After the last federal budget the NDP's Thomas Mulcair announced a National Day of Action. This is the kind of thing that gets my lefty heart pounding. Finally, citizens getting a chance to talk about substantive changes not just to the budget but to the whole idea of what government means to Canadians - what we are willing to pay and what we expect for that money. I was imagining a Nation wide debate, held at the local level but simultaneously with engaged and interested citizens mooting their own ideas and discussing issues that matter most to us. Instead, Mulcair decided the issues under discussion - and I'm not making this up - would be 1) ATM fees, 2) Credit Card interest rates, 3) Payday lending schemes, 4) corporate collusion and gas price fixing, and 5) companies adding a surcharge for mailing out statements at the end of each month.
Holy shit. It's lucky no one was killed in the resulting complete lack of interest. Why did they bother to stage a media event when they could have just stopped in to any Tim Horton's in the country and heard the exact same bitching? And got the exact same result. Nothing.
My five topics for a genuine National Day of Action? 1) Reducing income inequality to pre-1970 levels, 2) implementing a meaningful carbon tax for polluters, 3) the text of the apology to be delivered to scientists and librarians employed by the federal government as well as a repeal of all the insulting legislation the Harper government passed to curb their freedom of speech, 4) the creation of a new top tax bracket for incomes over $300k per annum and the elimination of a two decades worth of corporate tax breaks, and 5) giving subpoena powers to the parliamentary budget office.
and 6) reopening the Experimental Lakes Area with full funding. And one more for good luck 7) a federal commission on climate change run by climate scientists and funded by the federal government to provide the most up to date info to any member of parliament (to remain in effect until the climate stops changing or the world ends, whichever happens first).
Seriously, if I was a member of the NDP I would be very pissed off about this. What Mulcair is doing is taking the nation's pulse on issues that, by selection, belong to the conservatives. People who really think those are issues of importance are always going to vote for the conservatives because they are small issues that amount to, at most, a couple hundred bucks per year. And the conservatives will save them more than that by cutting taxes and services. Sure, those costs disproportionally hurt poor people but they are hurt far more by a government that keeps reducing its influence and ambition for the sake of reduced taxes.
People who support the NDP support big government - or, at least they are willing to provided the government has big ideas. The genuinely weird thing about Canadian politics, seen through the lens of American politics, is we are willing to pay more to get more. Canadians don't share the American fanaticism about small government. Most Canadians want a bigger government if you ask them on an issue by issue basis. When the sum of these issues is a government that takes a large and active role in our national life, people are not just willing to accept it - they welcome it. In 2004, the CBC started a contest to choose the "most influential Canadian". Most people thought it would go to Wayne Gretzky or Nobel Peace Prize winner Lester Pearson but it went to the Prairie Giant, Tommy Douglas. The father of socialized medicine in Canada. If the NDP wants to gain seats, if it wants to hold on to the ones it has, Thomas Mulcair better start thinking bigger.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Nice work if you can get it.
This is a piece about how climate change denial is being funded by the same people who brought us the Harper Government. Every time I see something like this my first thought is, "That's disgusting" and my second is, "I could do that".
For the record, the IPCC (a tremendously conservative body) included in its conclusions that climate scientists are 95% certain climate change is both real and anthropogenic. Of the scientists who contributed to it, 97.1% agreed its anthropogenic. Here's a take on those numbers in the middle of a really good attack on the media for it's fair and equal presentation of ideas. Here is an interesting article on the lay deniers who argue winter is positive proof the anthropogenic argument is wrong and how that should replace, "Hot enough for you?" as the standard culture signifier for an annoying loudmouth.
Still, there seems to be a consensus there is very little we can do as individuals except try to find the best way to survive the coming changes. The people who we need to be at the head of the movement for change are the same people who are funding the attacks against the science demonstrating the need for change. The fight is fix, as Leonard Cohen told us a long time ago. Things are so bad here is Canada, the government sends chaperones to sit with Canadian scientists at press conferences to ensure they stay "on message".
Since you don't need an advanced degree in climate science to attack it and anyone who wants to take a crack at "debunking" climate science already has the winning combination of an audience who want to be convinced and backers with deep pockets I might be approaching this issue completely backwards. The way I see it, I have two separate but related problems. I need to make money. That's problem number one. It's not as important as problem number two but it is far more immediate. Problem two is, of course, the fact we might have already locked in a climate change that will make the Earth uninhabitable.
This piece was published almost two years ago and it's a really interesting take on the new world order and our reactions to it. After connecting the current crop of apocalypse fanboys (including me, I suppose) to the people who were reacting similarly to the Mayan prophecy of 2012 (which I didn't credit for a second) or Y2K (which I also completely ignored), the author throws the king-bastard of all bummers on the unsuspecting reader:
"Imagine a future in which all the trends I've just sketched out [increasingly frequent disasters and a less and less assistance from the government and the community] just keeps getting worse, a tunnel growing slowly darker without any light at the far end - not even the lamp of an oncoming train. More to the point, imagine that this is your future; that you, personally, will have to meet ever-increasing costs with an income that has less purchasing power each year; that you will spend each year you still have left as an employee hoping that it won't be your job's turn to go away forever, until that finally happens; that you will have to figure out how to cope as health care and dozens of other basic good and services stop being available at a price you can afford, or at any price at all; that you will spend the rest of your life in the conditions I've just sketched out, and you know as you die that the challenges waiting for your grandchildren will be quite a bit worse than the ones you faced."
I can't deny I have a strange fascination with this potential apocalypse I would have probably scorned two years ago. The extent I'm willing to believe the potential for global catastrophe seems directly correlated to the mess in my personal life. I don't know if that makes me as petty is it sounds. It probably does.
For the record, the IPCC (a tremendously conservative body) included in its conclusions that climate scientists are 95% certain climate change is both real and anthropogenic. Of the scientists who contributed to it, 97.1% agreed its anthropogenic. Here's a take on those numbers in the middle of a really good attack on the media for it's fair and equal presentation of ideas. Here is an interesting article on the lay deniers who argue winter is positive proof the anthropogenic argument is wrong and how that should replace, "Hot enough for you?" as the standard culture signifier for an annoying loudmouth.
Still, there seems to be a consensus there is very little we can do as individuals except try to find the best way to survive the coming changes. The people who we need to be at the head of the movement for change are the same people who are funding the attacks against the science demonstrating the need for change. The fight is fix, as Leonard Cohen told us a long time ago. Things are so bad here is Canada, the government sends chaperones to sit with Canadian scientists at press conferences to ensure they stay "on message".
Since you don't need an advanced degree in climate science to attack it and anyone who wants to take a crack at "debunking" climate science already has the winning combination of an audience who want to be convinced and backers with deep pockets I might be approaching this issue completely backwards. The way I see it, I have two separate but related problems. I need to make money. That's problem number one. It's not as important as problem number two but it is far more immediate. Problem two is, of course, the fact we might have already locked in a climate change that will make the Earth uninhabitable.
This piece was published almost two years ago and it's a really interesting take on the new world order and our reactions to it. After connecting the current crop of apocalypse fanboys (including me, I suppose) to the people who were reacting similarly to the Mayan prophecy of 2012 (which I didn't credit for a second) or Y2K (which I also completely ignored), the author throws the king-bastard of all bummers on the unsuspecting reader:
"Imagine a future in which all the trends I've just sketched out [increasingly frequent disasters and a less and less assistance from the government and the community] just keeps getting worse, a tunnel growing slowly darker without any light at the far end - not even the lamp of an oncoming train. More to the point, imagine that this is your future; that you, personally, will have to meet ever-increasing costs with an income that has less purchasing power each year; that you will spend each year you still have left as an employee hoping that it won't be your job's turn to go away forever, until that finally happens; that you will have to figure out how to cope as health care and dozens of other basic good and services stop being available at a price you can afford, or at any price at all; that you will spend the rest of your life in the conditions I've just sketched out, and you know as you die that the challenges waiting for your grandchildren will be quite a bit worse than the ones you faced."
I can't deny I have a strange fascination with this potential apocalypse I would have probably scorned two years ago. The extent I'm willing to believe the potential for global catastrophe seems directly correlated to the mess in my personal life. I don't know if that makes me as petty is it sounds. It probably does.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
On Certainty
If you're a scientist or know anything about science you will probably want to stop reading this right now. I'm about to try to explain alpha errors and will almost certainly make a has of it.
Anyone who has been reading my latest entries will know I'm going a little crazy trying to figure out how much attention I should be paying to the scientific doomsdayers who say a + 4º planet is not fit for human inhabitation and would therefore result in Near Term Human Extinction. I was trying to talk to someone about it and, my first advice, don't do that. No one wants to hear about it. Literally no one. People have regular lives with a million little things built into them specifically so people can worry about sensible things and not craziness like human extinction. People worry about their kids, the schools their kids go to, the economy, their pensions, their next week at work, the state of their mortgages and other debts, many many normal things. They really don't need a lunatic like me dumping human extinction onto the pile and upsetting everything. Second thing, the concept of certainty requires explanation.
This is my best guess because I am not a scientist. I took some science as an undergrad but not much. Just enough to understand alpha and beta errors. So when scientists say they are 95% certain something is happening, it means they know something is happening and they are 95% certain it means what they say it means. Or, if they are predicting, it means they are 95% certain about their model. There is a huge difference between measuring and predicting (obviously) but the more important question is, "How certain is 95% certain?"
That 95% is a very important number because by itself it tells us a lot about the state of climate science. It is the statistical representation of the probability of a false positive. That's what alpha error is, a false positive. Reporting something is happening when it isn't really. The kind of opposite of alpha error is beta error and that's a false negative - reporting nothing is happening when something really is. No one needs to worry about beta error at all so long as we are talking about climate change because everyone agrees something is happening.
Alpha is typically expressed as a decimal but it gets converted into a percentage for public consumption. When I was an undergrad, we were taught that in most cases an alpha of .2 was acceptable. Meaning the results are accurate 4 times out of 5 and the corresponding certainty was therefore 80%. If you wanted a higher degree of certainty, you could make alpha .1 (or 9 times in ten, 90% certainty). So a 95% certainty is an accurate result 19 times in 20 or an alpha of .05
When you express it as a percentage it completely changes how people will perceive the number. 95% certain seems 5% more certain than 90%. And it is, kind of. But 1 error is 5 is twice as many errors (statistically) as 1 error in 10. And 1 in 10 is twice as many as 1 in 20. So 95% certain is not 15% more certain than 80% certain -it's four times as certain. An alpha of .2 is four times as high as an alpha of .05 - and that's the alpha they are using.
So when climate scientists say they are 95% certain something is happening, they mean they absolutely and conclusively know something is happening but there is a 5% chance their results are occurring because of a selection bias.
I don't know how climate scientists deal with selection bias. When I was dealing with alpha and beta errors the biggest problems were geographical and historical - people in different parts of the world are different and that causes problems for generalizing results in the social sciences. But weather is always different in different places. It has to be. That's the definition of weather and it happens because we have an atmosphere (without which we would be even more completely fucked than I think we are).
I'm going to try to get an expert to explain this to me and I'll report back.
Anyone who has been reading my latest entries will know I'm going a little crazy trying to figure out how much attention I should be paying to the scientific doomsdayers who say a + 4º planet is not fit for human inhabitation and would therefore result in Near Term Human Extinction. I was trying to talk to someone about it and, my first advice, don't do that. No one wants to hear about it. Literally no one. People have regular lives with a million little things built into them specifically so people can worry about sensible things and not craziness like human extinction. People worry about their kids, the schools their kids go to, the economy, their pensions, their next week at work, the state of their mortgages and other debts, many many normal things. They really don't need a lunatic like me dumping human extinction onto the pile and upsetting everything. Second thing, the concept of certainty requires explanation.
This is my best guess because I am not a scientist. I took some science as an undergrad but not much. Just enough to understand alpha and beta errors. So when scientists say they are 95% certain something is happening, it means they know something is happening and they are 95% certain it means what they say it means. Or, if they are predicting, it means they are 95% certain about their model. There is a huge difference between measuring and predicting (obviously) but the more important question is, "How certain is 95% certain?"
That 95% is a very important number because by itself it tells us a lot about the state of climate science. It is the statistical representation of the probability of a false positive. That's what alpha error is, a false positive. Reporting something is happening when it isn't really. The kind of opposite of alpha error is beta error and that's a false negative - reporting nothing is happening when something really is. No one needs to worry about beta error at all so long as we are talking about climate change because everyone agrees something is happening.
Alpha is typically expressed as a decimal but it gets converted into a percentage for public consumption. When I was an undergrad, we were taught that in most cases an alpha of .2 was acceptable. Meaning the results are accurate 4 times out of 5 and the corresponding certainty was therefore 80%. If you wanted a higher degree of certainty, you could make alpha .1 (or 9 times in ten, 90% certainty). So a 95% certainty is an accurate result 19 times in 20 or an alpha of .05
When you express it as a percentage it completely changes how people will perceive the number. 95% certain seems 5% more certain than 90%. And it is, kind of. But 1 error is 5 is twice as many errors (statistically) as 1 error in 10. And 1 in 10 is twice as many as 1 in 20. So 95% certain is not 15% more certain than 80% certain -it's four times as certain. An alpha of .2 is four times as high as an alpha of .05 - and that's the alpha they are using.
So when climate scientists say they are 95% certain something is happening, they mean they absolutely and conclusively know something is happening but there is a 5% chance their results are occurring because of a selection bias.
I don't know how climate scientists deal with selection bias. When I was dealing with alpha and beta errors the biggest problems were geographical and historical - people in different parts of the world are different and that causes problems for generalizing results in the social sciences. But weather is always different in different places. It has to be. That's the definition of weather and it happens because we have an atmosphere (without which we would be even more completely fucked than I think we are).
I'm going to try to get an expert to explain this to me and I'll report back.
Friday, February 21, 2014
I guess I'm a descriptivist
In an essay about television David Foster Wallace (he of the long name and even longer books) described a professor, "He was the type of person who used which even when the correct pronoun was that because it sounds fancier." I'm paraphrasing. The essay is called E Unibas Pluram and it was published in A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again. You can look it up for yourself if you want.
So I googled "which that" (not really because of the Foster essay, which I do recommend, but because I had to look up mutatis mutandis) and found a dozen web pages dedicated to using grammar correctly. I think that might be redundant (grammar is by definition correct). It should probably go without saying but reading anything on not making a total clusterf*ck of the English language will convince you in about ten minutes that you can't use the language you have been speaking and writing your entire life and every time you open your mouth you make things worse.
Which vs that is kind of simple. I'm not going to explain it, you can google it yourself. But that got me looking at further vs farther and I felt like a champion. I was getting it right. Then I looked at the dreaded dangling participle. I didn't know English had participles. Who vs whom I mostly get right, dragged vs drug I didn't even know was a thing. Laid vs lie? No clue. There were about 200 "common grammatical mistakes" or "common grammar mistakes" I forget which (that?) one. And not only did I not know the answers, I didn't even know they were questions.
Correcting someone's grammar is about the most insulting thing you can do. It's a snide way of saying, "You're ignorant." But even worse, it's like telling someone, "You smile wrong." From that moment on they will be ashamed of smiling in case they forget the rules for how to do it.
There is, among people who work for dictionaries or have a startling amount of free time, a debate between the so-called Descriptivists and Prescriptivists. The D's think language should be studied as it is used and the rules continuously (continually?) changed to reflect usage. You can think of them as the people who want "ain't" to be in the dictionary. The P's want language to be used according to the rules. You can think of them as the people who know whether I meant continuously or continually two sentences ago. Or the people who complain it's "YLOO" not "YOLO". Prior to actually trying to figure out some of the rules that govern our language I would have said (written?) I was a P. I take language seriously even though I can't punctuate for shit. I read a lot of books and I know the difference between further and farther, lesser and fewer. But the more rules you learn, the more there are to learn. And, really, the more smug and irritating P's start to seem.
Even if I didn't care about associating myself with that annoying, know-it-all-ish, finger-wagging, prescriptivist bullshit, a big part of the greatness of the English language is its ability to consume and mangle. Some people think the reason has become the parole (langue?) of the world is because it is the language of business. I think that's only partly true. The official access to most languages is controlled by a bunch of tight-assed P's who say what is, and what isn't, a word. Which is why when you listen to people speaking other languages on the telephone, you hear, "[a bunch of Mandarin words] microwave [a bunch more Mandarin words]." The technical word for this is neologism and it just means you're allowed to make up words and pretend they're English any time you want. And anybody can do it. I think it's kind of funny because neologism is from the French neoligisme. They didn't have a word to describe new words so they took the Greek for "new" and the Greek for "word" and stuck them together. But in French it kind of means "a bullshit word" because you can't make neoligisme in French. You can in English, so neologism became a perfectly good English word to describe other new perfectly good English words.
There are way more than a million words in English. It's probably closer to two million by now. There are about 120 000 in German and only 90 000 in French. About 80 000 of those German words are used in English because the Germans have a real knack for coming up with words for saying crazy shit no one in English bothered trying to say until they found out the Germans already had a word for it. Like dopelgänger and schadenfreude. It's only fair to add that while you can't make new words in German you can stick two or more old words together to make a (kind of) new word. The English equivalent would be knowitallism (instead of the massively incorrect "know-it-all-ism"), which (that?) would then be mangled and changed to kiam or douchebaggery or something else no one could predict.
Even though I am willing to call myself a descriptivist, I'm still not going to admit a construction like, "Either you is or you is ain't..." There are degrees. I am a descriptivist to precisely the degree that my grammar is incorrect. Any mistakes I make should therefore not be construed as mistakes but, rather, as a fluid and lively use of a mutable and growing language. Other peoples mistakes are just wrong. Unless I make them too. What a wonderful fucking language.
So I googled "which that" (not really because of the Foster essay, which I do recommend, but because I had to look up mutatis mutandis) and found a dozen web pages dedicated to using grammar correctly. I think that might be redundant (grammar is by definition correct). It should probably go without saying but reading anything on not making a total clusterf*ck of the English language will convince you in about ten minutes that you can't use the language you have been speaking and writing your entire life and every time you open your mouth you make things worse.
Which vs that is kind of simple. I'm not going to explain it, you can google it yourself. But that got me looking at further vs farther and I felt like a champion. I was getting it right. Then I looked at the dreaded dangling participle. I didn't know English had participles. Who vs whom I mostly get right, dragged vs drug I didn't even know was a thing. Laid vs lie? No clue. There were about 200 "common grammatical mistakes" or "common grammar mistakes" I forget which (that?) one. And not only did I not know the answers, I didn't even know they were questions.
Correcting someone's grammar is about the most insulting thing you can do. It's a snide way of saying, "You're ignorant." But even worse, it's like telling someone, "You smile wrong." From that moment on they will be ashamed of smiling in case they forget the rules for how to do it.
There is, among people who work for dictionaries or have a startling amount of free time, a debate between the so-called Descriptivists and Prescriptivists. The D's think language should be studied as it is used and the rules continuously (continually?) changed to reflect usage. You can think of them as the people who want "ain't" to be in the dictionary. The P's want language to be used according to the rules. You can think of them as the people who know whether I meant continuously or continually two sentences ago. Or the people who complain it's "YLOO" not "YOLO". Prior to actually trying to figure out some of the rules that govern our language I would have said (written?) I was a P. I take language seriously even though I can't punctuate for shit. I read a lot of books and I know the difference between further and farther, lesser and fewer. But the more rules you learn, the more there are to learn. And, really, the more smug and irritating P's start to seem.
Even if I didn't care about associating myself with that annoying, know-it-all-ish, finger-wagging, prescriptivist bullshit, a big part of the greatness of the English language is its ability to consume and mangle. Some people think the reason has become the parole (langue?) of the world is because it is the language of business. I think that's only partly true. The official access to most languages is controlled by a bunch of tight-assed P's who say what is, and what isn't, a word. Which is why when you listen to people speaking other languages on the telephone, you hear, "[a bunch of Mandarin words] microwave [a bunch more Mandarin words]." The technical word for this is neologism and it just means you're allowed to make up words and pretend they're English any time you want. And anybody can do it. I think it's kind of funny because neologism is from the French neoligisme. They didn't have a word to describe new words so they took the Greek for "new" and the Greek for "word" and stuck them together. But in French it kind of means "a bullshit word" because you can't make neoligisme in French. You can in English, so neologism became a perfectly good English word to describe other new perfectly good English words.
There are way more than a million words in English. It's probably closer to two million by now. There are about 120 000 in German and only 90 000 in French. About 80 000 of those German words are used in English because the Germans have a real knack for coming up with words for saying crazy shit no one in English bothered trying to say until they found out the Germans already had a word for it. Like dopelgänger and schadenfreude. It's only fair to add that while you can't make new words in German you can stick two or more old words together to make a (kind of) new word. The English equivalent would be knowitallism (instead of the massively incorrect "know-it-all-ism"), which (that?) would then be mangled and changed to kiam or douchebaggery or something else no one could predict.
Even though I am willing to call myself a descriptivist, I'm still not going to admit a construction like, "Either you is or you is ain't..." There are degrees. I am a descriptivist to precisely the degree that my grammar is incorrect. Any mistakes I make should therefore not be construed as mistakes but, rather, as a fluid and lively use of a mutable and growing language. Other peoples mistakes are just wrong. Unless I make them too. What a wonderful fucking language.
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Pretending to care about the Olympics (again)
Today, if Facebook posts are a reliable indicator, the Canadian women's hockey team won a gold medal. Like anyone gives a fuck about women's hockey. I don't mean to offend any women that read this but it's hockey - a sport so fucking dumb you really should know better. I know that women are smarter than men. I'm not trying to dig myself out of a hole here, they really are. Guys are so dumb they are even dumb about the things they are smart about. Like boats or guns. A guy who owns a boat will think he knows every fucking thing there is to know about boats and all of it will be wrong. And it isn't women who are threatening to kill Obama if he takes their guns away. Really, that is typical of male thinking - you took my toys away so I'm going to hit you. We are dumber than five year olds. My nephew knows how to share, how many adult men do?
So hockey. That's a guy thing. And that's not me being macho. It's the most damning condemnation I can pass on a thing. It's so fucking stupid only guys like it. Women, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Curling, on the other hand, is something women also do. And they do it because you can't just throw the fucking rock as hard as your steroidal muscles will manage. It's physics, timing, delicacy, and a strange kind of tactical thinking women are better at than men. The only reason men beat women at curling is because they sweep better. Put a female skip and lead with two male sweepers against a male skip and lead and two female sweepers and the female skip will win every time. Men are only good for sweeping. Wow, our culture really dropped the ball on that stereotype.
I'm not bitching about the Olympics just because I like to piss on other peoples' parades. Although that's definitely part of it. I also bitched about George Bush the Lesser invading Iraq. That was stupid, disingenuous, and genocidal. The Olympics are stupid, disingenuous, and boring. So Iraq wins on the losing scale.
Before this Olympics started everyone was talking about boycotting it because Putin is a homophobe. He's also a crazed monster whose politics are somewhere to the right of Attila. But the homophobic part really rubbed people the wrong way. But, homophobic or not, it's been a long time since Canada won double gold in Olympic hockey (since Salt Lake). I guess we better hope the next winter Olympics doesn't coincide with any major political upheaval that requires some canny intervention from the Great White North - or failing that, that the men's team gets eliminated early.
To be fair, I never gave much thought to how to respond to the official homophobia of the Russian state. In some way I always think it's nice when a nation does something as dumb as actually codifying the prejudices and idiocies everyone knows they. It makes them so much easier to mock. Look at the famous case of Dred Scott. America was racist as fuck before that and racist as fuck after it but people still gave their heads a shake when they heard the Supreme Court let that cat out of the bag. So when Russia passed its ridiculous anti-gay propaganda law, I thought we were in for some quality humour and, maybe, some very entertaining arrests during the ice dancing competitions. But the hotels were shit and people started posting funny pictures on Instagram and that was the end of the anti-gay bashing.
Maybe we'll get lucky and those mad bastard Brazilians will make some nutty laws before 2016. I think I wrote this before but if they make pro-gay propaganda mandatory, I will watch the entire Olympiad. From the opening to closing ceremonies, I will watch every mind numbing long jumping pole vaulting minute.
So hockey. That's a guy thing. And that's not me being macho. It's the most damning condemnation I can pass on a thing. It's so fucking stupid only guys like it. Women, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Curling, on the other hand, is something women also do. And they do it because you can't just throw the fucking rock as hard as your steroidal muscles will manage. It's physics, timing, delicacy, and a strange kind of tactical thinking women are better at than men. The only reason men beat women at curling is because they sweep better. Put a female skip and lead with two male sweepers against a male skip and lead and two female sweepers and the female skip will win every time. Men are only good for sweeping. Wow, our culture really dropped the ball on that stereotype.
I'm not bitching about the Olympics just because I like to piss on other peoples' parades. Although that's definitely part of it. I also bitched about George Bush the Lesser invading Iraq. That was stupid, disingenuous, and genocidal. The Olympics are stupid, disingenuous, and boring. So Iraq wins on the losing scale.
Before this Olympics started everyone was talking about boycotting it because Putin is a homophobe. He's also a crazed monster whose politics are somewhere to the right of Attila. But the homophobic part really rubbed people the wrong way. But, homophobic or not, it's been a long time since Canada won double gold in Olympic hockey (since Salt Lake). I guess we better hope the next winter Olympics doesn't coincide with any major political upheaval that requires some canny intervention from the Great White North - or failing that, that the men's team gets eliminated early.
To be fair, I never gave much thought to how to respond to the official homophobia of the Russian state. In some way I always think it's nice when a nation does something as dumb as actually codifying the prejudices and idiocies everyone knows they. It makes them so much easier to mock. Look at the famous case of Dred Scott. America was racist as fuck before that and racist as fuck after it but people still gave their heads a shake when they heard the Supreme Court let that cat out of the bag. So when Russia passed its ridiculous anti-gay propaganda law, I thought we were in for some quality humour and, maybe, some very entertaining arrests during the ice dancing competitions. But the hotels were shit and people started posting funny pictures on Instagram and that was the end of the anti-gay bashing.
Maybe we'll get lucky and those mad bastard Brazilians will make some nutty laws before 2016. I think I wrote this before but if they make pro-gay propaganda mandatory, I will watch the entire Olympiad. From the opening to closing ceremonies, I will watch every mind numbing long jumping pole vaulting minute.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Even more on public professors
I just wrote this in the previous entry but it was way at the bottom and I doubt anyone will bother struggling through my terrible prose to find it. So Nicholas Kristof published an op-ed piece on the need for more public intellectuals - something which I have previously agreed with. Kristof makes a glaring omission that I somehow didn't think of until my 15 minutes were almost up.
The most famous public intellectual (and the most trusted man in America according to some surveys) is the MIT professor Noam Chomsky. One of Chomsky's first big political splashes was his description of the limits of acceptable opinion. You can be a (very) little to the left on an issue or you can be (very) little to the right on it. But if you are outside the bounds of acceptable opinion, you might as well not say or write anything because no one will publish it. Of course, we have the interwebs now and you can publish it yourself on your blog or your Facebook page. And ten of your very best friends (who already agree with you) will read it. But if it gets too big and too many people read it, you will be excoriated in the journals that make public opinion as a radical. Maybe a radical liberal maybe a radical conservative but you will be described as a potentially dangerous lunatic either way.
So why do professors bury themselves in arcana? Partially because many fields of human knowledge are genuinely so fucking complex everything we don't already know seems like arcana to those of us who aren't specialists in the field. Anyone out there really understand anything beyond 12th grade particle physics? And partially because everything written above an 8th grade level seems like arcana to people who read newspapers. I happen to know a whole lot about the Roman concept of imperium, anyone interested? And partially because the spectrum of acceptable opinion is too fucking small for them to contribute anyway. I would really like to publish my opinions of American foreign policy since 1950, anyone want to print them for me?
The most famous public intellectual (and the most trusted man in America according to some surveys) is the MIT professor Noam Chomsky. One of Chomsky's first big political splashes was his description of the limits of acceptable opinion. You can be a (very) little to the left on an issue or you can be (very) little to the right on it. But if you are outside the bounds of acceptable opinion, you might as well not say or write anything because no one will publish it. Of course, we have the interwebs now and you can publish it yourself on your blog or your Facebook page. And ten of your very best friends (who already agree with you) will read it. But if it gets too big and too many people read it, you will be excoriated in the journals that make public opinion as a radical. Maybe a radical liberal maybe a radical conservative but you will be described as a potentially dangerous lunatic either way.
So why do professors bury themselves in arcana? Partially because many fields of human knowledge are genuinely so fucking complex everything we don't already know seems like arcana to those of us who aren't specialists in the field. Anyone out there really understand anything beyond 12th grade particle physics? And partially because everything written above an 8th grade level seems like arcana to people who read newspapers. I happen to know a whole lot about the Roman concept of imperium, anyone interested? And partially because the spectrum of acceptable opinion is too fucking small for them to contribute anyway. I would really like to publish my opinions of American foreign policy since 1950, anyone want to print them for me?
More on Professors
Here is Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times about how we need more professors to become public intellectuals. The article is a funny kind of thing because when I read it I got mad about it. And that's funny because I've made some very similar complaints here.
When I see it under someone else's name I can be a lot more critical. That's a ridiculous statements but the leader at the top of the page says, "Don't expect too much... 15 minutes or less." This is as smart as I can be on any given day in 10 to 15 minutes. And that's not very smart. So, let's start with the problems in Kristof's piece.
On the issue of academic marginalization: Kristof thinks (and I agree) the world needs more inspired generalists. This would be particularly true of the United States where Bill Nye (the Science Guy) has become the advocate for realism in the American culture. There is a systemic flaw (there are many but I want to write about one) in the academy and it has to do with the process of becoming a professor.
When you apply for a graduate school you have to submit a document stating your research intentions. And you know when you write it that the final result has to be a new and original contribution to the area you are working in. So. What are you going to do? Are you going to bet 4 years and +$100k that you can succeed in coming up with something new in an area that is very general and already has about a thousand books written about it or are you going to pick something very particular that no one else has researched yet? Kristof thinks you should do the latter but it's the riskier bet. And if you spend four years and pile up another $100-200k debt and don't come up with something you can use to get a job in academia, you're properly fucked. You know how long it takes to pay off $200k in student loans on what an adjunct prof makes? Forever. You'll be paying off loans with your social security - if there is any left by the time you apply for it. So the smart bet is specialization. And then you get a job (if you are very lucky) because you specialized. The next step is tenure and to earn that you have to publish and publish. Anything new can get published. It doesn't matter how arcane it is. Kristof acknowledges this in his backhand way. Publications in a newspaper don't count. Speeches made to thousands of people don't count (unless they are part of a conference). Being a dutiful and conscientious public intellectual doesn't count. Moving the conscience of a nation doesn't count. TED Talks really don't count (unless we are keeping track of the warm strokes to your ego). You need to teach and publish. So, if you do all that and you are very very lucky you get a tenured position. It is worth pointing out that since 1970 the number of tenured professors in the United States has increased only 10% despite hundreds of new schools opening and a massive increase in the percent of the population that goes to university or college. Luck is a very important factor.
Now you have another difficult decision to make. You feel very strongly about a number of issues and you want to bring your own knowledge to the discussion. Some of the administrators above you in the hierarchy (administrative positions have increased 240%) will be with you, some will be against you. Do you risk pissing people off - not just in the community at large but in the community you work in every single day? How many people do this outside of academia? What percentage stand up for their beliefs when it has the potential to cause them grief they can easily avoid by keeping their mouths shut? Academics have, I believe, a higher standard they ought to live up to but in order for them to do so we (meaning you, me, and everybody) have to make things just a little easier for them. I was looking for a site I sometimes visit that keeps track of the insane hoops academics are made to jump through, so I googled "professor complaint" and the first 5 pages of results were either instructions on how to complain about a professor or complaints against professors as a species. It is important to remember here that tenure isn't the last promotion a professor can get. There is a lot of money after that. Not just in salary either, the big money is in equipment, assistants, space to work, and other support.
Moving on. Kristof quotes a fellow at the Brookings Institute, "Many academics frown on public pontificating as a frivolous distraction from real research." The Brookings Institute isn't a university, it's a think tank funded by ExxonMobil, the Carnegie Corporation, the Republic of China and Qatar (among others). As a think tank public advocacy is it's reason d'être. So long as it keeps up its advocacy for causes its donors support, it has no need to worry about money. Researchers at universities need a constant influx of money from private and corporate donors. The trend is away from corporate donations and toward corporate partnerships that give the corporations control over everything from the patents generated to curriculum and hiring. And we all know how much corporations love public advocacy.
The liberal bias in the humanities and social science isn't a selection bias. There is no political agenda in the hiring committee. Same as there is no political agenda on the admission boards. The process of learning about any subject that falls into the humanities or social sciences has the effect of making a person more 'liberal'. That's using the American political spectrum. There are plenty of conservative professors in Canada in both faculties. In fact, I would argue historians are, by education, conservative. If history teaches you anything, it teaches you only very bad shit happens fast. Young people all want to change the world (or, if they are lazy, for the world to change itself). By the time they graduate they have learned every change in the world so far has produced an enormous body count and so they become conservative. Just not according to American nomenclature. So long as conservative means 'free market radical' they will be limited to economics. And maybe a few other disciplines that aren't particularly interested in how the world actually works.
In architecture, where I have the most direct experience, I would say my (tenured) professors were all far more conservative than I am. There were one or two Red Tories (conservatives with socialist leanings) but no Reds per se.
Kristof ends with a plea that professors not cloister themselves like medieval monks. And I agree with that too. But there is a reason medieval monks cloistered themselves. It was because the world they lived in became extremely hostile to them. And I think the same thing is true about professors. The world doesn't want to hear what they have to say. When the presidents and prime ministers of advanced nations start hurling anti-intellectual screed, when the government cracks down on "political speech" by librarians (as happened here in Canada, the political speech being discussions with kids in the third grade and helping people compile their family tree), when the mayor of Canada's largest city calls professors "leeches on the system" in a city council meeting, I would be cloistering myself too.
The worst part about the Kristof article is that he is right (in a very general way). I have argued here before that Matt Taibbi is the closest thing America has to a public intellectual (since George Carlin died). Maybe I should have given Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson more credit. The reason I was trying to find the site I mentioned about the lives of professors was because I read a very moving article I wish I could link written by a professor who just found out she has breast cancer. She had originally scheduled her scan for more than a year before the cancer was found but had to keep putting the appointment off for the everyday inconveniences being a professor entails. They don't have it easy, living off a kind of luxury welfare. The best professors I know, and in fact most of the professors I know, live their jobs. They don't ever really stop working. They become what they do and it is who they are. They have no private lives in the sense most people do. It's an incredible dedication to a vocation.
This entry is already a little long but, fuck, like I care whether any of this scrawl ever gets read by anyone. The second best lecture I ever attended in my life was about professions of the gown. There are, my professor said, some professions that require their practitioners to wear gowns. Judges, priests, professors, and sometimes lawyers. The reason they wear gowns is as a symbol of their collective purpose. Each judge is supposed to rule as any other judge would. Priests all perform the same sacrament in the same way. Professors share a common purpose and a common charge. The gown marks them as instruments of society. As a professor, and as a judge or priest, their duty is to society as a whole and not to some portion of it or to their own advancement. The gown is also a kind of visible submission to a more permanent order, a more lasting truth, than the world outside can offer. Judges are the voice of law, that abstract compact between people. The priest is the voice of an eternal g*d. The professor speaks only the truth as it is then known and is dedicated to making the current state of truth more faithful to reality. Of course some judges are corrupt, some priests pedophiles, some professors lazy and self-aggrandizing. The symbol of the gown finds its ultimate affirmation in the expulsion of priests, who are symbolically and literally defrocked.
This is perhaps the best argument against both Kristof and me. Public advocacy has little place in this culture of the gown. The role of professors is to relate the truth all the time to the best of their abilities. Public advocacy always reduces the conflicting ideas and simplifies them to a position that is right and a position that is wrong. There is no room for subtlety and, therefore, less fealty to the true state of things.
It is also worth pointing out that if there were thousands of professors making vigorous political stances on the issues of the day, how would we know? There is a limit to what the New York Times or the New Yorker (the publications Kristof takes as the bench mark for public advocacy) will print. If you are outside of those limits, you are left with few means of making your positions known. You can have a blog, I guess. You can speak at rallies that don't get covered in the news. You can organize talks in your local community center or church. Chomsky's main point about the potential from public advocacy is the how small the spectrum of acceptable opinion is. In the years since he first described it, it has only gotten smaller.
When I see it under someone else's name I can be a lot more critical. That's a ridiculous statements but the leader at the top of the page says, "Don't expect too much... 15 minutes or less." This is as smart as I can be on any given day in 10 to 15 minutes. And that's not very smart. So, let's start with the problems in Kristof's piece.
On the issue of academic marginalization: Kristof thinks (and I agree) the world needs more inspired generalists. This would be particularly true of the United States where Bill Nye (the Science Guy) has become the advocate for realism in the American culture. There is a systemic flaw (there are many but I want to write about one) in the academy and it has to do with the process of becoming a professor.
When you apply for a graduate school you have to submit a document stating your research intentions. And you know when you write it that the final result has to be a new and original contribution to the area you are working in. So. What are you going to do? Are you going to bet 4 years and +$100k that you can succeed in coming up with something new in an area that is very general and already has about a thousand books written about it or are you going to pick something very particular that no one else has researched yet? Kristof thinks you should do the latter but it's the riskier bet. And if you spend four years and pile up another $100-200k debt and don't come up with something you can use to get a job in academia, you're properly fucked. You know how long it takes to pay off $200k in student loans on what an adjunct prof makes? Forever. You'll be paying off loans with your social security - if there is any left by the time you apply for it. So the smart bet is specialization. And then you get a job (if you are very lucky) because you specialized. The next step is tenure and to earn that you have to publish and publish. Anything new can get published. It doesn't matter how arcane it is. Kristof acknowledges this in his backhand way. Publications in a newspaper don't count. Speeches made to thousands of people don't count (unless they are part of a conference). Being a dutiful and conscientious public intellectual doesn't count. Moving the conscience of a nation doesn't count. TED Talks really don't count (unless we are keeping track of the warm strokes to your ego). You need to teach and publish. So, if you do all that and you are very very lucky you get a tenured position. It is worth pointing out that since 1970 the number of tenured professors in the United States has increased only 10% despite hundreds of new schools opening and a massive increase in the percent of the population that goes to university or college. Luck is a very important factor.
Now you have another difficult decision to make. You feel very strongly about a number of issues and you want to bring your own knowledge to the discussion. Some of the administrators above you in the hierarchy (administrative positions have increased 240%) will be with you, some will be against you. Do you risk pissing people off - not just in the community at large but in the community you work in every single day? How many people do this outside of academia? What percentage stand up for their beliefs when it has the potential to cause them grief they can easily avoid by keeping their mouths shut? Academics have, I believe, a higher standard they ought to live up to but in order for them to do so we (meaning you, me, and everybody) have to make things just a little easier for them. I was looking for a site I sometimes visit that keeps track of the insane hoops academics are made to jump through, so I googled "professor complaint" and the first 5 pages of results were either instructions on how to complain about a professor or complaints against professors as a species. It is important to remember here that tenure isn't the last promotion a professor can get. There is a lot of money after that. Not just in salary either, the big money is in equipment, assistants, space to work, and other support.
Moving on. Kristof quotes a fellow at the Brookings Institute, "Many academics frown on public pontificating as a frivolous distraction from real research." The Brookings Institute isn't a university, it's a think tank funded by ExxonMobil, the Carnegie Corporation, the Republic of China and Qatar (among others). As a think tank public advocacy is it's reason d'être. So long as it keeps up its advocacy for causes its donors support, it has no need to worry about money. Researchers at universities need a constant influx of money from private and corporate donors. The trend is away from corporate donations and toward corporate partnerships that give the corporations control over everything from the patents generated to curriculum and hiring. And we all know how much corporations love public advocacy.
The liberal bias in the humanities and social science isn't a selection bias. There is no political agenda in the hiring committee. Same as there is no political agenda on the admission boards. The process of learning about any subject that falls into the humanities or social sciences has the effect of making a person more 'liberal'. That's using the American political spectrum. There are plenty of conservative professors in Canada in both faculties. In fact, I would argue historians are, by education, conservative. If history teaches you anything, it teaches you only very bad shit happens fast. Young people all want to change the world (or, if they are lazy, for the world to change itself). By the time they graduate they have learned every change in the world so far has produced an enormous body count and so they become conservative. Just not according to American nomenclature. So long as conservative means 'free market radical' they will be limited to economics. And maybe a few other disciplines that aren't particularly interested in how the world actually works.
In architecture, where I have the most direct experience, I would say my (tenured) professors were all far more conservative than I am. There were one or two Red Tories (conservatives with socialist leanings) but no Reds per se.
Kristof ends with a plea that professors not cloister themselves like medieval monks. And I agree with that too. But there is a reason medieval monks cloistered themselves. It was because the world they lived in became extremely hostile to them. And I think the same thing is true about professors. The world doesn't want to hear what they have to say. When the presidents and prime ministers of advanced nations start hurling anti-intellectual screed, when the government cracks down on "political speech" by librarians (as happened here in Canada, the political speech being discussions with kids in the third grade and helping people compile their family tree), when the mayor of Canada's largest city calls professors "leeches on the system" in a city council meeting, I would be cloistering myself too.
The worst part about the Kristof article is that he is right (in a very general way). I have argued here before that Matt Taibbi is the closest thing America has to a public intellectual (since George Carlin died). Maybe I should have given Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson more credit. The reason I was trying to find the site I mentioned about the lives of professors was because I read a very moving article I wish I could link written by a professor who just found out she has breast cancer. She had originally scheduled her scan for more than a year before the cancer was found but had to keep putting the appointment off for the everyday inconveniences being a professor entails. They don't have it easy, living off a kind of luxury welfare. The best professors I know, and in fact most of the professors I know, live their jobs. They don't ever really stop working. They become what they do and it is who they are. They have no private lives in the sense most people do. It's an incredible dedication to a vocation.
This entry is already a little long but, fuck, like I care whether any of this scrawl ever gets read by anyone. The second best lecture I ever attended in my life was about professions of the gown. There are, my professor said, some professions that require their practitioners to wear gowns. Judges, priests, professors, and sometimes lawyers. The reason they wear gowns is as a symbol of their collective purpose. Each judge is supposed to rule as any other judge would. Priests all perform the same sacrament in the same way. Professors share a common purpose and a common charge. The gown marks them as instruments of society. As a professor, and as a judge or priest, their duty is to society as a whole and not to some portion of it or to their own advancement. The gown is also a kind of visible submission to a more permanent order, a more lasting truth, than the world outside can offer. Judges are the voice of law, that abstract compact between people. The priest is the voice of an eternal g*d. The professor speaks only the truth as it is then known and is dedicated to making the current state of truth more faithful to reality. Of course some judges are corrupt, some priests pedophiles, some professors lazy and self-aggrandizing. The symbol of the gown finds its ultimate affirmation in the expulsion of priests, who are symbolically and literally defrocked.
This is perhaps the best argument against both Kristof and me. Public advocacy has little place in this culture of the gown. The role of professors is to relate the truth all the time to the best of their abilities. Public advocacy always reduces the conflicting ideas and simplifies them to a position that is right and a position that is wrong. There is no room for subtlety and, therefore, less fealty to the true state of things.
It is also worth pointing out that if there were thousands of professors making vigorous political stances on the issues of the day, how would we know? There is a limit to what the New York Times or the New Yorker (the publications Kristof takes as the bench mark for public advocacy) will print. If you are outside of those limits, you are left with few means of making your positions known. You can have a blog, I guess. You can speak at rallies that don't get covered in the news. You can organize talks in your local community center or church. Chomsky's main point about the potential from public advocacy is the how small the spectrum of acceptable opinion is. In the years since he first described it, it has only gotten smaller.
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