"Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves"

I expect this picture to become iconic. Certainly the breakthrough it represents is important enough: biologists can now activate individual neurons in a rat's brain with a laser pulse and show that this causes the rat to do something (in this case, get scared and freeze). [The writeup is lucid enough that I won't bother to paraphrase it.] The significance of these techniques is that they could potentially turn neuroscience into a discipline like physics in which one can measure responses to well-defined stimuli: the earlier fMRI work, I think one could fairly say, was more like astronomy in the sense that one mostly looked at correlations between events. The basic advantage of this is that one gets around causation-correlation problems because the causal structure of responses to, e.g., a light pulse is unambiguous. A sort-of-corollary is that data interpretation becomes much less dependent on statistics. Boris Altshuler is reported to have said that if you need statistics to understand your experiment you should make a better experiment; this is hopefully what optogenetics will do for neuroscience.

It is, of course, unlikely that these experiments can or will be performed on humans any time soon; from a scientific point of view, however, this is not an important loss. Humans are pointlessly messy subjects for almost all questions about how the brain works.

Teapocalypse roundup

The election was rather disappointing for obvious reasons. A few more specific thoughts:

1. 538's senate forecasts were not very good. By my count they missed the overall margin by over 6 points in at least 7 of the senate contests and over 8 points in at least six ("at least" b'se I wasn't counting very carefully), which crudely implies they were wrong about a fifth of the time. Alternatively, as many of the states were not toss-ups, one could ask how they did on the tossups: they got Nevada and Alaska completely wrong, Colorado probably wrong, were overconfident about Pennsylvania, and substantially underestimated the winners' margins in California and West Virginia. Their performance looks better if all you consider is the top-line how-many-wins-did-we-get-right number, but this is a stupid figure of merit to look at because most Senate races are practically uncontested. I've never been a fan of Silver's approach -- he tweaks his model far too much, it's too ad hoc and there's tons of overfitting -- and it only seems to work because of (a) the law of large numbers and (b) the fact that most contests are trivial to predict.

1a. However, Silver might be onto something when he observes that the polling in Nevada was way off, and GOP-biased, both last night and in 2008. It is a little appalling that many (most?) reputable pollsters only call landlines; nobody I know has a landline.

2. The Economist's Democracy in America blog is full of truly awful election coverage that exemplifies every pundit mistake political scientists like to mock. I used to sort of enjoy their stuff but "M.S." and "W.W." (i.e., Will Wilkinson) and "E.G." are all pretty worthless.

3. The dumbest California ballot initiatives -- prop. 22, which in effect prevents the state from cutting spending on transportation; and 26, which imposes yet another supermajority requirement for tax hikes -- both passed. These initiatives will evidently help the state balance its budget. (I feel like there was another recent ballot initiative requiring that the state not run deficits, but I might be making this up.) I wonder how openly contradictory these things have to be before they're ruled invalid. [Memo to self: try to avoid working for the UC system.]

4. Brendan Nyhan points to this graph comparing the demographics of the 2006 and 2010 electorates. Apart from the slight uptick in over-65s (due to population aging?) these were quite similar to each other, but noticeably different from the leap-year electorates.

Someone is right on the internet

Deep in the comments thread of this LL post about "untranslatable" words (Schadenfreude, litost, and the like), John Cowan said:

No, none of these are untranslatable. The real untranslatable words are things like hottentottententententoonstelling 'Hottentot tent exhibition'. I mean, you can't just replace that word with its English gloss. You'd have to find something in English with similar impact, and where can you find that? Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and ultramicroscopicosilicovolcanoconiosis just don't cut it.

Or you could go with hard, which cannot be translated into German because in a given context you need one of about 40 German adjectives, of which the only one I remember offhand is alkoholisch.

Read: Atmospheric disturbances, Everyman

I highly recommend Rivka Galchen's novel Atmospheric Disturbances; it falls off near the end as the plot veers into implausibility but the first two-thirds of it is quite compelling. (Hm. Independently, it turns out the Economist also liked the first two-thirds...) It's also beautifully written. The story is about a therapist -- the narrator -- who is convinced that his wife has been replaced by an exact replica of herself; he soon ends up in Argentina exchanging emails with a dead meteorologist and signing up to do a poorly-defined mission for a nonexistent agency in Patagonia. The basic charm of the thing is that it's a horribly sad book but the narrator usually doesn't register the sadnesses -- he's interested mostly in the detective-story end of things, trying to find out where his real wife went, etc. -- and the fact that it's so deadpan saves it from sentimentality and whininess.

I'm ambivalent about Roth's Everyman. It has much of the tediousness of American Pastoral but little of the energy; the writing is limpid but unmemorable, none of the characters really come to life, and a great deal of the novel was evidently written on autopilot if one knows one's Roth. I get that the novel is supposed to be skeletal and schematic like the play, but it just comes off as diluted Roth. Perhaps it is one of those books that you won't like if you have the wrong politics -- a lot of it is a tedious paean to the bourgeoisie that only comes to life at a couple of points, the best of which is the peculiarly resonant scene near the end in which a gravedigger explains the mechanics of grave-digging to Everyman shortly before he dies. There are also a couple of other arresting moments here and there, but not very many.

After the Cleveland School

Lord, thou hast made this world below the shadow of a dream,
An taught by time I tak' it so--exceptin' always steam.
From coupler-flange to spindle-guide I see thy hand O God -
Predestination in the stride o' yon connecting rod.
 (Kipling, "M'Andrew's Hymn")

Zach Sachs shared T.J. Clark's essay about "modernism, postmodernism, and steam," which is built around the same ambiguous symbol that Kipling is using here: steam, as an emblem both of evanescence and of machinery, represents the basic tension of modernism, which is between the anarchic individualistic tendency of modern (pre-1945) thought and the contrary, regimenting tendency of industrial life. It is surprising how close the parallels between literature and art are -- when Clark says,

You could say of the purest products of modernism [...] that in them an excess of order interacts with an excess of contingency.

he might as well be talking about Ulysses. (By the way, a point this essay brings home is that WW1 was a very minor part of the story, as most of the currents of modernism had been around for years.) Of course it's much wider than that: earlier this afternoon I was leafing through Russell's History of Western Philosophy at a Borders, looking for a passage about Locke, when I found a very close echo of Clark's thesis in Russell's remarks about how the English empiricists were driven by their arguments, against their natural temperament, to a position of extreme subjectivism that was at odds with the Zeitgeist. 

So, at a minimum, the tension that Clark associates with modernism is at least as old as Hume and Blake. One is tempted to write a long essay about this but it would never actually get written -- I'm too lazy to finish anything -- and the point of this blog is to record my half-digested impressions without worrying about structure etc. So I'm just going to assemble a few notes.

1. Modernism is, of course, one of two successful responses to modernity, the other being Romanticism. Romanticism wasn't a formalist movement in any deep sense; its basic tendency (seen from the modernist end of the telescope) is escapist; still, escapism might be fruitful under some conditions, and it might be that current conditions are better suited to good escapist art than to good formalist art.

2. Related to this, High Modernism was perhaps a decadent movement in Empson's sense that it depended on a tradition that its example was destroying. The best modernist art and literature works largely through unexplained and jarring juxtapositions. The idea always seems to be to force a new emotion into existence by making you think in multiple registers, each with a certain level of vividness, at once. A lot of the juxtapositions only worked while they remained unexpected, i.e., before the first-wave modernists were assimilated. Much of the later work maintains the unexpectedness by stylizing to a degree that makes the tension unimmediate and therefore ineffective. A lot of Pound is no longer readable: the Pound of flesh is now a Pound of maggots. Looking at the pictures that accompany Clark's text, one is tempted to say that something like this must also have happened in the visual arts beginning around Picasso.

3. An excess of contingency is implicit in an excess of form: why that pattern, one could ask, rather than any other? (The number of possibilities grows with the complexity of the pattern.) Had Keats's odes been identical except for being acrostics, we might think them less inevitable. In Clark's terms, Through the Looking Glass is a deeply modernist work, being schematic in the same way as Ulysses and some of the paintings Clark discusses. Victorian writing differs from Modernist writing in lacking the element of direct shock. My sense is that the shock value was primarily about forcing people to look at the work rather than through it, by frustrating their expectations. I don't think this is feasible or interesting at present because the better sort of readers have no expectations at all.  


4. To oversimplify somewhat, the internet has resolved the central tension of modernism; the dominant tendency is currently toward solipsism, and the basic tension is between the world of windowless monads and human nature, which is reluctant to adapt to this world. (The "objective" tendency is represented by neuroscience, which "tells us" that the mind is maladaptive.) So the natural theme of fiction is psychosis, and the struggle to reimagine a reality that is perfectly intelligible on its own terms -- which are Leibniz's -- in ways the mind is at home with. There have, for instance, been several novels lately -- Tom McCarthy's Remainder, Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances (very good!), Richard Powers's Echo Maker (juvenile and lame), etc. -- about characters who are obsessed with the fogeyish notions of authenticity and identity. (The latter two are about people with Capgras syndrome, which (for novelists) is a disorder that leaves you convinced that your family and friends are actually exact replicas of your family and friends.) I wonder if Clark has read these books and what he makes of them.

Death and whistles

I. from Xenia, I.
Eugenio Montale

We had planned a whistle
for the hereafter, a sign of recognition.
I try it out in the hope
that we are all dead already without knowing it.

II. Widgeon
Seamus Heaney

It had been badly shot.
While he was plucking it
he found, he says, the voice box--

like a flute stop
in the broken windpipe--

and blew upon it
unexpectedly
his own small widgeon cries.

Dotterel, whimbrel, kestrel, scoundrel

The suffix these words share is of such antiquity that the OED is rather tentative in deriving it from the French suffix -eau/elle, an analogous wide-ranging diminutive. The problem is that, whereas some examples like kestrel are straightforward borrowings from Old French, others are not:

Further formations within English on bases not of Romance origin appear in Middle English (e.g. GANGREL n., DOGGEREL adj., DOTTEREL n., MONGREL n., SUCKEREL n.); also, in some cases where the base is of Romance origin, it is uncertain whether the suffixed word was borrowed or formed independently in English (compare COCKEREL n., the equivalent of which is apparently rare in Anglo-Norman and Middle French (Normandy) and not otherwise attested in continental French).

(In many of these cases, even "kestrel," no one knows quite what the current form is a diminutive of.) What the surviving words of this class -- except mongrel -- seem to share is a quaint prettiness, no doubt due to their antiquity, that's nevertheless very disproportionate to what they mean. For instance "whimbrel" meant "little whimperer," and "dotterel" -- the prettiest of the lot -- meant "little dotard," a puzzling name for a bird until you learn that it was "A species of plover (Eudromias morinellus): so called from the apparent simplicity with which it allows itself to be approached and taken." Beyond this it gets messier: e.g., "mackerel" does not have anything to do with "a popular tradition that the mackerel assisted in the sexual activity of the herring" (?!), nor is a scoundrel a little trouble("scunner")-maker. 


By the way, a "ketterel" -- an obscure Scots word meaning "wretch" -- is not to be confused with the eminent physicist, one of many reasons why I'm grateful that my spell-checker does not use the OED.

Drably lyrical realism

James Lever on Franzen (LRB):

the book is, among other things, possibly the most lachrymose novel of modern times. There are, in its 560 pages, 26 separate instances of weeping, not counting the many blinked-back tears or suppressed sobs or ‘Tiny pearls of tear … clinging to her eyelashes’ (a formulation so heartfelt it is recycled from page 421 of The Corrections). Meanwhile the final results for our ensemble have come in: Republican go-getter Joey has seen the error of his ways and become an importer of ethically grown coffee. Jessica is a junior editor at a literary publishing house in Manhattan, excited to be publishing ‘an earnest young novelist’. Patty’s rotten sister Abigail has become a successful art-clown in Italy. Patty’s less rotten sister Veronica is an unappreciated but possibly genius-level painter. Patty works with kids; Walter, one supposes, with birds. Richard, ‘busy and successful’, has just completed ‘one of those avant-garde orchestral thingies for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’ and is currently working on scores for art-house movies. And pretty much everyone lives in New York. Now, that’s how life oughta be! At last the question ‘How to live?’, posed throughout the novel, has been answered: we should live like they do in Hannah and Her Sisters. It’s around now that it may dawn on the reader that Freedom has more in common with Richard’s country-tinged, Grammy-nominated middlebrow hit record than Franzen might have intended. This book is ‘Nameless Lake’.

Freedom, like Netherland, is a book I would presumably finish but that I cannot get excited about. Zadie Smith, writing about Netherland and Remainder a year or two ago, got at part of the drabness of "lyrical realism" of the McEwanesque sort, but, if the passages she quoted (or that Lever quotes from Franzen) really are the purplest at hand, what is surprising is how unlyrical, how lacking in "sharp tender shocks," the writing is, despite its elegance. Perhaps the problem with all these books is their quest for "relevance"; I wish there were more of "the sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea" or at least far less of "I was seized for the first time by a nauseating sense of America, my gleaming adopted country, under the secret actuation of unjust, indifferent powers." Or perhaps the reviewers are doing the book an injustice by picking out those bits.

The necessary angle

There is an obvious joke, which I've never actually heard anyone make, re Schrodinger's cat, the measurement process, and "curiosity killing the cat." (This joke would be vaguely appealing because of the role reversal -- it's the scientist's curiosity that kills the cat -- and would fit very naturally in an elementary discussion of quantum mechanics.)

Tangentially, I wonder what it says about my intellectual seriousness that I sometimes get interested in a problem purely because I can think of an amusing title for a talk about it. I started working on (what I thought were) macroscopic tunneling phenomena in superconducting whiskers because I wanted to give a talk titled "Schrodinger's whiskers." (This has the additional advantage of providing a segue into trapped flux in SQUID-like rings, which of course one can call "quantum handcuffs." In the event, the program sort of petered out.) Recently I've been finding it hard to get interested in problems that would not lead to a talk titled "Fear and loathing in the electron gas."

Snips of Jellyfish

I was planning to blog about Kay Ryan -- one of the three or four living poets whose work I actually care about -- but Paris Review just interviewed her so I can put this off for a while:

---

INTERVIEWER

How did you come up with what you’ve called recombinant rhyme?

RYAN

When I started writing nobody rhymed—it was in utter disrepute. Yet rhyme was a siren to me. I had this condition of things rhyming in my mind without my permission. Still I couldn’t take end-rhyme seriously, which meant I had to find other ways—I stashed my rhymes at the wrong ends of lines and in the middles—the front of one word would rhyme with the back of another one, or one word might be identical to three words. In “Turtle,” for instance, I rhyme “afford” with “a four-oared,” referring to a four-oared helmet: “Who would be a turtle who could help it? / A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet, / she can ill afford the chances she must take / in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.” The rhymes are just jumping all around in there, holding everything together. 

What’s recombinant rhyme? It’s like how they add a snip of the jellyfish’s glow-in-the-dark gene to bunnies and make them glow green; by snipping up pieces of sound and redistributing them throughout a poem I found I could get the poem to go a little bit luminescent.

Local color III: coppery keen slaws

This bit from Humphry Clinker is worth excerpting if only for its concreteness.

I am pent up in frowzy lodgings, where there is not room enough to swing a cat; and I breathe the steams of endless putrefaction; and these would, undoubtedly, produce a pestilence, if they were not qualified by the gross acid of sea-coal, which is itself a pernicious nuisance to lungs of any delicacy of texture: but even this boasted corrector cannot prevent those languid, sallow looks, that distinguish the inhabitants of London from those ruddy swains that lead a country-life — I go to bed after midnight, jaded and restless from the dissipations of the day — I start every hour from my sleep, at the horrid noise of the watchmen bawling the hour through every street, and thundering at every door; a set of useless fellows, who serve no other purpose but that of disturbing the repose of the inhabitants; and by five o'clock I start out of bed, in consequence of the still more dreadful alarm made by the country carts, and noisy rustics bellowing green pease under my window. If I would drink water, I must quaff the maukish contents of an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement; or swallow that which comes from the river Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster — Human excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed of all the drugs, minerals, and poisons, used in mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying carcasses of beasts and men; and mixed with the scourings of all the wash-tubs, kennels, and common sewers, within the bills of mortality.

This is the agreeable potation, extolled by the Londoners, as the finest water in the universe — As to the intoxicating potion, sold for wine, it is a vile, unpalatable, and pernicious sophistication, balderdashed with cyder, corn-spirit, and the juice of sloes. In an action at law, laid against a carman for having staved a cask of port, it appeared from the evidence of the cooper, that there were not above five gallons of real wine in the whole pipe, which held above a hundred, and even that had been brewed and adulterated by the merchant at Oporto. The bread I eat in London, is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone-ashes; insipid to the taste, and destructive to the constitution. The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration — but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because it is whiter than the meal of corn: thus they sacrifice their taste and their health, and the lives of their tender infants, to a most absurd gratification of a mis-judging eye; and the miller, or the baker, is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his profession. The same monstrous depravity appears in their veal, which is bleached by repeated bleedings, and other villainous arts, till there is not a drop of juice left in the body, and the poor animal is paralytic before it dies; so void of all taste, nourishment, and savour, that a man might dine as comfortably on a white fricassee of kid-skin gloves; or chip hats from Leghorn.

As they have discharged the natural colour from their bread, their butchers-meat, and poultry, their cutlets, ragouts, fricassees and sauces of all kinds; so they insist upon having the complexion of their potherbs mended, even at the hazard of their lives. Perhaps, you will hardly believe they can be so mad as to boil their greens with brass halfpence, in order to improve their colour; and yet nothing is more true — Indeed, without this improvement in the colour, they have no personal merit. They are produced in an artificial soil, and taste of nothing but the dunghills, from whence they spring. My cabbage, cauliflower, and 'sparagus in the country, are as much superior in flavour to those that are sold in Covent-garden, as my heath-mutton is to that of St James's-market; which in fact, is neither lamb nor mutton, but something betwixt the two, gorged in the rank fens of Lincoln and Essex, pale, coarse, and frowzy — As for the pork, it is an abominable carnivorous animal, fed with horse-flesh and distillers' grains; and the poultry is all rotten, in consequence of a fever, occasioned by the infamous practice of sewing up the gut, that they may be the sooner fattened in coops, in consequence of this cruel retention.

Of the fish, I need say nothing in this hot weather, but that it comes sixty, seventy, fourscore, and a hundred miles by land-carriage; a circumstance sufficient without any comment, to turn a Dutchman's stomach, even if his nose was not saluted in every alley with the sweet flavour of fresh mackarel, selling by retail. This is not the season for oysters; nevertheless, it may not be amiss to mention, that the right Colchester are kept in slime-pits, occasionally overflowed by the sea; and that the green colour, so much admired by the voluptuaries of this metropolis, is occasioned by the vitriolic scum, which rises on the surface of the stagnant and stinking water — Our rabbits are bred and fed in the poulterer's cellar, where they have neither air nor exercise, consequently they must be firm in flesh, and delicious in flavour; and there is no game to be had for love or money.

It must be owned, the Covent-garden affords some good fruit; which, however, is always engrossed by a few individuals of overgrown fortune, at an exorbitant price; so that little else than the refuse of the market falls to the share of the community; and that is distributed by such filthy hands, as I cannot look at without loathing. It was but yesterday that I saw a dirty barrow-bunter in the street, cleaning her dusty fruit with her own spittle; and, who knows but some fine lady of St James's parish might admit into her delicate mouth those very cherries, which had been rolled and moistened between the filthy, and, perhaps, ulcerated chops of a St Giles's huckster — I need not dwell upon the pallid, contaminated mash, which they call strawberries; soiled and tossed by greasy paws through twenty baskets crusted with dirt; and then presented with the worst milk, thickened with the worst flour, into a bad likeness of cream: but the milk itself should not pass unanalysed, the produce of faded cabbage-leaves and sour draff, lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings, discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco-quids from foot passengers, overflowings from mud carts, spatterings from coach wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke's sake, the spewings of infants, who have slabbered in the tin-measure, which is thrown back in that condition among the milk, for the benefit of the next customer; and, finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milk-maid.

I shall conclude this catalogue of London dainties, with that table-beer, guiltless of hops and malt, vapid and nauseous; much fitter to facilitate the operation of a vomit, than to quench thirst and promote digestion; the tallowy rancid mass, called butter, manufactured with candle grease and kitchen stuff; and their fresh eggs, imported from France and Scotland.

[NB The "bills of mortality" is a wonderful synecdoche metonym for London. Would be curious to know of any equivalent contemporary phrases. "Within the police blotter" is almost apt for Champaign nowadays but seems unlikely to catch on.]

Sheridan; the blush as local color

I read the usual Restoration plays in an edition that introduced them as clever but heartless precursors of Sheridan and Goldsmith, and now I've read Sheridan's plays in an edition that insinuates that they are bowdlerized and insipid descendants of Restoration drama. (Why don't people edit books they like?) I'm more sympathetic to the latter point of view, at least re Sheridan; Goldsmith is a different kettle of fish altogether, and not Restoration-like at all. (Sheridan, it appears, actually bowdlerized Vanbrugh's Relapse to make it acceptable to a 1760s audience.) Both The Rivals and The School for Scandal are comedies of manners; the plots -- e.g., man woos idiosyncratic woman with comic aunt -- are very much in the mold of Congreve and Wycherley. The plots are clever enough, but both plays are short on spirit and edge; the characters are pretty blah, though I imagine a good actor could make them come to life, and the dialogue, despite stunts like Mrs. Malaprop's malapropisms, never gets off the ground. In general these plays are what one would expect of period pieces -- unlike The Country Wife, which is entirely contemporary.

The difference, it seems, lies in the smut. Are plays without explicit sexual references ipso facto quaint? There's something appealingly reductive about this notion, and it certainly is quite hard to find sexually explicit ancient texts that are boring. I'd venture an alternative explanation, though, which is that the basic dramatic tension in the comedy of manners -- the horror of being cast out of the loop -- depends on social existence being a bit of a tightrope-walk, which requires a degree of cruelty and willingness to ostracize on the part of the "men of sense" (as ostracism would otherwise be empty) as well as a degree of objective danger (as the men of sense must appear sensible). Sheridan's tendencies deprecated the former; the age's conventions prevented the latter, and one is left, in the end, with two halfhearted plays that were unable -- unlike She Stoops to Conquer -- to create a genre to match their temperament.

The School for Scandal is interesting and flawed in the way that Auden found Twelfth Night interesting and flawed: a few of the characters -- in this case, Sir Peter Teazle; in the other, Viola -- exist at the wrong level of seriousness, and intrude rather damagingly into the fabric of the play. Sir Peter is an old man who has married a young woman who is about to start an affair with his hypocritical ward who's "gulled" Sir Peter; in a Restoration play this would have been a purely comic part, but Sheridan lacks the heartlessness to make it work, and there is an entirely jarring degree of pathos to the scenes in which Sir Peter appears -- jarring because he is so much more "real" than the others; because his presence critiques and undermines the scandalmongers; because it is clear that in Sheridan's view the entire "school for scandal" is at some level out-of-date and irrelevant, like the women in Pope:

As hags hold Sabbaths, less for joy than spite,
So these their merry, miserable night.
Still round and round the ghosts of beauty glide,
And haunt the places where their honor died.

And because these facts let the air out of the main action of the play: if sensible people are indifferent to scandal, the activities of scandalmongers can only be so important; but if so almost everything that happens in the play is insignificant.

I should say that by contrast The Critic is an entirely admirable and very funny play, much better than its Restoration model The Rehearsal.

Flat-nose and Horse-thrift

James Davidson has a delightful article in the LRB about Greek names. You should read the whole thing; I wanted to flag this bit, though:

The most famous account of intentionality in Greek naming comes from Aristophanes’ Clouds; Strepsiades explains how he wanted to call his son Pheidonides (‘Of the Line of Thrift’) but his posh wife wanted a Hippos-name to evoke upper-class horsemanship and chariots. So they ended up with Pheidippides. That name (‘Of the line of Thrifty with Horses’?), shared with the famous long-distance runner of Marathon, shows that although the elements of a name might be transparent they might not necessarily make sense when combined.

Of course, sparing-with-horses was a sensible name, to the point of being bizarrely apt, for the guy who ran the original marathon. It is reminiscent of the kinds of things that pop up in Old English poetry, which consists almost entirely of litotes, kennings, and compound epithets. Or the Icelandic sagas -- cf. the habit of calling blood "dark beer," or saying, e.g.,

"He twisted the tail of his cloak around Thorbjorn's throat and bit through it, then snapped his head back, breaking his neck. With such rough treatment Thorbjorn quietened down considerably."

(Not to mention that the Laxdaela saga begins with a guy called Ketil Flat-nose; the Gk. for flat-nose, "Simon," is cross-culturally popular as a name for upper-class twits.)

Gerund Zero

My initial reaction to this Language Log post about gerunds/participles was that it was imagining an ambiguity where none actually exists. I can't remember ever having been puzzled about whether a particular -ing construction was a gerund or a participle; it's generally clear, and (as some of the commenters said) it seems useful to have different names for the noun-functions and the adjective-functions of a given -ing construction.

Upon reflection, however, I've come around a little to MYL's point of view -- gerunds are not, as a rule, echt nouns. This becomes clear when you try to modify them: consider, e.g.,

(a) "Drinking continuously is a good idea" vs. (b) "Continuous drinking..."

These are both essentially idiomatic constructions to my ear; however, if drinking really were a noun, (a) should sound ridiculous. In fact there are probably instances, like "Going on endlessly about grammar will lose you friends," where you really need the adverbial form, though on a traditional parse "going" is a noun qua gerund. The fact that adverbs can modify gerunds appears quite general to constructions with gerunds in them; and -- to my mind -- offers very strong evidence that gerunds are not to be treated as true nouns. (Obviously the entire phrase is still functioning as a noun; the ambiguity is about the order of operations, as one can noun the verb either before or after adding the qualifier, and depending on what one does first the qualifier is either an adjective or an adverb.)

Some constructions w/ gerunds are of course a lot more noun-like than others -- definitely a pluralized gerund is an echt noun. But they do seem to occupy a bizarre syntactic middle ground, along with infinitives and other similar beasts.

The wages of rudeness

Google analytics has started collecting site traffic data; I was amused to find that the two leading non-obvious searches (i.e., other than my name, the blog's name, or a specific poem) that lead here are for "malcolm gladwell is an idiot" (which leads here) and "ezra klein is a hack" (which leads to this STOATUSblog post). Not "asshole loser fame" by any means, but this suggests a more replicable approach to picking up readers. Look out for "Dan Brown is an imbecile," "David Foster Wallace is a moron," "David Brooks is a douchebag," and other bouts of biliousness.

Borges and Local Color

What's odd about Borges's Personal Anthology is how boring it is relative to his collected works. Borges explains in a preface that he's left out stories that were "superficial exercises in local color" (or something like that); what remain are bland and repetitive statements of certain metaphysical positions -- about infinity and idealism and such -- that obviously meant a great deal to Borges but are trite as philosophy. A good example of the sort of thing Borges seems to have liked in later life is "The Other Tiger"; for all I know it's a good poem in Spanish but in translation one finds it drab and obvious. A good example of the sort of thing he did not like is "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

I wonder if this is due in part to Borges (mistakenly) comparing himself to Kafka. Jonathan Mayhew has a delightful post likening the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare to a story by Borges or James or Kafka. I would be much more specific: such a story would have been at home among Borges's Ficciones but has very little to do with Kafka. I am not sure, either, that a reader who knew Borges exclusively through the Personal Anthology would have perceived the accuracy of this comparison, as none of the "notes on imaginary books" are in it. It seems to me quite inaccurate to bracket Kafka with Borges at all. Kafka's novels can be understood in textbook modernist terms, as being rather like Macbeth -- successful attempts to find objective correlatives for a certain set of feelings, a certain sense the isolated mind has of its relation to the world. This will not work with Borges as the stories aren't mood-driven. A Kafkaesque situation is a nightmare; a Borgesian situation is an artifact.

The Borges stories I like best (other than the enjoyable but silly stuff in A Universal History of Iniquity) are the notes on imaginary books and two later stories, "The South" and "Averroes' Search," which come off for reasons that might be fortuitous. The general problem with writing "philosophical" literature, as Eliot remarks, is that the philosophy has to be realized -- fleshed out, peopled, colonized -- for the enterprise to work. (One should make an exception for purely frivolous uses, like the Hitchhiker's Guide.) A lot of Borges stories, like "The Circular Ruins," are bad b'se insufficiently real. In later work like "The Aleph," concreteness coexists uncomfortably with philosophical notions, but the philosophy comes off as an exotic and unjustified plot device. But in Tlon, "Pierre Menard" etc., idealism finds an odd but satisfying local habitation in names. Like Swinburne's poems (insert more Eliot here) these stories seem to indicate that there are other worlds than the physical one that are rich and irregular enough to "inhabit" or "realize" ideas in: the world of words and literature, in particular. I wonder, though, if the truth isn't simpler: these stories depend for effect largely on the ability of language to refract ordinary objects, say the moon, "into something rich and strange" -- all literature does, I think -- and lose their charm when there aren't any objects to be looked at. I've expressed vaguely similar sentiments about Stevens in the past, the good bits of his poems are the half-distinct, dazzling images seen out of the corner of the eye, while he's going on about something or other. This is probably a somewhat heretical opinion.

Afterthought on emergence and limits

See this post for context.

A "universality class" is a basin of attraction, i.e., it consists of the set of microscopic models that coarse-grain to a particular fixed point. Universality classes are, of course, equivalence classes -- of sequences of models that coarse-grain similarly. This structure is to some extent analogous to the set-theoretic construction of real numbers from rational numbers (i.e., pairs of integers): a real number x "is" an equivalence class of Cauchy sequences of rationals (i.e., all sequences that converge to x). The analogy is admittedly not very good: the reals have binary operations on them, etc., whereas there isn't really anything analogous for models. However, I think it is good enough to get at the main point: viz. that when one talks about the properties of the set of equivalence classes of rational numbers, one is doing a different sort of mathematics from the theory of rational numbers: the theory is defined on a different set, so very different sorts of things are true -- reduction to lowest terms in one case, the extreme value theorem in the other -- and the "reduction" of one theory to the other is a reduction of analysis, not to number theory, but to number theory plus set theory. It is also well-understood in the mathematical case that the reduction is not useful in that it doesn't help you prove theorems about the reals; its only potential use is in consistency proofs (which are anyhow precluded by Godel's theorems).

A similar statement seems to be true in physics -- the theory of fixed points is a theory of equivalence classes of sequences of models; this is not a reduction of many-body physics to particle physics but rather to particle physics plus set theory on renormalization group flows. The clumpy, highly classified, scale-invariant space of macroscopic objects is not like the relatively smooth landscape of parameters allowed by the standard model (or the "landscape" in string theory): the reduction is "useless" in the same sense as above. This is closely connected to the intuitive point that coarse-graining doesn't preserve distances in parameter space (two very similar microscopic theories can have very different macroscopic limits, etc.), which is why microscopic theories do not constitute explanations of macroscopic phenomena. Batterman is, I think, correct to try to find more formal and precise ways of saying this than just saying that it's a "useful idealization" to think of emergent phenomena as existing -- while strictly speaking this is all that one can say, "useful" is an ambiguous word, and it is worth emphasizing, I think, that emergent phenomena are "useful idealizations" in the same way as real numbers are useful idealizations of the way we talk about rational numbers.

Although I don't understand the holographic principle terribly well, I should note John McGreevy's claim that the (d + 1)-dimensional holographic dual of a d-dimensional model can be understood as a stack of d-dimensional slices of the model at various stages under the renormalization group. (The d+1 dimensional universe has two boundaries: a surface corresponding to the original model, and a point corresponding to its fixed point.) I suspect that this only really works for the "AdS"-like models, which don't describe the large-scale structure of our universe, but it would be neat if the renormalization group had a "physical" interpretation.

Emergence and limits

If you haven't read it yet, I recommend Batterman's article on the philosophical connection between emergent phenomena and singularities. It is nice to have philosophers taking the renormalization-group idea seriously, as this idea has had an enormous impact on how physics is done and interpreted by physicists -- at least by theorists -- but hasn't made it to the pop physics books or the undergraduate curriculum. Batterman correctly observes that physicists understand emergent phenomena in terms of the renormalization group, that the renormalization group concept needs limits (like that of infinite system size) to be made precise, and that the limits lead to singularities; he goes on to make what I think are some misleading statements about the interpretation of singularities. In this post I'll try to run through the usual argument and explain how I think the singularities ought to be interpreted.

I understand emergent phenomena in terms of the following analogy. Suppose you drop a ball onto a hilly landscape with friction, and ask where it will end up a very long time later. The answer is evidently one of the equilibrium points, i.e., a summit, a saddle point, or (most likely) a valley. Two further points to be made here: (1) It does not matter where on the hillside the ball started out; it'll roll to the bottom of the hill. In other words, very different initial conditions often lead to the same long-time behavior. (2) It matters very much which side of the summit the ball started out on; small differences in initial conditions can lead to very different long-time behavior. So what constitutes an "explanation" of the properties of the ball (say its response to being poked) a long time after its release? One possible answer is that, because mechanics is deterministic, once you've described the initial position and velocity you've "explained" everything about the long-time behavior. However, this is unsatisfactory because point (1) implies that most of this "explanation" would be irrelevant, and point (2) implies that the inevitable fuzziness of one's knowledge of initial conditions could lead to radically indeterminate answers. A better answer would be that the explanation naturally divides into two parts: (a) a description of the properties (curvature etc.) of the equilibrium points, and (b) the (generally intractable) question of which basin-of-attraction the ball started out in. In particular, part (a) on its own suffices to classify all possible long-time behaviors; it reduces a very large number of questions (what does the ball smell like? at what speed would it oscillate or roll off if gently poked?) to a single question -- approximately where is it? (Approximate position typically implies exact position in the long-time limit, except if there are flat valleys.)

"Emergent" (or "universal") phenomena are descriptions of equilibrium points, i.e., answers to part (a) of the question. The renormalization group concept is the notion that the large-scale behavior of a many-body system is like the long-time behavior of a ball in a frictional landscape, in the sense that it is governed by certain "fixed points," which can be classified, and that theories of these fixed points suffice to describe the large-scale properties of anything. So, for instance, there are three states of matter rather than infinitely many. The analogue of time is the length-scale on which you investigate the properties of the system -- as you go from a description in terms of interacting atoms to one in terms of interacting blobs and so on -- and the analogue of the "loss of information" via friction is the fact that you're averaging over larger and larger agglomerations of stuff. (All of this is quite closely related to the central limit theorem.)

The role of infinite limits in the former case is obvious: if you start the ball very close to the top of the hill (where, let's say, the slope is vanishingly small), it'll take a very long time to roll off. So the fixed-point idea only really works if you wait infinitely long. However, it's also obvious that if you wait a really really long time and the ball hasn't reached its equilibrium, this is because it is near another equilibrium; so the equilibrium description becomes arbitrarily good at arbitrarily long times. (This is of course just the usual real-analysis way of talking about infinities.) The infinite-system-size limit is precisely analogous: while it only strictly works in the infinite-size limit, this "infinity" is not a pathology but is to be interpreted in the usual finitist way -- given epsilon > 0 etc. Epsilon-delta statements are true regardless of how far the series is from convergence, but they grow increasingly vacuous and useless as epsilon increases; something similar is true with dynamical systems and the renormalization group.

I should explain what this has to do with fractals, by the way. In the case of the ball, a fixed point is defined as a configuration that is invariant under the equations of motion; in the case of the many-body system, a fixed point is a configuration that is invariant under a change of scale, i.e., a fractal. A continuum object is, of course, a trivial kind of fractal; you can't see the graininess of it without a microscope, and it doesn't seem to have any other scale than the size of its container. Systems near phase transitions are sometimes nontrivial fractals -- e.g., helium at the superfluid transition is a fractal network of droplets of superfluid in a bath of normal fluid, or vice versa. Phase transition points, btw, correspond to ridges; if you move slightly away from them, you "flow" into one phase or the other. The association between unstable equilibria and nontrivial fractals is not an accident. Any departure from the nontrivial fractal (say in the helium case) leads to either superfluid or normal fluid preponderating at large scales; if you average on a sufficiently large scale the density of droplets of the minority phase goes to zero, and you end up in one trivial phase or the other.

Read: Evelina

I was talking about Trollope with a well-known physicist last year -- he's a fan, I'm not -- when one of his grad students, who didn't speak much English and hadn't been listening, burst in with "What's a trollop?" I explained that a trollop was a prostitute, whereas A. Trollope was a novelist. Said Trollope fan was outraged at my quip that there are no good English novels between Persuasion and Ulysses (qua novels, that is; Dickens has a lot of virtues, but construction is not among them). Having read Middlemarch, I suppose I have to revise this opinion, which is sad because it was snappy and easily stated.

The Trollope fan also claimed that Fanny Burney's Evelina was superior to Tom Jones; I have now dutifully read it, and concluded that my Trollope problem is that I just don't much care for novelists who aren't eyecatching prose stylists. While neither Trollope or Burney would begin a novel with "Ingenuous debutante Evelina Anville crumpled behind a bush, having been bludgeoned by notable libertine Lord Merton," they aren't Joyce, and the temptation to skim is often overwhelming. Evelina has a lot of nice satirical touches -- esp. the heroine's stay with her bourgeois relatives in London, her reactions to their "vulgarity," and her extreme embarrassment whenever she runs into aristocratic acquaintances -- and is also very good, in ways that anticipate Austen, on how class distinctions and crushes interact. On the whole, though, it doesn't come off. One of the problems is that the same three aristocrats keep popping up absolutely everywhere, which gives the aristocracy the sense of a claustrophobic little club, and acts at cross purposes with the rest of the plot (which is about an ingenue in the big world). Another is that the posh people don't talk credibly; only the "broad," dialect-speaking characters do. A third is the role of "Sir Clement Willoughby" (btw, the names are not clever at all, another stylistic limitation) who is a rival suitor, a seducer, and, more often than not, a plot device. Mostly, though, it's the drab functional nature of the prose, which is a far cry from Fielding or Smollett; while this was inevitable to some extent in a novel written as a young woman's letters -- "it would be odd for a six-year-old girl to display the character of Winston Churchill" -- (a) that's arguably a statement that the novel was poorly conceived, (b) an easy fix, in this case, would have been to include letters written by the other characters, a la Smollett.

Hodge

The OED defines "Hodge" as follows:

1. A familiar by-form and abbreviation of the name Roger; used as a typical name for the English agricultural labourer or rustic.

c1386 CHAUCER Cook's Prol. 12 Euer sie I highte hogge of ware. [Ibid. 21 Oure host seyde I graunt it the, Now telle on, Roger.] 1483 Cath. Angl. 187/1 Hoge, Rogerus, nomen proprium. 1589 GREENE Menaphon (Arb.) 58 These Arcadians are giuen to take the benefit of euerie Hodge. a1700 B. E. Dict. Cant. Crew, Hodge, a Country Clown, also Roger. 1794 WOLCOTT (P. Pindar) Wks. III. 350 No more shall Hodge's prong and shovel start. 1826 in Hone Everyday Bk. II. 1210 You seem to think that with the name I retain all the characteristics..of a hodge. 1885 Observer 13 Dec. 5/3 The conduct of Hodge in the recent election.

I wonder if being hodged is similar to being rogered. (He was rogered unto a hodgepodge.) I also wonder [well, only rhetorically] about whether the next OED will include the standard mathematical sense of "Hodge."

PS to wander into the country and hang out w/ peasants is to be on a Hodge pilgrimage.

Whimbrels; sea-surfaces

Walking along the beach this evening I saw what I think were whimbrels:

I really ought to buy batteries for my camera. I also finally understand what Eliot meant re

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

The waves really looked like that. The sea was abnormally fine-textured and matte this evening; although it was sunny, there wasn't the cheap plasticky gloss one associates with the water on nice days.

Crooked Neighbors

Clive Crook writes, re libertarianism, liberaltarianism [which sadly has nothing to do with altars], etc:

Libertarians disagree with progressives about markets and with conservatives about "values", and that is really that.

I think he's dodging the issue by putting "values" in scare quotes -- as if "value" judgments had no overlap with markets -- so I'm going to read the sentence without the quotes. This brings out an obvious inconsistency: if libertarians and conservatives agreed about the probable outcomes of markets (or anything else) and disagreed about how to value those outcomes, they would disagree about policy. Since they agree about policy they must have either common values or inconsistent forecasts -- for instance, some libertarians believe in trickle-down economics whereas conservatives don't really want wealth to trickle down.

The debate about "liberaltarianism" has brought out some of the bizarreness of libertarianism as an "ideology." To set up a contrast, conservatism in the typical, Ross-Douthat sense is a complex of things, based around the notion of a body politic: (a) a belief that people ought to behave in traditional, "normal/natural" ways -- these change over time -- and that such behavior should be encouraged or enforced; (b) a belief in social hierarchies, currently the family, previously the feudal extended family incl. servants that are in some sense "personal," i.e. that are maintained by stronger than commercial bonds (being personal, such bonds are exclusive, hence the xenophobic streak); (c) a sense that most of the existing order is just, and that malcontents are (currently) freeloaders or (formerly) people unhappy with their station or (eternally) Deviants. Populism is quite close to this, but instead of (c) has (d): the body politic is sick because of a cancer (deviant/freakish behavior at the head) or because of invading outsiders. Similarly, classical liberalism is a complex of tendencies based around the notion of the explorer: (e) it values freedom, individuality, and self-fulfillment; (f) it has strong anti-hierarchical tendencies, and is anti-feudal -- it prefers contractual to personal relations; (g) it is xenophilic (the "explorer" strain) and stands for the individual against the mob, even when the mob has a point (e.g., murderers and rapists). In addition, some classical and most modern liberals believe (h): the penalties for failure should be limited; everyone should be guaranteed a decent standard of living. Obviously each of these ideologies comes with a certain class identification -- conservatives with the small businessman who's a "pillar of the community" and liberals with travelers, scholars, and to some extent "The Other" in general.

You can't describe libertarianism in these terms at all. Being a libertarian is more like being a prohibitionist than like being a liberal or a conservative -- it's an agenda without a specific worldview. (Many libertarians dishonestly pretend that getting rid of government will make life better for everybody; this, however, just reinforces my point.) Of course it's possible to be a libertarian conservative -- you might believe (e.g.) that the government is weakening "local communities" -- or a libertarian populist -- if you think the govt. is run by special interests and actively oppresses the poor -- or a libertarian liberal -- if you think the govt. is basically a wiretapping agency. None of these ideologies is about government in any direct way -- rather, they're about desirable and undesirable outcomes. It is admittedly true that the relevant political parties have partly been hijacked by narrow interest groups that have little to do with worldviews per se; libertarians make a perfectly sensible pressure group; but there are excellent reasons why more self-aware pressure groups like AIPAC don't agonize over whether to think of themselves as liberal or conservative.

The politics of poverty

It is sometimes argued that American politics is bad for the poor because (a) interest groups have a huge amount of influence through campaign donations, etc., (b) the poor are not a powerful interest group. One could attempt to solve this by taking steps to decrease the influence of interest groups; however, this is not feasible because everyone currently in power is beholden to a range of interest groups: in particular, incumbents gain enormously from interest-group connections, and would be less safe if the groups did not exist. Besides, the swing-voter subset of the public is too ill-informed and clueless to care about relatively high-order "process" issues like campaign-finance reform. In addition to such practicalities, I would argue that lobbyists are a bit of a red herring: the real problem is that the poor are not numerically a powerful political force, esp. when one accounts for age-related disparities in voting -- democracies are, by and large, perfectly happy to give minorities the shaft. Besides, one could argue that technocrats (the alternative, I suppose, to vested interests) are themselves an interest group in some ways; in particular, as a socio-economically homogeneous bunch, they are liable to underestimate the costs of policies when these costs fall on other groups, and to overestimate the costs that fall on themselves and their friends. Very few policies are good for everybody or bad for everybody; most have winners and losers; in these situations, educated elites are likely to adopt policies that shift the costs onto other demographic groups.

One should, therefore, be concerned with how to make an interest group out of the poor: or, more realistically, how to align the interests of the poor with those of extant interest groups. A naive approach to this is Tony Judt's "social democracy of fear" idea -- persuade the [lower half of the] middle class that, in an uncertain world, it is desirable to have some stays against extreme privation. Unfortunately this idea suffers from bad psychology: in an uncertain world, what people actually do is cling bitterly to whatever they have, and protest mosque-building. (However, it is possible to get the middle classes to support existing programs that they benefit from.) The next most obvious solution seems to me as follows: have the govt. subsidize groups such as health-insurance providers, transportation companies, etc. to provide services to the poor and perhaps to employ them. In order to pay for these services, one will need tax raises; if geared toward the super-rich, these might create conflicts of interest between corporations and their CEOs, so gear them toward the middle class or even the poor, by flattening the tax structure somewhat. In other words, if a policy redistributes wealth both upwards and downwards from the middle class, that would mean (a) an interest group with clout will defend the policy, (b) it will ostensibly serve the poor and thus might keep the socialist left only boundedly unhappy. Certain segments of the middle class will be extremely irritated but they would probably have voted Republican anyway.

This sort of coalition of the rich and the poor against the middle class has happened in the past; I believe it was the basic political alignment in 18th-century England. As the GOP's populist-nativist streak grows stronger and stronger, I suspect that this is the sort of anti-populist coalition that would have the best shot at keeping the GOP out of power. The most serious danger is, of course, that the corporations will pocket the money and not provide services to the poor; this can to some extent be ameliorated by making the services broad-based so that the middle class (which is vocal) gets to benefit from them. (They wouldn't be getting their money's worth but I'm not sure they'd notice.) So -- in short -- we should be soaking the middle class in order to provide broad-based services that would make help the top 2% and the bottom quartile. The (electorally necessary) remaining 23% can be picked up through social liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and other "values" issues, as well as by buying the votes of clueless independents w/ the money of the top 2%.

Interest, sensibility, soft paternalism, etc.

Jonathan Bernstein, re horse-race politics:

Pick something that you pay no attention to.  For my dad, I always suggest NASCAR. [...] If you asked him to name a NASCAR driver he'd probably look at you as if you were nuts...but if you named some of them, he'd probably recognize the names.  The idea is that lots and lots of people have about that level of knowledge about most of what happens in politics.  It's just background noise.  We, the people who write and read political blogs, and watch debates, and pay attention to politics even in the off season --we're the minority.

Of course, with politics unlike sports, we're "supposed" to be paying attention, and a lot of people probably don't like to admit that they really aren't. 

This is related to a general set of issues about "paternalism." There's some evidence that poor people are relatively uninformed about (say) the nutritional content of various kinds of food, the correct approach to diet and exercise, etc. By a quirk of character, I'm also clueless about this stuff, because it bores me to death. Really a lot of things bore me to death. When people start talking about carbon footprint or omega-3 fatty acids, or anything of the sort, my eyes glaze over and I start thinking about something else; this is a tendency I can't help, there is just nothing about the subject that engages my imagination. I also absolutely hate shopping. When I'm forced to go to Walmart or a supermarket to buy X, I try to find the aisle that has X, then grab the first item I can find and move on. Labeling requirements would have no impact on my buying habits because I don't look at labels. When I want to buy a computer I pick a manufacturer's website at random and navigate as rapidly as possible to the "buy" button. And so on. This leaves me with the same take on things like ethical shopping and informed consumerism and the rest; yes I agree that one ought to do it, but it's a colossally tedious waste of my time. I would much rather have a trusted agency of some kind tell me what it's OK to buy, and keep me from getting swindled or poisoned or from leaving a "carbon footprint," than have to try and wade through the information myself. I believe a lot of others are similarly situated, esp. the poor, except that it's because they're more preoccupied than uninterested.

(Similarly, regarding Yelp reviews of restaurants, or Amazon reviews of electronics: is there anything quite as dispiriting as wading through 20-30 barely grammatical and usually off-topic rants? It's almost as bad as NYT blog comments. I would much rather just have someone reliable/accountable just certify that certain things work. Similarly, an hour that I spend comparing ticket prices is an hour of mild suffering that I would pay a finite amount to avoid.)

Now, given that I interact mostly with highly educated people, who care about these things, I can make things easier for myself by trusting their judgment. Besides, the market goes some way towards taking care of these issues as long as a critical mass of customers care enough to do their homework. However, customers who care are largely people of a certain socioeconomic status, and in markets that cater largely to poorer people, one presumably does not have such a critical mass, and the arguments for regulation of some kind become fairly strong.

Of course, one must weigh this against the interests of people who do care; who have done their homework, and want to experiment with things that might harm them -- or, for that matter, with people who simply aren't that invested in not being poisoned. It is bad to forbid people from doing things they might have chosen rationally: even if most people make such choices because they're clueless, odds are that you are blocking a fair number from doing something that's victimless. So one is led to a form of soft paternalism according to which it is hard to find something potentially bad for you unless you're really looking for it. In some respects the Great Firewall of China is exemplary: it imposes slight barriers that anyone can overcome if they want to.

However, I do find it rather irritating when such people get sanctimonious about the need for others to be informed browsers or customers or whatever. This shouldn't be necessary: we live in a highly specialized world in which people have better things to do than read labels and compare prices and be well-informed about random stuff that they're not experts about: there are actual experts out there. In addition to the sheer waste of time, "a little learning is a dangerous thing" -- as well as being intellectually rather unsatisfying -- as I guess the example of WebMD suggests.

As for politics -- I think the political scientists' picture of swing voters voting based on whether they feel well-off or not leads to an OK equilibrium, which is quite possibly the best equilibrium achievable with an uninformed public. Would having a more informed public improve political outcomes by enough to overcome the cost to individuals of becoming more informed? I don't know, but I would guess not.

PS in the third world the real choice is between rule by the uninformed and rule by the uniformed.

In Praise of Blunt Instruments

From today's David Brooks column:

The [FinReg] law also calls upon government experts to make some heroic judgments. For example, it calls upon regulators to break up banks that might be about to pose a risk to the country’s economy. That is to say, investors may believe a bank is stable. The executives of the bank may believe it is stable. But the regulators are called upon to exercise their superior vision and determine which banks are stable and which are not.

When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era — when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute it to the have-nots. It’s not a conservative era, when the governing class concedes that the world is too complicated to be managed from the center. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems. 

I'm reminded of this old Yglesias post -- responding to yet another Brooks column -- that I think is worth quoting at length:

in just the areas where we’d most like effective regulation, we’re sort of unlikely to get it. If traders are likely to overestimate the effectiveness of their risk models, then regulators are prone to those exact same errors. Where does this leave us?

Brooks, I think, thinks it leaves us just as skeptical of regulation as we were before we took the behavioral turn. I think it arguably leaves us somewhere else. It leaves us with an appreciation of crude measures rather than hubristic efforts to get the regulations precisely right. Until the 1980s, banks couldn’t operate across state lines at all. This didn’t make any real sense. Some states (California, New York, Texas) are much bigger than others either in terms of land area or population or both. And of course New York City is much more integrated with parts of New Jersey (and even some parts of Connecticut) than it is with, say, Buffalo. So whatever the “right” rule was here, this clearly wasn’t it. At the same time, this rule, for all its arbitrariness, has the virtues of being clear and largely self-implementing. It doesn’t depend on anyone’s discretion being used wisely or honestly, and it doesn’t depend on anyone’s calculations being right. And it had the effect of limiting the size of banks so that you never had a really enormous bank failure.

Now that’s not to say we should go back to the ban on interstate banking (I honestly have no idea), but I think it shows the general shape of what we should be looking at. The best you can hope from a regulatory regime is that it will be a satisficing solution wherein some fairly crude rule will improve on the outcomes generated by the unfettered market. When that’s not the case, we may as well let the market go unfettered even though that, too, will be somewhat sub-optimal. But at the same time when we’re looking at a regulatory regime that seems to be working okay, and the regulated parties start saying we need tweaks x and y and z and oh there’s no danger there we should be very suspicious. We shouldn’t count on being to fine-tune our results to perfection, we should either lean in with a heavy hand or else stay away.