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Sun, 25 Nov 2007

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Wed, 21 Nov 2007

Reading Skills

OK, boys and girls, settle down. I know everyone is anxious to leave for Thanksgiving break, but based on the reaction to the previous post around the blogs, we need to do a quick reading skills test.

A number of people have earnestly objected that Slate doesn't charge a subscription --- very true! Can anyone tell me the name of the figure of speech being employed in the title? Go ahead, Johnny. "Sarcasm; the use of irony to express contempt; from the Greek sarkazein, to tear flesh." Very good, Johnny.

Next, can someone tell me why the names of Saletan's sources appear underlined in the text? "Because they are anchors of hyperlinks." That's right! Did anyone follow those hyperlinks? You did! And what do you find there? No, Johnny, let someone else take a turn --- Cindy? "Demonstrations that, even if you accept IQ is valid, his sources are quacks who couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag." Excellent! My, you're doing much better than the blogosphere, boys and girls. Let me just add that if you follow this controversy at all, you know that these people are quacks; you can even discover it by, at most, a quarter of an hour with your favorite search engine. I will leave you to judge whether a journalist who doesn't check up on his sources that way is doing his job.

Third point: Why do I not go into all the reasons why you shouldn't accept the usual IQ framework in the first place? Alex? "Because you wrote about 22,000 words in two parts doing so already, and linked to all that at the bottom of the post." Correct!

Finally, fourth point, why do I not say anything about the correlation between head sizes and IQ that impresses Saletan so much? Johnny? "Because you can't handle the truth?" I knew I was going to regret calling on you. Who else? Chris? "Because a construct's being correlated with a physical variable doesn't imply being physically meaningful in any way. Height is correlated with head size, so the sum of height and blood triglycerides will be correlated with head size." True, but maybe not all that compelling to the audience. Anyone else? Roxana? "Because the evidence for that correlation is taken apart in the piece you linked to about Rushton?" Right --- do you have something to add to that? "It's easy to discover from the literature that there really isn't any such correlation, once you design your study so that it's not hopelessly confounded." Did people catch what Roxie did there — she attached a link. Boys and girls, you should follow that link! Roxie, thanks for that article, and let me say that getting a result like that out of Vincent Sarich, of all people, is an especially nice catch.

OK, class, congratulations; you passed this little exam in basic on-line reading skills, unlike the blogosphere's various comment sections. Have a happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

IQ #

Tue, 20 Nov 2007

In Which I Demand That Slate Refund My Subscription

William Saletan's recent venture into demanding that we squarely face the harsh light of his pseudo-scientific prejudices is, in itself, intensely boring — we've played this scene over and over again — but becomes more interesting when we try to trace it back to causes, and then forward again to effects.

His writing the story may be explained in one of two ways.

1. He may be ignorant and stupid enough to be gulled by charlatans like Rushton or Richard Lynn;
2. More charitably, he may not believe the bullshit himself, but may repeat it to his readers because he hopes that doing so advances some agenda of his own.

William Saletan is the national correspondent of Slate, and published this multi-part heap of rubbish there. This means it was approved by his editors. We may interpret their action in one of three ways.

1. They were ignorant and stupid enough to believe what Saletan was saying.
2. They knew better, but published it anyway because they hoped it would advance causes they believe in.
3. They knew better, but published it anyway because they hoped it would advance their personal interests or that of their magazine.

The efficient alternative is, of course, to stop paying attention to Slate, or other magazines which publish idiotic and pseudo-scientific apologias for bigotry.

Updates: See next post before complaining. 25 November: Stupid mis-spelling fixed, thanks to Loren Spice.

Manual trackback: 3 Quarks Daily; Crooked Timber; American Nonsense; The Mahatma X Files; Quantum of Wantum; Language Log

IQ #

Aleister Crowley: Grandfather of the Beast?

This would explain a lot, you know.

The Continuing Crises #

Sat, 17 Nov 2007

My New Office-Mate

Because one mindless, shapeless, blasphemous, unhealthily-expanding entity in the office just wasn't enough:

Self-Centered #

Fri, 09 Nov 2007

I Read These Papers So You Don't Have To

A passage from the fourth referee report I wrote today: "It would be unfair to compare the author's methodological advice to enjoining us to remember to breathe; it is more like reminding us not to hold forks by their pointy ends, which rather go into the food." But on second thought I deleted that; I grow soft.

Learned Folly #

Thu, 08 Nov 2007

NaNoWriMo

November is, supposedly, National Novel Writing Month. In honor of this season, I would like to encourage everyone (not just the various participants) to read this post at Making Light, and the ensuing comments thread. #900, in particular, is very funny, but it really has to be appreciated in context.

The Commonwealth of Letters #

Wed, 07 Nov 2007

Where the Angles Are All Wrong

Speaking, as we were, of the Futurists, I present today's evidence of their subliminal influence over the course of the twentieth century.

The Street Enters the House (Umberto Boccioni, 1911)	The Stata Center at MIT (Frank Gehry, 2004)

Eventually, as post-humaniy mutates into a species of mind-bending Lovecraftian monstrosities, we'll not only be at home in such buildings, they'll keep the rain out, too.

(AP story via Science After Sunclipse; photo of Stata Center via flickr user highsmith.)

Linkage #

Tue, 06 Nov 2007

Destination Pittsburgh

My grandfather used to tell a joke about a magazine running a contest where the first prize was an all-expenses-paid week in Pittsburgh --- and the second prize was two weeks. With that kind of baseline, it's nice to see it getting some love from National Geographic and from the Times, though calling Butler Street in Lawrenceville a "design district" may still be a bit of a stretch. (The Coca Cafe is indeed very nice, however.)

The funniest endorsement of Pittsburgh as a travel destination I've read lately is undoubtedly the Washington Post's account of Richard Mellon Scaife's marital troubles. What makes it extra amusing to me is that Scaife and his soon-to-be-ex-wife live in my neighborhood, and I go past his house on my usual running route. (I guessed the "Welcome home, Beauregard" sign was about the dog coming back from the vet's.) While I am, of course, sad that my fellow Shadysiders are having such an ugly divorce, I can't help feeling that it couldn't happen to a nastier wingnut. The role of obscene amounts of inherited money in fostering the whole sordid spectacle is more yet evidence that Andrew Carnegie was on to something when he declared "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced."

(Via K. in e-mail, except for the Post story, via Krugman's blog.)

Postcards; The Running-Dogs of Reaction #

Mon, 05 Nov 2007

The Presentation of Self in Internet Life

I present for your consideration two case studies in rhetorical self-fashioning. John Brunner almost saw this coming.

The morals you draw may be your own.

(The second via Halfway Down the Danube.)

Linkage; Scientifiction #

Sun, 04 Nov 2007

"The object of torture is torture"

From Marty Lederman at Balkinzation:

Jack Goldsmith left OLC before he could complete the "replacement" torture opinion. Daniel Levin succeeded him. OLC had previously opined that waterboarding was lawful. Levin apparently (and understandably) was a bit skeptical -- so much so that he asked the military to subject him to waterboarding! (This is not your parents' OLC -- can you imagine what it would take for anyone after this to want to be Assistant Attorney General there?) Naturally, Levin concluded that the procedure was, well, torture, at least "unless performed in a highly limited way," and under guidelines the Administration had failed to implement. (No doubt Levin did suffer severe physical suffering, and that's in a situation far removed from being a detainee.)

At this point, Alberto Gonzales nevertheless insisted that Levin include in his December 30, 2004 opinion the footnote about how the legal analysis did not affect all previously approved techniques! It's not clear why Levin assented to this -- it's an outrageous and inappropriate thing for a White House Counsel to do -- but the footnote was included. (I should add that the December 2004 Levin opinion also included an analysis of "severe physical suffering" that is entirely unpersuasive and that is the basis for the counterintuitive (i.e., patently wrong) conclusion that waterboarding is not torture. I've criticized that portion of the Levin memo previously. Now I wonder whether that, too, was the work of Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, rather than Levin himself, and whether Levin's planned follow-up memo (see below) might have called that analysis into question.)

Levin then set about to write another opinion, one that would cut back on the approved techniques (and that would, at a minimum, repudiate or temper the previous OLC advice on waterboarding).

Unfortunately, at this point Gonzales was confirmed as AG -- and he fired Levin, replacing him with Steve Bradbury, who was more than happy to give Gonzales the legal advice they wanted. (No word -- yet -- on whether Bradbury was waterboarded.)

Let's go over that again. A "loyal conservative, Republican lawyer" cares enough for the law that he has himself waterboarded. He concludes that water-boarding is torture. (This is what everyone with experience says too, not to mention our own legal history.) Torture is a crime. For saying as much, he got fired. The reason is, this administration wants to torture.

The point of this torture is not to extract information; there are better ways to do that, which we have long used. The point of this torture is not to extract confessions; there are no show trials of terrorists or auto-de-fes in the offing. The point of this torture is to exercise unlimited, unaccountable power over other human beings; to negate the very point of our country, to our profound and lasting national shame.

Calling this administration "sadistic" insults thousands of sane, decent, kinky sexual perverts.

Manual trackback: Nanopolitan; Wintry Smile

The Beloved Republic; The Continuing Crisis; The Running-Dogs of Reaction #

Sat, 03 Nov 2007

Failing to Seize the High Ground

BLDGBLOG has just posted about the the crazy, and highly depressing, architecture created by the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies for their trench warfare in the Alps during WWI, with the trenches running as far up the mountains as they could get. The post is, as usual, excellent, with great photos and contemporary reportage by (of all people) H. G. Wells. I commend it to your attention. (I have long wondered whether some of Gramsci's remarks about "wars of position" vs. "wars of maneuver" were not colored by news of this conflict.)

This gives me the occasion to plug the best book I've read on the Alpine front, and one of the the best memoirs of the Great War I've encountered period, Emilio Lussu's Sardinian Brigade (in the original, Un anno sull'altipiano). Lussu's real achievement here is to movingly evoke the proverbial "long stretches of boredom, punctuated by brief moments of terror" — and he is very good at conjuring both futility and terror — without histrionics. His auctorial voice remains cool, lucid, rational, slightly detached — to mangle Wells, in a different connection, the voice is that of an intellect vast, cool, and not wholly sympathetic, though the story the voice tells is one of what it was like to be a dirty, bloody, suffering soldier in a palpably idiotic war. Writing at a literal remove — twenty years later, and in exile owing to his outspoken opposition to Fascism — may have helped achieve this effect. It deserves a wide audience.

Manual trackback: Kottke.org.

Linkage; The Commonwealth of Letters #

Fri, 02 Nov 2007

Chaos, Complexity, and Inference (36-462): Course Announcement

I will be teaching 36-462, "topics in statistics", in the spring. This is a special topics course for advanced undergraduates, intended to expose them ideas they wouldn't see going through the ordinary curriculum.

36-462: Chaos, Complexity, and Inference

Description: This course will cover some key parts of modern theories of nonlinear dynamics ("chaos") and complex systems, and their connections to fundamental aspects of probability and statistics. By studying systems with many strongly-interacting components, students will learn how stochastic models can illuminate phenomena beyond the usual linear/Gaussian/independent realm, as well as gain a deeper understanding of why stochastic models work at all. Topics will include: chaos theory and nonlinear prediction; information; the distinction between randomness and determinism; self-organization and emergence; heavy-tailed and "scale-free" distributions; complex networks; interacting agents; and inference from simulations.

Venue: Tuesdays and Thurdays 12:00--1:20 in Scaife Hall 208. Office hours in 229C Baker Hall, times to be determined.

Required Textbooks: Gary William Flake, The Computational Beauty of Nature, and John Miller and Scott Page, Complex Adaptive Systems.

Optional Textbook: Peter Guttorp, Stochastic Modeling of Scientific Data.

Prerequisites: A previous course in mathematical statistics (such as 36-310, 36-401, or 36-625/626) and a course in probability and random processes (such as 36-217, 36-225/226, 36-410, or 36-625/626); or consent of instructor. Some programming experience will be helpful.

A more detailed syllabus will follow on the course website once I actually draw it up. If you have any questions, please send e-mail.

Corrupting the Young; Complexity; Enigmas of Chance #

Thu, 01 Nov 2007

Mail Clobbered

My mail spool got clobbered this afternoon; if you sent me anything between midnight last night and around 2 pm today, please resend. (If you sent something but have thought better of it, consider yourself reprieved.)

#

Wed, 31 Oct 2007

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, October 2007

John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry

I finally read this as part of writing my social media paper; I'm very glad I did, and wish I had done so earlier.

"The public" exists, potentially, whenever there are serious and persistent externalities; it consists of those who are on the receiving end of the resulting market failures. The public organizes itself to regulate those externalities; these specialized organs and officers constitute government, or the state. (Cf. ibn Khaldun.) The implementation of all this, and the monitoring of those officers, raises problems of collective action; but prior to this is a problem of collective cognition, of recognizing that these externalities exist and deciding intelligently, that is, with regard to concrete consequences, what to do about them. The great problem of the public is finding modes of organizing itself, and its inquiries into what should be done, which are consonant with the modern scope of externalities and interdependence brought about by industrialization. (I have modernized Dewey's terminology, but not, I think, distorted his meanings.)

Obviously, I think this is all very, very good, and would love to see what he would have thought of our modern technologies of communication. (I suspect that there would have been a certain amount of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth involved.) Extremely strongly recommended to anyone interested in democracy, general social theory, or social media.

Liz Ball, Month-By-Month Gardening in Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Gardener's Guide

Rose Marie Nichols McGee and Maggie Stuckey, The Bountiful Container: A Container Garden of Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits and Edible Flowers

Having now gone through a full agricultural year, I think I can safely say that these are the best of the gardening books I've used. McGee and Stuckey in particular was very handy and had lots of useful ideas (for instance, Malabar spinach).

Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936--1945: Nemesis

The conclusion of the story of, probably, the worst person who ever lived: a man who in a better world would have been an unusually boring, cranky and mean coffee-house loafer. The fascination lies in seeing just how this man was able to cause so much damage and pain, which means that a large part of Kershaw's 887 pages (plus notes) is about the German state, German society, and — more and more as the story goes on — the war and the genocides. This is appropriate, because, as Kershaw makes plain, these horrible events were not just the produts of Hitler's crazed beliefs and wicked desires, but also of the fit between those and what other members of German society, especially its most powerful members, wanted and believed, and the choices they made.

Let me just quote two paragraphs (from p. 841), which sum things up and give a sense of Kershaw's style:

Never in history has such ruination — physical and moral — been associated with the name of one man. That the ruination had far deeper roots and far more profound causes than the aims and actions of this one man has been evident in the preceding chapters. That the previously unprobed depths of inhumanity plumbed by the Nazi regime could draw upon wide-ranging complicity at all levels of society has been equally apparent. But Hitler's name justifiably stands for all time as that of the chief instigator of the most profound collapse of civilization in modern times. The extreme form of personal rule which an ill-educated beerhall demagogue and racist bigot, a narcisstic, megalomaniac, self-styled national saviour was allowed to acquire and exercise in a modern, economically advanced, and cultured land known for its philosophers and poets, was absolutely decisive in the terrible unfolding of events in those fateful twelve years.

Hitler was the main author of a war leaving over 50 million dead and millions more grieving their lost ones and trying to put their shattered lives together again. Hitler was the chief inspiration of a genocide the like of which the world had never known, rightly to be viewed in coming times as a defining episode of the twentieth century. The Reich whose glory he had sought lay at the end wrecked, its remnants to be divided among the victorious and occupying powers. The arch-enemy, Bolshevism, stood in the Reich capital itself and presided over half of Europe. Even the German people, whose survival he had said was the very reason for his political fight, had proved ultimately dispensable to him.

(A quote which should not be inflammatory, but under the present circumstances, is, from p. 779: "[General] Guderian recalled Hitler stating: 'The soldiers on the eastern front fight far better. The reason they give in so easily in the west is simply the fault of that stupid Geneva convention which promises them good treatment as prisoners. We must scrap this idiotic convention.' ")

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets

For the most part, this is a recounting of the history of the development of modern financial economics, circa 1950 to circa 1980 — the random character of securities prices, the Modigliani-Miller propositions about the irrelevance of capital structure, portfolio selection theory, the capital asset pricing model, and most of all the derivative-pricing problem, culminating in the work of Black, Scholes and Robert C. Merton, and the rise of the no-arbitrage condition and martingale methods as central organizing ideas in finance. This is also a history of the development of markets in derivative securities, covering that same period down to roughly 1990, and a peak into some of the things going on in the late 1990s, most notably a new explanation of how Long-Term Capital Management got in trouble. (To summarize: it was so successful that it was approximately imitated by many other funds, so they were all participating more or less strongly in a common "super-portfolio", and this itself created additional correlations among the assets in that portfolio.) These stories are all told really excellently; I don't think I've ever seen a better non-mathematical explanation of any of these matters, and the book is worth reading for them alone.

The frame-tale, however, is given by the subtitle: that the book is an investigation of how, and to what extent, financial theory is "performative". That is, MacKenzie wants to know not just whether participants in the financial markets talk about financial models (they do), or use them practically (they do), but whether that use caues the markets to change in ways making the models more accurate ("Barnesian performativity", which he admits slights the great Robert K. Merton), or indeed in ways which make the models less accurate ("counterperformativity"). This is an interesting idea, but to claim to have an example about either is to make an extremely complex hypothesis about social causation, one which is in the nature of things very difficult to establish. MacKenzie (cough unlike some of his colleagues in science studies cough) grasps this, and is correspondingly cautious in his claims.

The best example of possible "Barnesian" performativity he provides concerns the Black-Scholes option-pricing formula. If one compares the prices it predicts for otpions to th (admittedly very limited) historical data on option pricing before the formula was widely used, the fit is not horrible but not outstanding. There then follows a period from the mid-1970s through 1987, when organized stock-option markets came into existence and flourished, and many of the participants deliberately used the formula as a guide to pricing. During this period, the fit of the model to the data is excellent. In particular, it implies a certain relation holds betwen the price of a stock-option contract, the strike-price of the contract, the expiration date of the contract, and the underlying stock's current price and the volatility of that price. All of these, except the volatility, are observable, so observed option prices can be used to solve for the implied volatility. This should be the same for all option contracts on the same underlying asset, which, during this period, they were, to a very close approximation. Since 1987, however, this nice constancy has disappeared, and implied volatility has varied systematically with the strike-price of the option. MacKenzie's interpretation --- which he supports in ways I will not go into here --- is that this systematic "volatility skew" is due to the great crash of 1987, and the caution, not to say fear, it continues to inspire about how certain kinds of trades can go wrong, thereby altering the prices people are willing to trade at. Thus an era when the theory was very strongly performative has, he says, been followed by one where it is not, though it continues to be used in other ways. It should be possible to model this through evolutionary game theory: Black-Scholes pricing strategies are able to invade at the expense of their predecessors, and they form a Nash equilibrium, but not an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Minor disappointments: the idea that markets are systems for collective calculation is not a recent invention of sociologists of science, but goes back to the participants in the "socialist calculation" debate of the 1930s — to von Mises, to Lange, and especially to Hayek. Speaking of the present epoch as "high" or "late" modernity carries connotation of "looking backwards" and of historical prophecy which is thoroughly unjustified.

MacKenzie says that his goal is to help improve the "conversation" about markets. That this book will improve the academic discussions of financial markets, economics, and the social life of the mind I have no doubt. But MacKenzie also says that he wants to contribute to the broader, non-academic discussion of marekts, and to to help people come up with positions more nuanced, and more useful, than "holy, holy holy is the invisible hand almighty" and "greed kills". (The caricatures are mine, not his.) This suggests an aspiration to political relevance which his findings, I think, lack. The basically political questions about financial markets have to do with details: what are the consequences of having this market in these securities, organized in this way, are those consequences good or bad, and what are the alternatives? MacKenzie contributes here to answering such questions only by forcefully demonstrating that financial markets are, indeed, human institutions, created, designed, re-designed and sustained by all the usual social processes. Some people will need this reassurance that the markets are not enchanted, that their current organization is not inscribed in the foundations of objective reality, before contemplating what, if anything, we should do about them. In this respect An Engine, not a Camera is itself more of a camera than an engine: but what a camera!

Jenny Davidson, Heredity

I hardly know how to even begin categorizing this one; a uniquely perverse fusion of the literary-investigation "secret history" novel with the 18th century London underworld and early 21st century biomedical schemes, slathered in great heaping doses of morbid self-abuse. But in the fun way one expects from the author of the Light Reading blog. I find it astonishing that this is a first novel.

Neil Mercer, Words and Minds: How We Use Language to Think Together

A social psychologist's investigation into "inter-thinking", and the detailed mechanics of conversation and collective cognition, including how different kinds of conversation lead to different kinds of "inter-thinking", which may be more or less productive. He particularly draws attention to the differences between "disputational" talk (basically, arguing with each other and self-defense), "cumulative" talk (building rapport and solidarity without concern for quality or accuracy) and "exploratory" talk, when we "engage critically but constructively with each other's ideas". The examples are largely but not entirely drawn from classrooms, which is understandable, though I'd like to see how well they generalize to other settings --- pretty well, I'd guess. My biggest reservation is that, like many people (rightly) impressed with Vygotsky, Mercer has an unduly negative view of computational models of cognition. I on the other hand think it would be fascinating, and important, to try to model his phenomena algorithmically.

This requires no background in linguistics or cognitive science to follow; it's almost a popular science book. Recommended very strongly if any of this sounds the least bit interesting.

Ivan Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History: Cassirer, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss, and Malinowski

Interesting "ideas-in-context" intellectual history of the four theorists-of-myth named in the subtitle, trying to answer the question of why they bothered coming up with theories of myth in the first place, how the kind of theories they gave fitted in to the larger intellectual and social scnes they lived in, and why it is that their theories are so totally different it is very hard to believe that they are even talking about the same thing. The answer to that last, Strenski says, is that they aren't, that there is no well-defined subject of myths about which one might profitably theorize. One can appreciate his intellectual history without necessarily accepting that last point (with which I must say I am somewhat sympathetic). However, the discussion of Eliade is a little superseded by evidence which has since come to light about just what he was up to in the '30s (not good), and his connections to "traditionalism" in a rather different sense than Strenski uses the word (see here).

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur #