]

well that explains it: he's trying to impress profs.

yeah

"Your behavior today no more shapes events tomorrow than it shapes events yesterday. Instead, in a seemingly backward way, the fatalist says it is how things are in the future that uniquely constrains what happens right now. What might seem like an open possibility subject to human choice — say, whether you fire your handgun — is already either impossible or absolutely necessary. You are merely going with some cosmic flow."

that they have no influence on the future?!

hard to see how that could be.

normally a fatalist thinks "human actions
and decisions" are entirely influenced by factors
that are determined by the past.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/magazine/14wwln-Wallace-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

so if he committed suicide, his whole life was shaped by that

Well that's a good example...

since the paragraph you just
quoted is easily comprehensible,

why not just say it that way
instead of with the symbols?

the article-writer is making it comprehensible for us

same point.

maybe because when you say it plainly it sounds patently absurd

same thing whether it's a NYT writer

or the original thinker who's clarifying the point.

I've sometimes thought this in law... require people to write very clearly because it's a test of whether they are right

well, it sounds like he's basically
saying time is an illusion --
everything exists at once.

(or, not even "at once" since time is an illusion)

which is what my blog post was about:

http://jaltcoh.blogspot.com/2008/11/reality-of-time-and-doodle-of-me.html

if they can't or won't say it clearly,
suspect error or fraud

You'd be calling into question a lot of
academic scholarship with that principle.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether that would be a bad thing or a good thing.


IN THE COMMENTS: My dad turns up a trenchant on-point quote from an essay by John Kenneth Galbraith called "Writing, Typing, and Economics." It's about economics but is easily generalizable to philosophy and other esoteric fields. Here's a more extended passage:

Any specialist who ventures to write on money with a view to making himself intelligible works under a grave moral hazard. He will be accused of oversimplification. The charge will be made by his fellow professionals, however obtuse or incompetent. They will have a sympathetic hearing from the layman. That is because no layman really expects to understand about money, inflation, or the International Monetary Fund. If he does, he suspects that he is being fooled. One can have respect only for someone who is decently confusing.

In the case of economics there are no important propositions that cannot be stated in plain language. Qualifications and refinements are numerous and of great technical complexity. These are important for separating the good students from the dolts. But in economics the refinements rarely, if ever, modify the essential and practical point. The writer who seeks to be intelligible needs to be right; he must be challenged if his argument leads to an erroneous conclusion and especially if it leads to the wrong action. But he can safely dismiss the charge that he has made the subject too easy. The truth is not difficult.

Complexity and obscurity have professional value—they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.

Additionally, and especially in the social sciences, much unclear writing is based on unclear or incomplete thought. It is possible with safety to be technically obscure about something you haven't thought out. It is impossible to be wholly clear on something you do not understand. Clarity thus exposes flaws in the thought. The person who undertakes to make difficult matters clear is infringing on the sovereign right of numerous economists, sociologists, and political scientists to make bad writing the disguise for sloppy, imprecise, or incomplete thought. One can understand the resulting anger.

I feel very strongly about all this.

UPDATE: Another variation on the theme.

Relativism and liberalism -- an unfortunate pairing

After my dad's relativism post went up, my mom linked to it and asked:

Did RLC take a big lurch right yesterday?

His response:

Did I take a big lurch right? More likely one of my many wobbles.

I wish being a liberal who criticizes relativism didn't seem like a contradiction or a move to the "right."

I don't see anything inherently relativistic about liberalism. In practice, though, there's an unfortunate correlation: liberals are a lot more likely than conservatives to think of themselves as relativists.

But in fact, that's the real contradiction. The idea that no culture's values or principles are objectively better than any other culture's is the antithesis of "progressive."

If you want to see the contradiction on full display, just ask a self-proclaimed relativist how they feel about abortion laws or civil rights or the death penalty or _________. Somehow, the relativism vanishes and absolute principles take its place once the conversation turns to issues that actually matter in the real world.

Relativism ad absurdum

In response to my comments on his relativism post, my dad had this to say:

If you're right about relativists' thinking that objective aesthetic judgments are too self-centered, it certainly shows up a contradiction, because they're being equally self-centered, as you point out, in dictating relativism. I think their attitude comes from a desire on liberals' part to believe that they represent all that is nice and good and peaceful and all-accepting. (As Dylan said in 1964, "I'm liberal, to a degree/ I want everybody to be free/ But if you think I'm gonna let Barry Goldwater move in next door, marry my daughter/ You must be crazy.") They're blind to the passive aggression in that stance. And it flummoxes them when you point out that relativism must admit its opposite as a possible "take".

Fortunately, though, we're beating a dead horse. Postmodernism has been on its way out for a decade, and before long college students will be reviling their pomo professors as hidebound reactionaries and demanding to know why that crap has been shoved down their throats.

Another commenter added this, which I think is very problematic:

I guess I am a person who accepts the complexity of life, attitudes, points of view, beliefs. I hate the destruction of war and struggle against the oppressive patriarchal system we are all victims of - men and women. I am suspicious of "purism" and abhor labels.

So, as you describe it, I might be considered a "relativist," even though the term seems to cause me some discomfort.

It seems to me that that's just not getting at what "relativism" really means. By the same token, I don't see what my dad's support of affirmative action even if it's counter to his self-interest has to do with relativism.

The opposite of relativism is not "being selfish" or "being close-minded" or "not taking unfamiliar viewpoints into account" or "disrespecting other cultures."

In fact, the very fact that I do think it's vital to understand foreign cultures and appreciate the views of people who disagree with me is why I can't be a relativist. Relativism, taken seriously, is incompatible with the idea that someone in the United States should stop and think, "Hey, maybe certain values that are unpopular here but are prevalent in other countries are actually better than mine." If relativism is true, then the only value that matters is adhering to the values that are internal to your own culture/community (whether that's your country, locality, religion, etc.)

I'm not the first person to point this out: if you adhere to that principle, then you can't recognize the goodness of a society making transformative moral progress. And that means that the theory shouldn't count Harriet Tubman or Martin Luther King, Jr. as great Americans. After all, they were deviating from the prevailing values of their time and culture, so by the standards of relativism, weren't they acting wrongly? That's why I consider relativism "wrong" in both senses of the word: not just incorrect but also evil.

And I know that some people will think, "Oh, he's making a straw-man argument by just attacking a really extreme version of 'relativism' that's not what most relativists actually believe." Well, I know there are millions of people who would call themselves relativists but disagree with the conclusion that it's impossible for a society to make radical moral progress. But I simply think they're being internally inconsistent and should resolve the inconsistency in favor of making judgments based on standards that are universal/objective rather than local/relative.


IN THE COMMENTS: Quibbling.

December 8, John Lennon day

The clock radio woke us, and the first sound that came over it was an announcer’s voice: “We’ll have more about the murder of John Lennon after this.”

We sat bolt upright in bed. Had we heard correctly? It had come to us at the tail end of sleep, maybe he had really said some other name, or not the word “murder.”

But when the commercial was over, we learned that it was true. Then we remembered hearing an unusual storm of sirens when we’d gone to bed around midnight, sirens which we now learned had been a couple of miles north of us....

We went to a law students’ party, and one guy, a student’s husband, ... told us that he and his wife lived on the Upper West Side and had been out walking at the time of the murder, just a couple of blocks away, and had heard the horrible sirens, and without knowing anything about what they were for, he had suddenly begun to cry as he walked home.

That's an excerpt from my dad's account — you can read the whole thing here.

And here's my mom's version — posted a few hours later, before either of them had seen the other's post.

(Notice my cameo appearance in the first paragraph of my dad's post and the last paragraph of my mom's post.)