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Categories
Self-Centered
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur
Books (etc.) I've read this month and
feel I can recommend (warning: I have no taste)
- Palani Mohan, Hunting with Eagles: In the Realm of the Mongolian Kazakhs
- Beautiful black-and-white photographs of, as it says, Mongolian Kazakhs hunting with eagles, and their landscape. Many of them are just stunningly composed.
Upcoming Talks
Upcoming Talks
- Statistics Department, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 13--17 and 20--22 March 2017
- A short course on "Nonparametric tools for statistical network modeling",
based on 36-781.
- Santa Fe Institute, Complex Systems Summer School, 20--21 June 2017
- Exact dates tentative.
|
December 31, 2022
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, December 2022
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on anti-discrimination law, early 20th century shock art movements, early 20th
century science fiction, or the Renaissance reception of classical mythology.
Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while
bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.
- Marie Mercat-Bruns, Discrimination at Work: Comparing European, French, and American Law (trans. Elaine Holt)
- A French legal academic interviewing distinguished American legal academics
about anti-discrimination law and related topics, with her commentary. (The
interviews close off around 2011,
so Ricci
vs. DeStefano is a big subject, and the idea of a Supreme Court
case instituting
gay marriage nationally is definitely beyond everyone's horizon...) In
between the interviews, Mercat-Bruns provides her own analysis, including a lot
of discussion of French and EU legislation, regulations and case law. Her
accuracy on those topics is (obviously?) not something I can evaluate, but I
found it notable that she's usually asking why European law can't be more like
American law. (Thus our soft-power conquest of the Old World continues.)
- I read this for
the inequality class,
because I was unhappy repeating "I know nothing about anti-discrimination
policy in other countries, sorry" in response to very reasonable questions from
students. I now feel entitled to reply "I know hardly anything about how
anti-discrimination law works in other countries, but...", which is
progress. §
- Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (1977)
- This is older, but it's still a really good book about the
Italian Futurists.
Indeed I can't think of a better one for a general audience with some
background knowledge of modern art. The chapters on Futurist painting and
sculpture, on music and performance, on women, and on politics are
especially good.
- I fell in love with Futurist painting as an undergrad, so like a freak I've
read far too much about them; this book is surviving the on-going purge of my
library. §
- Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)
- I
read Last
and First Men as a boy, and it warpped my mind forever, but I never
attempted any other Stapledon (aside from being left cold by A Last Man
in London, both as a child and as a grown-up). This was a mistake
I am glad I finally fixed.
- Star Maker is a very conscious attempt at creating a truly
cosmic modern myth, so the whole two-billion-year saga of humanities in
Last and First Men is a passing incident mentioned in a handful of
paragraphs. Rather this attempts to embrace the whole life of our universe,
and of the other universes which are all the work of the titular Star Maker.
- A few stray notes (avoiding spoilers):
- Some philosophical influences are very obvious: Hegel,
Spinoza, Leibniz's Monadology. The
Hegelianism is pervasive throughout; it leads me to wonder what
a Deweyan equivalent work of
science-fictional myth would be like. The Spinoza who comes through here is
that of the Ethics, in particular (but not just) the "intellectual
love of God", the life of the stars (and the way the order and connection of
their material bodies is the order and connection of their mental
lives, seen under a different aspect), and some of the presentation of eternity
in the climactic myth-within-a-myth. That last is also where Leibniz is felt.
- I will be surprised if Stapledon wasn't familiar with
Attar's The
Conference of the Birds, in which a group of travelers of various
species move through a visionary landscape which is also a series of spiritual
developments in search of a transcendent being, only to have revealed to them
that they collectively are that being. (The true Simurgh is the friends they
made along the way, as it were.) Just so here, with the growth of the
collective group of seekers. Indeed I'd not be surprised if Attar's seven
valleys map, in order, on to the stages of Stapledon's future history. (But see
Allen below...)
- Reading this now, with half a lifetime of consuming mind candy behind me, I
can see just how much it shaped subsequent science fiction, even when that has
contented itself with less ambitious and visionary, more all-too-human,
projects. There are places where Star Maker is dated (the
sequence of stellar evolution, the origin of planets, etc.), but it's still a
magnificent venture, and I recommend it highly. §
- Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (1971, 2020) [Open Access]
- For several centuries following the revival of classical learning, the
received theory among European scholars and intellectuals was that the
classical myths, especially as recounted in great poets like Homer, Virgil, and
Ovid, were actually elaborate moral allegories and/or symbolic depictions of
physical theories. These ranged from the you-can-kind-of-see-it (Circe turning
Odyssesus's men, but not Odysseus himself, into swine \( \simeq \) something about reason resisting temptation to which the appetites succumb) to the excruciatingly flimsy. (I will not attempt
to do justice to the elaborate encouragements to fussy virtue which were
supposedly encoded in, of all books, Ovid's Metamorphoses.) Of
course, the interpreters showed little agreement about exactly what a given
myth was allegorizing --- except when one interpreter borrowed from his
predecessors. None of the interpreters, moreover, seem to have really faced
the question of why great poets would go to such pains to create
elaborate allegories for rather trite morals.
- Just to add to the confusion, all this went along with also seeing
classical mythology as ripped off from, or a literally-demonic parody of, the
Biblical Genesis story, and/or distorted memories of various historical events
among the pagans (so Zeus was a king of Crete, etc.). As Allen explains, these
ideas all had their roots in antiquity --- in writings of later pagans looking
back at the myths (with more or less embarrassment), and in writings of the
Church Fathers trying to make their own kind of sense of those stories.
Medieval Christian practices of interpreting Biblical passages in multiple ways
fed into the mix.
- All of this was taken extremely seriously, and when Renaissance Europeans
learned about classical myths, they learned them with these interpretations.
Moreover, this complex of ideas helped shape how Europeans understood literary
interpretation in the first place, and how they composed their own literary
works. (Allen is especially good on Ariosto, Tasso
and Milton.)
This persisted, as Allen documents in great detail, for centuries, down through
the 1700s where he calls a halt *.
- From the modern perspective that began to appear in the 1700s, the idea
that the classical myths were composed as elaborate moral or cosmological
allegories is, of course, loony tunes. But the sheer distance between the
surface story of (say) Aphrodite and Ares getting caught in adultery by
Hephaestus and the ways that story was read allegorically over the centuries
tells us something about how good
people are at extracting meanings from anything **, about how unconstrained those meanings are by the
object being interpreted, about how much, and how little, tradition and
intellectual communities do to channel interpretation, and
about how much of the
history of ideas is a history of freaks. (Allen is more
polite.) §
- *: Stopping around 1750 is
actually a bit disappointing to me, because the Romantic era seriously revived
the idea that
the ancient myths
were full of hidden meanings, an idea which has persisted to this day. The
Romantic mutation, however, seems to lie in implying that the meaning is
personally transformative while being (strategically?) vague about just what
it is. (The Renaissance mythographers, by contrast, were ploddingly
explicit, and the morals were always very conventional.) It'd be very
interesting to know what (say) Novalis had read in earlier
mythographers. ^
- **: OK, maybe not
anything. I
have speculated that one
reason some stories last for so long is that they have a quality of suggestive
ambiguity: they seem like they should mean something important, but it's not
obvious what. Our surviving corpus of myths, and of renditions of myths, may
have been under selection for this
quality. ^
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Writing for Antiquity;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
Teaching: Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination;
The Beloved Republic;
The Commonwealth of Letters
Posted at December 31, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
November 02, 2022
Your Favorite DSGE Sucks
Attention
conservation notice: 1800+ words of academic self-promotion, boosting
a paper in which statisticians say mean things about some economists' favored
toys. They're not even peer-reviewed mean things (yet). Contains abundant
unexplained jargon, and cringe-worthy humor on the level of
using
a decades-old reference for a title.
Entirely seriously: Daniel is in no way responsible for this
post.
Update, December 2022: Irritatingly, there are some small
but real bugs, glitching all our numerical results. This is an even
stronger reason for you to direct your attention elsewhere. (Details at the end.)
I am very happy that after many years, this preprint is loosed
upon the world:
- Daniel J. McDonald and CRS, "Empirical Macroeconomics and DSGE Modeling in Statistical Perspective", arxiv:2210.16224
- Abstract: Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models have been an ubiquitous, and controversial, part of macroeconomics for decades. In this paper, we approach DSGEs purely as statstical models. We do this by applying two common model validation checks to the canonical Smets and Wouters 2007 DSGE: (1) we simulate the model and see how well it can be estimated from its own simulation output, and (2) we see how well it can seem to fit nonsense data. We find that (1) even with centuries' worth of data, the model remains poorly estimated, and (2) when we swap series at random, so that (e.g.) what the model gets as the inflation rate is really hours worked, what it gets as hours worked is really investment, etc., the fit is often only slightly impaired, and in a large percentage of cases actually improves (even out of sample). Taken together, these findings cast serious doubt on the meaningfulness of parameter estimates for this DSGE, and on whether this specification represents anything structural about the economy. Constructively, our approaches can be used for model validation by anyone working with macroeconomic time series.
To expand a little: DSGE models are models of macroeconomic aggregate
quantities, like levels of unemployment and production in a national economy.
As economic models, they're a sort of origin story for where the data comes
from. Some people find DSGE-style origin stories completely compelling, others
think they reach truly mythic levels of absurdity, with very little in between.
While settling that is something I will leave to the professional
economists
(cough obviously
they're absurd myths cough), we can also view them as statistical
models, specifically multivariate time series models, and ask about their
properties as such.
Now, long enough ago that blogging was still a thing and Daniel was doing
his dissertation on statistical
learning for time series
with Mark Schervish and myself,
he convinced us that DSGEs were an interesting and important target for the
theory we were working on. One important question within that was trying to
figure out just how flexible these models really were. The standard learning-theoretic principle is that the more flexible model classes learn
slower than less flexible ones. (If you are willing and able to
reproduce really complicated patterns, it's hard for you to distinguish between
signal and noise in limited data. There are important qualifications to this
idea, but it's a good start.) We thus began by thinking about trying to get
the DSGEs to fit random binary noise, because that'd tell us about
their Rademacher complexity,
but that seemed unlikely to go well. That led to thinking about trying to get
the models to fit the original time series, but with the series randomly
scrambled, a sort of permutation test of just how flexible the models were.
At some point, one of us had the idea of leaving the internal order of each
time series alone, but swapping the labels on the series. If you have a
merely-statistical multivariate model, like a vector autoregression, the
different variables are so to speak exchangeable --- if you swap series 1 and
series 2, you'll get a different coefficient matrix out, but it'll be a
permutation of the original. (The parameters will be "covariant" with the
permutations.) It'll fit as well as the original order of the variables. But
if you have a properly scientific, structural model, each variable will have
its own meaning and its own role in the model, and swapping variables around
should lead to nonsense, and grossly degraded fits. (Good luck telling the
Lotka-Volterra model that hares are predators and lynxes are prey.) There might
be a few weird symmetries of some models which leave the fit alone (*), but for
the most part, randomly swapping variables around should lead to drastically
worse fits, if your models really are structural.
Daniel did some initial trials with the classic "real business cycle" DSGE
of Kydland and Prescott
(1982), and found, rather astonishingly, that the model fit the swapped
data better a large fraction of the time. Exactly how often, and how
much better, depended on the details of measuring the fit, but the general
result was clear.
The reason we'd gotten in to all this was wanting
to apply statistical learning
theory to macroeconomic forecasting, to put bounds on how bad the forecasts
would be. Inverting those bounds would tell us how much data would be needed
to achieve a given level of accuracy. Our results were pretty pessimistic,
suggesting that thousands of years of stationary data might be needed.
But those bounds were "distribution-free", using just the capacity or
flexibility of the model class, and the rate at which
new points in the time series
become independent of its past. This could be pessimistic about
how well this very particular model class can learn to predict this very
particular data source.
We therefore turned to another exercise: estimate the model on real data (or
take published estimates); simulate increasingly long series from the model;
and re-estimate the model on the simulation. That is, bend over backwards to
be fair to the model: if it's entirely right about the data-generating
process, how well can it predict? how well can it learn the parameters? how
much data would it need for accurate prediction? With, again, the
Kydland-Prescott model, the answer was... hundreds if not thousands of years
worth of data.
Of course, even in the far-off days of 2012, the Kydland-Prescott model was
obsolete, so we knew that if we wanted anyone to take this seriously, we'd need
to use a more up-to-date model. Also, since this was all numerical, we didn't
know if this was a general problem with DSGEs, or just
(more) evidence that Prescott
and data analysis were a bad combination. So we knew we should look at a
more recent, and more widely-endorsed, DSGE model...
Daniel graduated; the
workhorse Smets and Wouters
(2007) DSGE is a more complicated creature, and needed both a lot of
programming time and a lot of computing time to churn through
thousands of variable swaps and tens of thousands of fits to simulations. We
both got busy with other things. Grants came and (regrettably) went. But what
we can tell you now, with great assurance, is that:
- Even if the Smets-Wouters model was completely correct about the structure
of the economy, and it was given access to centuries of stationary data, it
would predict very badly, and many "deep" parameters would remain very poorly
estimated;
- Swapping the series around randomly improves the fit a lot of the
time, even when the results are substantive nonsense.
The bad news is that even if this model was right, we couldn't hope to actually
estimate it; the good news is that the model can't be right, because it
fits better when we tell it that consumption is really wages,
inflation is really consumption, and output is really inflation.
Series swapping is something we dreamed up, so I'm not surprised we couldn't
find anyone doing it. But "let's try out the estimator on simulation output"
is, or ought to be, an utterly standard diagnostic, and it too seems to be
lacking, despite the immense controversial literature about DSGEs. (Of course,
it is an immense literature --- if we've missed precedents for either,
please let me know.) We have some thoughts about what might be leading to both
forms of bad behavior, which I'll let you read about in the paper, but the main
thing to take away, I think, is the fact that this widely-used DSGE
works so badly, and the methods. Those methods are, to repeat,
"simulate the model to see how well it could be estimated / how well it would
predict if it was totally right about how the economy works" and "see whether
the model fits better when you swap variables around so you're feeding it
nonsense". If you want to say those are too simple to rise to the dignity of
"methods", I won't fight you, but I will insist all the more on their
importance.
It might be that we just so happened to have tried the only two
DSGEs with these pathologies. (It'd be a weird coincidence, but it's
possible.) We also don't look at any non-DSGE models, which might be as bad on
these scores or even worse. (Maybe time series macroeconometrics is inherently
doomed.) But anyone who is curious about how whether their favorite
macroeconomic model meets these very basic criteria can check, ideally
before they publish and rack up thousands of citations lead
the community of inquirers down false trails. Doing so is conceptually simple,
if perhaps labor-intensive and painstaking, but that's science.
Update, December 2022: Bugs
After posting the preprint, people helpfully found some bugs in our code.
These glitch up all our numerical results. Since this is primarily a paper
about our numerical results, this is obviously bad. The preprint needs to be
revised after we've fixed our code and re-run everything. I am pretty
confident, however, about the general shape of the numbers, because as I said
we got the same kind of behavior from the Kydland-Prescott model and
(importantly, in this context) off-the-shelf code. Of course, you being less
confident in my confidence after this would be entirely sensible. In
any event, I'll update this again when we're done with re-running the code and
have updated the preprint.
*: E.g., in Hamiltonian mechanics, with
generalized positions \( q_1, \ldots q_k \) and corresponding momenta \( p_1,
\ldots p_k \) going into the Hamiltonian \( H \), we have \( \frac{dq_i}{dt} =
\frac{\partial H}{\partial p_i} \) and \( \frac{dp_i}{dt} = -\frac{\partial
H}{\partial q_i} \). A little work shows then that we can exchange the roles
of \( q_i \) and \( -p_i \) with the same Hamiltonian. But you can't (in
general) swap position variables for each other, or momenta for each other, or
\( q_1 \) for \( -p_2 \), or even \( q_i \) for \( p_i \), etc.
The Dismal Science;
Enigmas of Chance;
Self-Centered
Posted at November 02, 2022 14:51 | permanent link
October 31, 2022
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, October 2022
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on public administration, political philosophy, social
epistemology, or the aims and methods of sociology. Also, most of my reading
this month was done at odd hours and/or while bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm
less reliable and more cranky than usual.
- T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead
- Mind candy: a re-telling of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" as (is
this really a spoiler?) parasite-porn horror. Amusing, and pleasingly creepy.
§
- Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky, Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland: Or, Why It's Amazing That Federal Programs Work at All, This Being a Saga of the Economic Development Administration as Told by Two Sympathetic Observers Who Seek to Build Morals on a Foundation of Ruined Hopes
- I realize this is some sort of classic of the public policy /
administration literature, so I am very late to this party, but
it's really good. One way to expound this --- not Pressman and
Wildavsky's, except once in passing early on --- is by an analogy with computer
programming. When legislators (or dictators or executives, whatever) proclaim
a policy, they state objectives and resources, and provide a sort of sketch of
how they think the resources should be used to achieve the objectives. This is
like getting requirements for a program and maybe some vague pseudo-code. The
job of the programmer is then to implement, to actually come up with a
program that runs. In the course of doing so one may discover all sorts of
things about the original specification which will often call for it to be
revised. If multiple programmers need to implement different parts of the
specification, they will have to coordinate somehow, and may find this hard.
If the program has to rely on other programs, let alone on other systems, well,
good luck coordinating.
§
- (Link is to the 3rd edition of 1984, which is in print, though I read the
2nd of 1979, and haven't had a chance to compare the two.)
- Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell
- Horror mind candy; all six stories (the last two are really novellas) share
a common mythology. Usually-reliable sources had praised Ballingrud's work, so
when I ran across a cheap copy I picked this up. I understand the praise,
because these are skillfully written (with an exception I will get to below),
but I didn't love it, for some mostly-me reasons:
- While many of the props are Lovecraftian
(ghouls,
sanity-destroying
artifacts, subterranean
English cannibal cults), the underlying metaphysics is much more
Christian-heretical
--- "Hell" is meant very literally, and human laws and interests and emotions
have great significance (if not necessarily validity) in Ballingrud's
cosmos-at-large. As I
have said
before, I have standards for my cosmic horror, and the merely Satanic does
not cut it.
- I think it's fair to say that basically every human emotion is depicted as
a snare of Hell, love very much included. In some moods I could go along for
such a ride, especially if it were presented with a lot more satirical humor,
but as this went on I merely found it unpleasant.
- Ballingrud's endings here are generally abrupt and weak. ("Skullpocket"
is a notable exception.)
So: some real merits, but I will not be seeking out more.
§
- Olúfémi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)
- (Note: The e in "Olúfémi" should also have a dot accent underneath, but every way I've tried to generate this makes my antiquated blogging software produce gibberish...)
- I picked this up because I'd liked
one
of the essays it was was based on, but wished
Táíwò would elaborate on the argument. (I also had
hopes of using it in the inequality class.) I was,
however, disappointed. The book is no clearer than the essays about key
concepts, such as "elite", "elite capture", "rooms", and what
non-elite-captured institutions would look like. It's a short book, but there
are many historical anecdotes, which are all overly-intricate. (Some of them
are inspiring, but the details simply aren't relevant.) Abstruse
philosophy-of-language ideas about conversational "common ground" are invoked
to explain phenomena which a few pages later are also explained as mere
fear-of-the-consequences, without any recognition of the tension. (There is a
big difference between actually creating false consciousness, and merely
intimidating people into saying things they don't believe.) It was a mistake
to expand the essay to this length, at least in this way.
- Now, there is a core idea here which I find persuasive, namely that those
with existing advantages will tend to use those advantages to play a
disproportionate, even dominating role in
any situation, undertaking or movement and to steer it to their
advantage, unless pretty severely checked by strong, and enforced,
institutional constraints.
That's Jo Freeman's
"tyranny of structurelessness" (cited by Táíwò), as well
as Robert
Michel's "iron law of oligarchy" (not cited). So far, so convincing.
- But let me push a little. Unless one imagines that everyone in a
movement is equally influential, it's mathematically necessary that the most
influential members, the elite, are disproportionately influential.
(Just build
the Lorenz curve of influence.) I admit this pretends that "influence" is
a one-dimensional numerical variable, but that'll be true of all sorts of
proxies for influence, like time other members of the movement spend attending
to you. At what point does this disproportionate influence tip over into
"elite capture"? If this is a matter of degrees rather than thresholds, how
ought one trade off the bad of elite capture against other desiderata, like
actually getting anything done? (Imagine every member of a movement of even
1,000 people speaking for just a minute on a
decision, and
being listened to.)
- These are, of course, very old questions of democratic theory. Liberalism
has at
least evolved some
answers, by now boringly familiar: leadership through formal representation,
accountability of representatives to members through regular elections,
competition between rival factions of would-be leaders, etc. --- in short, the
threat of members throwing the bums out will keep the would-be bums in line.
These have their own issues (throwing the bums out can be
a collective
action problem, which must be preceded
by collective
cognition), but, at least here, Táíwò doesn't seem to even dismiss
the liberal-democratic stand-bys as inadequate, not suited to progressive
movements, or what-have-you.
- I realize this all amounts to wishing Táíwò had written a different book,
but I do.
§
- (On the question of "identity politics", which actually gets comparatively
little space in the book, I can't help boggling at a line Táíwò quotes from
Barbara Smith, one of
the founders of
the Combahee
River Collective, explaining why they needed to introduce a new kind of
politics in the late 1970s: "We, as black women, we actually had a right to
create political priorities and agendas and actions and solutions based in our
experiences". The reason I boggle is that was a well-developed
political theory in the 1970s which stood solidly behind groups organizing
politically to articulate and advance agendas based on their common interests,
values and ascriptive identities, including allying with other groups likewise
pursuing their agendas. That theory was good old fashioned American
interest-group pluralism. If the leading advocates of pluralism lacked the
imagination to apply it to black women (or black lesbians, or...), that wasn't
a fault in the theory. To be fair, leftist political theory
at the time was coming from a place where the only legitimate group to advocate
for itself was the organized working class...)
- T. Kingfisher, The Twisted Ones
- Arthur Machen, The House of Souls
- Mind candy, seasonal. The Kingfisher novel begins with a middle-aged
person traveling from Pittsburgh to North Carolina to clear out a relative's
house and storage unit, a scenario I instantly identified with, and from there
builds the strangeness and tension very satisfyingly. It's the first Kingfisher I've read, but it certainly won't be the last.
- The Twisted Ones is avowedly based on Machen's short story
"The White People", collected in House of Souls, so I finally read
Machen. (I previously knew of him just as one of Lovecraft's influences, but,
well, there were many, of varying quality.) There's a lot of genuinely good
creepy stuff in here, but it's also often hard to tell whether, when Machen
mentions nameless abominations, he's talking about genuinely indescribable
cosmic horrors, or just being prudish about sex.
- Spoiler-y inter-textual commentary for The Twisted Ones: I strongly suspect that some aspects of the visit of our hero to the city of the white people are homages to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness: both feature series of murals depicting the history of the city as its population dwindles over the ages, and the city is ultimately taken over by servitors
of the original inhabitants, shoggoths for Lovecraft, and von Neumann-esque self-reproducing magical automata for Kingfisher.
§
- Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread
- Popular social science. The hook here is explaining what the hell has gone
wrong with our politics / culture / thoughts in general over the last decade or
so. What O'Connor and Weatherall actually do is explain, clearly but
carefully, a range of models of social learning and social influence, intended
to model how the social organization of a scientific community helps, or
hinders, that community's pursuit of truth. (They tend to be Bayesians, and so
presume that the truth is always an available option, rather than something
that needs to be actually discovered; but
I have a thing about this.) In
later chapters, they consider how these social processes can be manipulated or
subverted by interested parties, especially industrial propagandists. (The
last part draws on Oreskes and Conway's great Merchants of
Doubt, which I will review Any Year Now). Because of the authors'
institutional affiliations, this counts as philosophy of science, but you could
equally well see it as theoretical sociology (*). This is all skillfully done.
- The last chapter gestures at applying the models to explain why our
contemporary information environment is so awful, especially online. I say
"gestures" because they don't really try to establish any very serious results
here. I don't think they ever even try to document that, in aggregate, people
are more mis-informed now than in, say, 1980 or 1960. As I've said
before, I have a strong suspicion that the difference isn't
the quantity of craziness, but its condensation into blobs
of shared insanity. (The proverbial "tin-foil hat brigade" has indeed
become a brigade.) If that's true, models of network learning would
be a natural candidate to explain the development...
- While I have gone on at some length about the last chapter, I am inclined
to cut it a lot of slack as mere marketing. Two philosophers writing a
non-technical account of social learning in networks, even a very clear and
engaging account, might lead to a few course adoptions. (I myself would
be very happy to use those chapters in a class on social learning
or collective
cognition, following their verbal explanations with the technicalities.)
Claiming to explain "the misinformation age" will move a lot more copies, which
I can't begrudge them. And the phenomena they describe are probably
part of the story...
§
- *: I'd say "sociological theory", but that name is pre-empted by a sort of
hazing ritual, in which newcomers are initiated into the tribe by means of
textual ancestor worship, and the relative strength of different tribal
segments is reflected in exactly which ancestors get worshiped.
- Daniel Rigney, The Matthew Effect: How Advantage Begets Further Advantage
- This is mostly a rather pedestrian review of literature on sources of
cumulative advantage in science, the economy, aspects of democratic politics,
and education. There are places where the book is clearly trying to be popular
social science, but it just doesn't have the spark, or the clear lines of
argument. The one exception is actually the first chapter, on
how Robert Merton
introduced the term "Matthew Effect", and how it fitted into his larger
programs in the sociology of science and general sociology.
- I'll keep this around to mine for references, but even those will be
increasingly antiquated...
§
- John H. Goldthorpe, Sociology as a Population Science
- On the advice of readers, I have spun off my remarks into
a separate
review (and expanded them to 800-odd
words). §
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
The Progressive Forces;
Teaching: Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
Commit a Social Science;
The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts;
Networks;
Philosophy;
Cthulhiana;
Actually, "Dr. Internet" Is the Name of the Monsters' Creator
Posted at October 31, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
August 31, 2022
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, August 2022
Attention
conservation notice: I have no qualifications to opine on early 20th
century Russian and Mongolian history, or even on crackpots.
- Craig Alanson, Columbus Day and SpecOps
- Mind-cotton-candy science fiction. I use the phrase "cotton candy"
deliberately: it's pure diverting fluff of no substance whatsoever. I
appreciated the diversion, but feel no compulsion to read any further in what
is evidently a long series. It did, however, inspire me to re-read William
Tenn's
magnificent "The
Liberation of Earth", which deserves to be retained as a precious part of
our common cultural heritage. §
- Richard Stark, Nobody Runs Forever
- Mind candy crime fiction. This is a Parker novel, which is to say coolly
detached competence porn set among professional criminals --- with emotional
amateurs providing contrast and heaps of Plot. I found it
refreshing. §
- James Palmer, The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia
- The life and times of an orientalist crackpot who rode the Russian Civil
War to enacting a reign of terror in Inner Asia checks so many of my boxes that
I have avoided reading this for years, lest it disappoint. Far from doing so,
it was a treat. The subtitle is a bit inaccurate (as Palmer explains clearly,
there was a
khan, and he was a
Mongol). But the book itself is clear, amused (when appropriate), humane,
learned (when appropriate) and lively.
§
Constant readers (if I have any left) will notice that this was not a lot of
books. This is because I am now engaged in a very time- and attention-
consuming project which will occupy me for the foreseeable future. My
collaborator in this endeavor requests that I not blog about it, but I am
allowed to describe it
by linking to
an emblematic image. I like to imagine that the satyr is playing the pipes
because he and the nymph have learned that it is, paradoxically, actually the
only way to get their baby to sleep.
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime;
Afghanistan and Central Asia;
Psychoceramica;
Writing for Antiquity;
The Running-Dogs of Reaction
Posted at August 31, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
July 31, 2022
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, July 2022
Attention conservation notice:: I have no taste, and no qualifications to
opine on the Italian Renaissance, political philosophy, intellectual history,
or even game theory.
- Niccolò Machiavelli, Selected Political Writings: The Prince, Selections from The Discourses, Letter to Vettori (edited and translated by David Wootton)
- I have, of course, no qualifications to opine on translations of
Machiavelli, but having worked my way through a fair number of versions
of The Prince over the years, this is easily the most-readable one
I've run across. (Wootton's introduction, in particular, is a remarkable
production in its own right --- I'd say more but I don't want to spoil the
effect!) It would be easy to treat these works as mere documents,
artifacts illustrating a dead past, of merely-historical relevance. This
translation makes them feel remarkably like a part of arguments we could be
having right now, maybe are having right now.
- Admittedly there is a cost to this --- when Wootton has Machiavelli use
contemporary expressions like "political mechanism" or "social structure", I
for one am curious about what the actual phrasing was. (If it really was
"political mechanism", that'd be very interesting for
the history of mechanism, so I suspect it wasn't.) But
if I truly cared about that, I could consult other translations,
or for that matter the original text. And the difficulties of trying to
be more word-for-word literal are well-illustrated by Wootton's practice of parenthetically marking every place where Machiavelli used virtù (or one of its derivatives --- on p. 191 alone this has to be translated as, variously, "skill", "effect" and "will-power".
- One thing reading this leaves me pondering is how to interpret
The Prince: when (if ever?) was he speaking sincerely; when was he
being ironic; when was he unmasking hypocrisy by plainly describing what his
contemporaries were doing* (in a spirit I might characterize as somewhere
between "I learned it from you" and "you say you want results,
I'll tell you how to get results"); when was he using
coded, "Aesopian"
language to talk safely about dangerous matters; and when was he trying to make
himself appear useful
to dangerous
gangsters
and blasphemous grifters
in the hopes they'd give him a desperately-needed job? (These are not mutually
exclusive and I can well imagine him being especially pleased with himself when
passages worked in multiple ways at once.)
- The Discourses, by contrast, seem much more straightforwardly
sincere. (Unless: maybe that's just what he wanted us to think!) But I will
just mention two things which intrigued me. (1) I presume it's well-known to
scholars, but new to me, that the famous opening to Gibbon's Decline and
Fall about the age of the Antonines is clearly
ripped off from elaborating on book I, chapter 10 of
the Discourses. (Except for the bits in Gibbon about religion,
which are from Machiavelli's book I, chapter 11.) (2) Has anyone written a
good comparison between Machiavelli
and ibn Khaldun,
especially their ideas about institutions, personal character, and cycles of
political founding, decay and re-formation? It's very interesting to see two
inheritors of ancient political philosophy trying to found a generalizing
science of politics based on historical examples, and I'm equally intrigued
by the similarities and the differences. (Virtù is not how you say 'asabiyya in Italian, and neither is arete, but...)
- This concludes this episode of my nattering about books I am not entitled
to judge. §
- ObLinkage: Previously on Wootton on Machiavelli.
- *: Thus on Ferdinand of
Aragon, ch. 21 begins "if you think about his deeds, you will find them all noble", but by
the end of the paragraph, "exploiting religion, he practiced a pious cruelty,
expropriating and expelling from his kingdom the Marranos: an act without
parallel and truly despicable" (pp. 67--68).
- Alain Bensoussan, Jens Frehse and Phillip Yam, Mean Field Games and Mean Field Type Control Theory
- Mean field games are ones where each player's payoff depends on the
distribution of states (or actions) across the other players, not on what any
particular individual does. There are some interesting mathematical questions
which arise when we consider the limit of an infinitely large population.
(Each finite-dimensional individual then confronts the results of their joint
actions as an alien and infinite-dimensional force.) In particular, the way
large-but-finite-population games converge on infinite-population
limits is related to some convergence issues in a long-simmering project, so I
have been trying to educate myself about this topic. As part of that
self-education, I have tried to explain my current understanding of
mean field games more fully in another place.
- This short book from 2013 is intended as a sort of crash course in mean
field games (and the related mean field control problems). It presumes a lot
of familiarity with
mathematical control
theory, partial differential equations
and stochastic
differential equations, but less with
(e.g.) convergence
of stochastic processes or even conventional game theory. In common with,
it appears, most of the literature, it limits itself to settings where agents'
internal states and exterior actions are all continuous, but it does consider
both a single homogeneous population of agents, and the setting where agents
are separated into a fixed number of discrete types (with the population of
each type going to infinity together). It was useful for my purposes, which
was giving me some orientation to the literature, but I imagine there must be
better introductions now available.
- If you are the sort of person who finds
this intriguing, the odds are very good that you have access to
the electronic version
from the publisher, which is honestly probably all you
need. §
- Don S. Lemons, An Introduction to Stochastic Processes in Physics
- This is very much intended as a first book on probability and
stochastic processes for physics undergrads, and as such I imagine
it'd work pretty successfully. I stopped being a physics undergrad 29 years
ago, and will review the book for teachers of this material, not learners. (I.e.,
I won't explain common jargon.)
- Lemons starts with very basic discrete and continuous distributions, spends
a lot of time on Gaussians and moment generating functions, including a sketch
of using moment generating functions to derive the central limit theorem. He
then tries to describe continuous-time Gaussian processes, specifically the
Wiener process and the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes. The viewpoint is
essentially: take a deterministic ordinary differential equation, of the kind
we know and love from physics courses,
and throw a
random-variable term into the right-hand side, i.e., more or less the way
Langevin proceeded Back in the Day.
(Langevin's key paper
is included in translation.)
- Lemons does a remarkable job of "solving" such stochastic differential
equations by assuming that the solution is a Gaussian process, so all that's
needed are the first and second moments as functions of time; getting ODEs for
those moments; and solving those ODEs. It is, in short, a heroic attempt to
act as though the theory of stochastic processes stopped
with Chandrasekhar
1943. (The
name "Ito"
does not appear anywhere in the text.) Now, in deriving his solutions, Lemons
pulls off some tricks which make me think that (unlike some physicists writing
about stochastics) he does know Ito calculus, but doesn't mention it
explicitly
lest he be prosecuted by his less enlightened fellow
tribesmen so as to not frighten off the children. I hesitate to say
that this is unwise --- I presume that it's worked pedagogically for Lemons ---
but what is unwise is not letting the reader know that there is a more
advanced, i.e., both more flexible and more internally consistent, theory of
SDEs, a theory which is certainly within the ability of physicists to master.
(Cf.) In fact, I think that if
Lemons had tried to teach Ito calculus to larval physicists, he'd have
done a good job, which exaggerates my disappointment.
- Over-all, if I had read this when I was in the intended audience, it would
probably have done me a lot of good, but now I think my main use for this will
be to mine it for examples to use as homework problems the next time
I teach
SDEs. §
- Steven Cassedy, What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning?
- I have struggled with the expression "meaning of life" for as long as I can
remember, because I can't understand how "life" can be something like a message
or a sign that means anything (outside of
some very special
circumstances). Cassedy is similarly puzzled: the way he puts it (I
paraphrase a little) is that if someone could say "the meaning of life is X"
(not that most people ever fill in X), one should be equally able to say "life
means X", and, well, life is not a message or a sign. By a slight extension of
this original sense, "meaning" also conveys "intention, purpose", and one could
make sense of "the purpose of life is X" or "life is intended to do X", though
it raises the question of whose intention or purpose.
- What Cassedy does in this book is try to trace the history of how the
phrases, and the ideas, of "the meaning of life" and "a meaningful life" became
so ubiquitous in English and other languages. The starting point is
Greco-Roman and Hebrew antiquity, where, he argues, there is simply no such
concept. He then traces its pre-history, through the Christian fathers
(especially Augustine) and the early modern period. "The meaning of life", he
argues, first emerged in German, in the Romantic period, and spread from there,
into English, French and Russian. (He has a convincing-to-me discussion of the
German word involved, Sinn, but since my knowledge of German mostly
relates to linear algebra and public transit, I am not competent to judge.)
The phrase got further popularized in English through translations of the great
19th century Russian authors, especially Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, who were of
course influenced by the German usage. (Again, Cassedy goes over the history
and usage of the Russian words translated as "meaning", but I know no Russian
at all.)
- Finally, he locates the real tipping point in post-war America, in the
writings of the immigrant German theologian Paul Tillich, where "meaning"
became a way of talking about God without having to affirm, or even explicitly
mention, traditional supernatural dogmas --- but also without denying them,
either. At the present, he concludes, it is the very slipperiness of "meaning"
which makes it so ubiquitous: if people had to spell out exactly what they
were trying to say, it would be less effective (and they might realize they
don't know themselves what they're saying).
- I found this fascinating and drily funny, but then I'm
philistine
anima-blind reconciled to living in a blind, purposeless universe, the fortuitous product
of the concourse of atoms and void, where I get to be one of those safely on shore watching storms at sea
lucky enough to not need this particular analgesic. §
- Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York: Knopf, 1979)
- This is a learned and gracefully written book which goes into a lot of the
details of how Italian city states --- mostly but not exclusively north of Rome
--- formed, struggled, were run, and eventually got absorbed (for the most
part) into larger polities. I learned a lot about the internal political
machinations, especially about institutional devices which, whatever their
republican intentions, ended up helping to perpetuate oligarchy. Thus the
"power" part.
- The "imagination" is the high culture, especially art and humanism.
Martines, for his part, sees this as ideology, and ideology in the service of
upper class interests. While a lot of that is convincing, there do seem to be
two gaps in his argument there. One is that he never grapples with
why this art continues to be meaningful to people all over the world,
centuries later, in ways which earlier and later art, equally in the service of
related upper classes, just isn't.
(Cf.) He does, to be fair,
raise the parallel issue with humanistic scholarship, and says that
the humanists made some "objective" discoveries of lasting value, but doesn't
address how that was possible in a basically-ideological enterprise. The other
defect, which I suspect is related, is that he doesn't really explain why
serving upper class interests in this time and place should have required such
an astonishingly large amount of innovation in technique. He's
certainly aware of it: his first two pages of illustrations contrast
a Florentine painting
from the 1270s (basically still Byzantine)
with one from
1426 (that might as well be from another world), and he has perceptive
things to say about the development of artistic and literary styles. But these
two issues --- why there was so much artistic and intellectual
innovation, and why we still value the results --- are just not things he
really tries to explain.
- In the end, Martines gives the impression that he thinks of his subjects,
the upper classes of the Italian city states, extraordinary but also horrible,
and I can't help think that by the last chapters he was somewhat sick of
them, and that in describing the Italian wars that began in 1494 he was (as the
saying goes) "rooting for injuries". If so, it's hard not to sympathize. §
- (I have not seen the paperback edition [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988], but I can't find any indication of revisions.)
- Fernand Braudel, Out of Italy: Two Centuries of World Domination and Demise (translated by Siân Reynolds from Le Modèle italien [Paris: Éditions Arthaud, 1989], but first published in Italian {Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1974])
- I picked this up because I ran across a cheap copy and
had been
impressed by my earlier exposure to Braudel. This is wide-ranging and
amiable, but I ended it with no clear idea of what Braudel was trying to argue,
and very confused by what, exactly, he meant when he referred to something as a
historical "problem" --- and he talks about problems incessantly. (And he's
weirdly confident about what he knows are exceedingly tenuous estimates of
economic conditions.) I half suspect the key to the book is a seemingly
throw-away remark in the last chapter that "Everyone thinks for instance that
'France under the Sun King,' Louis XIV, was 'greater' than Francce under de
Gaulle, but the 'inferior' France of the 1960s had a population two or three
times greater and was many times richer". In conclusion: maybe worth reading
if you are studying Braudel himself (or mid-20th-century historiography, etc.).
Yes, I fully realize just how presumptuous it is of me to say such a
thing. §
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Writing for Antiquity;
Philosophy;
Enigmas of Chance;
The Dismal Science;
Physics
Posted at July 31, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
June 30, 2022
Book to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, June 2022
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on the (linked) decay of our infrastructure and our institutions, or to evaluate
books on pregnancy (but then neither does that author).
- Walter Jon Williams, Lord Quillifer
- Mind-candy fantasy, competence-porn division. I very much enjoyed the
latest installment in Quillifer's adventures and mis-adventures, but you
really need to have read the previous books (1, 2) to get anything out of this. §
- Emily Oster, Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong --- and What You Really Need to Know
- There are two hooks here. (Neither is that the "conventional pregnancy
wisdom" is all wrong.) One is Oster bringing the clarity
of decision
theory to pregnancy: let the doctors tell us the probabilities of outcomes
under various contingencies, then let pregnant women come up with their
utilities for those outcomes and decide which risks are worth it. The other
hook is that Oster actually understands study design, and pokes at the medical
literature on pregnancy and child-bearing to see which bits of it can support
any weight. I am much more persuaded by the second part than by the first, if
only because I had independently read a bunch of the same studies Oster and
came to similar evaluations. The medical literature isn't all on a
level with the Journal of
Evidence-Based Haruspicy, but a surprisingly large part of it comes
shocking close. I'm sure there are real obstacles to doing better, but it
wouldn't hurt the medical system to admit how little confidence
they ought to have.
- As for the decision theory, well, I just defy anyone to actually implement
that ideal. To repeat a favorite
anecdote from the great
Persi Diaconis:
Some years ago I was trying to decide whether or not to move to
Harvard from Stanford. I had bored my friends silly with endless discussions.
Finally, one of them said, "You're one of our leading decision theorists.
Maybe you should make a list of costs and benefits and try to roughly calculate
your expected utility." Without thinking, I blurted out, "Come on, Sandy, this
is serious." That said, I did appreciate Oster's efforts
at providing actual estimates of various probabilities, however imperfect. §
- ObLinkage1: I am
sure this
will cause all kinds of awkwardness at the farmers' market. I find the
criticisms of Oster in that essay unfair, despite agreeing that public
policy is needlessly mean and has, in many ways, grown meaner over my lifetime.
The flaws of public policy around parenting, pregnancy, etc. are not Oster's
fault; they're not even the economists' fault collectively; it seems fine
to not go into policy in a book of advice to prospective
mothers, even if you think policy is very important.
- ObLinkage2: This puts many of Oster's anecdotes about her own mother in a different (and more impressive) light.
- NoLinkage: I am vaguely aware that Oster has made herself controversial
with ideas about how to respond to the pandemic. I haven't followed that, I
have no opinion on it, I don't see how it's relevant (one way or the other)
to this book, and I don't intend to learn anything about this matter, if I can
help it.
- Chris Raschka, Charlie Parker Played Be Bop
- I thank Dmitri Tymoczko for bringing this to my attention.
- Chris Ferrie and Marco Tomamichel, Blockchain for Babies
- I blame Dmitri Tymoczko for bringing this to my attention, and will
not dignify it with a purchase link.
- Thomas Thwaites, The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch
- What it says on the label: an art student tries to build a toaster, from
raw materials sourced from Great Britain. Whether he succeeds is a matter of interpretation, but
many valuable lessons about technology, knowledge, materials, the division of labor in
society, and the nature of the built environment are learned along the way.
Recommended if you can enjoy, or even just tolerate, wry, self-deprecating,
Very British humor. §
- Anna Clark, The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy
- I think it's fair to say that this is the standard account of the Flint
disaster, and it should be: it's well-written, impassioned, meticulous without
being overwhelming, and provides a lot of important context. That said,
there are a few points where I want to push back a little on some things
Clark seems to imply.
- In Flint, when ordinary people complained that their water was bad, blamed
it for all sorts of mysterious medical complaints, and disbelieved official
reassurances, the plain people of Flint were, in fact, right. But when
ordinary people complain about MMR or Covid vaccines, blame them for all sorts
of mysterious medical complaints, and disbelieve official reassurances, they
are very, very wrong. (Anyone taking this as an occasion to send me anti-vax
rubbish will be piped to /dev/null.) I don't expect Clark to give us the tools
to differentiate between these two cases, in a principled way which could help
readers going forward --- she's a journalist, not a prescriptive social
epistemologist! But I do wish her writing showed some awareness of this
pitfall of celebrating the wisdom of the common folk.
- Relatedly, "hundreds of protesters bang[ing] on the locked doors of the
ornate capitol building, shaking its wood panels" as the legislature tries to
go about the ordinary business of democratic self-government (p. 167) --- well,
that registers a little differently now, doesn't it?
Let me re-iterate that this is a really good book, which I strongly recommend. §
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Natural Science of the Human Species;
The Beloved Republic;
The Continuing Crises;
The Great Transformation;
Scientifiction and Fantastica
Posted at June 30, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
June 21, 2022
Upcoming Talk: "Matching Random Features"
Attention
conservation notice: You have better things to do with an hour of your
precious, finite life than staring at a screen while an academic tries
to give a hand-wavy summary and advertisement for
technical work on abstruse problem you don't care about.
I will be talking on Random-Feature Matching to
the One
World Approximate Bayesian Computation Seminar at 8:30 am Eastern time (=1:30 pm UK time) on
Thursday, 23 June. If you are interested in simulation-based inference
but have not (oddly) read my paper, or if you just want to marvel at how bad
someone can be at giving a Zoom talk, two years on, please join. (Details on getting access to the Zoom session can be had by
following that last link.)
Let me take this opportunity to thank the organizer both for the invitation,
and for not insisting on the usual seminar time of 9:30 am UK time.
Self-centered;
Enigma of Chance
Posted at June 21, 2022 14:11 | permanent link
Course Announcement: "Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination" (36-313)
Attention
conservation notice: Advertisement for a course you won't take, at a university you don't attend, in which very human and passionately contentious topics deliberately have all the life sucked from them, leaving only the husk of abstractions and the dry bones of methodology.
In the fall I will, again, be teaching my class on inequality
36-313, Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination
9 units
Time and place: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:25 -- 2:45 pm, in Wean Hall (WEH) 6403 (tentatively)
Description: Many social questions about inequality, injustice and unfairness are, in part, questions about evidence, data, and statistics. This class lays out the statistical methods which let us answer questions like Does this employer discriminate against members of that group?, Is this standardized test biased against that group?, Is this decision-making algorithm biased, and what does that even mean? and Did this policy which was supposed to reduce this inequality actually help? We will also look at inequality within groups, and at different ideas about how to explain inequalities between groups. The class will interweave discussion of concrete social issues with the relevant statistical concepts.
Prerequisites: 36-202 ("Methods for Statistics and Data Science") (and so also 36-200, "Reasoning with Data"), or similar with permission of the instructor
Last year was the first time I got to teach it, and it was a mixed
experience. The students who stuck with it were, gratifyingly, uniformly very
happy with it (and I am pretty sure they learned a lot!). But it also had the
biggest "melt" of any class I've taught, with fully half of those who initially
signed up for it eventually dropping it. The most consistent reason why --- at
least, the one they felt comfortable telling me! --- was that they were
expecting something with a lot more arguing about politics, and a lot less math
and data analysis. I have taken this feedback to heart, and decided to do
even more math and data analysis.
Tentative topic schedule
Slightly more than one week per. A more detailed listing, with related readings, can be
found on the class
homepage.
- "Recall": Reminders about probability and statistics: populations, distribution
within a population, distribution functions, joint and conditional probability;
samples and inference from samples.
- Income and wealth inequality: What does the distribution of income
and wealth look like within a population? How do we describe population
distributions, especially when there is an extreme range of values (a big
difference between the rich and poor)? Where does the idea of "the 1%"
wealthy elite come from? How has income inequality changed over recent
decades?
Statistical tools: measures of central tendency (median, mode, mean),
of dispersion, and of skew; measures of dispersion (standard deviation etc.); measures of concentration and inequality (ratios between percentiles, the Lorenz curve, Gini coefficient); the concept of "heavy tails" (the largest
values being orders of magnitude larger than typical values); log-normal
and power law distributions; fitting distributions to existing data;
positive feedback, multiplicative growth and "cumulative advantage" processes.
- Speed-run through social and economic stratification: Reminders (?) about social concepts:
ascriptive and attained social statuses, and qualitative/categorical vs. more-or-less dimensions of differentiation. Important forms of differentiation, including (but not necessarily limited to): sex, gender, income, wealth, consumption, caste, race, ethnicity, citizenship, class, order, education. The legal notion of "protected categories".
- Income disparities: How does income (and wealth) differ across groups? How do we compare average or typical values? How do we compare entire
distributions? How have income inequalities by race and sex changed over recent decades?
Statistical tools: permutation tests for differences in mean (and other
measures of the average); two-sample tests for differences in distribution;
bootstrapping;
inverting tests to find the range of differences compatible with the data;
the "analysis of variance" method of comparing populations;
the "relative distribution" method of comparing populations
- Explaining, or explaining away, inequality: To what
extent can differences in outcomes between groups be explained by differences
in their attributes (e.g., explaining differences in incomes by differences
in marketable skills)? How should we go about making such adjustments? Is
it appropriate to treat discrimination as the "residual" left unexplained?
When does adjusting or controlling for a variable contribute to an
explanation, and when is it "explaining away" discrimination? What would it
mean to control for race, sex or gender?
Statistical tools: Observational causal inference; using
regression to "control for" multiple variables at once, with both linear
models and nonparametrically (by means of matching or nearest-neighbors);
using graphical models to represent causal relations between variables; how
to use graphical models to decide what should and what should not be
controlled for; the causal model implicit in decisions about controls.
- Detecting discrimination in hiring, admissions, etc.: Do employers discriminate in
hiring (or schools in admission, etc.)? How can we tell? When are
differences in hiring rates evidence for discrimination? How do statistical
perspectives on this question line up with legal criteria for "disparate
treatment" and "disparate impact"?
Statistical tools: tests for differences in proportions or
probabilities; adjusting for applicant characteristics (again)
- Inequalities in health, disease and mortality: Quantifying differences in the incidence of diseases, in death rates, and in life expectancy. The "deaths of despair" controversy.
Statistical tools: differences in proportions and probabilities again; survival analysis and survival curves; some of the elements of demography.
- Mobility and Transmission of Inequality: What does it mean to talk about social mobility? Conversely, what doe it mean to say inequality can be transmitted from one generation to the next? What are the mechanisms this happens through? What are the large-scale patterns about mobility and transmission, over the last few decades?
Statistical tools: correlations; conditional probability modeling;
Markov models.
- Measuring segregation: What do we mean by "segregation"? Segregation in law ("de jure") and
segregration in fact ("de facto"). Different ways of measuring de facto
segregation. Trends in de facto racial segregation since the end of de jure
racial segregation. Why different measures of segregation give different
results. Segregation by income. Segregation by political partisanship.
Consequences of segregation. Inter-generational transmission again.
Statistical tools: Standard measures of segregation; more
recent measures of segregation based on information theory; spatial correlation; how do we make adjustments for changing distributions?
- Algorithmic bias and/or fairness: Can predictive or decision-making algorithms be
biased? What would that even mean? Do algorithms trained on existing data
necessarily inherit the biases of the world? What notions of fairness or
unbiased can we actually implement for algorithms? What trade-offs are
involved in enforcing different notions of fairness? Are "risk-prediction
instruments" fair?
Statistical tools: Methods for evaluating the accuracy of predictions;
differential error rates across groups; decision trees; optimization and multi-objective
optimization.
- Standardized tests: Are standardized tests for school
admission biased against certain racial groups? What does it mean to
measure qualifications, and how would we know whether tests really are
measuring qualifications? What does it mean for a measurement to be biased?
When do differences across groups indicate biases? (Disparate impact
again.) Why correlating outcomes with test scores among admitted
students may not make sense. The "compared to what?" question.
Statistical tools: Predictive validity; differential
prediction; "conditioning on a collider"
- Intelligence tests: Are intelligence tests biased? How do
we measure latent attributes? How do we know the latent attributes even
exist? What would it mean for there to be such a thing as "general
intelligence", that could be measured by tests? What, if anything, do
intelligence tests measure? What rising intelligence test results (the
Flynn Effect) tell us?
Statistical tools: correlation between test scores; factor
models as an explanation of correlations; estimating factor values from
tests; measurement invariance; alternatives to factor models; item
response theory
- Measuring attitude and prejudice: How do we measure people's feelings about different groups? Why do different measures give different results? Do "implicit association tests" measure
unconscious biases? What, if anything, do implicit
association tests measure?
Statistical tools: More on measurement; the distinction between
reliability and validity; why it's much easier to quantify reliability than
validity; approaches to "construct validity".
- Evaluating inequality-reducing interventions: If we try to do something to reduce inequality, how do we know whether or not it worked? How do we design a good study of an intervention? How do we pool information from
multiple studies? What can we do if only bad studies are available? Do implicit bias interventions
change behavior? Does having a chief diversity officer increase faculty
diversity? What does, in fact, seem to work?
Statistical tools: Design and analysis of studies; experimental design: selecting measurements
of outcomes, and the importance of randomized studies; meta-analytic
methods for combining information
- Policing and crime: When do differences in traffic stops, arrests, or police-caused deaths
indicate discrimination? How do we know how many traffic stops, arrests and
police-caused deaths there are to begin with? Does "profiling" or "statistical
discrimination" make sense for the police, whether or not it's socially
desirable? How can the same group be simultaneously
over- and under- policed?
Statistical tools: test for differences in proportions; signal
detection theory; adjusting for systematically missing data; self-reinforcing equilibria
- Self-organizing inequalities and "structural" or "systematic"
inequalities: Models of how inequalities can perpetuate themselves
even when nobody is biased. Models of how inequalities can appear
even when nobody is biased. The Schelling model of spatial segregation as a
"paradigm". How relevant are Schelling-type models to actual, present-day
inequalities?
Statistical tools: Agent-based models; models of social
learning and game theory.
- Statistics and its history: The development of statistics
in the 19th and early 20th century was intimately tied to the eugenics
movement, which was deeply racist and even more deeply classist (but also
often anti-sexist). The last part of the course will cover this history, and
explain how many of the intellectual tools we have gone over to document, and
perhaps to help combat, inequality and discrimination were invented by people
who wanted to use them for quite different purposes. The twin learning
objectives for this section are for students to grasp something of this
history, and to grasp why the "genetic fallacy", of judging ideas by where
they come from (their "genesis") is, indeed, foolish and wrong.
Statistical tools: N/A.
- How do we know what we do about inequalities?
Social data-collection systems and institutions. Measurement again, and
measurement as a social process. Difficulties in reducing social reality to
data; the case of race in the US census as an example. What systematic data
collection leaves out.
Evaluation
There will be one problem set per week; each of these homeworks will involve
some combination of (very basic) statistical theory, (possibly less basic)
calculations using the theory we've gone over, and analysis of real data sets
using the methods discussed in class. There will also be readings for each
class session, and a short-answer quiz after each session will combine
questions based on lecture content with questions based on the readings.
There will be no exams.
My usual policy is to drop a certain number of homeworks, and a certain
number of lecture/reading questions, no questions asked. The number of
automatic drops isn't something I'll commit to here and now (similarly, I won't
make any promises here about the relative weight of homework
vs. lecture-related questions).
Textbook, Lecture Notes
There is, unfortunately, no one textbook which covers the material we'll go
over at the required level. You will, instead, get very detailed lecture notes
after each lecture. There will also be a lot of readings from various books
and articles. (I will not agree with every reading I assign.)
Teaching: Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination;
Corrupting the Young;
Enigmas of Chance;
Commit a Social Science
Posted at June 21, 2022 13:45 | permanent link
May 31, 2022
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, May 2022
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on the archaeology of the Southwest, the pre-history of diversity training, or
trends in American economic inequality.
- Walter Jon Williams, Metropolitan and City on Fire
- These are two novels Williams wrote in the '90s about intrigue and
machinations in a world-spanning city, where the geomantic forces generated by
covering the planet in concrete, metal and plastic are carefully harvested and
metered, and our heroine longs to smash it all. They're some of the best stuff Williams has ever done,
which is saying a lot. Strictly speaking, they are fantasy, even "urban
fantasy", but very much in the manner of well-thought-through science fiction.
- As a character, Aiah has something in common with
Williams's Caroline
Sula and even (when it comes to learning to lie and
manipulate) Dagmar
Shaw, but she is her own, vivid and plausible, person.
- I last read these in 1999; I re-read them because
Williams recently
said that the long, long delayed third volume will finally happen. I am very eager. §
- John Kantner, Ancient Puebloan Southwest
- This is a well-written, semi-popular account of the archaeology of the
American Southwest, focusing on the period from the rise of Chaco Canyon to the
early years of Spanish rule. The writing is mostly smooth and expository
(*), and I learned a lot of
fascinating-to-me details from it. Kantner does do the usual archaeologist
thing of making very confident-sounding assertions about social organization
which he must know are far more conjectural than he makes them
sound. (**) But this is par
for the archaeological course. If you have a non-expert interest in the
subject, and can handle the lack of a definite article in the title, this is a
worthwhile book. I would read a second edition. §
- *: Though inconsistently so;
he explains "inference", but not "dendrochronology" or "palynological". --- On
a different plane, Kantner persistently writes "inequity" (an evaluative,
qualitative judgment) when he should write "inequality" (a descriptive and
quantitative comparison). Unless, that is, he regards every
inequality as inequitable, which is his right but not something to be just
assumed... ^
- **: To paraphrase, he
does things like assert that a division of such-and-such a community into
"moieties" can be inferred from the construction of a wall dividing a building
in two. Or, again, there are assertions that a one community couldn't
have politically dominated another because the latter kept making pots
in its old way. This sort of thing just shows a failure of imagination. (I
used to part-own a house that had been built for one large family around 1900,
and later split with a wall down the middle. While Pittsburgh has some
peculiarities it does not divide duplex residents into two endogamous groups,
so that I am expected to regard all North-Halfers as some kind of kin.) It
also, I think, betrays a failure to check this sort of inference against cases
where much more is known about society and politics from written
records. ^
- Elisabeth
Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity
Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution
(2001)
- This is, obviously (?), a work of cultural criticism, but it's done with
the tools of a serious historian who is trying to excavate where
things like diversity training came from, and why they both emerged when and
where they did, and how they survived that initial context. To oversimplify
and exaggerate: the late 1960s/early 1970s were a weird time, when plenty of
people on the fringes of psychology felt entitled to make stuff up because it
sounded good and vibed with their politics, with very little reality-testing.
Add the "triumph of the therapeutic" and of self-esteem, plus corporate
concerns to ward off liability by claiming to do something (however
ineffective), plus the continuing attraction of racialist thinking under
another guise (*), and we get a mess.
- There are, equally obviously, some political and ethical commitments
animating this book, but they are transparent, and honestly ones I have a lot
of sympathy for, even if I suspect she and I would often disagree on concrete
policies. I would pay very good money to read Lasch-Quinn writing seriously
about 2020; unfortunately this is not the kind of work which can be done that
quickly, and anyway she seems to have moved on to other topics. §
- *: Lasch-Quinn does not use phrases like
"reinscribing an essentialized racial binary", but they would actually fit her
argument.
- Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
- A collection of journalistic essays. The formula each time is Kolbert
visiting some place --- an electrified anti-invasive fish barrier on the
reverse-flowing Chicago river, the mouth of the Mississippi, a cave in the
Nevada desert where a unique native fish species is being quixotically
maintained, the Great Barrier Reef, a carbon-sequestration site in Iceland ---
where she can see (as the saying went) "the Earth as transformed by
human action", and talk to the workers. Often enough, the reason these efforts
are necessary are dealing with side-effects of earlier efforts at
control, which Kolbert presents as ironic but unavoidable; we've gone too far
down this path to turn back now. (Though she doesn't say
so, we'd gone too far when
Gilgamesh was king in Uruk.) Stewart Brand is quoted, aptly; so is John
McPhee's classic The Control of Nature.
- Speaking of McPhee: this is one of the most New Yorker-y books
I've ever read. It has all the characteristic virtues: easy prose, lively (but
not startling) intelligence, an eye for detail expressed through original (but
not outlandish) metaphors, judiciously-chosen historical anecedotes,
sympathetic if amused pen-portraits of interesting characters; you come away
feeling like you've understood something, without having been taxed. I realize
my description may sound a bit barbed, because it is. On the one
hand, I want to acknowledge how hard such writing is to pull off ---
being scholarly and exhaustive actually takes much less effort and skill ---
and record my admiration, indeed my envy. But on the other hand, the reader
puts the book down feeling like they've understood something, without
necessarily having done so. On the topics where I know enough to think I
could judge (mostly having to do with climatology), Kolbert seems accurate,
which increases my confidence in the rest of her work. But somehow I was more
conscious of the art, and more suspicious of its effects, than I normally
am.
- This was the first book by Kolbert I've read; I will certainly read more.
§
- Gino C. Segrè and John D. Stack, Unearthing Fermi's Geophysics
- This is a perfectly nice little introduction to geophysics, suitable for
third- or fourth- year physics majors. (That is, you are expected to have
forgotten undergraduate classical mechanics, thermo, and E& M; fluid
and continuum mechanics are introduced here as needed.) The hook
here is that this is based on the notes for such a course which Fermi taught,
and which Segrè discovered in the archives. Of course it has been
vastly fleshed out (the authors reproduce selected pages from Fermi's notes,
and "telegraphic" hardly does it justice), and there are a few places where
it's been brought up to date, primarily by comparing Fermi's numerical figures
with modern measurements. There is thus no discussion of continental drift or
of climate change, to name just two important topics. Still, I
enjoyed the gimmick, and it's a nice introduction to interesting and important
topics in physics. I would imagine that it would suffer, in terms of classroom
use or even serious self-study, from lacking exercises. (It would be very
interesting to see Fermi's idea of good homework problems!) §
- Rebecca M. Blank, Changing Inequality
- This is essentially a huge exercise in comparing the American Community
Survey's economic statistics in 1979 with those in 2007. The headline is that
households at (almost) every level had substantially higher incomes in 2007
than in 1979, even after making all kinds of allowances for changes in the cost
of living (*). There was also vastly more inequality, particularly but
not only towards the top.
- The thing which makes this book more interesting than that sounds is the
way Blank does very careful comparisons --- she calls them "simulations" ---
why try to tease out the factors which have contributed to these shifts
(**). Thus she tries to work out how
much of the changes in typical incomes and in measures of inequality can be
explained by changes in family structure, by changes in labor-force
participation, by changes in income by education level, etc., leaving other
factors at their 1979 values. Thus she can give answers to questions like "How
much richer-but-unequal would we be just from our being more educated,
if salaries and marriage patterns still looks like 1979?" Or, rather, she can
give reasonable but still conjectural answers to such questions; any sort of
counterfactual assertion rests on untestable hypotheses.
- To summarize, much of the increase in typical household incomes comes from
increased female labor-force participation. Some of the increase
inequality is related; it comes from the increased tendency of highly educated
men to be married to highly educated women who also work in well-paid jobs.
But lots of the increasing inequality, which takes the form of higher
household incomes increasing much faster than those at the median (or
even the 80th percentile...) can't be explained in these ways. These findings
in turn let Blank say some sensible things about how different policies
might reduce inequality. (One finding, at first startling, is that bringing
every poor household up to the poverty line would actually do very little
to reduce inequality by any of the usual metrics.)
- This isn't a scintillating read, but it's serious, sober and (as we used to
say) reality-based. I read it in part as fodder for my inequality class, and I
am seriously considering having The Kids do (simplified) versions of Blank's
comparisons. If you have a serious concern with economic inequality, or social
change in America since the 1970s, this is very worth reading. §
- *: One important limitation to this conclusion, which Blank duly acknowledges, comes with this
data. Because the ACS doesn't track households from one year to another, it
doesn't let us saying anything about the stability or security of income. In
particular, it doesn't let us say whether a household at the median in 1979
could be more confident of staying at the median than their
counterparts in 2007. There
is evidence that incomes fluctuate
more now than they used to, which, if you believe standard economic theory,
would reduce the value of any given level of income. ^
- **: Mathematically,
I think what she does amounts to a piece-wise constant approximation
of
Handcock and
Morris's "relative distribution" method, which was
also invented for studying shifts in
inequality. But I haven't ground through the algebra and there might be
subtle differences. ^
- A. M. Stuart, Singapore Sapphire, Revenge in Rubies, Evil in Emerald
- Mind-candy historical mysteries, set in Singapore, mostly among
just-barely-genteel Britishers, in the years immediately before World War I.
Enjoyable period color, though family tradition requires me to make dark aside
about British imperialism as I read. §
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Scientifiction and Inequality;
The Dismal Science;
Writing for Antiquity;
Commit a Social Science;
The Progressive Forces;
Teaching: Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination;
Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime;
Tales of Our Ancestors;
Physics;
The Great Transformation;
Biology
Posted at May 31, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
May 28, 2022
Don't @ Me
Attention
conservation notice: Rationalizing my gut-level dislike of a social
medium as Objectively Correct. First drafted in mid-2017, left to rest in my
drafts folder because, while sincere, it feels a bit mean. Posted now because
I found myself re-writing the next-to-last paragraph.
If, as Leibniz has prophesied, libraries one day become cities,
there will still be dark and dismal streets and alleyways as there are
now. --- Lichtenberg
I mentioned, some years ago, that in response to reader requests I have a
Twitter account. I use this only
for announcing new posts here. Messages sent to it will go unread; attempts to
communicate through it will be fruitless.
I have, nonetheless, put some time over the years into observing Twitter; I
wish I had it back again. There are, so far I can see, only four good
uses for Twitter:
- Announcements of actual, substantive posts, resources or discussions
elsewhere. (But we have e-mail and RSS already.)
- Announcing off-line events, details given elsewhere.
- Snapshots of cute animals, pretty landscapes, children's birthday parties, and the like.
- Jokes.
For everything else, well, if someone had deliberately tried to combine the
worst features of comments sections and Usenet, they could hardly have done
better --- except by first imposing silly length restrictions, followed by
kludged-on threads that make Usenet seem a model of clear organization, plus of
course an interface that channels people towards the outrage
(or main
character) of the moment.
I don't know whether it makes people
unhappy and angry, or whether only unhappy, angry people persist in using it,
but I am not joking when I say that we would all be better off if it
disappeared immediately.
--- One of my long-held semi-crank notions is this: all online
communication, being through writing, reproduces the social dynamics of
literary communities,
especially print-literary
communities. This law holds independent of the educational level or even
intellectual seriousness of the participants. Thus flame-wars, sock-puppets,
selective quotation, trawling through the archive for discreditable episodes,
"the lurkers support me in
e-mail", creating
isolated fora to incubate increasingly weird
ideas, recycling from
supposedly-authoritative source texts long after they're debunked (if they
were ever bunked in the first place), spastic attention cascades
in
which "all
fandom was plunged into war", etc., escape from the pages of the little
magazines (such as
the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society), to become part of everyone's
life. Twitter has raised this to a new level of awfulness, by making it very
hard to actually contribute anything of value, or, having done so, for others
to find it and build on it, while still preserving the affordances for
weirdness, meanness, and spasm-proneness.
That is my opinion; and it is further my opinion that you people should get
off my lawn.
Update, 28 May 2022, further to the theme, in no particular order:
- C. Thi Nguyen, "Twitter, the Intimacy Machine"
- A. A. Forst, "The Poisoned Chalice of Hashtag", Catalyst 4:2 (Summer 2020) (*)
- Chris Hayes, "On the Internet, We're Always Famous", The New Yorker 24 September 2021
- Fonda Lee, "Twitter Is the Worst Reader"
- Momin Malik, Bias and Beyond in Digital Trace Data, Ph.D. Thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, 2018
*: Some comments on Frost's
review, without having read the book being reviewed. (1) I am, unsurprisingly,
extremely sympathetic to the position that hashtag activism is basically
futile. (If the authors really
neglect Tufekci's
empirical and theoretical work as much as Frost says they do, it's pretty
damning.) (2) Not examining right-wing hashtag activism seems like an obvious
analytical flaw. (Even if your primary interest is in left-wing movements, the
comparisons are essential.) (3) It's true that Twitter isn't accountable to
its users, or to the people-as-represented-by-government, but Frost for her
part never makes clear which of the flaws she identifies would be remedied by
such accountability. (4) Doing something about the opioid epidemic by
tinkering with drug policy seems a hell of a lot more practical to me that
doing something about it by overthrowing American capitalism, or even
reversing the trends in inequality over the last
half-century. (I would like to see those trends
reversed.) ^
Actually, "Dr. Internet" Is the Name of the Monsters' Creator;
Linkage;
Modest Proposals;
The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts
Posted at May 28, 2022 12:56 | permanent link
April 30, 2022
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, April 2022
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on U.S. politics, or the lives and works of 20th century Marxist intellectuals.
- Charles Willeford, Miami Blues and New Hope for the Dead
- Mind candy mystery: First two "Hoke Moseley" mystery novels, written and
set in Miaimi c. 1980. They're still funny and satisfying crime fiction, but
very much artifacts of a vanished age. (The cover of the in-print edition
of Miami Blues is more than usually misleading.) The community-college bits in Miami Blues, and
particularly the pontificating English professor, are made more amusing by
learning that Willeford's day job was, precisely, being an English professor at
a Miami community college. §
- Elizabeth Hand, Available Dark
- Sequel
to Generation
Loss, which I re-read. This time around, Cass gets mixed up with
the confluence of Nordic death metal, neo-paganism, bizarre art photography,
and Iceland's role in the financial crisis of 2008. Stirring this together
with drugs, booze, toxic nostalgia and her convincingly awful combination of
bad decisions and sudden insight produces truly absorbing Plot.
- Something which registered on the re-read of Generation Loss,
but which eluded me the first time around: Cass isn't from just any podunk town
in upstate New York, but from the literally haunted town in Hand's Black
Light, whose inhabitants have made a deal with, if not the Devil, then
at least a nasty avatar of Dionysus. I now believe that it is legitimate to
take Cass's visions not as [just] drug-induced hallucinations, but factual
descriptions of supernatural experiences. In particular, I think Cass is, if
not exactly a valkyrie or banshee, then something in that line, a
walking, talking, bourbon-and-meth-swilling, shutter-happy harbinger of doom,
and the birds know it. All of which said, these books are eminently enjoyable
on a "straight", non-fantastic level, which is a neat trick.
- I eagerly look forward to her further mis-adventures. §
- Graydon Saunders, A Succession of Bad Days
- Mind candy fantasy, the sorcerors' apprenticeship division: 900-or-so pages
of the education of wizards, in the same world as
Saunder's The
March North, with detailed thermodynamics. (It's not called
thermodynamics but I dare say anyone who will enjoy this will recognize what is
going on.) I did not enjoy this as much as I did The March North,
at least in part because all of the characters tend to sound too much the same,
i.e., like Saunders. But I enjoyed it enough to keep reading all the
way to the end. §
- Jennifer Nicoll Victor, Understanding the U.S. Government
- The fact that I listened to a course of Poli. Sci. 1 lectures, and
learned from them, shows I am not qualified to actually review them.
But I enjoyed this. §
- Disclaimer: Prof. Victor and I actually collaborated once, in
supervising a student project which tried to use social network analysis to get
at the question of whether campaign donations affect Congressional outcomes.
It was never published because we got null results (and the student moved on to
other things). In retrospect, my guess is that resources (including
funds) do matter, but that it's rare for disputed issues to have lots of
resources on only one side of the dispute (if they did, the dispute wouldn't
stay on the agenda for long), and the study wasn't well-positioned to get at
the counter-factuals. But, like I said, I learned stuff about how my
government works from these lectures, so you probably shouldn't listen to me!
- Stanley Pierson, Leaving Marxism: Studies in the Dissolution of an Ideology
- Mostly, this is three biographies of three very different intellectuals who
all ended up ex-Marxists: Henri de Man, the Belgian advocate of planning and
WWWII-collaborator; Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School;
and Leszek
Kolakowski. Pierson emphasizes that, like many Marxist intellectuals, they
came from bourgeois backgrounds, were drawn to socialism and to Marxism by its
resonance with their bourgeois values, and ultimately left Marxism because of
those same values. (He does not inquire into how they differed from
intellectuals of bourgeois origins who remained Marxists, or the rare
20th-century Marxist intellectuals from humbler backgrounds like Gramsci.)
There are no great revelations here, but they're well-written and
well-researched biographical studies. Recommended if you care about
intellectuals in politics, or the Marxist
tradition. §
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime;
The Progressive Forces;
Writing for Antiquity;
Commit a Social Science;
The Beloved Republic
Posted at April 30, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
April 25, 2022
Intermittent Finds in Complex Systems and Stuff, No. 2
Attention
conservation notice: Links to forbiddingly-technical scientific papers
and lecture notes, about obscure corners of academia you don't care about, and
whose only connecting logic is having come to the attention of someone with all
the discernment and taste of a magpie (who's been taught elementary probability
theory).
Or whatever the heck it is I study these days.
(I did promise that
this series would be intermittent.) In no particular order.
- Modibo K. Camara, "Computationally Tractable Choice" [PDF]
- I'll quote the abstract in full:
I incorporate computational constraints into decision theory in order to capture how cognitive limitations affect behavior. I impose an axiom of computational tractability that only rules out behaviors that are thought to be fundamentally hard. I use this framework to better understand common behavioral heuristics: if choices are tractable and consistent with the expected utility axioms, then they are observationally equivalent to forms of choice bracketing. Then I show that a computationally-constrained decisionmaker can be objectively better off if she is willing to use heuristics that would not appear rational to an outside observer.
- If you like seeing SATISFIABILITY reduced to decision-theoretic optimization problems,
this is the paper for you. I enjoyed this partly out of technical interest,
and partly to see Simon and Lindblom's heuristic arguments from the 1950s
rigorously validated.
- One last remark: the slippage of "rationality" in the last sentence of the abstract is fascinating. We started by wanting to define "rational behavior" as being about effectively adapting means to ends; we had an intuition, inherited from 18th century philosophy, that calculating the expectation values in terms of rat orgasm equivalents would be a good way to adapt means to ends; we re-defined "rational behavior" as "acting as though one were calculating and then maximizing an expected number of rat orgasm equivalents"; now it turns out that that is provably an inferior way of adapting means to ends, and we have to worry about what it says about rationality. There's something very wrong with
this picture! §
- (Thanks to Suresh Naidu for sharing this paper with me.)
- Carlos Fernández-Loría and Foster Provost, "Causal Decision Making and Causal Effect Estimation Are Not the Same... and Why It Matters", arxiv:2104.04103
- To make an (admirably simple) argument even simpler: Think of decision-making as a classification problem, rather than estimation. If your classifier mis-estimates \( \mathbb{P}\left( Y|X=x \right) \), but you're nonetheless on the correct side of 1/2 (or whatever your optimal boundary might be), it doesn't matter for classification accuracy! So if you over-estimate the benefits of treatment for those you decide to treat, well, you're still treating them...
- Ira Globus-Harris, Michael Kearns, Aaron Roth, "Beyond the Frontier: Fairness Without Privacy Loss", arxiv:2201.10408
- My comments got long enough to go elsewhere.
- Hrayr Harutyunyan, Maxim Raginsky, Greg Ver Steeg, Aram Galstyan, "Information-theoretic generalization bounds for black-box learning algorithms", arxiv:2110.01584
- I was very excited to read this --- look at the authors! --- and it did not disappoint. It's a lovely paper which both makes a lot of sense at the conceptual level and gives decent, calculable bounds for realistic situations. I'd love to teach this in my learning-theory class, even though I'd have to cut other stuff to make room for the information-theoretic background.
- Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan, Karren Yang, Mikhail Belkin, Caroline Uhler, "Memorization in Overparameterized Autoencoders", arxiv:1810.10333
- I was blown away when Uhler demonstrated some of the results in a talk here, and the paper did not disappoint.
- Mikhail Belkin, "Fit without fear: remarkable mathematical phenomena of deep learning through the prism of interpolation", arxiv:2105.14368
- Further to the theme.
- Nicholas Carlini, Florian Tramer, Eric Wallace, Matthew Jagielski, Ariel Herbert-Voss, Katherine Lee, Adam Roberts, Tom Brown, Dawn Song, Ulfar Erlingsson, Alina Oprea, Colin Raffel, "Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models", arxiv:2012.07805
- Demonstrates that from GPT-2 they can extract "(public) personally
identifiable information (names, phone numbers, and email addresses), IRC
conversations, code, and 128-bit UUIDs", even though "each of the above
sequences are included in just one document in the training data".
- Some miscellaneous, largely mean, comments:
- I don't understand why they compare zlib entropy to language-model perplexity, when entropy density is basically log(perplexity). This probably wouldn't make a big difference to any results but it bugged me.
- This has to be connected to Radhakrishnan et al., right?
- I'd really like to see someone throw this many parameters, and this much data, at something like Pereira, Singer and Tishby 1996 and see how it does in comparison, both in terms of the usual performance metrics and memorizing random (and inappropriate) bits of the training data. (Pereira may be in a position to do the experiment!)
- Some people will, of course, interpret this as evidence that GPT-2 knows who you are, and so is that much closer to
judging the quick and the dead basilisk-dom being amenable to bargaining under the canons of timeless decision theory.
- Gabriel Rossman and Jacob C. Fisher, "Network hubs cease to be influential in the presence of low levels of advertising", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (2021): e2013391118
- In a pure social-contagion/diffusion-of-innovations process, the
contagion/innovation will spread farther, and spread faster, if it begins at
one of the the most central nodes in the network, than if it begins at a
randomly chosen node, let alone a deliberately-peripheral one. This motivates
a lot of effort in applications to search for influential figures and target
them. What Rossman and Fisher do is extend the model very modestly, to model
"advertising", i.e., a probability for nodes to contract the contagion / adopt
the innovation spontaneously, without direct contact with an infected / adopter
node. What they show is that even a very small amount of advertising massively
reduces the advantage of beginning at a central node. It's a very convincing,
lovely, and potentially-applicable result. I also strongly suspect there's a
genuine phase transition here, with the transition point moving towards zero
external field as the size of the network goes to infinity, but I haven't been
able to show that (yet). --- Many thanks to Prof. Rossman for presenting this
paper to
CMU's Networkshop.
- Yuan Zhang, Dong Xia, "Edgeworth expansions for network moments", arxiv:2004.06615
- This is technical, but valuable for all of us interested in being able to
quantify uncertainty in network data analysis, especially in those of us
working graph-limits/graphons/conditionally-independent-dyads
framework. --- Thanks to Prof. Zhang for a very enjoyable conversation about
this paper during a "visit" to Ohio State via Zoom.
- David Childers, "Forecasting for Economics and Business"
- Great materials for an undergraduate economics course (73-423) at CMU. Thanks to David for the pointer.
- Vera Melinda Galfi, Valerio Lucarini, Francesco Ragone, Jeroen Wouters, "Applications of large deviation theory in geophysical fluid dynamics and climate science",
La Rivista del Nuovo Cimento 44 (2021): 291--363, arxiv:2106.13546
- The laws of large numbers say that, on large enough scales, random systems
converge on their expected values. ("Large scales" here might indeed be number
of samples, or length of time series, or something similar.) In symbols which you should not take too literally here, as \( n \rightarrow \infty \), \( \mathbb{P} \left( |A_n - a_{\infty}| > \epsilon \right) \rightarrow 0 \) for every \( \epsilon > 0 \),
where \( a_{\infty} \) is the limiting behavior of the process.
Large deviations theory is about fluctuations away from the expected behavior, and specifically about finding rate functions \( r \) such that \( \mathbb{P} \left( |A_n - a_{\infty}| \geq \epsilon \right) \sim \exp{\left( -n r(\epsilon)\right) } \). This is a "large" deviation because the size \( \epsilon \) is staying the same as \( n \) grows. We'd anticipate seeing this kind of behavior if \( A_n \) was the result of some number \( \propto n \) of independent random variables, all of which had to cooperate in order to produce that \( \epsilon \)-sized fluctuation.
More specifically, a good point-wise rate function will let us say that
\[
\frac{1}{n}\log{\mathbb{P}\left( A_n \in B \right) } \rightarrow - \inf_{x \in B}{I(x)}
\]
so that, as the saying goes, an unlikely large deviation is overwhelmingly
(exponentially) likely to happen in the least unlikely possible way. Large deviations theory gives us lots of tools for calculating rate functions, and so saying how unlikely various large deviations are (at least to within asymptotic log factors), and for characterizing those least-unlikely paths to improbable events. (I am glossing over all kinds of lovely mathematical details, but follow some links.)
- Now climate systems contain a lot random variables, which are
mostly tightly dependent on each other but not completely so. And a lot of
what we should worry about with climate comes from large fluctuations away from
typical behavior. (E.g., transitions from one meta-stable state of the
climate, where, say, there is a Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic keeping
western Europe warmer than Labrador or Kamchatka, to another meta-stable state
where there is not.) So climate modeling is actually a very natural
application for large deviations theory. This is a well-written review paper
surveying those applications, with a minimum of mathematical apparatus. (The
implied reader does, however, remember fluid mechanics and thermodynamics.) It
makes me want to learn more about rare-event simulation techniques. §
Complexity;
Enigmas of Chance;
Networks;
Physics;
The Dismal Science;
Constant Conjunction Necessary Connexion;
Automata and Calculating Machines
Posted at April 25, 2022 10:41 | permanent link
Positive-Definite Tab Closure
Attention conservation notice: A link-dump piece, where some of the links were first opened in 2015.
Tabs I have closed recently, which are of a positive and/or
constructive and/or cheerful nature:
- The Glorious Stupidity of Fomenko's New Chronology. (Part of what makes this so outrageous is that Fomenko is actually rightly celebrated for his mathematical work.)
- "Always bet on text".
- Teaching nearest neighbor methods led me to talking about Voronoi tesselations in class, which led to me finally asked "who was Voronoi, anyway?", and so discovering Halyna Sen and Rien van de Weygaert's "Life and Times of Georgy Voronoi" (arxiv:0912.3269).
- Similarly, there is an entirely logical path from re-assuring a certain historian that she did indeed understand the equations in
Bacaër's chapter on Song Jian and China's one-child policy to listening to International Federation for Automatic Control's Orchestra performing "Smoke on the Water", but I decline to explain.
- Further musical entertainment: the Brooklyn Funk Essential's "The Revolution Was Postponed Because of Rain"
- Speaking of the Revolution that wasn't: "The First Privilege Walk" is an amazing article full of wonders; also of places where I had to roll my eyes at Parenti's unreconstructed Marxist-true-believer-dom.
- Speaking of the Revolution yet to come: "What Do Addison Rae's Critics Have in Common With the Taiping Rebels?"
- "Life in a carbon dioxide world" (via Paul McAuley)
- For living in a carbon dioxide world in a different sense, we might
consider
building commercially-competitive
"junkyard datacenters" from decade-old smartphones. This is very cute, and
even hopeful, but the calculations in the paper make me long for carbon pricing
with a special fervor. (Also, I hate the way this paper uses the word
"compute" with a peevish passion.)
- The eminent probabilist Michel Talagrand tries to make sense of quantum field theory. (I've just begun reading the book, but the handful of people who'll find that sentence exciting need to hear the news.)
- Speaking of QFT: a remembrance and appreciation of Steven Weinberg.
- Speaking of shapers of 21st century thought: Arianna Wright Rosenbluth and the birth of Markov chain Monte Carlo
- Speaking of the shape of ancient thought: "A work of speculative friction"
- Speaking of speaking about your thoughts: "Phobos and Deimos and public speaking" [cf. On Academic Talks: Memory and Fear]
- Adam Elkus uses Norbert Wiener to re-invent the young Marx's theory of alienation (without mentioning "Marx" or "alienation"). Also from Adam Elkus: Vampire Hunting as a Vocation.
- Maciej Ceglowski's "Confronting New Madrid"
(I, II)
is the best travelogue about seismic hazards and the meaning of America ever.
Not that one expects anything less from the chronicler of America's most grandiose, and tasty, imaginary infrastructure.
- David Auerbach's Books of the Year for 2020 and 2021. The fiction recommendations always make me feel provincial and Philistine (not his fault!), but when I'm familiar with the non-fiction works they're uniformly of high quality, and I mine these for my own purposes.
(I am sure that I am forgetting to credit sources for these links, and can
only plead for forgiveness.)
Linkage;
Psychoceramica;
Physics;
Natural Science of the Human Species;
Mathematics;
Automata and Calculating Machines;
The Commonwealth of Letters;
Biology
Posted at April 25, 2022 10:40 | permanent link
March 31, 2022
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, March 2022
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no credentials to opine on
the sociology of education, political and moral philosophy, medieval Islamic
science, or even, strictly speaking, pure mathematics.
- Dana Stabenow,
A Cold Day for Murder,
A Fatal Thaw,
Dead in the Water,
A Cold-Blooded Business,
Play with Fire
- Mind candy mysteries, where the Alaskan environment is as much a character
as any human being, or husky. Stabenow was, I believe, originally a science
fiction and fantasy writer, and I think some of that comes through in the way
the very strange world of Alaska is unfolded before the reader. It also comes
through in the character of Kate Shugak, a hero of basically-royal birth who
lives on the border between civilization and the wilderness, and who roams the
countryside defeating monsters and malefactors, especially those who have
offended against the laws of kinship and hospitality. (There are a lot of
explicit references to Greek myths and I do not believe any of this is
coincidence or even unconscious.) The fact that I read five of these in a
month, and have more in the queue, tells you how easily they go
down. §
- Douglas B. Downey, How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong
- I am not sure what to make about this one.
- Downey studies some nationally-representative longitudinal data sets, which
measure student achievement in reading and math at multiple points in the
school year, over multiple years. "Longitudinal" here means that each
student is being measured multiple times, allowing one to draw inference about
how much was learned when. The basic finding Downey extracts from this is
that during the school year, richer and poorer students, and black and
white students, learn at basically the same rate. But they arrive at
school at very different average levels of achievement, and their gaps grow
while out of school each year. Thus, on this evidence, schools for
the disadvantaged are in fact doing about as well at teaching reading and math
as other schools. The inequality in educational outcomes, then, isn't due to
inequality in schooling, but to (as Downey puts it) the other 87% of
students' lives.
- This is remarkably contrary to received opinion, what Downey calls
"The Assumption", that schools for the poor are poor schools which do not
teach effectively. I get the impression that Downey started by
wanting to be talked out of this position, but came to embrace it for
lack of intelligent opposition:
I don't think that the people questioning the evidence are bad people, but they are reluctant to let go of the dominant narrative about schools. It would be one thing if the reason was because they had issues with whether the ECLS-K item-response theory scales of reading can be considered truly interval, or if they questioned whether nonschool investments in children are constant across seasons, or if they thought that the approach scholars use to model the overlap days between test dates and the beginnings and ends of school years was insufficient. ... But while many have resisted the empirical patterns in chapters 1--4 and remain committed to The Assumption, the quality of evidence doesn't seem to be the obstacle. [p. 97]
- I join Downey's audiences in astonishment. I also join him in thinking
that "we really need to reform the distribution of rewards in the broader
society", but I just have a hard time swallowing the findings. (Among other
things, if he's right, why are parents so convinced otherwise?) But
I also don't have any clever explanations to make this pattern in the
data into a mere artifact. As a statistician, I do wonder about whether these
surveys really cover a nationally representative sample of students and
schools. (Though it's hard to imagine what sort of sampling bias would produce
this pattern!) There is also the issue (which Downey highlights in the quote
above) of whether these reading and math scores are really "interval".
Concepts like "median" make sense with merely ordinal variables, but something
like "the change in the median poor kid's reading score from September to May
is equal to the change in median scores for rich kids", \( X_p(2) - X_p(1) =
X_r(2) - X_r(1) \), needs us to be able to compare differences at arbitrary
points along the scale. So this is resting a lot on the ways the survey
researchers translate students' answers into numerical values, and I'd have
liked to see a lot more about that. In particular I'd want to make really sure
that this sort of parallel trajectories isn't an artifact of the scaling
procedure.
- It is unlikely, but not I guess impossible, that I will actually
investigate this properly. In the meanwhile, I am informed, but puzzled and
unsettled. §
- (Text lightly edited 3 June 2022, to resolve some ambiguous pronouns etc.)
- Update, 3 July 2022: a favorable review in the American Journal of Sociology.
- Jürgen Jost, Postmodern Analysis
- I should begin by admitting that I took real analysis as a sophomore,
scraped out a C through the kindness of the teacher, and became a physicist.
(I did eventually learn measure-theoretic probability.) So the idea of anyone
taking advice from me on pure math textbooks is preposterous.
- I should also say that I met Jürgen
through Santa Fe more than twenty years
ago, admire his work on
information geometry and
complex
systems, have given
talks at the Max Planck Institut he directs, etc. If I read one of his
books and didn't like it, I'd just say nothing publicly.
- With my throat now hopefully adequately cleared: When we all went home in
March 2020, I got the idea that this would be when I finally learned some
important areas of math properly. This fantasy led to downloading a
large number of books from the library, and discovering that I would never read
most of them for good reason. But this one I stuck with. It's a
really good survey of crucial topics in analysis, starting with the basics of
differentiation and Riemann integration, visiting things like ordinary
differential equations as dynamical systems, Lebesgue integration, and function
approximation, and ending up with the calculus of variations and partial
differential equations and their interconnections. It's "postmodern" only in
the sense that it comes after the classical works on modern analysis of the
mid- / late- 20th century, and tries to give a survey of what a bright young
mathematician should know now. The exposition is great, consistently just
rigorous enough that I needed to inhibit my lizard-brain physicist impulses
("it'd be nice if that equation had a square-integrable
solution, therefore it does"), but always with an eye on applications,
i.e., on reality. It's really quite enjoyable, and makes me want to read
Jost's other textbooks. §
- (The obvious question is whether I would have done any better, as an
undergrad, if this had been the text in my real analysis course. Honesty
compels me to say: "not on your life"; our textbook was forgettable but decent,
the problem was teenage me.)
- Final disclaimer: I read the second (2003) edition; the third (2005) edition seems to mostly correct mis-prints,
and add some results on coverings in the chapter on \( L^p \) function spaces.
But I cannot swear to its content the way I can to the 2nd edition.
- Stuart Hampshire, Justice Is Conflict
- This is a strange (and short) little book of philosophy. The starting
point is Plato's analogy,
in
the Republic,
between conflict within the soul and conflict within the city (= polity).
Hampshire says that,
pace Plato, the way we really resolve conflict in the city is to make
sure that all (he says "both") sides know that they have been able to make
their case and be heard, even if they cannot get what they want. What
ultimately matters is that there was a fair procedure, rather than a
substantively just outcome. In the analogy of inner conflict,
individual people just have more-or-less incompatible values, and we should not
expect to find some way of reconciling them or subordinating one to the most
correct values. Nor, he says, should we even want such a reconciliation or
ordering.
- I am sympathetic --- in some sense he's getting at the core of liberalism
--- but I found the argument lacking. The analogy is obviously a bit weak: I
don't think he ever really addresses what would correspond to a fair procedure
in the soul. (Adversarial or critical thinking is all very well to endorse,
but being your own critic
has obvious
limits.) Also, I think he equivocates about whether unifying values is
impossible, or merely undesirable. That's fine by me, because I am strongly in
the "impossible" camp --- I encountered
"A heterarchy of values determined
by the topology of nervous nets" at an impressionable age, and still regard
it as irrefutable --- but philosophically a bit unsatisfying.
- More frustrating was that Hampshire is fully aware that there are often
disputes about which procedures are fair, and this doesn't seem to
help us figure that out at all. To use a (banausic and depraved) analogy of my
own: if I
am writing
new code to perform some task, i.e., devising a procedure, I check whether
it works right by seeing if it gives the correct answer on test cases, i.e., is
substantively correct in particular circumstances. But of course, just to make
things circular, in other cases I work out what the answer is by using
my procedure. At a much more elevated plane than numerical software, something
like this would seem to be at work here, and could use some philosophical
illumination. That is, I wish Hampshire would absorb something like
Laudan's Science
and Values. §
- George Malagaris, Biruni [doi:10.1093/oso/9780190124021.001.0001]
- Brief historical study of Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni (973 --
1050?), emphasizing the historical context of Central Asia and the eastern
Islamic world in general, giving the main facts of Biruni's biography
(including puncturing some picturesque stories), and surveying his major works.
Pride of place in Malagris's treatment goes to Biruni's India,
fairly enough, but he's pretty comprehensive, and seems to understand the math.
(I was astonished to learn that Biruni translated/adapted the Yoga
sutras of Patanjali, which must have made some heads explode.) There's
also some treatment of his correspondence
with ibn Sina; it is
simultaneously reassuring and depressing to see that a millennium ago, great
scholars were just as capable of mutual incomprehension, dismissal, and
pettiness as their modern counterparts, or online posters
(cf.)
(Actually, I suspect there's the possibility for a very interesting study of
different conceptions of "science" in this exchange, and I wonder if someone
has done it.) The book concludes with a treatment of Biruni's place in later
historical memory, including the way he is claimed by multiple modern
nation-states as part of their illustrious past. §
- John Scalzi, The Kaiju Preservation Society
- Mind candy comic science fiction. It's Scalzi, which means it's funny and
mostly but not entirely lightheartedly, and reads extremely smoothly.
§
- Jane Langton, The Dante Game
- Mind candy mystery: the umpteenth book in Langton's series, in which Homer
Kelly stumbles his way into an artistic or literary enthusiasm and a homicide
investigation. This time it's Dante, and the city of Florence, and the new
pope's anti-drug crusade, which is far too successful for some people's liking.
It's an old favorite which holds up very well. (Previously.) §
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime;
Philosophy;
Commit a Social Science;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
Islam and Islamic Civilization;
Afghanistan and Central Asia;
Writing for Antiquity;
Mathematics;
Teaching: Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination
Posted at March 31, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
February 28, 2022
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, February 2022
Attention
conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine
on the history of Central Asia, the philosophy of science, the anthropology of
New Guinea and/or cultural creativity, archaeology, Antarctic exploration, or
the philosophy of Spinoza.
- Adeeb Khalid, Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present
- By "central Asia", Khalid means "Turkestan", both the eastern parts
conquered by the Qing in the 1700s and the western parts conquered by the
Romanovs in the 1800s. (Thus Afghanistan, Tibet, Mongolia, etc., feature only
incidentally.) He begins with those conquests, after a little scene-setting to
make their events comprehensible, and then goes down to 2020 and the on-going
police state and cultural genocide in Xinjiang. Khalid's great (and
persuasive) theme is how ordinary this history is, in a global
perspective --- imperial conquest, the arrival of modernity, the development of
nationalism and the construction of national cultures (he doesn't use the
phrase "peasants into Uzbeks", but he comes close), Communism as a vehicle for
nationalism, ambitious-to-mad state projects to develop economies, to transform
nature and/or transform society, widening entanglement with global culture and
economic forces... This is what the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries were like,
for much if not most of the world. It's extremely scholarly --- Khalid has
clearly read and synthesized almost everything --- but still very readable. If
you are at all interested in this part of the world, it's very much worth your
time. §
- Wesley C. Salmon, with Richard C. Jeffrey and Jeffrey G. Greeno, Statistical Explanation and Statistical Relevance (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971)
- 1300 words of review: Distinctions That Make Differences to Chances.
- Annalee Newitz, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age
- I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it's pleasantly-written
and engaging popular social science about four interesting and important cities
that were, for one reason or another, abandoned and (largely) forgotten:
Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor and Cahokia. I learned from it,
and I mostly enjoyed reading it. On the other hand, I sometimes found
myself irritated by the sensation that Newitz was pandering to the prejudices
of people like me --- all the cities were full of diverse immigrants, etc.,
etc. (Looking around after writing that, I
see James
Palmer had a similar reaction to those bits.)
- Beyond those matters of tone, though, I do want to quibble with the way
Newitz presents these cities. Many archaeologists have a bad tendency to
present speculative interpretations as though they were facts. (They are not,
of course, alone in this, and
I've complained about
this before.) This tendency seems to be very much on display here in the
chapters on Çatalhöyük and Cahokia, where we have no writings
to fill us in on ideologies and structures of inequality (not to say
oppression). I can't help but suspect that this makes those cities better
screens for modern projections than Pompeii and Angkor. There's also some
trash-talking of V. Gordon Childe that strikes me as unfair, and dismissal of
the idea that there are developmental trajectories to more hierarchy, size and
complexity as Eurocentric myths, rather
than cross-cultural empirical
regularities. (And of course a key part of the Enlightenment world-view
was seeing Europe as a place which had regressed in these regards for
a millennium of barbarism, "mired in the superstitions and brutal monarchies of
the Middle Ages", as Newitz puts it on p. 210.)
- On re-reading this, I see I've given more space to what irritated me, which
is mostly incidental, than to what I enjoyed --- so I will just re-iterate that
despite my quibbles, I did enjoy. §
- (Thanks to Jan Johnson for my copy of the book.)
- Fredrik Barth, Cosmologies in the Making: A Generative Approach to Cultural Variation in Inner New Guinea
- 750-plus words of review: Cosmology and Cosmologists --- The Modern Ok School.
- (I forget what chain of references first put this
on my radar --- probably something in
the Dan Sperber
/ Pascal Boyer nexus, but that's
honestly just me guessing.)
- Edmund Stump, The Roof at the Bottom of the World: Discovering the Transantarctic Mountains
- A scientist's winningly enthusiastic history of exploration in the
Antarctic mountains, from the first visits to the continent, through the
heroic era, to the early 1960s. (It's startling just how much more massive the
US's post-1945 efforts were than everything that came before.) The stories are
supplemented with Stump's own memories of decades of geologizing on the
continent, and his very good photographs. §
- Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age
- Partly exposition of the Theological-Political Treatise, partly
a biography of Spinoza, partly intellectual, political and religious history to
set the context. I enjoyed it, but since I've never actually read
the Treatise,
despite an interest in
Spinoza, I'm in no position to judge it. §
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Writing for Antiquity;
Philosophy
Enigmas of Chance;
Afghanistan and Central Asia;
The Great Transformation;
Minds, Brains, and Neurons;
Commit a Social Science;
Psychoceramics
Posted at February 28, 2022 23:59 | permanent link
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