November 25, 2024

Tenure-Track Opening in Computational Social Science at CMU (a.k.a. Call to Pittsburgh, 2024 edition)

Attention conservation notice: Advertising an academic position in fields you don't work in, in a place you don't want to live, paying much less than the required skills can get from private industry.

We have a tenure-track opening at the intersection of statistics and complex social systems, a.k.a. computational social science:

The Department of Statistics and Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University invites applications for a tenure track position in Computational Social Science at the rank of Assistant Professor starting in Fall 2025. This position will be affiliated with the Institute for Complex Social Dynamics.

The Department seeks candidates in the areas of social science statistics and data science, as well as related interdisciplinary fields. Potential areas of interest include network science, social simulation, data science for social good, simulation-based inference, cultural evolution, using large text and image corpora as data, and data privacy. Candidates with other research interests related to the work of both the Department and the Institute are also highly encouraged to apply.

The Institute for Complex Social Dynamics brings together scholars at Carnegie Mellon University who develop and apply mathematical and computational models to study large-scale complex social phenomena. The core members of the Institute are based in the Departments of Statistics and Data Science, Social and Decision Sciences, and Philosophy. Interests of the Institute include studies of the emergence of social behavior, the spread of misinformation, social inequality, and societal resilience.

As tenure-track faculty, the successful candidate will be expected to develop an independent research agenda, leading to publications in leading journals in both statistics and in suitable social-scientific venues; to teach courses in the department at both the undergraduate and graduate level; to supervise Ph.D. dissertations; to obtain grants; and in general to build a national reputation for their scholarship. The candidate will join the ICSD as a Core Member, and help shape the future of the Institute.

CMU's statistics department is unusually welcoming to those without traditional disciplinary backgrounds in statistics (after all, I'm here!), and that goes double for this position. If this sounds interesting, then apply by December 15th. (I'm late in posting this.) If this sounds like it would be interesting to your doctoral students / post-docs / other proteges, then encourage them to apply.

(If you'd like to join the statistics department, but are not interested in complex social dynamics what's wrong with you? we have another tenure track opening, where I'm not on the hiring committee.)

Kith and Kin; Enigmas of Chance

Posted at November 25, 2024 10:30 | permanent link

November 14, 2024

Come Post-Doc with Me!

Attention conservation notice: Soliciting applications for a limited-time research job in an arcane field you neither understand nor care about, which will at once require specialized skills and pay much less than those skills command in industry.

I am, for the first time, hiring a post-doc:

The Department of Statistics and Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University invites applicants for a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in simulation-based inference. The fellow will work with Prof. Cosma Shalizi of the department on developing theory, algorithms and applications of random feature methods in simulation-based inference, with a particular emphasis on social-scientific problems connected to the work of CMU's Institute for Complex Social Dynamics. Apart from by the supervisor, the fellow will also be mentored by other faculty in the department and the ICSD, depending on their interests and secondary projects, and will get individualized training in both technical and non-technical professional skills.

Successful applicants will have completed a Ph.D. in Statistics, or a related quantitative discipline, by September 2025, and ideally have a strong background in non-convex and stochastic optimization and/or Monte Carlo methods, and good programming and communication skills. Prior familiarity with simulation-based inference, social network models and agent-based modeling will be helpful, but not necessary.

Basically, I need someone who is much better than I am at stochastic optimization to help out with the matching-random-features idea. But I hope my post-doc will come up with other things to do, unrelated to their ostensible project (God knows I did), and I promise not to put my name on anything unless I actually contribute. If you don't have a conventional background in statistics, well, I'm open to that, for obvious reasons.

Beyond that, the stats. department is a genuinely great and supportive place to work, I hope for fabulous things from ICSD, and CMU has a whole has both a remarkable number of people doing interesting work and remarkably low barriers between departments; Pittsburgh is a nice and still-affordable place to live. Apply, by 15 December!

--- If I have sold you on being a post-doc here, but not on my project or on me, may I interest you in working on social networks dynamics with my esteemed colleague Nynke Niezink?

(The post-doc ad is official, but this blog post is just me, etc., etc.)

Self-Centered

Posted at November 14, 2024 23:20 | permanent link

October 17, 2024

30 Years of Notebooks

Attention conservation notice: Middle-aged dad has doubts about how he's spent his time.

In September 1994, I wanted to write a program which would filter the Usenet newsgroups I followed for the posts of most interest to me, which led me to writing out keywords describing what I was interested in. I don't remember why I started to elaborate the keywords into little essays and reading lists (perhaps self-clarification?), but I did, and then, because I'd just learned HTML and was playing around with hypertext, I put the document online. (My records say this was 3 October 1994, though that may have been fixing on a plausible date retroactively.) I've been updating those notebooks ever since, recording things-to-read as they crossed my path, recording my reading, and some thoughts. The biggest change in organization came pretty early: the few people who read it all urged me to split it from one giant file into many topical files, so I did, on 13 March 1995, ordered by last update, a format I've stuck to ever since (*).

This was not, of course, what I was supposed to be doing as a twenty-year-old physics graduate student. (Most of the notebook entries weren't even about physics.) Unlike a lot of ideas I had at that age, though, I stuck with it --- have stuck with it. Over the last thirty years, I've spent a substantial chunk of my waking hours recording references, consolidating what I understand by trying to explain it, and working out what I think by seeing what I write, by using Emacs to edit a directory of very basic HTML files. (I learned Emacs Lisp to write functions to do things like add links to arxiv.)

Was any of this a good use of my time? I couldn't begin to say. Long, long ago it became clear to me that I was never going to read more than a small fraction of the items I recorded as "To read:". I sometimes tell myself that it's a way of satiating my hoarding tendencies without actually filling my house with junk, but of course it's possible it's just feeding those tendencies. I do use the notebooks, though honestly the have-read portions are the most useful ones to me. Some of the notebooks have grown into papers, though many more which were intended to be seeds of papers have never sprouted. I know that some other people, from time to time, say they find them useful, which is nice. (Though I presume most people's reactions would range from bafflement to "wow, pretentious much?") Whether this justifies all those hours not writing papers / finishing any of my projected books / gardening / hanging out with friends / being with my family / playing with my cat (RIP) / drinking beer / riding my bike / writing letters / writing al-Biruni fanfic / actually reading, well...

The core of the matter, I suspect, is that if anyone does anything for a decade or three consistently, it becomes a very hard habit to break. By this point, the notebooks are so integrated into the way I work that it would take lots of my time and will-power to stop updating them, as long as I keep anything like my current job. So I will keep at it, and hope that it is, at worst, a cheap and harmless vice.

I never did write that Usenet filter.

*: A decade later, I started using blosxom, rather than completely hand-written HTML, and Danny Yee wrote me a cascading style sheet. I also was happy to use first HTMX, and then MathJax, to render math, rather than trying to put equations into HTML. ^.

Posted at October 17, 2024 09:30 | permanent link

October 04, 2024

The Professoriate Considered as a Super-Critical Branching Process

Attention conservation notice: Academic navel-gazing, in the form of basic arithmetic with unpleasant consequences that I leave partially implicit.

A professor at a top-tier research university who graduates only six doctoral students over a thirty year career is likely regarded by their colleagues as a bit of a slacker when it comes to advising work; it's easy to produce many more new Ph.D.s. (Here is a more representative case of some personal relevance.) That slacking professor has nonetheless reproduced their own doctorate six-fold, which works out to $\frac{\log{6}}{30} \approx$ 6% per year growth in the number of Ph.D. holders. Put this as a lower bound --- a very cautious lower bound --- on how quickly the number of doctorates could grow, if all those doctorate-holders became professors themselves. Unless faculty jobs also grow at 6% per year, which ultimately means student enrollment growing at 6% per year, something has to give. Student enrollment does not grow at 6% per year indefinitely (and it cannot, even if you think everyone should go to college); something gives. What gives is that most Ph.D.s will not be employed in the kind of faculty position where they train doctoral students. The jobs they find might be good, and even make essential use of skills which we only know how to transmit through that kind of acculturation and apprenticeship, but they simply cannot be jobs whose holders spawn more Ph.D.s.

The professoriate is a super-critical branching process, and we know how those end. (I am a neutron that didn't get absorbed by a moderator; that makes me luckier than those that did get absorbed, not better.) In the sustainable steady state, the average professor at a Ph.D.-granting institution should expect to have one student who also goes on to be such a professor in their entire career.

Anyone who takes this as a defense of under-funding public universities, of adjunctification, or even of our society having more non-academic use for quantitative skills than for humanistic learning, has trouble with reading comprehension. Also, of course this is Malthusian reasoning; what made Malthus wrong was not anticipating that what he called "vice" could become universal the demographic transition. Let the reader understand.

Learned Folly

Posted at October 04, 2024 11:00 | permanent link

September 30, 2024

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, September 2024

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on world history, or even on random matrix theory. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while chasing after a toddler, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

Marc Potters and Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, A First Course in Random Matrix Theory: for Physicists, Engineers and Data Scientists, doi:10.1017/9781108768900
I learned of random matrix theory in graduate school; because of my weird path, it was from May's Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems, which I read in 1995--1996. (I never studied nuclear physics and so didn't encounter Wigner's ideas about random Hamiltonians.) In the ensuing nearly-thirty-years, I've been more or less aware that it exists as a subject, providing opaquely-named results about the distributions of eigenvectors of matrices randomly sampled from various distributions. It has, however, become clear to me that it's relevant to multiple projects I want to pursue, and since I don't have one student working on all of them, I decided to buckle down and learn some math. Fortunately, nowadays this means downloading a pile of textbooks; this is the first of my pile which I've finished.
The thing I feel most confident in saying about the book, given my confessed newbie-ness, is that Potters and Bouchaud are not kidding about their subtitle. This is very, very much physicists' math, which is to say the kind of thing mathematicians call "heuristic" when they're feeling magnanimous *. I am still OK with this, despite years of using and teaching probability theory at a rather different level of rigor/finickiness, but I can imagine heads exploding if those with the wrong background tried to learn from this book. (To be clear, I think more larval statisticians should learn to do physicists' math, because it is really good heuristically.)
To say just a little about the content, the main tool in here is the "Stieljtes transform", which for an $N\times N$ matrix $\mathbf{A}$ with eigenvalues $\lambda_1, \ldots \lambda_N$ is a complex-valued function of a complex argument $z$, \[ g^{\mathbf{A}}_N(z) = \frac{1}{N}\sum_{i=1}^{N}{\frac{1}{z-\lambda_i}} \] This can actually be seen as a moment-generating function, where the $k^{\mathrm{th}}$ "moment" is the normalized trace of $\mathbf{A^k}$, i.e., $N^{-1} \mathrm{tr}{\mathbf{A}^k}$. (Somewhat unusually for a moment generating function, the dummy variable is $1/z$, not $z$, and one takes the limit of $|z| \rightarrow \infty$ instead of $\rightarrow 0$.)
The hopes are that (i) $g_N$ will converge to a limiting function as $N\rightarrow\infty$, \[ g(z) = \int{\frac{\rho(d\lambda)}{z-\lambda}} \] and (ii) the limiting distribution $\rho$ of eigenvalues can be extracted from $g(z)$. The second hope is actually less problematic mathematically **. Hope (i), the existence of a limiting function, is just assumed here. At a very high level, Potters and Bouchaud's mode of approach is to derive an expression for $g_N(z)$ in terms of $g_{N-1}(z)$, and then invoke the assumption (i), to get a single self-consistent equation for the limiting $g(z)$. There are typically multiple solutions to these equations, but also usually only one that makes sense, so the others are ignored ***.
At this very high level, Potters and Bouchaud derive limiting distributions of eigenvalues, and in some cases eigenvectors, for a lot of distributions of matrices with random entries: symmetric matrices with IID Gaussian entries, Hermitian matrices with complex Gaussian entries, sample covariance matrices, etc. They also develop results for deterministic matrices perturbed by random noise, and a whole alternate set of derivations based on the replica trick from spin glass theory, which I do not feel up to explaining. These are then carefully applied to topics in estimating sample covariance matrices, especially in the high-dimensional limit where the number of variables grows with the number of observations. This in turn feeds in to a final chapter on designing optimal portfolios when covariances have to be estimated by mortals, rather than being revealed by the Oracle.
My main dis-satisfaction with the book is that I left it without any real feeling for why the eigenvalue density of symmetric Gaussian matrices with standard deviation $\sigma$ approaches $\rho(x) = \frac{\sqrt{4\sigma^2 - x^2}}{2\pi \sigma^2}$, but other ensembles have different limiting distributions. (E.g., why is the limiting distribution only supported on $[-2\sigma, 2\sigma]$, rather than having, say, unbounded support with sub-exponential tails?) That is, for all the physicists' tricks used to get solution, I feel a certain lack of "physical insight" into the forms of the solutions. Whether any further study will make me happier on this score, I couldn't say. In the meanwhile, I'm glad I read this, and I feel more prepared to tackle the more mathematically rigorous books in my stack, and even to make some headway on my projects. §
*: As an early example, a key step in deriving a key result (pp. 21--23) is to get the asymptotic expected value of such-and-such a random variable. Using a clever trick for computing the elements of an inverse matrix in terms of sub-matrices, they get a formula for the expected value of the reciprocal of that variable. They then say (eq. 2.33 on p. 22) that this is clearly the reciprocal of the desired limiting expected value, because after all fluctuations must be vanishing. ^
**: We consider $z$ approaching the real axis from below, say $z=x-i\eta$ for small $\eta$. Some algebraic manipulation then makes the imaginary part of $g(x-i\eta)$ look like the convolution of the eigenvalue density $\rho$ with a Cauchy kernel of bandwidth $\eta$. A deconvolution argument then gives $\lim_{\eta \downarrow 0}{\mathrm{Im}(gx-i\eta)} = \pi \rho(x)$. This can be approximated with a finite value of $N$ and $\eta$ (p. 26 discusses the numerical error). ^
***: There is an interesting question about physicists' math here, actually. Sometimes we pick and choose among options that, as sheer mathematics, seem equally good, we "discard unphysical solutions". But sometimes we insist that counter-intuitive or even bizarre possibilities which are licensed by the math have to be taken seriously, physically (not quite "shut up and calculate" in its original intention, but close). I suspect that knowing when to do one rather than the other is part of the art of being a good theoretical physicist... ^
Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World, volume 3 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th--18th Century
This is the concluding volume of Braudel's trilogy, where he tries (as the English title indicates) to give a picture of how the world-as-a-whole worked during this period. It's definitely the volume I find least satisfying. Braudel organizes everything around a notion of "world economies" borrowed from Immanuel Wallerstein (an unfortunate choice of guide), postulating that these are always centered on a single dominating city, and spends a lot of his time tracking the shifts of what he says is the dominating city of the European world economy. But by his own definition of world economy, I don't see how there was more than one during his period, because all his other "world economies (East Asia, India, sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, etc., etc.) were all tied in to the same economic system as western-and-central Europe. In fact, Braudel goes on at great length about these ties! (At most, Australia and Oceania might have been outside the world economy during this period.) This is also the volume where the, let us say, eccentricity of Braudel's economic thought began to press on me *. It was his discussions of cycles, "the conjuncture" and time-series decomposition which however truly irritated me. Or, rather, it made me want to sit him down and give him a lecture on the Yule-Slutsky effect, because I am quite certain he was smart enough to grasp it **. --- All these remarks are, of course, the height of presumption on my part. §
Previously.
*: After quoting a detailed passage from Ricardo about how both Portugal and England are better off if the former grows wine and the latter grows wheat and they exchange, Braudel spends many pages going over how Portuguese wine-growers came to rely on credit from English merchants. Stipulating that this is all true, and even stipulating that in some sense those English merchants dominated the Portuguese vintners, it does not refute Ricardo! (The cooperative socialist commonwealth will care very much about comparative advantage.) Or, again, Braudel repeatedly talks about how certain cities or countries were dis-advantaged by their high wages, without ever considering that some employers there must have felt those wages were worth paying. Indeed many employers there must have, or those would not have been the prevailing wages. --- In general, I sympathize with wanting to rescue older perspectives, here those of the mercantilists, from the condescension of posterity, but I think Braudel takes that too far, to the detriment of his understanding of his material. ^
**: To be fair, there are some hints in those passages that Braudel might have been happy to accept Slutsky's perspective on the effect. Namely: the appearance of low-frequency cycles is the natural consequence of high-frequency noise (what Braudel would call "events") whose effects just take time to work their way through the economic system. (This reminds me that I need to actually read Barnett's biography of Slutsky one of these years.) ^
Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection
It's not quite true to say that this is an attempt to write Marshall Hodgson's never-completed world history as a volume of pop history. This is not quite true because it is also, and equally, inspired by McNeill and McNeill's The Human Web. The result is extremely engaging, and while I didn't particularly learn from it, I daresay most of the prospective audience will not, in fact, have read as widely in Ansary's sources as I happen to have done. §
Errata: When describing Mesopotamian civilizations, Ansary repeatedly refers to Sumerian as a Semitic language, which is wrong. This is not particularly consequential, and I didn't notice any other errors of fact.
Disclaimer: My grandfather and Ansary's father were friends, so he's a family connection.

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Writing for Antiquity; The Great Transformation; Mathematics; Enigmas of Chance; The Dismal Science

Posted at September 30, 2024 23:59 | permanent link

August 31, 2024

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, August 2024

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on world history. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while chasing after a toddler, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, volume 2 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th--18th Century
On re-reading, I am much more struck by Braudel's constant, but un-supported, assertions about who controlled various trades. "Power" and "control" are unavoidably causal notions, which means that at the very least they involve counterfactuals, the sort of thing B. would normally say he avoids. A bit more concretely: say Braudel is right that in the late 1500s and earlier 1600s, the European international currency market was funneled through a small number of mostly Genovese merchants/bankers operating at periodic fairs. (Subsequent scholarship seems to agree.) I'm sure those traders made money. In fact, I'm sure that they exploited network externalities to make supra-normal profits. But asserting that they controlled those currency markets implies that they could have imposed different outcomes --- on exchange rates? on discount rates? Braudel never bothers to say --- if they had wanted to, as opposed to having their actions more or less dictated by the real economic activity which generated bills of exchange, demand for currency exchange, etc. Braudel does not provide evidence for control, and it doesn't even arise as a problem within his horizon.
Wishing Braudel had collaborated with someone like (impossibly) Paul Krugman, or (more plausibly, but still impossibly) Charles Kindleberger, is both idle and impertinent, even philistine, but I can't help it.
Sequel.
Glen Cook, The Black Company, Shadows Linger, The White Rose (also an omnibus, Chronicles of the Black Company, not seen by me)
Mind candy military fantasy, in which Our Protagonists find themselves working as mercenaries for the Dark Lord's only-barely-less-evil ex-wife, on whom the narrator develops an unhealthy crush. (These are not spoilers.) There are a lot of these, and I might pick up more later, but this first trilogy comes to a satisfying ending point.
(I'd be very surprised if these weren't an influence on Graydon Saunders, though the prose style is rather different.)
Megan E. O'Keefe, The Blighted Stars
Mind candy: a very angsty romance wrapped in a shell of space opera. Both aspects of the story are left in media res, and I look forward to reading the sequels.
Phillip Kennedy Johnson et al., The Last God
Mind candy, comic book fantasy heavily influenced by D & D.
Wen Spencer, Tinker
Mind candy fantasy, in which Pittsburgh is transported to Elfland for most of each month. I read it for the local interest (admission to CMU plays a small part of the plot, and bad things happen in Turtle Creek [which I can only too easily believe]), and it was OK, but not good enough to make me pick up any of the many sequels.
Lilith Saintcrow, Moon's Knight
Mind candy portal fantasy, in which Our Protagonist's struggles to escape back to Mundania are rather complicated by her growing recognition that her life there sucked, actually, and maybe fighting strange beasts and stranger people isn't so bad in comparison...

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Writing for Antiquity; The Dismal Science; Heard About Pittsburgh PA

Posted at August 31, 2024 23:59 | permanent link

July 31, 2024

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, July 2024

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Also, most of my reading and viewing this month was done at odd hours and/or while chasing after a toddler, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night
J. S. Dewes, The Last Watch and The Exiled Fleet
Space opera mind candy. The Bear is good, as usual, but not quite her best. Dewes is new to me, and I'd say not quite as good at either world-building or character development as Bear, but still enjoyable, and I'll get the third book in this trilogy when it comes out.
(Parenthetical with implicit spoilers for Ancestral Night: I can't decide if Bear's characters are merely fooling themselves when they assert that the Synarchy has progressed beyond money, or if Bear has not thought through what "providing more value than you use up" is going to entail, especially when one needs to balance, say, a recovered spacecraft hull against expended fuel. Since Bear's narrator is, demonstrably confused about a lot of important matters, I am inclined to think this is the character's mis-apprehension, perhaps encouraged by propaganda. [But then, I would.])
Prometheus
Spoilers for this movie from 2012 follow.
I enjoy a good re-telling of At the Mountains of Madness more than the next fan, and am pleased to learn that xenomorphs are, in fact, shoggothim. (That is: originally amorphous bits of protoplasm, built as weapons or tools, which learned to imitate their creators and then destroyed them.) But there's a huge part of the plot which makes no sense: if you thought humanity was the creation of beings who were merely an advanced alien species, merely engineers, why of why would you think they have any more of an answer to the riddles of existence than we do, or even a way of making human bodies last forever? The fact that the existentially-befuddled human beings in this scenario have created intelligent androids would seem to make this obvious. (In fact the android character basically says as much!)
Also: Am I right in thinking that this is the first time "being infected by the alien parasite is like being pregnant" has moved from subtext to text?
2001: A Space Odyssey
Re-watched for the nth time as a palette-cleanser after Prometheus. Icy perfection from start to finish. (The iciness is part of the perfection.) --- The influence of Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star-Maker on Clarke, and so on this movie, is, naturally, very patent to me on this re-watch.
The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Sanjuro
And since I was staying up late watching beloved classics... I can't remember exactly how old I was when my father took my brother and me to see a revival of The Hidden Fortress at the old Biograph Theater in Georgetown, but we couldn't have been more than eleven, and we both imprinted. I am happy to say these movies, too, only improve with age and re-watching.

Books to Read While Algae Grow in Your Fur; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Tales of Our Ancestors

Posted at July 31, 2024 23:59 | permanent link

March 23, 2024

The "Quality Control" Interview for Big Classes

Attention conservation notice: Advice on teaching, which I no longer follow myself.

I teach a lot of big classes --- the undergraduate advanced data analysis class passed 100 students many years ago, and this spring is over 230 --- which has some predictable consequences. I don't get to talk much to many of the students. They're mostly evaluated by how they do on weekly problem sets (a few of which, in some classes, I call "take-home exams"), and I don't even grade most of their homework, my teaching assistants do. While I try to craft problem sets which make sure the students practice the skills and material I want them to learn, and lead them to understand the ideas I want them to grasp, just looking at their scores doesn't give me a lot of information about how well the homework is actually working for those purposes. Even looking at a sample of what they turn in doesn't get me very far. If I talk to students, though, I can get a much better sense of what they do and do not understand fairly quickly. But there really isn't time to talk to 100 students, or 200.

About ten years ago, now, I decided to apply some of the tools of my discipline to get out of this dilemma, by means of random sampling. Every week, I would randomly select a fixed number of students for interviews. These interviews took no more than 30 minutes each, usually more like 20, and were one-on-one meetings, distinct from regular open office hours. They always opened by me asking them to explain what they did in such-and-such a problem on last week's homework, and went on from there, either through the problem set, or on to other topics as those suggested themselves.

In every class I did this in, it gave me a much better sense of what was working in the problems I was assigning and what wasn't, which topics were actually getting through to students and which were going over their heads, or where they learned to repeat examples mechanically without grasping the principle. There were some things which made the interviews themselves work better:

  • Reading each students' homework, before the meeting. (Obvious in retrospect!)
  • Handing the student a copy of what they turned in the week before. (Though, as the years went on, many brought their laptops and preferred to bring up their copy of the document there.)
  • Putting a firm promise in the syllabus that nothing students said in the interview would hurt their grade. (Too many students were very nervous about it otherwise.)
  • Putting an equally firm promise in the syllabus that not coming in to the interview, or blowing it off / being uncooperative, would get them a zero on that homework. (Obvious in retrospect.)
  • Offering snacks at the beginning of the interview.

Setting aside a fixed block of time for these interviews didn't actually help me, because students' schedules are too all-over-the-place for that to be useful. (This may differ at other schools.)

Choosing the number of students each week to interview has an obvious trade-off of instructor time vs. information. I used to adjust it so that each student could expect to be picked once per semester, but I always did sampling-with-replacement. In a 15-week semester with 100 students, that comes out to about 3.5 hours of interviews every week, which, back then, I thought well worthwhile.

I gave this up during the pandemic, because trying to do a good interview like this over Zoom is beyond my abilities. I haven't resumed it since we went back to in-person teaching, because I don't have the flexibility in my schedule in any more to make it work. But I think my teaching is worse for not doing this.

Corrupting the Young

Posted at March 23, 2024 15:10 | permanent link

The Presentation Exchange for Workshops and Classes

Attention conservation notice: Advice for running an academic workshop, which I've only followed myself a few times.

Some years ago, Henry Farrell and I ran a series of workshops about cooperative problem-solving and collective cognition where we wanted to get people with very different disciplinary backgrounds --- political theorists, computer scientists, physicists, statisticians, cognitive psychologists --- talking to each other productively. We hit upon an idea which worked much better than we had any right to hope. (Whether it's ultimately due to him, or me, or to one of us tossing it out as obviously dumb and the other saying "Actually...", neither of us can now recall.) We've both used it separately a few times in other settings, also with good results. Since we both found ourselves explaining it recently, I thought I'd describe it in a brief note.

  1. Every participant in the workshop writes a brief presentation, with enough lead time for the organizers to read them all.
    In the context of an inter-disciplinary workshop, what often works best is to describe an outstanding problem in the field.
  2. The workshop organizers semi-randomly assign each participant's presentation to someone else, with enough lead time that the assignee can study the presentation.
    Again, in the interdisciplinary context, the organizers try to make sure that there's some hope of comprehension.
    (While I called this the "presentation exchange", it needn't be a strict swap, where A gets assignd B's presentation and vice versa.)
  3. Everyone gives the presentation they were assigned, followed by their own comments on what they found interesting / cool / provocative and what they found incomprehensible. No one gives the presentation they wrote.
    In some contexts, I have found it helpful to institute the rule that the author don't get to speak until after the presentation is finished...

Doing this at the beginning of the workshop helps make sure that everyone has some comprehension of what everyone else is talking about, or at least that mis-apprehensions or failures to communicate are laid bare. It can help break up the inevitable disciplinary/personal cliques. It can, and has, spark actual collaborations across disciplines. And, finally, many people report that knowing their presentation is going to be given by someone else forces them to write with unusual clarity and awareness of their own expert blind-spots.

As I said, Henry and I hit on this for interdisciplinary workshops, but I've also used it for disciplinary workshops --- because every discipline is a fractal (or lattice) of sub-sub-...-sub-disciplinary specialization. I've also used it for student project classes, at both the undergrad and graduate level. That requires more hand-holding and/or pastoral care on the part of the teacher than a research workshop, and I've never tried to make it the way I start a class.

Learned Folly; The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts; Corrupting the Young

Posted at March 23, 2024 15:05 | permanent link

July 31, 2023

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, July 2023

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on the sociology and industrial organization of intellectuals, political philosophy, or American history. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

Allison Brennan, The Lost Girls, Make Them Pay, Breaking Point, Too Far Gone
Mind candy series mystery. As with many long-running series, the soap-operatic elements keep piling up, and I honestly enjoyed those less than seeing Lucy tackle the murder-or-kidnapping-of-the-week, but still fun. (Previously.) §
Daniel Drezner, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas
Popular social science. Drezner's main argument is as follows. He begins by distinguishing between "public intellectuals", who are critical and multi-sided, and "thought leaders", who have One Big Idea (if not One Weird Trick), which they push relentlessly. (I don't think the phrase "policy entrepreneur" appears in the book; the old-fashioned but apt term "projector" definitely doesn't.) Recent changes in the societies of the rich democracies have increased the sway of thought leaders, and reduced that of public intellectuals.
One of these is rising economic inequality ("plutocrats"): rich people are constitutionally more inclined to pay for advocacy, especially flattering or self-serving advocacy, than for critique. Here Drezner advances, without much fuss, some sensible-sounding notions about the relations between material interests and ideology. (I actually wish he'd elaborate a theory of ideology on this basis, but that would call for a different sort of book.)
A second change is the rise of partisanship. This makes it easier to ignore criticisms coming from the other side. (You will, after all, often be right in thinking that those criticisms are made ignorantly, in bad faith, or merely to posture before the critic's own side.) This is, of course, bad for reason and democracy.
The third change is the decline in trust in established institutions ("pessimism"). These have not been replaced by alternative gate-keeping institutions, but rather by more of a free-for-all scrum for attention. (Again: "Actually, 'Dr. Internet' is the name of the monsters' creator.") This exacerbates already-existing tendencies in intellectual life to highly-skewed, winner-take-a-hell-of-a-lot outcomes. His descriptions of the temptations to chase those rewards is vivid.
Drezner does little to address why plutocrats, partisans, and the plain people of the Internet should have such an appetite for intellectual fare. It's probably impossible for social animals of our sort to conduct our common lives without justifications and rationalizations (cf. Mercier and Sperber). That those rationales should be intellectual, that they should take the form of culturally-transmitted abstractions, general ideas, appeals to impersonal principle, appeals to evidence, attempts at logical argument, etc., is another matter and evidently far more contingent. Here I personally would gesture at the very high levels of education attained in all the countries Drezner is concerned with, and/or generations of the Flynn effect.
Drezner is careful to explain that the changes and prospects are not all grim. (There are real benefits to less gatekeeping, even for public intellectuals in Drezner's sense.) He's also careful to note that in many ways the social life of the mind has always been bad. (This is cold comfort, but at least avoids catastrophizing.) But he leaves me convinced that he's right about specific ways in which that social life has recently become dysfunctional than it was, with little prospect of improvement in the foreseeable future. §
Disclaimer: Drezner is a co-author of a co-author, and a fellow relic of the The Second Age of the Web early '00s blogging. But I don't think we've ever met, and I feel no obligations to read or to praise his books. (Especially not years after they come out...)
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West
Re-read in memoriam. This is a strange but effective fusion of truly ugly action and truly beautiful language. Revisiting after some decades, I can see how it's influenced a lot of other, later books I've read, some for the better, some very much not. (If it weren't for the dates, I'd think Stephen King's The Gunslinger was in the former set.)
Two thoughts: 1. As usual, it's a mistake to identify the opinions of characters --- even ones who are given a lot of room to opine --- with the opinions of the author. In particular, I see a lot of people quoting the judge's speeches as though they were Cormac's views, but the action of the novel makes it clear that the judge is a cunning, deceitful, possibly-inhuman villain! He is not to be trusted! (Reading is hard.) 2. Something about the narration's frequent recourse to the ancient, the primeval, to mysterious forces under the earth, etc., makes me wonder about what Cormac thought of Lovecraft. §
Disclaimer: I knew Cormac through SFI; not well, but well enough to call him Cormac.
Tommie Shelby, The Idea of Prison Abolition
This is a thorough and sympathetic, but ultimately very negative, investigation of case for abolition of prisons, from a view point that tries to meld analytical Marxism with what's come to be called the "black radical tradition" [1]. Much of the argument here proceeds by way of exposition and critique of the prison-abolitionist writings of Angela Davis [2].
Many self-proclaimed prison abolitionists seem to merely be expressing outrage at way we treat crime through hyperbole. But some of them mean it. (Some of them, I suspect, have been swayed by their own hyperbole.) In any event it's a morally serious issue, which deserves to be examined with some care, whatever one might think of some of its advocates. This Shelby does.
Shelby outright dismisses the idea that society might have a legitimate interest in meeting out retribution for crimes [3], but accepts interests in deterrence [4], in rehabilitation, and (I think) in incapacitation. He further explains that consequences for anti-social behavior will only deter if they are, in fact, unpleasant. This does not mean that those consequences need to be horrors, but unless people would rather not experience them, they simply will not work. Even if one wishes to emphasize gentler means that might better serve the aims of rehabilitation and (perhaps) incapacitation, those will need to be back-stopped by some kind of deterrence of those who are neither rehabilitated nor incapacitated.
Shelby tries his best to be fair to Davis's claims that the legitimate social functions of prisons can be better served without imprisonment, but ends up having to admit that there just isn't very much substance to those claims. I honestly doubted whether he was really being fair to Davis here, so at this point read her Are Prisons Obsolete?, and concluded that Shelby was being, in fact, far too generous.
To sum up, Shelby pretty convincingly demolishes the arguments for prison abolition, i.e., for thinking that prisons have no place in just societies. He is very careful to say that none of his arguments imply that current American prisons, or our criminal justice system more generally, are acceptable. §
Disclaimer: I met Shelby years ago at a workshop, where I was impressed by his presentation, and he was generous with his time in offering suggestions on work-then-in-progress. This contributed to my picking up his book.
[1]: Shelby elaborates on his conception of his own "Afro-Analytical Marxism" in this 2021 essay. Like most analytical Marxists, he seems more interested in fairly orthodox historical materialism and political economy --- the sort of topics someone shaped by the Second International, like Kautsky or Trotsky or Luxemburg, would've recognized --- than in the Frankfurt School. (Davis, of course, as Marcuse's student, owes more to Frankfurt.) Thus I think can continuing to view Joseph Heath as the world's leading, because only, rational-choice critical theorist. ^
[2]: Certain episodes in Davis's career go (tactfully?) unmentioned. ^
[3]: The dismissal is forthright, but perhaps a bit hasty. Those who are wronged by others, or their family and friends, will tend to seek retribution from those who have wronged them. In fact they will tend to seek disproportionate and intemperate retribution. Such excessive retribution is both unjust itself, and apt to set of a vicious cycle of feud and revenge. To prevent this, punishment of wrong-doers by the state must include, and be seen to include, reasonable and proportionate retribution. --- To be clear, I'm not saying this is unanswerable, just that I wish Shelby hadn't dismissed retribution so swiftly. ^
[4]: There is a disconcerting possibility about deterrence which Shelby doesn't discuss, but which his arguments do not, so far as I can see, foreclose. This is that punishing people for crimes they didn't commit would have much the same deterrent effect as punishing the guilty, so long as most people thought that they were guilty. Someone has to suffer in order to fulfill the legitimate public function of deterring wrong-doing [5], but it's trickier than I'd like to say why, ethically, it should be criminals who do the suffering. (Of course, the task becomes easier if one believes in retribution.) ^
[5]: Conversely, I could easily make a case for the authorities only convincingly pretending to punish anyone. But such a deception would be very fragile, with bad consequences when it unraveled; perhaps that's enough to rule it out. ^
Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence
A journalistic, but very thorough, history of violent left-wing radicals from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. (Right-wing violence during the same period is outside Burrough's scope, but it would make an interesting set of comparison cases.) Many of the figures he discusses --- including Davis! --- also show up in Shelby's book, albeit presented in rather different lights. §
Adolph Reed, Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
If you like Reed's essays at nonsite.org (and I usually do), you will enjoy this, and if not, not. The marketing material from the publisher makes it seem vastly more ambitious than it really is, but Reed's introductory remarks make the scope clear. §
Simon Spurrier and Matías Bergara, Coda vols. 1, 2, 3
Comic book mind candy fantasy. Superficially, this is a cynical, post-apocalyptic subversion of the Matter of Middle Earth. In fact, the hard-bitten surface merely conceals a core which actually believes in epic fantasy, both in the content and in the classical form (a trilogy ending in a eucatastrophe). §

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; The Beloved Republic; The Progressive Forces; Philosophy; Commit a Social Science; The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts; Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Tales of Our Ancestors; The Commonwealth of Letters

Posted at July 31, 2023 23:59 | permanent link

June 22, 2023

On Shoggothim

Attention conservation notice: Self-promotion of a pay-walled piece which combines a trendy topic with what even I admit is a long-held semi-crank notion.

Henry Farrell and I have an essay in The Economist, riffing off the meme that every large language model is really a shoggoth. Our point is that this is right, because an LLM is a way of taking the vast incohate chaos of written-human-language-as-recorded-on-the-Web and simplifying and abstracting it in potentially useful ways. They are, as Alison Gopnik says, cultural technologies, more analogous to library catalogs than to individual minds. This makes LLMs recent and still-minor members of a larger and older family of monsters which similarly simplify, abstract, and repurpose human minds: the market system, the corporation, the state, even the democratic state. Those are distributed information-processing systems which don't just ingest the products of human intelligence, but actually run on human beings --- a theme I have been sounding for while now.

The piece is paywalled, but Henry has a Twitter thread that provides a good summary, and Brad DeLong has excerpts, along with thoughtful commentary. (I agree with Henry's response to said comments.) Update, 7 July: Henry links to the longer, older version we cut down for The Economist.

Some things we didn't include:

  • Thanks to the editorial staff at The Economist, both for the opportunity and for their very professional work.
  • Thanks to Ted Chiang (!) for helpful comments on a draft.
  • Any discussion of LLMs as artifacts, in the sense of Herbert Simon's Sciences of the Artificial. (I for one learned this way of thinking of markets and hierarchies as information-processing systems from Simon...) Update, 17 August: I endorse Maxim Raginsky's treatment of this topic.
  • Any discussion of Dan Sperber's account of culture as "the precipitate of cognition and communication in a human population", the role in that process of chains of alternately private-mental and public-physical representations, and LLMs as public-representation-producing artifacts
  • Any discussion of Arthur Stinchcombe's work on the positive role of abstraction and formalities in institutions
  • "More is different": These things emerge from the massed results of human social interaction and individual intelligence, and therefore are very different from human minds. In particular, they tend to have their own intrinsic dynamics, which are usually not things anyone intends, and often things no-one wants. (Someday I will write that essay about blackouts and alienation.) That doesn't mean they can't be controlled; it means control is hard, and usually itself impersonal.
  • An adequate discussion of monster-taming and its limits, which would necessarily include extended praise of social democracy (though see DeLong's post)
  • Any mention of the the primal scene of AI.
  • Henry's reflections on modern neo-Lovecraftian fiction, which I hope he will publish elsewhere. Update, 7 July: see.

Update, 23 June: Small wording tweaks and additions. More important: insightful and generous commentary from Daniel "\( D^2 \)" Davies. (It's virtually a blogosphere reunion.) Incorporated (sorry) by reference: Beniger, The Control Revolution; Yates, Control through Communication; Ashby, "Design for an Intelligence Amplifier".

(I know I learned that the correct plural of "shoggoth" is "shoggothim" from reading Ruthanna Emrys, but I cannot now locate the passage --- it may just be in her Lovecraft Reread series with Anne Pillsworth.) Update: and indeed it was (tracked down by Henry).

Self-Centered; The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts; Cthulhiana; The Great Transformation

Posted at June 22, 2023 12:45 | permanent link

April 30, 2023

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, April 2023

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on the biographies of 20th century tyrants, or the impact of the Internet on collective creativity. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

Wislawa Szymborska, Poems New and Collected, 1957--1997
Donald Hall, Selected Poems
I observe National Poetry Month by reading poets I really ought to have read already. (I'd seen Szymborska's "A Word on Statistics", of course, IIRC from Thomas Lumley.)
Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent
Mind candy fantasy / campus novel, in which Yale is literally a gateway to Hell. It's a sequel to Ninth House, and it'll be much more enjoyable if you read that first, but there's enough cluing-in for the new reader that it's probably not necessary. Ends in media res. §
Andrea Fort et al., Songs for the Dead: Afterlife
Mind candy fantasy, comic book flavor. A satisfying conclusion to the story. §
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Yes, I knew the story. No, I had never actually read it before. Yes, it's really good. §
Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, volumes I, Paradoxes of Power, 1878--1928 and II, Waiting for Hitler, 1929--1941
Writing an adequately-contextual biography of Stalin means, for Kotkin, pretty much writing a history of the world, as well as detailing the ups and downs of Ioseb Barionis Jughashvili. I think this is right, and am entranced at how well Kotkin tacks back and forth between different scales. One of the themes those constant changes of scale let Kotkin explore is the tension between large, structural forces or trends --- particularly the imperative pressure on any state that wanted to retain independence to industrialize (cf.) --- and fine-grained and contingent yet consequential facts of friendship and rivalry, of personality, even of sheer accident. (These are very non-Marxist books, which could only have been written by someone who had seriously wrestled with Marxist thought.) I very eagerly await the next volume (or volumes?). §
Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
Reading a 2010 book about the promise of the Internet for cooperation, especially for intellectual collaboration, in 2023 is, well, rather melancholy. Instead of carpooling, we have giant illegal taxi companies; instead of safe couch-surfing, we have giant illegal hotel chains; instead of sharing information about political violence, we have organizing political violence; and instead of sharing information about rare medical conditions, we have created multiple new forms of contagious hysteria.
One conclusion I draw from this is that Shirky was fundamentally right about how the Internet would unleash new forms of collective creativity, but far, far too optimistic about the value of that creativity. ("After all, to any rational mind, the greater part of the history of ideas is a history of freaks.")
The other conclusion --- one I've been tending to for a while --- is that as a teenager, I got caught up in a Utopian milieu, which somehow thought that integrating the Internet, and especially the Web, into civilized life would make things better. I spent my adult life in this environment, it was very good to me (and I daresay to Shirky). But, thirty years later... Well, I often find myself thinking on a passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, reflecting on another such hangover:
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle --- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting --- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark --- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Shirky was offering a view from the crest of the wave. This one didn't exactly break and roll back; it just left the same old rubbish as before in its wake, only sodden and salt-rimed. This is, perhaps, the best a utopia can hope to achieve. §
Disclaimer: I'd forgotten, until I was almost ready to post this, that back in the Second Age of the Web 2003--2004 Shirky and I were both parties to a discussion involving the exact shape of the degree distribution for weblogs. That dispute is irrelevant to the subject of this book, and has no bearing on my views of it. (For the record: he was wrong about the degree distribution.)

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Writing for Antiquity; The Progressive Forces; Linkage; The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts; Actually, "Dr. Internet" Is the Name of the Monsters' Creator; Scientifiction and Fantastica; The Commonwealth of Letters

Posted at April 30, 2023 23:59 | permanent link

March 31, 2023

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, March 2023

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on African-American political psychology, opinion-survey research, medieval Islamic Indology, or the history of the scientific revolution. Also, most of my reading this month was done while recovering from foot surgery and/or while bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm much less reliable and more cranky than usual.

Kel Symons et al., I Love Trouble
Cecil Castellucci and Marley Zarcone, Shade, the Changing Girl
Cullen Bunn et al., Harrow County, vols. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Philippe Thirault et al., Miss: Better Living Through Crime
Kurt Busiek et al., The Autumnlands, vols. 1 and 2
Ryan North et al., The Midas Flesh, vol. 2
Comic-book mind candy, assorted. Autumnlands reminds me a little of Zelazny from the 1960s or 1970s. --- Previously for Midas Flesh; previously for Harrow County.
Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, Black Pride and Black Prejudice [JSTOR]
The central question here is whether, among African Americans in the greater Chicago area circa 2000, higher levels of racial pride lead to higher levels of prejudice against those not in the race, especially (but not exclusively) against Jews. The authors addressed this through opinion surveys, including some ingenious survey experiments *.
On substantive grounds I have little to say here. What troubles me about this though is that the authors (and their critics) seems content to take few-level ordinal data and run it through linear regression after linear regression, endlessly permuting which variable goes on the left hand side and which ones are on the right. The ideas about validating measurements are hopeless, along the lines of the Zeller and Carmines book which so disappointed me (unsurprisingly, since Sniderman and Carmines collaborated). They are also prone to the fallacy of confusing "this regression coefficient is not statistically significant" with "this relationship is unimportant" **, and they never once look at their residuals to check their a regression specification. To be clear, I have no doubt that the survey was done as well as humanly possible; it's the analysis of the results which drives me nuts.
At some point, I confess, I wanted to make them shut down their statistical software, hand over the data set, and run the whole thing through pcalg myself, using the chi-squared test for conditional independence that works for categorical variables. (This would assume all the systematically-important variables are measured, but then, so do their regressions.) I would then hand them back the inferred graphical causal model, and let them use it to address their substantive questions. (This is of course a fantasy, because pcalg didn't exist --- but not such a fantasy, because TETRAD was a thing in 2002.) The upshot of my fantasy would be a comprehensible, reliably-constructed guess at how all their different variables inter-relate, allowing one to draw real inferences. The way they actually proceeded instead gave them an uninterpretable mush --- or, rather, a mush which demands interpretation rather than supporting calculation. In all this, of course, they are no worse than most quantitative social science. §
*: Reassuringly, including indicator variables for their experimental treatments makes no differences to the coefficients of other variables in their regressions. They do not appear to appreciate that this has to be true if the treatments were successfully randomized (so the treatment indicator is linearly unpredictable from the covariates). This would not be true if the treatment interacted with the covariates, but they never consider interactions anyway. ^
**: To repeat a teaching example: "Imagine hearing what sounds like the noise of an animal in the next room. If the room is small, brightly lit, free of obstructions, and you make a thorough search of it with unimpaired vision and concentration, not finding an animal in it is, in fact, good evidence that there was no animal there to be found. If on the other hand the room is dark, large, full of hiding places, and you make a hurried search while distracted, without your contact lenses and after a few too many drinks, you could easily have missed all sorts of things, and your negative report has little weight as evidence. (In this parable, the difference between a large [coefficient] and a small [coefficient] is the difference between looking for a Siberian tiger and looking for a little black cat.)" ^
Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, Alberuni's India: An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of India about A.D. 1030 (trans. Edward C. Sachau, 1888; online in two volumes)
Biruni went to India in the wake of the armies of his patron/captor, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, and stayed for a dozen years or so, learning languages, studying the country, and assimilating Hindu learning. This is his attempt at summarizing what he thought was most important about Indian culture for a Muslim audience. It's encyclopedic, sympathetic, admiring, sometimes exasperated, occasionally baffled. I can't find a more recent translation into English, so this one from the 19th century had to do. It's mostly readable, though there are quite a few places where the translator calls for more research and this reprint, naturally, doesn't say whether it's been followed up *. In any event, I found this fascinating. One aspect which particularly struck me is Biruni's concern with convincing the reader that educated Hindus are really monotheists, drawing explicit analogies to Christian veneration of saints, "idols", etc. I think the goal here is to get the reader to not dismiss Indian thought as mere pagan superstition. (But might he be hinting that Hindus are really a People of the Book?) §
*: Sachau does have the odd habit of rendering some of Biruni's Arabic technical and philosophical vocabulary as (English renditions of) Greek words. I found this vexing, because he never explains whether this is because an Arabic term was itself a translation of a Hellenistic original, or whether he just thinks Greek would be more familiar to a Victorian audience, or what. I realize this is me tweaking a 19th century Orientalist scholar for insufficient philological exactitude, and can't wait to find out what form karma will take. ^
David Wootton, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies
For the most part, this is a very able, even exciting, biography of Galileo, and a defense of him as a scientist and a natural philosopher from criticisms by the likes of Feyerabend. There are, however, one or two passages of truly wild psychoanalysis, so wild I can't begin to say whether Wootton means those bits seriously. So: mostly what I expected from the author of The Invention of Science. §

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Writing for Antiquity; Islam and Islamic Civilization; The Great Transformation; Commit a Social Science; Enigmas of Chance; The Beloved Republic

Posted at March 31, 2023 23:59 | permanent link

February 28, 2023

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, February 2023

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on the economic of socialism (whether actually-existing or hypothetical), political philosophy, the social organization and intellectual development of literary criticism, or participatory democracy in social movements. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (1983)
Alec Nove, Political Economy and Soviet Socialism (1979)
Alec Nove, Socialism, Economics and Development (1986)
Alec Nove, Efficiency Criteria for Nationalised Industries (1973)
Alec Nove and J. A. Newth, The Soviet Middle East: A Model for Development? (1967)
Nove was (as these titles might suggest) a British economist, the child of exiled Mensheviks, who made a specialty of studying the Soviet economy, and of advocating market socialism. He's best known for two works: The Economics of Feasible Socialism and An Economic History of the USSR. The former is a personal touchstone which shaped me deeply; the later is merely very good. Looking up something else, I happened to discover that a bunch of his books are now available through our library electronically, so I plunged in.
I'll start with the most important book first. The point of Feasible Socialism is to advocate for, and sketch, a socialist economy "which might be achieved within the lifetime of a child already conceived", i.e., not in some distant post-scarcity future. The first chapter explains why Marxism offers absolutely no useful ideas about how to actually run a socialist economy. (Here Nove summarizes Soviet debates on this matter in the early 1920s --- debates which have been little known since, and so often, in effect, re-run from scratch.) The second chapter looks at the entirely-negative lessons to be drawn from the Soviet experience, and the third at the mostly-negative lessons to be drawn from Cold War-era Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland and China. The last two chapters lay out Nove's attractive vision of a market socialism, with lots of public provision of many goods, and workplace democracy where sensible and feasible. (He is sound on seeing that there is a tension between democratic control of an enterprise by its workers, and democratic control of that enterprise by the people-as-a-whole.)
On re-reading, I am relieved, chagrined, and exasperated. Relieved, because I still think this book holds up, and has not been visited by the Suck Fairy. Chagrined, because I've written a lot about socialism and planning over the years, some of it well-received, and on examination I have just been channeling a book I first read as a teenager. Exasperated, because we keep having the same conversations about the same bad ideas, without actually being able to retain and build on the better ones, like Nove's. (I have been making this complaint on this blog for nineteen years now.)
Since I have a weird completist tendency, I then proceeded to read the other four books here, since I hadn't read them before, and they were available.
The first two are collections of academic papers and essays; many of them are effectively studies for Feasible Socialism, not always in very obvious ways: Nove account of more-or-less self-inflicted economic crises facing Allende's government in Chile (observed as visiting faculty in Santiago) clearly informs his discussion of the transition to socialism. I also found very interesting his series of papers on the economic thought of the Bolsheviks (from before the revolution through the 1930s), and later Soviet economics of the 1960s and 1970s (i.e., Kantorovich and co. versus traditionalists).
Efficiency Criteria is a plea to think about why one would want a nationalized industry in the first place, as opposed to just regulating and taxing private firms.
The Soviet Middle East looks at economic development efforts in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The emphasis is on flows of money, machinery and trained personnel from the center to these regions. The environmental costs imposed go largely unremarked. That this was a project of imperial domination is on the other hand made very clear.
To sum up: go track down a copy of Feasible Socialism, if that side of what I write interests you at all. The rest of these are now of just-historical interest, though I'm glad I read them. §
Joseph Heath, Cooperation and Social Justice
This is an essay collection, loosely united by the theme that a (functional) society is an on-going system of cooperation, which has implications for what anything we might want to call "social justice" would look like, and how it might be achieved. (Indeed, Heath would say that principles of social justice are principles that help systems of cooperation work better. [Cf.]) This supposed unifying theme is most evident in chapters 1 and 5.
Chapter 1, "On the Scalability of Cooperative Structures", is mostly a response to G. A. Cohen's Why Not Socialism?, patiently pointing out that modes of cooperation which work in a small group of friends on a temporary camping trip do not, in fact, scale up to thousands or millions of people over lifetimes. The logical weakness here is that Heath never really explains why different modes of cooperation have the scales they do.
Chapter 5 is about reasonable accommodation for immigrants: they come to new countries because they want to join that country's system-of-cooperation, so it's reasonable to mostly expect them to conform to its ways, but reasonable accommodations for them are ones which don't, in fact, impair the efficacy of the system. Turned around, this provides Heath with an argument for border control, i.e., limiting who gets to participate in the system of cooperation, in order to keep it going. I'm not sure why this latter argument doesn't allow every city's current residents to restrict who can move there, or indeed any neighborhood. Those are fragmentary systems of cooperation, inter-dependent on larger ones, but so is any national economy.
Chapter 2 argues that the fact that corporations are only supposed to pursue profit doesn't lead them to anti-social behavior; the problem isn't profit, but inadequate regulation, and poor professional ethics. (He knows better than to suppose courses on ethics lead to better behavior.) I sympathize, but don't think he gives enough consideration to (people working for) corporations expending effort to shape regulations in their self-interest.
Chapter 3 is about the importance of status to our social lives, and the dilemmas this creates for egalitarians, since status simply cannot be equalized. Complex societies will have multiple status hierarchies (I once knew someone highly esteemed among his fellow collectors of rare fruit-company banana labels), but it strains credulity to imagine a situation where everyone is at the top of a status hierarchy they find compelling.
Chapter 4 defends stigmatizing bad behaviors, on the grounds that social stigma is actually an important resource people can draw on when attempting self-control. (This idea is briefly touched on, as I recall, in Heath's Enlightenment 2.0.) The question of which behaviors should be stigmatized is left open.
Chapter 6, finally, is about the "dilemmas of US race relations", and our attempts to "achieve Singaporean outcomes using Canadian methods" (p. 299). This is thought-provoking, not least for trying to put our difficulties into comparative perspective. (This chapter is an expanded, more scholarly version of a 2021 essay in a rather odd-seeming little magazine.) On the basis of these arguments, Heath ought to endorse a sort of counterfacctual black nationalism: it'd be a good idea, if only most black people were concentrated in one part of the US where they were numerically predominant, like the Francophones in Quebec.
As my remarks make clear, I didn't come away completely satisfied with Heath's answers or arguments in every case, but I always enjoyed the reading, and found a lot more to chew over than I have time to itemize. §
John Guillory, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study
This is a wonderfully rich book, but I will just point to Merve Emre's exposition in lieu of writing my own. It makes me want to read Guillory's Cultural Capital from the 1990s. Thanks to Scott Newstok for recommending this to me. §
Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (2002)
The usual knock on participatory democracy is that it doesn't scale to large groups, and becomes increasingly ineffective as the group gets larger. (I have scribbled out thoughts along these lines myself.) Polletta, who sympathizes very obviously and strongly with participatory democracy, especially in its more left-wing * forms, explicitly tries to counter this critique by looking, primarily, at three mid-20th-century movements: pacifists in the 1950s, the SNCC, and SDS. (She's good on the historical inter-connections between her three movements.)
Polletta has extremely astute things to say about the way participants in these movements imagined their relationships to each other, and used those conceptions to help make participation work ** . She makes it absolutely clear that participatory democracy does have heuristic and strategic value. Even more, when it's working, it has moral and morale value; her striking title comes from an SDS members's recollection of what participation meant to her.
Despite all this, Polletta completely fails to undermine the it-doesn't-scale critique. In fact, when both SNCC and SDS did get large, they famously flamed out into utterly dysfunctional wrecks, and Polletta gives honest and insightful accounts of the beginnings of the disintegration in both cases. (She doesn't follow SDS all the way into the LaRouchies and Weather Underground, but she doesn't need to.) The 1950s pacifists, of course, never grew enough to have such problems.
The end of the book covers some contemporary-at-time-of-writing movements: a surviving branch of the Industrial Areas Foundation in Texas, and anarchists around David Graeber (who features as a native informant) who would go on to be key to Occupy. By Polletta's own account, that branch of the IAF seems like a perfectly ordinary class/ethnic political formation, dominated by the group's clergy --- doing good work for its members, but not really a direct or participatory democracy, whatever motions it might go through. As for what became Occupy, again, its career hardly argues for the scalability of participatory democracy.
To sum up, Polletta makes a strong case for the virtues and powers of participatory democracy in small groups bound by strong ties of solidarity. (I am tempted to say: groups which have 'asabiyya.) She also has interesting observations on the forms those ties can take. But beyond the small group, she is, if anything, underlining that the Iron Law of Oligarchy rules ok. §
*: Right-wing political movements of the same vintage (e.g., Young Americans for Freedom) go undiscussed. Maybe none of them aspired to the same sort of internal democracy as SNCC or SDS --- I honestly don't know enough about them to say --- but if any did, they'd make extremely informative contrast cases. ^
**: She's returned to this theme in later work, which I am eager to read. --- If I were smarter, I would try to connect this to John Levi Martin's mysterious-to-me claims about the need for social structures to be comprehensible to their members. ^

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; The Progressive Forces; The Beloved Republic; Commit a Social Science; The Commonwealth of Letters; Philosophy; Afghanistan and Central Asia

Posted at February 28, 2023 23:59 | permanent link

December 31, 2022

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, December 2022

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on anti-discrimination law, early 20th century shock art movements, early 20th century science fiction, or the Renaissance reception of classical mythology. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

Marie Mercat-Bruns, Discrimination at Work: Comparing European, French, and American Law (trans. Elaine Holt)
A French legal academic interviewing distinguished American legal academics about anti-discrimination law and related topics, with her commentary. (The interviews close off around 2011, so Ricci vs. DeStefano is a big subject, and the idea of a Supreme Court case instituting gay marriage nationally is definitely beyond everyone's horizon...) In between the interviews, Mercat-Bruns provides her own analysis, including a lot of discussion of French and EU legislation, regulations and case law. Her accuracy on those topics is (obviously?) not something I can evaluate, but I found it notable that she's usually asking why European law can't be more like American law. (Thus our soft-power conquest of the Old World continues.)
I read this for the inequality class, because I was unhappy repeating "I know nothing about anti-discrimination policy in other countries, sorry" in response to very reasonable questions from students. I now feel entitled to reply "I know hardly anything about how anti-discrimination law works in other countries, but...", which is progress. §
Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (1977)
This is older, but it's still a really good book about the Italian Futurists. Indeed I can't think of a better one for a general audience with some background knowledge of modern art. The chapters on Futurist painting and sculpture, on music and performance, on women, and on politics are especially good.
I fell in love with Futurist painting as an undergrad, so like a freak I've read far too much about them; this book is surviving the on-going purge of my library. §
Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)
I read Last and First Men as a boy, and it warpped my mind forever, but I never attempted any other Stapledon (aside from being left cold by A Last Man in London, both as a child and as a grown-up). This was a mistake I am glad I finally fixed.
Star Maker is a very conscious attempt at creating a truly cosmic modern myth, so the whole two-billion-year saga of humanities in Last and First Men is a passing incident mentioned in a handful of paragraphs. Rather this attempts to embrace the whole life of our universe, and of the other universes which are all the work of the titular Star Maker.
A few stray notes (avoiding spoilers):
  • Some philosophical influences are very obvious: Hegel, Spinoza, Leibniz's Monadology. The Hegelianism is pervasive throughout; it leads me to wonder what a Deweyan equivalent work of science-fictional myth would be like. The Spinoza who comes through here is that of the Ethics, in particular (but not just) the "intellectual love of God", the life of the stars (and the way the order and connection of their material bodies is the order and connection of their mental lives, seen under a different aspect), and some of the presentation of eternity in the climactic myth-within-a-myth. That last is also where Leibniz is felt.
  • I will be surprised if Stapledon wasn't familiar with Attar's The Conference of the Birds, in which a group of travelers of various species move through a visionary landscape which is also a series of spiritual developments in search of a transcendent being, only to have revealed to them that they collectively are that being. (The true Simurgh is the friends they made along the way, as it were.) Just so here, with the growth of the collective group of seekers. Indeed I'd not be surprised if Attar's seven valleys map, in order, on to the stages of Stapledon's future history. (But see Allen below...)
Reading this now, with half a lifetime of consuming mind candy behind me, I can see just how much it shaped subsequent science fiction, even when that has contented itself with less ambitious and visionary, more all-too-human, projects. There are places where Star Maker is dated (the sequence of stellar evolution, the origin of planets, etc.), but it's still a magnificent venture, and I recommend it highly. §
Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (1971, 2020) [Open Access]
For several centuries following the revival of classical learning, the received theory among European scholars and intellectuals was that the classical myths, especially as recounted in great poets like Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, were actually elaborate moral allegories and/or symbolic depictions of physical theories. These ranged from the you-can-kind-of-see-it (Circe turning Odyssesus's men, but not Odysseus himself, into swine \( \simeq \) something about reason resisting temptation to which the appetites succumb) to the excruciatingly flimsy. (I will not attempt to do justice to the elaborate encouragements to fussy virtue which were supposedly encoded in, of all books, Ovid's Metamorphoses.) Of course, the interpreters showed little agreement about exactly what a given myth was allegorizing --- except when one interpreter borrowed from his predecessors. None of the interpreters, moreover, seem to have really faced the question of why great poets would go to such pains to create elaborate allegories for rather trite morals.
Just to add to the confusion, all this went along with also seeing classical mythology as ripped off from, or a literally-demonic parody of, the Biblical Genesis story, and/or distorted memories of various historical events among the pagans (so Zeus was a king of Crete, etc.). As Allen explains, these ideas all had their roots in antiquity --- in writings of later pagans looking back at the myths (with more or less embarrassment), and in writings of the Church Fathers trying to make their own kind of sense of those stories. Medieval Christian practices of interpreting Biblical passages in multiple ways fed into the mix.
All of this was taken extremely seriously, and when Renaissance Europeans learned about classical myths, they learned them with these interpretations. Moreover, this complex of ideas helped shape how Europeans understood literary interpretation in the first place, and how they composed their own literary works. (Allen is especially good on Ariosto, Tasso and Milton.) This persisted, as Allen documents in great detail, for centuries, down through the 1700s where he calls a halt *.
From the modern perspective that began to appear in the 1700s, the idea that the classical myths were composed as elaborate moral or cosmological allegories is, of course, loony tunes. But the sheer distance between the surface story of (say) Aphrodite and Ares getting caught in adultery by Hephaestus and the ways that story was read allegorically over the centuries tells us something about how good people are at extracting meanings from anything **, about how unconstrained those meanings are by the object being interpreted, about how much, and how little, tradition and intellectual communities do to channel interpretation, and about how much of the history of ideas is a history of freaks. (Allen is more polite.) §
*: Stopping around 1750 is actually a bit disappointing to me, because the Romantic era seriously revived the idea that the ancient myths were full of hidden meanings, an idea which has persisted to this day. The Romantic mutation, however, seems to lie in implying that the meaning is personally transformative while being (strategically?) vague about just what it is. (The Renaissance mythographers, by contrast, were ploddingly explicit, and the morals were always very conventional.) It'd be very interesting to know what (say) Novalis had read in earlier mythographers. ^
**: OK, maybe not anything. I have speculated that one reason some stories last for so long is that they have a quality of suggestive ambiguity: they seem like they should mean something important, but it's not obvious what. Our surviving corpus of myths, and of renditions of myths, may have been under selection for this quality. ^

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Writing for Antiquity; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Teaching: Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination; The Beloved Republic; The Commonwealth of Letters

Posted at December 31, 2022 23:59 | permanent link

Three-Toed Sloth