You can't facebook the truth!

This NYRB piece about Facebook seems shoddily researched (either that or my memory's failing). For instance:

1. It claims the original "relationship status" answers were: Single; In a Relationship; Engaged; Married; "It's Complicated"; "In an Open Relationship." I feel like "it's complicated" was a later addition, dating from 2004 or 2005.
2. It claims that the site removed "Random Play" and "Whatever I Can Get" from the options of what members were "Looking For"—to be replaced by "Networking." Last I checked, "random play" was definitely still an option.
3. It doesn't even mention my favorite erstwhile Facebook feature, the "social net" thing that allowed you to see which of your friends knew each other. I remember the feature was always plagued by various technical problems but it was actually a fun thing to mess with.
   

And there are some assertions that seem implausible. For instance: It even became something of a norm to greet a friend in the dining hall by declaring, for example, "I see you added Trotsky to your list of favorite authors—but dropped Marx!" This seems very far off; as the author remarks elsewhere, the site was generally understood to be a lark, and I certainly never overheard people talking about their profile updates at Valentine.

That said, this description of the decline and fall -- the growing tiresomeness -- of Facebook is exactly right:

... what might be called Facebook's "suburban period," which began in September 2006 and continues, in many ways, into the present. We can pinpoint the start date so precisely because at the same time that Zuckerberg opened Facebook to anyone who wanted to join, he launched a function that has since come to dominate the site: the "News Feed."

The News Feed, as the name suggests, resembled a personalized wire service. "Imagine a device that monitors the social marketplace the way a blinking Bloomberg terminal tracks incremental changes in the bond market," The New York Times described the new feature at its debut. But I would propose an alternate metaphor: the suburban backyard fence. Facebook, when restricted to colleges, had relied on the typically intense social lives of students in the dorm room and at the dining hall. It was possible to obsessively check the pages of a few good friends or a cute girl in your class, but you could easily ignore everyone else.

The News Feed, by contrast, made everyone and everything an object of gossip by automatically sending the minutest changes to a wide circle of "friends." Along with the pleasure of learning that a crush had added Godard to her list of favorite filmmakers, you had to endure image after image of the drunken escapades of people you hadn't seen in years. New features were supposed to screen out some "friends," but these settings barely worked.

Yes. This was a huge nuisance if you were already on Facebook and had the new features foisted on you. The problem was that under the old rules there was no reason not to be friends with everybody -- that way if they joined a different network you would still be able to Facebook-stalk them -- but suddenly your newsfeed was cluttered with, not the drunken escapades, but the vapid and inconsequential chatter of people you had no interest in.

In fact, there has always been a selection effect by which precisely the people you don't want to hear about are the kind that update their profile or join a group every three minutes. This effect extends, I think, to the Wall (the single most pointless and obnoxious thing about Facebook): I can't remember the last time someone actually posted something on my wall that I wanted to read; it's always random clowns I haven't seen in years saying something placeholderish and misspelled.

All the same, I can see that if I joined Facebook a long time after I actually did, I would perhaps like it better. Facebook does a lot of useful things: one could use the status updates as tweets, write facebook notes instead of blog posts, and use the privacy settings to get something almost like planworld. OTOH I don't really see myself defriending half my acquaintance; I might not want to know much about their lives, but I would like to know where they live, in case I'm ever in (say) Portland -- incidentally I'll be there in March for the APS meeting -- and have an afternoon to kill. Besides, the blog, twitter, Google reader, and planworld are entirely adequate as far as they go.

So thaoghaire!

Quoghoth Flann O'Brien (NB "strobh" is "strove" and "Dun Laoghaire" is "Dunleary" and everything else is determined by the rhyghymes):

Said a Sassenach back in Dun Laoghaire
"I pay homage to nationalist thaoghaire,
But wherever I drobh
I found signposts that strobh
To make touring in Ireland so draoghaire."

Link roundup

Back in 08 I used to blog links I thought were cool. Then I started using Google Reader; sharing was less work than blogging but the catch is that everyone is a compulsive oversharer (I'd put myself somewhere between Emily Gould and Grobstein) so shared items tend to be more ephemeral than I'd like. I think I'm going to periodically blog a link roundup. Here's the first. (The others will, I imagine, be a lot shorter.)

[H/t as appropriate to Grobstein, Alan, and Liz Chiang.]

1. Rivers used to run straight before plants came along (SciAm)
2. What people thought about Reagan in 1982 (Bernstein)
3. Hexagonal London (Strangemaps)
4. They voted for healthcare before they voted against it (Yglesias)
5. Robert Solow on the financial crisis (TNR)
6. pourquoi michael jackson est blanc (Andrew Gelman)
7. "Orthogonal, ooh" (Volokh)
8. The Crisis of Juvenile Prison Rape (NYRB)
9. Auden martini (PoetryFoundation)
10. "The internet is badgering everybody" (Brendan Nyhan)
11. Quotes with and without quotes (Language Log)
12. The Samuel Beckett bridge (Crooked Timber)
13. "Eating an orange / while making love / makes for bizarre enj- / oyment thereof." (Tom Lehrer via Language Log)
14. Toy drives checking immigration status of children (Yglesias)
15. Can you guess what these maps show? (Flowing Data)
16. Power laws in chess (Physics)
17. Syllepsis gone wild (Language Log)
18. Frozen Horse, Embuggerance, etc. (Language Log)
19. 32 meters of Mao (Neatorama)
20. NYC population by borough (Yglesias)
21. X and Y: the one-track mind of Ivy Compton-Burnett (Light reading)
22. "America's secular saboteurs" (WaPo, On Faith [for the record this link is just amusingly abhorrent])
23. Who benefits from equality? (David Runciman, LRB)
24. Kay Ryan: The paw of a cat (New Yorker)
25. The Powers of Dr Johnson (Andrew O'Hagan, NYRB)
26. Why strip malls don't have empty storefronts (Yglesias)
27. The metamorphosis of Charlie Brown (Book Bench)
28. Kay Ryan: Fool's Errands (New Yorker)
29. 20 insults from P.G. Wodehouse (Cosmic Variance)
30. Sophomore optics fail (Cosmic Variance)
31. Geoff Nunberg channels Alexander Pope to mock Strunk (Language Log)
32. Evolution and the Second Law (Cosmic Variance)
    

"Everything reminds Judis of the white working class"

John Judis of the New Republic is a hack. Perhaps as a consequence, he is a respected and influential pundit; there's something about specious, easily refutable narratives that appeals to the collective unconscious of the pundit class. Judis's general shtick is to interpret all of national politics in terms of the "white working class," and his general approach is to vulgarize the sociology (making working-class whites out to be more racist and homogeneous than they are) and misrepresent the data. Jay Cost dismantled his "realignment" theory in 2007. I tried to test his theory about racism and the 2008 election here; it doesn't seem that he looked very hard at the data.

You might think it's a step forward for him to actually plot a graph, as he does in this (drearily typical) new piece:



(If the axes are illegible, the red graph is Obama's disapproval rating and the blue graph is the unemployment rate over time.) The analysis, however, is beneath rebuttal:

What I found in Obama’s case is that at the beginning of last fall, when Washington began debating his health care plan in earnest, his level of disapproval began to exceed the rise in the unemployment rate. [Having "established" this Judis goes on to blather about white working class anger re the Cadillac tax.]

Incidentally I suspect that he's using made-up data for unemployment Nov-Jan. Surely the unemployment rate hasn't stayed exactly the same to two significant figures.

Repeating recent history

I can't find the link but the sharpest point I've heard about MA and healthcare reform is that if the House Democrats give up, they will nevertheless be attacked in November as having been "for it before they were against it." Of course, it is unlikely to be the determining factor in the midterms -- if the economy is doing moderately well, the Democrats will avoid getting clubbed, etc. -- but it seems clear that (1) the Dems cannot salvage political capital regardless of what they do so they might as well pass the damn bill, (2) if Obama really takes the bill back to the Senate and spends another year on healthcare reform, he will look increasingly out-of-touch. Very few people care about healthcare reform; the best thing to do is to ram the Senate bill as-is through the House, and if that can't be done then to give up and pick other fights. (And please NOT cap-and-trade.)

Chewing (out) the fat

I've been making bits of this argument for years and maybe I should put it together. Here goes:

1. It is rational to trade off longevity for other kinds of benefits. Actually, it is not only rational, but commonly done. As Gary Becker says, most deaths are suicides: if one's overriding objective in life were to live as long as possible, one would live quite differently from the way people actually do.

2. Different people will presumably want to make their longevity-happiness tradeoff in different ways; there are no objectively right or wrong ways to do this; in the absence of externalities and other compelling reasons, the state should let them make such tradeoffs for themselves.

3. In a society with universal healthcare (e.g., Britain) it is sometimes claimed that fat people are a burden on the healthcare system. This isn't actually true. Fat people cost more per year of life, but less overall. (e.g. This study shows that the lifetime medical expenses of the obese/smokers are less than those of "fit" people.) Remember, the life expectancy even for obese people is somewhat higher than the retirement age. Therefore, healthy people generally spend their additional years of life as parasites rather than as generators of wealth. [In a society like the US the situation is unjust to the fat. Obese people, smokers, and others who are less likely to live past 65 are subsidizing the medical expenses of those who live past 65. There seems to be no compelling economic reason to provide this kind of incentive for living past 65.]

4. Life expectancy is not a sound measure of welfare any more than GDP per head. As Krugman argues here, the French put up with earning less because they get to take longer vacations. Similarly, obese alcoholics might be fine with heart attacks because they get to drink bacon martinis while they are alive. These are both, in principle, rational tradeoffs, though in both cases you can imagine conditions (acquiring expensive new obligations, being on your deathbed) where people regret their rationally made choices.

5. Exceptions should, I suppose, be made for the case of serious physical addiction, in which the addict seriously wants to change his lifestyle but can't. For long-time smokers I imagine this is a substantial fraction of the relevant demographic, but for drinkers, stoners, compulsive eaters, and non-exercisers it's a relatively small segment. e.g. there's a large grey area between drinking enough to increase your chances of liver cancer and drinking enough to be unable to go without booze; this is presumably where most regular drinkers fall.

6. Unlike smoking or public drunkenness, obesity does not obviously hurt other people. (Except on airplanes. I don't really have a problem with charging people extra if they don't fit in their seats.)

7. Arguably being obese increases your chances of being unemployed and therefore on public assistance. (And maybe it increases your chances of being poor and hence a beneficiary of progressive tax credits and/or welfare policies.) I'm pretty sure, however, that the causation goes the other way, and that whatever residual effect there might be is largely explained by anti-fat discrimination. If one could establish that being fat or a smoker made you sufficiently unproductive per hour that you were on the whole a ward of the state in times of full employment I would probably change my mind on this entire issue.

---

So to sum up etc. (1) I don't see that society has a compelling reason to want people to make the health/pleasure tradeoff in a way that's maximally skewed toward health. (2) One could argue that by feeding kids healthy food when they're young you avoid the tradeoff altogether because they learn to enjoy the mashed yeast. I am deeply skeptical of this: in general, food can be arbitrarily healthy and arbitrarily good for you only to the extent that the ingredients are arbitrarily upscale. This is unworkable for a large number of people. (The usual ways of dealing with lousy ingredients, e.g. spicing the hell out of everything a la Indian food, come with health costs.)

I should note that the basic reason I care about this issue is that I think Megan McArdle's right that there's something very Victorian and moralistic about the (blue-state) public's attitude to fat. I find this sort of hardworking/lazy dichotomy extremely irritating esp. since the "upright" classes tend to be smug, rich, and liberal.

Are badgers "demure"?

John Clare thinks so. This poem describes the rather horrific old sport of badger-baiting. (It's not clear whether "badgering" refers to what people do to badgers or what badgers do to other animals.)

The Badger
John Clare

When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den,
And put a sack within the hole and lie
Till the old grunting badger passes by.
He comes and hears - they let the strongest loose.
The old fox hears the noise and drops the goose.
The poacher shoots and hurries from the cry,
And the old hare half wounded buzzes by.
They get a forkéd stick to bear him down
And clap the dogs and take him to the town,
And bait him all the day with many dogs,
And laugh and shout and fright the scampering hogs.
He runs along and bites at all he meets:
They shout and hollo down the noisy streets.

He turns about to face the loud uproar
And drives the rebels to their very door.
The frequent stone is hurled where'er they go;
When badgers fight, then everyone's a foe.
The dogs are clapped and urged to join the fray;
The badger turns and drives them all away.
Though scarcely half as big, demure and small,
He fights with dogs for hours and beats them all.
The heavy mastiff, savage in the fray,
Lies down and licks his feet and turns away.
The bulldog knows his match and waxes cold
The badger grins and never leaves his hold.
He drives the crowd and follows at their heels
And bites them through - the drunkard swears and reels.

The frighted women take the boys away,
The blackguard laughs and hurries on the fray.
He tries to reach the woods, an awkward race,
But sticks and cudgels quickly stop the chase.
He turns again and drives the noisy crowd
And beats the many dogs in noises loud.
He drives away and beats them every one,
And then they loose them all and set them on.
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men,
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again;
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and cackles, groans and dies.

The biosphere on a rotisserie

Michael Hoffman's review of Frederick Seidel quotes this poem, which makes me want to read Seidel:

from Evening Man
Frederick Seidel

To Ninety-second Street and Broadway I have come.
Outside the windows is New York.
I came here from St. Louis in a covered wagon overland
Behind the matchless prancing pair of Eliot and Ezra Pound.
And countless moist oases took me in along the way, and some
I still remember when I lift my knife and fork.
The Earth keeps turning, night and day, spit-roasting all the tanned
Tired icebergs and the polar bears, which makes white almost contraband.
The biosphere on a rotisserie emits a certain sound
That tells the stars that Earth was moaning pleasure while it drowned.
The amorous white icebergs flash their brown teeth, hissing.
They’re watching old porn videos of melting icebergs pissing.
The icebergs still in panty hose are lesbians and kissing.
The rotting ocean swallows the bombed airliner that’s missing.

Counting Badgers

There was a Language Log post the other day about how some phrases seemed to return more Google hits when you searched for them with quotes than when you searched without quotes; this clearly oughtn't to happen because every phrase which contains "badger hair" contains the words "badger" and "hair." I would suppose Google is finding all the results but just not doing a very good job of estimating how many there are.

I tried the following variant on this: I googled strings of the form "badger badger ... badger" (i.e. arbitrarily long sequences of the word "badger" -- and I had quotes around the string to get rid of e.g. the Wikipedia page for badgers, which has a lot of nonsequential instances of "badger") and wanted to see if the hit count was monotonic with the length of the string -- which, again, it ought to be as any string of the form "badger badger badger" contains a string of the form "badger badger." I was amused to find out that this is not in fact the case. Something weird happens with the seventh "badger," the hit count goes up from about 10000 to about 85000 and I have no real sense of why.

(For instance I also tried this with the string "seal seal seal... seal," which was well-behaved.)

Dept of Voluminous Drivelers

(Wildly overpraised) poet and translator Richard Howard, blurbing the Moncrieff-Kilmartin-Enright version of Proust:

Twice amended to bring it to documentary decorum and the kind of textual completion Proust himself could never achieve, the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of the Search, buffed, rebuffed, lightened, tightened, and in the abstergent sense, brightened, constitutes a monument which is also a medium—the medium by which to gain access to the book, the books, even the apocrypha of modern scripture. A triumph of tone, of a single (and singular) vision, this ultimate revision of the primary version affords the surest sled over the ice fields as well as the most sinuous surfboard over the breakers of Proustian prose, an invaluable and inescapable text.”

"The Voluminous, Prosaic, and Drivelling Monk"

The fifteenth century was a low-water mark for English poetry, inter alia because of the accidentally pernicious influence of Chaucer. So in Chaucer's day words like make, lerne, etc. had the final e pronounced (as in modern German). So for instance a typical Chaucerian line like

Han felt that Love dorste yow disple[a]se

is actually an 11-syllable line in good iambic pentameter. However, even by the time of Chaucer's death the final e was falling out of use, and by the early 15th-cent it was gone altogether. Unfortunately, 15th-cent poets took it as axiomatic that (1) what Chaucer wrote was metrical, and (2) Chaucer pronounced words they way they themselves did. This led to an essentially complete cluelessness about meter and rhythm that affected all their work, which was, as it happens, not free of other faults. Eventually, English verse became metrical again in the 16th century, because people stopped imitating Chaucer and found other models in (e.g.) Italian where all you had to do was count syllables; the process of writing ten-syllable lines leads one fairly directly to iambic pentameter if one has a decent ear. Of course it took about 200 years longer to realize that Chaucer was metrical too if you pronounced the final e, but that his successors were not.

All of this is by way of introducing George Saintsbury's wonderful evisceration of John Lydgate, the most famous -- at his time -- of Chaucer's disciples, which I've excerpted below.

---

It is thus reasonable to fix his career as lasting from c. 1370 to c. 1450.
If this be so, his life was not short: and it is quite certain that such exercises of his art as we possess are very long.

Of Chaucerian vigour, Chaucerian pathos, Chaucerian vividness of description, Lydgate had no trace or tincture.

To these defects he added two faults[...]: The one is prosodic incompetence; the other is longwinded prolixity. [...] It is enough to say that, even in rime royal, his lines wander from seven to fourteen syllables, without the possibility of allowing monosyllabic or trisyllabic feet in any fashion that shall restore the rhythm; and that his couplets, as in The Story of Thebes itself, seem often to be unaware whether they are themselves octosyllabic or decasyllabic—four-footed or five-footed. [...]

The Temple of Glass, partly in heroics, partly in rime royal, is one of the heaviest of fifteenth century allegorical love-poems, in which two lovers complain to Venus and, having been answered by her, are finally united. It is extremely prosaic; but, by sheer editing, has been brought into a condition of at least more systematic prosody than most of Lydgate’s works. The Assembly of Gods is a still heavier allegory of vices and virtues presented under the names of divinities, major and minor, of the ancient pantheon, but brought round to an orthodox Christian conclusion. The piece is in rime royal of the loosest construction, so much so that its editor proposes a merely rhythmical scansion.[...]

Lydgate has not lacked defenders, who would be formidable if their locus standi were more certain. The fifteenth century adored him because he combined all its own worst faults, and the sixteenth seems to have accepted him because it had no apparatus for criticism. When, after a long eclipse, he was in two senses taken up by Gray, that poet seems chiefly to have known The Falls of Princes, in which, perhaps by dint of long practice, Lydgate’s metrical shortcomings are less noticeable than in some other places, and where the dignity and gravity of Boccaccio’s Latin has, to some extent, invigorated his style. Warton is curiously guarded in his opinions; and a favourable judgment of Coleridge may, possibly, be regarded as very insufficiently based. The apologies of editors (especially those who are content with systematised metre, however inharmonious) do not go very far. On the whole, though Ritson’s condemnation may have been expressed with characteristic extravagance and discourtesy towards the “voluminous, prosaic and drivelling monk,” nobody can dispute the voluminousness in the worst sense, and it is notable that even Lydgate’s defenders, in proportion as they know more of him, are apt to “confess and avoid” the “prosaic” and to slip occasionally into admissions rather near the “drivelline.” It is to be feared that some such result is inevitable. A little Lydgate, especially if the little be judiciously chosen, or happily allotted by chance, is a tolerable thing: though even this can hardly be very delectable to any well qualified judge of poetry. But, the longer and wider that acquaintance with him is extended, the more certain is dislike to make its appearance. The prosodic incompetence cannot be entirely due to copyists and printers; the enormous verbosity, the ignorance how to tell a story, the want of freshness, vigour, life, cannot be due to them at all. But what is most fatal of all is the flatness of diction noticed above—the dull, hackneyed, slovenly phraseology, only thrown up by his occasional aureate pedantry—which makes the common commoner and the uncommon uninteresting. Lydgate himself, or some imitator of him, has been credited with the phrase “gold dewdrops of speech” about Chaucer. He would hardly have thought of anything so good; but the phrase at least suggests an appropriate variant, “leaden splashes,” for his own.

Light and fissures: a continuing series

Mercian Hymns XVI
Geoffrey Hill

Clash of salutation. As keels thrust into shingle. Ambassadors, pilgrims. What is carried over? The Frankish gift, two-edged, regaled with slaughter.

The sword is in the king’s hands; the crux a craftsman’s triumph. Metal effusing its own fragrance, a variety of balm. And other miracles, other exchanges.

Shafts from the winter sun homing upon earth’s rim. Christ’s mass: in the thick of a snowy forest the flickering evergreen fissured with light.

Attributes assumed, retribution entertained. What is borne amongst them? Too much or too little. Indulgences of bartered acclaim; an expenditure, a hissing. Wine, urine and ashes.

---

See also here and here.

PS The Swedish for butter is "smör" (as in smorgasbord) which is pronounced vaguely like smear and is, of course, etymologically related.

Editors vs. peers

Andrew Gelman links to Bruno Frey "suggesting a change in journal review processes, so that the editorial board first decides whether to accept or reject a paper and then referees are brought in solely to suggest changes on accepted papers." As Gelman points out this is vaguely similar to what some journals (I believe the best examples are Nature and Science) already do: have editors screen the articles before sending them out to review. There's a crucial difference though: at Nature, what seems to happen is that the editors screen the article to see if its claims are interesting, and mostly leave it to the referees to figure out if the claims are true. This is sensible because the referees -- who are typically people working on similar research -- are poor judges of broader interest whereas the editors are poor judges of whether the article is true.

The downside to this is that it creates a systematic incentive to make your article seem more interesting than it is and to hide the caveats in places where the editors will miss them. Sometimes the referees will object -- this article does not explain the origin of time -- but recommend publication anyway, and the editors are unlikely to overrule the referees even if the revisions make the article uninteresting enough that it wouldn't have gone to the referees in the first place. To some extent these problems are just inherent in the idea of a prestige journal, but there are ways to get around the puffing-up. One possibility is to do away with prestige journals, publish more or less everything that seems true, and have selections like Physical Review Focus to spotlight articles that were an especial hit with the referees and/or the editors. As referees vary in their willingness to praise, this scheme isn't that great either. In some ways a better plan is to have intelligent physicists blog their favorite new papers in a given area of physics, and to sort of hope that over time blogs with good taste win out. (As physicists are interested in fame, and probably read the relevant journals anyway, this isn't necessarily too taxing to work.) The -- possibly fatal -- objection is that it gives said bloggers an inordinate amount of influence over the career prospects of young physicists.

Are you a filibuster-buster, buster?

Ezra Klein is:

The danger of reforming the Senate is that, like health-care reform before it, it comes to seem a partisan issue. It isn't. Members of both parties often take the fact that neither Democrats nor Republicans can govern effectively to mean they benefit from the filibuster half the time. In reality, the country loses the benefits of a working legislature all the time.

Jay Cost isn't:

I strongly favor moderate-if-infrequent policy changes. It is not ideal - I find the compromised, moderate Senate health care bill highly objectionable, and of course the filibuster can be used for narrowly partisan purposes - but it is preferable to the alternative of ideologically polarized policy-making.

Ross Douthat is, and has something intelligent to say about it:

if you can't shrink the stimulus package much more substantially than the centrists have done, you shouldn't shrink it at all. There's a case to be made for a stimulus that's radically different than the one we have now; there's a case to be made for a stimulus that's like the one we have now, but a great deal smaller and more targeted; and there's a case to be made for a stimulus that's absolutely gargantuan. But thanks to the centrists, we're getting the cheapskate version of the gargantuan version: They've done absolutely nothing to widen the terms of debate about what should go into the bill, and they've shaved off just enough money to reduce its effectiveness if Paul Krugman is right - but not nearly enough to make it fiscally prudent if the stimulus skeptics are right.

My take on this is that the filibuster works fine for some things but not for others. There are two relevant distinctions: whether the bill is Frankensteinable or not, and whether it is necessary or not. I don't have sharp definitions of these concepts but here are some examples. The stimulus is a good example of a Frankensteinable bill: as Douthat says, any coherent bill -- whether left-wing or right-wing -- would have been preferable to the spineless and ineffectual thing we actually got. On the other hand, Supreme Court nominations are not Frankensteinable: a compromise appointee is an actual person, not a hodgepodge of attributes. Supreme Court appointments are also necessary, like (e.g.) the budget, which is Frankensteinable. On the other hand, a bill restricting cloning would be Frankensteinable -- a compromise could have perverse consequences that a straight-up right-wing bill would not -- but unnecessary. Finally, a bill creating a new national holiday would be neither Frankensteinable nor necessary.

The arguments against the filibuster are (1) that it frankensteins Frankensteinable bills, and (2) that it allows a unified opposition to block necessary legislation, thus paralyzing government. The obvious counter-argument is that without the filibuster there would be a great deal of sweeping and unnecessary legislation. In the narrow sense I prefer, necessity means both sides agree that the status quo is intolerable in the short-to-medium term but disagree on how to change it. (A healthcare bill is generally agreed to be necessary to deal with the Medicare crisis, but e.g. climate change isn't necessary by this def'n as a lot of Republicans believe that no action should be taken.)

I tend to believe in overdoing the checks and balances, so I'd like to keep the filibuster wherever possible. On the other hand, maybe what's needed is for the filibuster to come with a procedural price. Here's a possible set of rules:

1. When party A proposes a (frankensteinable) bill, party B gets either to (a) introduce a competing bill and forfeit the right to filibuster or (b) keep the right to filibuster and forfeit the right to introduce a competing bill for, let's say, 12 years. Party B can still, of course, vote for Party A-sponsored bills.
2. For all unfrankensteinable bills (e.g. appointments), the filibuster is usable on a tit-for-tat basis.

Obviously there are some definitions left to be filled in but this seems to be the right sort of approach.

Wickedness, Whips, and Life Imprisonment

David Bernstein asks "why the infliction of physical pain on someone, assuming he’s not just a suspect but been convicted of a crime, is considered beyond the bounds of human decency by all respectable sources, but locking that same individual in a cell for the rest of his life is a-ok." I'm not sure I have an entirely sound answer to this question but I think that -- at least to some extent -- the basic point is that torture degrades the torturers. There is a relevant moral difference between pushing a button that somewhere, somehow, kills someone you don't know and strangling someone with your bare hands, viz. that one of these things can be done without emotion. I think it's important that no one should derive pleasure from the punishment of others; therefore, public executions, whipping, and anything else that personalizes the process of punishment should be avoided if possible.

You might ask why I'm assuming that the relevant emotion would be pleasure rather than revulsion. This is because there's a selection effect: if you don't enjoy public executions, you can avoid them; if you don't enjoy whipping people, you can try finding work as a plumber.

More Proustblogging

The Hombre from Combray has a nice way with large-scale echoes; here's an example I think is particularly appealing. First, in Vol. 1, the illustration:

We would return by the Boulevard de la Gare, which contained the most attractive villas in the town. In each oftheir gardens the moonlight, copying the art of Hubert Robert, hadscattered its broken staircases of white marble, its fountains of waterand gates temptingly ajar. Its beams had swept away the telegraph office.All that was left of it was a column, half shattered, but preserving thebeauty of a ruin which endures for all time. [...]

Suddenly my father would bring us to a standstill and ask my mother--"Where are we?" Utterly worn out by the walk but still proud of her husband, she would lovingly confess that she had not the least idea. He would shrug his shoulders and laugh. And then, as though it had slipped, with his latchkey, from his waistcoat pocket, he would point out to us, when it stood before our eyes, the back-gate of our own garden, which had come hand-in-hand with the familiar corner of the Rue du Saint-Esprit, to await us, to greet us at the end of our wanderings over paths unknown.

And the echo, in vol. 6:

If our memories do indeed belong to us, they do so after the fashion of those country properties which have little hidden gates of which we ourselves are often unaware, and which someone in the neighborhood opens for us, so that from one direction at least which is new to us, we find ourselves back in our own house.

Light and grease redux

Proust, The Captive, trans. Scott Moncrieff (mainly because that's the version that's online):

In the early-rising mornings of spring that followed, I could hear the tram-cars moving, through a cloud of perfumes, in an air with which the prevailing warmth became more and more blended until it reached the solidification and density of noon. When the unctuous air had succeeded in varnishing with it and isolating in it the scent of the wash-stand, the scent of the wardrobe, the scent of the sofa, simply by the sharpness with which, vertical and erect, they stood out in adjacent but distinct slices, in a pearly chiaroscuro which added a softer glaze to the shimmer of the curtains and the blue satin armchairs, I saw myself, not by a mere caprice of my imagination, but because it was physically possible, following in some new quarter of the suburbs, like that in which Bloch’s house at Balbec was situated, the streets blinded by the sun, and finding in them not the dull butchers’ shops and the white freestone facings, but the country dining-room which I could reach in no time, and the scents that I would find there on my arrival, that of the bowl of cherries and apricots, the scent of cider, that of gruyère cheese, held in suspense in the luminous congelation of shadow which they delicately vein like the heart of an agate, while the knife-rests of prismatic glass scatter rainbows athwart the room or paint the waxcloth here and there with peacock-eyes.

(I like long sentences a little too much for my own good.) Cf. also here and here. I should note in passing that one of the reasons Proust is a difficult writer is that he's got to be read both somewhat fast (so that you remember the bits in the earlier vols. that correspond to bits in the later vols.) and somewhat carefully (so that you don't skim past the good bits). Had one but world enough and time, I think one would want to do the whole thing at something like five hours a day over two weeks.

Two thoughts on translation

From an old college paper on A.E. Housman's version of "Diffugere Nives":

We don’t like being preached at in verse—there is no tradition of 20th cent didactic verse in English—but are willing to overhear a sermon and listen to it seriously as long as it is addressed to someone else. In general, we are willing to accept much in a translation that we would consider intolerably silly in an original English poem, and this is what gives translation some of its power to alter the linguistic climate. [...] What Housman has achieved is a poem that sits squarely in the English tradition but is, at the same time, not quite an English poem. The objective of this type of translation is to make the poet speak good English, but not house-train as regards structure or subject matter. (A parallel that comes to mind is the Ascot scene in “My Fair Lady.”)

From the preface to my final project:

These poems are meant to bear the same sort of relation to the original as an umbrella does to the dome of St. Paul's: they are roughly the same shape and serve a similar purpose.

Four specious arguments

Below are four things I used to believe, not that long ago, but have since given up on. I'll follow up -- maybe -- on why I don't believe any of these things any more in subsequent posts. Note that I don't currently believe any of these arguments, though I still agree with several -- perhaps most -- of the premises.

1. Majoritarianism and the Constitution. As a formalist by instinct, I've always been drawn to originalism, at least meant narrowly as a criterion for judges. Laws ought to change their meaning only if the Legislature thinks so, or else we're going to be run by the whims of unelected judges. On the other hand, I've never had much time for the founding fathers or the Constitution per se; on the substance of current issues, whether gay marriage or internet privacy, "what would James Madison do?" is almost never a germane question. (Similarly, one would not expect "What would Barack Obama do?" to be relevant to 22nd cent. debate.) If you put these together, that seems to imply that the constitution should be a lot easier to amend than it is, and that judges should be textualists in their interpretation. At least, this is what one would want in an ideal world: in practice, judges should defer to the executive except in extreme cases.

2. Means-testing. The government wastes rather a lot of money on providing "universal" public services that are largely used by the wealthy. Examples of note are major public universities, some transportation systems, roads and highways in expensive suburbs, etc. From a redistributionist point of view, the purpose of government is to take money from the rich and give it to the poor, not to spend it on the rich; this would be the worst sort of nanny-state behavior. It would be better to tax the rich (possibly less) for goods specifically intended for the poor, and to let them fund their own roads and hospitals.

3. Inequality and poverty. Poverty matters; inequality per se does not. It's OK for there to be arbitrarily large differences in income and lifestyle as long as (a) no one is starving or is otherwise deprived of necessities, (b) there is some degree of social mobility for the poor (i.e., "equality of opportunity"). In general, wealth and happiness are non-zero-sum; there is usually a trade-off between efficiency and equality of outcome; one should maximize efficiency under the constraint that no one is living in actual poverty.

4. Unilateral military intervention. National sovereignty is stupid and immoral. When one believes that other countries (or cultures) are engaging in abhorrent activities, it is reasonable to invade if one has the power to do so. The United Nations is not a representative world government as it consists largely of dictatorships, the UN Human Rights committees are worse because dictators are disproportionately interested in being on them; in any case, the UN has no legitimacy. In general, rich western governments have at least as much legitimacy (in the normative sense) as the local warlord when it comes to representing the interests of the citizens of, e.g., Sudan or Iraq. [I should note that I still think this is true normatively; however, one must also consider the descriptive sense of legitimacy, and the impact thereon of the fact that occupying troops tend to corrupt over time.]

Douthat's new blog

I used to enjoy Douthat's old blog at the Atlantic, which I thought was a much better medium for him than the Times column. The thing about Douthat is that he's only any good when he's reacting to someone; it was a common feature, I think, of all his best posts on the old blog that they began with a longish quote from someone -- esp. his recurring sparring partners, Will Saletan, Damon Linker, and Will Wilkinson, all of whom are dumber and worse writers than Douthat. (Even if I agree with them more often.) His columns, by contrast, have been kind of flat and formulaic, and sometimes (the one about the "audacity of the pope") extremely silly. (His book reviews, on the other hand, are often good because he's reacting to the author.)

Anyway, he seems to be back to blogging, now at the NYT, and his blog is -- at least as of now -- a lot better than his columns.

Defining the origin-of-life problem

Gowers wants to do a Polymath project on the origin of life. This problem has been around for a long time now -- Schrodinger wrote a not-very-good book about it in his decadent Irish phase -- and part of the trouble with it is that it's hard to make precise. As Gowers explains, some statistical physicists have been trying to model life using sandpiles etc., with the working definition that "self-organized criticality" -- the persistence of structure on various length scales, hence some manner of fractal structure -- defines life. This is an unsatisfactory approach because (1) having order on various length scales does not imply fractality, which requires that the order must be the same, which isn't necessarily the case with life unless you buy some version of the Gaia hypothesis; (2) it presupposes a property of early organisms -- that they formed multilevel ecosystems -- that isn't a priori obvious. There are similar issues with Conway's game of life and some of the computer-science approaches that involve looking for self-generated Turing machines (!) in simple games.

On the whole I'm unconvinced that the problem is a good one for a mathematician (or physicist) at present, although -- like all semi-masturbatory projects -- it might stimulate developments in pure mathematics. The hard part is not finding an algorithm that generates "life" from the "primeval soup" for some definition of life and primeval soup; it is finding one that gets the gross features of real primitive life right. The existence proof is not the issue. One needs to think harder about testability than Gowers seems to want to: there are probably a gazillion different automata that give structures that are lifelike, but are any of them relevant to what happened in the primeval soup, and how would we know?

It's not obvious, either, that there is a math-problem/toy-model/"universal" aspect to biogenesis. As I understand the rough story, it goes something like this: given a primal soup with appropriate ingredients and dreadful weather, you can form (with some finite probability) a very primitive self-replicating strand of some (probably zipping) molecule. This is more or less what the Miller-Urey experiment suggests. The gaps in this story are essentially about rates -- would the amino acids survive for long enough to run into each other, what's the lifetime of an RNA strand, etc. -- and have no math content. The next question is how an RNA strand turns into a self-replicating proto-cell. Once again, this is mostly a question of rates; it's clear that a cell is more stable than a strand, once formed. There's a whiff of universality here -- for some simplified model of e.g. 3 cell ingredients, a spherical cell ingesting amino acid at a constant rate r etc., you can ask what the conditions are for life to be stable for long enough that cells can diffuse out -- they're unlikely to be motile at first -- into new environments before they suffocate in their own waste. In principle this might give you constraints on the origin of life. However, it seems exceedingly unlikely that a model of this kind would make testable nontrivial predictions. To get any further one would have to separate the essential and accidental features of the most primitive cells, and I'm not sure we're in a position to do that. The simplest organisms still existing today are wildly unrepresentative being the ones that survived.

The Straw Wee-Wee

I think Steven Pinker gives Gladwell more than his due, but his diagnosis here is spot on:

The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus — for example, that “we” believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that “risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable.” As a generic statement, this is true but trite: of course many things can go wrong in a complex system, and of course people sometimes trade off safety for cost and convenience (we don’t drive to work wearing crash helmets in Mack trucks at 10 miles per hour). But as a more substantive claim that accident investigations are meaningless “rituals of reassurance” with no effect on safety, or that people have a “fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another,” it is demonstrably false.

On the other hand, the structure described here is a paradigmatic strawman argument. One rarely knocks down a straw man for the sheer pleasure of it. The point of strawmanning is to introduce a counter-assertion that can be defended narrowly -- the "trite" version, which only an idiot, i.e. straw man or Gladwell's typical reader, would disagree with -- but is meant to sound like a broad (and usually indefensible) statement. And I must say that Pinker's evident irritation gives me some pleasure: this is, after all, a guy who straw-manned all of Western thought in The Blank Slate.

PS Gladwell's "igon values" reminded me of this old running joke Grobstein and I had about eigenworthlessness.

The butterknives of others

Hilary Mantel in the Guardian, via Light reading:

I need not explain why I was reading a list of school reunions, when my eye fell on what follows: the address of a girls' school in Llandudno, and the notification that it was the "Final Old Girls' Reunion". Next April it will occur; the information tolled in my ears: why is it the last, how can anyone know? It may be that the organiser has just got tired of doing all the work: that fewer and fewer old girls are turning up, that some of them are shrill and grubby and have vodka bottles in their bags, and piercings, and toyboys in tow: or that Llandudno is just too hard to get to. But sadder explanations suggest themselves. Are there only two old girls left, and has one of them been given a bad prognosis? I can't help thinking what it would be like, two sassy old dames crumbling a final scone together, replacing in its saucer the teacup drained of Darjeeling, polishing their noses with a crumpled tissue: "Well, Blinky, old thing . . ." "Well, Nodders, old girl . . ."; brushing crumbs from their laps, laying down the final butterknife, stepping into separate taxis to go their final ways. Surely there's a short story in it. But it's not mine, is it? It's one for Jane Gardam.

Casual Squawk

I think this is a rhetorical question. But consider these lines of poetry that Yeats wrote at some point in the 20th century:

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

Are they better described thus:

The plainest, most straightforward language in the poem, in some ways, comes at the very end—final words, not uttered in the conversation, are more private and more urgent than what has come before. ... That closing passage of interior thoughts [...] makes the poem feel, to me, as though not simply heard but overheard.

or like this?

... how artificial Yeats's manner of writing was. As a rule, this artificiality is accepted as Irishism, or Yeats is even credited with simplicity because he uses short words, but in fact one seldom comes on six consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an archaism or an affected turn of speech.

Wallaceism

Went to a talk by ex-BBC producer Roy Davies today, about his new book The Darwin Conspiracy, which supposedly proves that Darwin stole Alfred Russel Wallace's ideas rather than coming up with them independently. Davies' argument in the talk was three-pronged: (1) Darwin was provably mendacious, (2) Darwin's 1840s work on evolution was entirely wrongheaded, and there's no reason to believe that he was on the right track before Wallace's letters reached him, and (3) Darwin lied about when Wallace's letters reached him, on the evidence of a bunch of 1850s Indonesian naval timetables that show when the mailboats came and went from wherever Wallace was at the time. Davies' work seems either comprehensively false or largely correct, as his story hangs together quite well. I have no idea of how sound the detective work on (3) is, but if (1) and (2) are true then (3) is plausible anyway. The main evidence for (1) is that Darwin silently edited his Beagle diaries between the 1839 edition and the 1844 edition to insert a bunch of material semi-plagiarized from Edward Blyth and possibly Vestiges of Creation. As for (2), Davies claims that Darwin's 1840s work on evolution was mostly based on the idea that species swam across the sea and found themselves in new surroundings where they had "somehow" to adapt to survive; and that Darwin hadn't thought of survival of the fittest at this point. As someone who's utterly unfamiliar with 19th-century biology, I'm curious to know if Davies is entirely making this up.

As for how this fits into the larger picture, it's of no consequence whether Darwin or Wallace came up with the theory of evolution, or whether Darwin was a crook. But it's always seemed to me -- and here of course I differ from Davies -- that Darwin/Wallace get way too much relative credit for their contributions to evolutionary theory. The story as I see it goes something like this:

1. Early 1800s geologists find out that the geography of the earth changes over time, sometimes relatively fast. The earth appears to be pretty old. Native species seem well-adapted to their changing environments; this is implausible in the extreme if everything was created at once. Therefore, some sort of adaptation must happen. Also, there are fossils.

2. The species native to some (old) islands are highly distinctive, whereas those from recently isolated islands are similar to the mainland varieties. The pattern of similarities in archipelagoes, in particular, -- Indonesia, the Galapagos -- seems strongly suggestive of a common ancestor from whom the varieties diverged over time because they were isolated. This gets you the "descent with modification" part.

3. A half-assed analogy with Malthus leads to the claim that descent with modification is due to "survival of the fittest" while competing for scarce resources. This claim was largely unsubstantiated (it's more a conjecture than anything else) and had huge problems, e.g., that with "blending inheritance" -- the naive belief that characteristics "blend" during reproduction, which I think everyone believed at the time -- mutations are unlikely to survive.

4. Gregor Mendel discovers that inheritance is particulate rather than blending, i.e., that black + black = white 1/4 of the time, and basically invents genetics. I don't know if Mendel thought about the implications for evolution, but this is really the key point that makes natural selection work.

5. 20th-century geneticists -- people like Morgan, Fisher, and Haldane -- turn genetics into a proper experimental science and construct the theory of evolution through natural selection, or, if you like, prove Darwin's conjecture using Mendel's theory.

In terms of importance I would rank these 4-1-5=2-3 -- and that's without discounting 3. as derivative of Malthus. First of all, 3. is conceptually shaky without 4., and vague besides; this is evident from e.g., the fact that the next major advances in evolutionary theory came through 4. via 5. This is rarely the case with true scientific breakthroughs. Second, I feel like 4. would have led immediately to 3. once people started taking Mendel seriously. This is because 1. and 2. had opened up the question of the variation of species (which is why they are important advances).

It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Darwin discovered evolution like Democritus discovered atoms, but not, I suspect, a complete falsehood.

PS Wallace was a spiritualist and a teleologically minded type so it's probably a good thing he didn't grow too influential. Besides, he was no Marsellus Wallace.