Grobstein

“Bluerazz Sourpower Snackattackpacks” is one of my favorite pages from A Lesson Is Learned, But The Damage Is Irreversible, by David Hellman and Dale Beran (I have many favorite pages). It’s got pathos, absurdity, references to classical and modern literature, and a silly but very appealing metaphysics that synthesizes ancient and contemporary visions. The look and flow of the art reflect the ideas of the story, like the broken images in panel 2ish, and the blue and purple coloring throughout that resolves into triangles in the middle of the page. Check it out.

Once you’ve gone and enjoyed it, I have some questions for you. Consider the beginning of the story:

I have generally assumed that the “candy drops” (Dale’s speech in second bubble) are the same as what comes in the Snackattackpacks (Dale’s speech in fourth bubble). But, if so, they both trigger and are the only defense against the bitter memories. Do you think that is the intended reading? It seems to me to minimize the problem, in a way — to make the comic more about the candy drops and less about the anti-entropy of recollection, so less universal etc. — because the problem arises because of the candy drops in the first place. It’s not (explicitly) a condition of existence to be tormented by bitter memories; rather it is what happens to you when you taste the Snackattackpacks. Does that seem right to you? Perhaps that should be read ironically — it’s an obviously demented inversion of expectation to frame pain and regret as arising out of candy flavor (not to say I haven’t experienced that causal sequence).

Jesse Thorn interviewed Adam Reed, creator of TV’s Archer, in 2011. Not essential reading but some of what Reed says is interesting. In addition, Thorn goes out of his way to defend Archer against charges of meanness:

JESSE THORN: I want to read you this quote that frankly I entirely disagree with, from a review of the show that ran in the Washington Post when it first came out. Forgive me for doing this to you.

ADAM REED: Is it mean?

JESSE THORN: Oh, it’s spectacularly mean. It says, “Be warned, Archer is as obnoxious and cruel as it can possibly be and still call itself humor. I’d quote dialogue, but all the snappier stuff included naughty words for genitals.” Do you think of the show as being a mean show?

ADAM REED: I do now, after hearing that quote. I’m despondent. I do think it’s mean-spirited a lot of times, but I think there are unexpected moments of sweetness. Yeah, it’s a pretty mean show.

JESSE THORN: I just want to say that when I read that I was annoyed, because I felt like it’s not a mean show, it’s a show full of very petty shallow characters. There’s something very sweet about all of them, and I don’t think the shows perspective is a mean perspective.

ADAM REED: I think it’s more selfish than mean.

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From Christina Hoff Sommers in the Times:

There are some who say, well, too bad for the boys. If they are inattentive, obstreperous and distracting to their teachers and peers, that’s their problem. After all, the ability to regulate one’s impulses, delay gratification, sit still and pay close attention are the cornerstones of success in school and in the work force. It’s long past time for women to claim their rightful share of the economic rewards that redound to those who do well in school.

As one critic told me recently, the classroom is no more rigged against boys than workplaces are rigged against lazy and unfocused workers. But unproductive workers are adults — not 5-year-olds. If boys are restless and unfocused, why not look for ways to help them do better? As a nation, can we afford not to?

A few decades ago, when we realized that girls languished behind boys in math and science, we mounted a concerted effort to give them more support, with significant success. Shouldn’t we do the same for boys?

I wrote up some recommended science fiction reading for a friend, and figured I would post it here. I’ve also been mentioning a couple favorite writers in my grad app Statements of Purpose, in the hope they might catch someone’s eye. A lot of the pleasure of science fiction for me is philosophical speculation.
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(This is just a super-sketchy idea I had. I don’t have any particular confidence that there’s any error in Chomsky’s politics or in his linguistics, and my knowledge of each is limited. I have no formal education in linguistics. But I was reading something and this clicked so here it is.)

Chomsky is known in linguistics for his idea that human language acquisition is helped along by an innate “universal grammar.” It hinges on an observation about “the poverty of the stimulus” from which infant children are able to learn language. The thought is that it seems like it should be really hard to competently learn a human language based just on the incidental exposure that infant children normally have — there’s just not enough evidence for the rules and structures of a language to be learned completely from scratch. Since they couldn’t be learned completely from scratch, they must be learned with the aid of an in-born cribsheet built into the brain. Since all languages are learned from the same cribsheet, the fundamental structure of all languages is similar. Hence, universal grammar.

Chomsky basically won the debate over universal grammar, but apparently there are still critics, and recently they have been empowered by advances in computational pattern recognition. Wikipedia: “A common argument is that the brain’s mechanisms of statistical pattern recognition could solve many of the imagined difficulties.” More.

If we agreed with the critics, we could say that Chomsky has made the error of thinking that there must be sort of a preset master plan for languages, when in fact they could be constructed by bottom-up learning with the right tools.

Now compare Chomsky on the media, explaining that sports are an opiate of the masses:

Take, say, sports — that’s another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view. For one thing because it — you know, it offers people something to pay attention to that’s of no importance. [audience laughs] That keeps them from worrying about — [applause] keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it’s striking to see the intelligence that’s used by ordinary people in [discussions of] sports [as opposed to political and social issues]. I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in — they have the most exotic information [more laughter] and understanding about all kind of arcane issues. And the press undoubtedly does a lot with this.

You know, I remember in high school, already I was pretty old. I suddenly asked myself at one point, why do I care if my high school team wins the football game? [laughter] I mean, I don’t know anybody on the team, you know? [audience roars] I mean, they have nothing to do with me, I mean, why I am cheering for my team? It doesn’t mean any — it doesn’t make sense. But the point is, it does make sense: it’s a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements — in fact, it’s training in irrational jingoism. That’s also a feature of competitive sports. I think if you look closely at these things, I think, typically, they do have functions, and that’s why energy is devoted to supporting them and creating a basis for them and advertisers are willing to pay for them and so on. (Source.)

Here and throughout the interview (see link), Chomsky is telling a story where pro-establishment features of the media seem to be an effect of a conspiracy among the powerful — corporate and government executives, etc. So something like televised sports is explained as top-down propaganda, which is intentionally cultivated in order to serve the function of inculcating pro-establishment values. The pattern of media institutions that we see is explained as the product of a propaganda plan that serves a particular purpose.

But we might think it’s just as likely that our media environment is explained by bottom-up instead of top-down forces. Entertainment providers, advertisers, etc., are all in competition blah blah to sell things people want. And so the sports leagues are just low-cost providers of feelings of band-belongingness etc. that people tend to want. No overarching plan necessary, just as for the critics of universal grammar no innate cribsheet or plan for the structure of a language is necessary.

See the connection? Maybe it’s just me. A thought, anyway.

I read on Marginal Revolution about a new set of four prizes for scholarly achievement called the Tang prizes, after the cultural achievements of Tang dai China. The prizes are roughly on par with the Nobels in amount (they pay a little more but are awarded only biannually). They were created by a Taiwanese businessman with an endowment of $102MM.

$102MM seems like a sort of low price to me, actually — if you can spend that much and achieve the prominence of the Nobels, that seems like a lot of bang for your buck. There are probably a couple hundred people alive who could make a gift like that without affecting their lifestyle or solvency. And yet very few have done so. The number of large prizes for scientific achievement is pretty small, and the number awarded yearly or bi-yearly very small I think. Hmmm. . . .

I did some Wikipedia research to check my belief that there are very few other Nobel-caliber prizes, i.e. science prizes that pay large awards and / or are regarded as paramount achievements in a field. There actually turn out to be a bunch of other prizes with plausible claims to be Nobel-level, some of which I list below. The Nobel Prizes, though, are seemingly better-known and more prestigious than all of these. Some possible reasons: older; pays more money; covers more fields. Other prizes that might be regarded as Nobel-caliber: Abel Prize (mathematics, one prize yearly, big money); Fields Medal (mathematics, about one prize yearly, small money); Crafoord Prize (science, one prize yearly, big money); Chern Medal (mathematics, new prize, one prize every four years, big money); Kyoto Prize (science & humanities, new-ish prize, three prizes every year, big money); Rolf Schock prize (math & humanities, new-ish prize, 4 prizes every 2 years, small money); Shaw Prize (science & math, new prize, about 3 prizes every year, big money); Turing Award (computer science, one prize a year, paid no money for most of its existence(???) but now $250K). You can probably think of some other contenders: John Bates Clark Medal, Templeton Prize, etc.; this may be a sort of arbitrary list.

So maybe you can’t endow a real competitor to the Nobels for $100MM, because there are a lot of well-endowed prizes out there that have a lot less stature than the Nobel. What do you think?

I have so far not been tempted to read Thomas Nagel’s new book, but I’ve read a couple things about it. Here is H. Allen Orr in the New York Review of Books. I am a fan of Nagel’s famous article, What Is It Like To Be A Bat? which argues that there are holes in materialist explanations of consciousness, and that we don’t really know what sort of thing could go in those holes. In his new book, Mind & Cosmos, Nagel appears to be arguing that this and other holes are so big that the current scientific paradigm is somehow not seaworthy. (Based on what I’ve seen, Nagel’s conclusions in the book seem a little nuts — Orr is very fair I think.)

The holes in the current “materialistic” scientific paradigm are supposed to point the way to a new “teleological” theory or model for scientific theories. Here is Orr, emph. mine:

Natural teleology doesn’t depend on any agent’s intentions; it’s just the way the world is. There are teleological laws of nature that we don’t yet know about and they bias the unfolding of the universe in certain desirable directions, including the formation of complex organisms and consciousness. The existence of teleological laws means that certain physical outcomes “have a significantly higher probability than is entailed by the laws of physics alone—simply because they are on the path toward a certain outcome.”

So, there are some teleological laws, beyond or outside the physical laws (not just the ones we know but all of them), and the teleological laws cause outcomes to differ from what they otherwise would be under the physical laws. The “teleology” at issue has nothing to do with the particular purposes of any person or God; it is distinctively teleological because (supposedly) we empirically see some moves towards “purpose” broadly, divorced from any agent, and physical laws are insufficient.

Apart from whether this account is at all plausible, I want to ask: does it even make sense? Does it describe a worldview that is meaningfully distinct from materialism? I am tempted to answer “no,” based on an argument like the following:

If there is some teleological tendency that exerts a pull on physical outcomes, then that should be conceptualized as a physical law. After all, physical law is just our theory for explaining physical outcomes; if some new tendency is discovered exerting a pull on physical outcomes, then the law that describes that tendency is a physical law, not some new kind of law, even if it is a physical law that would surprise today’s physicists.

(Orr:

Science has, since the seventeenth century, proved remarkably adept at incorporating initially alien ideas (like electromagnetic fields) into its thinking. Yet most people, apparently including Nagel, find the resulting science sufficiently materialist.)

I like this argument but it’s just a little too categorical and tautological to be really satisfying. A reply might say: if the new tendency is strange and different enough, then it could be too strange to assimilate under physical law. For example, we could maybe imagine a teleological tendency that would upset ordinary reductionist assumptions in a disturbing way. Suppose there is somehow a tendency towards the evolution of conscious organisms. That seems like it would constitute a pull on physical outcomes. But we don’t know how to cleanly reduce consciousness to lower-level physics, so we also don’t know how to reduce this tendency to the terms of our physical laws. So we would have something like a teleological law, a tendency in physical outcomes that is easy to state in the language of purpose but can’t be neatly reduced to lower-level physics.

This example probably shouldn’t work, though. Even if there are things about consciousness that are hard to reduce to lower-level physics, anything like a tendency towards the evolution of conscious organisms should be easy to reduce to lower-level physics, because conscious organisms as far as we know are physical things that obey physical laws. If there really was a tendency towards the evolution of conscious life, we would be able to analyze it in terms of all the little things that go together to make a conscious being. (Since conscious life apparently exists, there arguably is a tendency towards the evolution of conscious life. But there is every reason to believe that tendency works on the level of physical law, as in the arguments for fine-tuning.)

There is a parallel here to debates over the definition of magic. If magic is simply something outside of physical laws, then it seems contradictory — in a world that had magic, magic would just be part of the physical laws, wouldn’t it? But magic looks very different from physical law as we know it — in magic, changes at the level of meaning, of human significance, somehow unlock dramatic physical changes, which seemingly can’t be explained in lower-level physics. An incantation works changes in the world by virtue of the meaning of the words; a chemical recipe works the opposite way. A world with magic is a world in which there’s something special and privileged about our semantics (hence “magical thinking”) — the physical world is governed by the categories into which we divide it, rather than vice versa, or rather than solely vice versa.

We can say, then, that a world of Nagel’s teleological laws might look like a world with magic. Unfortunately for Nagel, we’ve been looking for magic for a long time, and it doesn’t seem to be there. (Orr: “Teleological science is, in fact, more than imaginable. It’s actual, at least historically. Aristotelian science, with its concern for final cause, was thoroughly teleological.”) Why should we think the magical worldview is about to rally and reemerge?

Not very novel confession from dissident conservative Republican Bruce Bartlett describes how none of his conservative friends got angry at him for his remarks to the New York Times, because they refused to even look at the New York Times. But this part was quite striking to me:

Among the interesting reactions to my book is that I was banned from Fox News. My publicist was told that orders had come down from on high that it was to receive no publicity whatsoever, not even attacks. Whoever gave that order was smart; attacks from the right would have sold books. Being ignored was poison for sales.

I later learned that the order to ignore me extended throughout Rupert Murdoch’s empire. For example, I stopped being quoted in the Wall Street Journal. Awhile back, a reporter who left the Journal confirmed to me that the paper had given her orders not to mention me. Other dissident conservatives, such as David Frum and Andrew Sullivan, have told me that they are banned from Fox as well.

Vivid illustration of how a closed society can exist within an open society, without resort to closed communes and brain-washing. Brings to mind the work of Timur Kuran on preference falsification. Individuals who might want to waver from the reigning conservative orthodoxy do not because they feel they are alone in their views; the effect is self-reinforcing.

If we are hopeful we might ask, to what extent is the Republican consensus already hollowed out, waiting for a crack in the exterior that will show everyone it’s safe to dissent?

Since I don’t follow conservative media I can’t speak to the details of this question. Are conservatives really as closed-minded as Bartlett’s colorful stories suggest? Do seemingly reasonable writers like Ross Douthat enjoy any traction in conservative media? Etc. But what Bartlett says crystallizes for me both the horror and the seeming fragility of the current equilibrium.