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