Category Archives: Literature

Wow, this classic research article from 1955 on betting and probability has a really high math-to-conceptual-content ratio!

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Mark Tuttle points to an article from 1955, “Fair Bets and Predictive Probabilities,” by John Kemeny. Tuttle writes:

I assume that this paper is near and dear to your heart. At the time, during the “Bayesian” wars, I’m guessing it was novel, relatively.

Per the conclusion of your recent post, Gambling is fun but it can ruin addicts, are you “wary” of this paper, in 1955 at least . . . ?

My response: I’ve never read this particular article before, but to my eyes in 2022, it seems like piles and piles of math, to prove something that I already know is true!

Now, I know what you’re gonna say: it’s only obvious to me now because this dude went to the trouble of proving it, back in 1955. For me to criticize this article for being obvious and overkill would be like hating on Beethoven’s Fifth for being nothing but one musical cliche after another.

But I don’t think so. I think it’s more of a language thing, or a style thing. I think the Neumann/Morgenstern utility theorem is both beautiful and important; I enjoyed Luce and Raiffa; and I like a lot of other decision theory literature. I still think the theorems in this Kemeny paper are trivial, and I’m not a fan of the way the article is written. But, again, that’s a style thing. If you could bring Kemeny back to life today and force him to read the collected works of me, I daresay he’d be disgusted that I wrote ten thousand blog posts and managed to say so little. Why not focus a bit, he’d say, and just publish some theorems??? And maybe he’d be right, who’s to say.

Here’s another way of looking at it: Modern-day statistics research has tons of computing for each bit of statistical insight. It’s just the way things go: if you have an idea, you evaluate it on a lot of examples. Back in the day, they didn’t have cheap computing cycles so they did lots of math.

OK, I know you were all waiting for this one: My review of the 1995 album, Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits

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It all started last month when I was talking with my social media consultant about planning our next Greatest Seminar Speaker competition. We were going through a few possible categories—I’m actually forgetting most of these, but I’m sure my consultant has them written down somewhere—; in any case I do remember that we only had 6 or 7 out of the necessary 8 categories, and in the back of my mind I was trying to think of one or two more.

Then today I was working on an article on equivalent sample size for Bayesian prior distributions—it’s funny, there are a bunch of articles on the topic, all of which include people who I know personally: Peter Mueller, Rob Trangucci, Xiao-Li Meng, and Sebastian Weber. This is not one article, it’s 4 different articles, each of which includes a friend, and none of which I’d heard about until my colleagues and I started looking into the topic. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there; the relevance of this particular digression is that one of the other references in the paper is to the statistician I. J. Good (his “device of imaginary results”), and that got me thinking of famous people who are known by their initials: A. J. Foyt, J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkien, E. Nesbit, T. S. Eliot (alternatively, he could go into the always-crowded “bigots” category), etc. I was trying to come up with a good set of 8 of these people, and the name “H. R. Pufnstuf” jumped into my head.

Just to be clear, we can’t use H. R. Pufnstuf in the Greatest Seminar Speaker competition as he’s not a real person. H. R. Pufnstuf, as anyone who happens to be exactly my age and grew up in the United States and watched too much TV—ummmm, I guess that would be just about everyone my age who grew up in the U.S.—was a Saturday morning cartoon—actually, it was not a cartoon; according to Wikipedia, it was a “live-action, life-sized-puppet program.” Like any other kid, I much preferred cartoons to live-action anything, but given the options on TV, we watched whatever was on in those long weekend hours.

Anyway, thinking about that show brought to mind that infectious earworm of its theme song: “H. R. Pufnstuf, can’t do a little cause he can’t do enough.” What can that possibly mean, I always thought? Can’t do a little cause he can’t do enough?? I still have no idea.

It’s been often noted that The Jetsons have had an outsized influence on popular memory given that it was only on the air for one season (later forgettable reboots notwithstanding). H. R. Pufnstuf, also airing for only one season, had a much smaller cultural foonote. But I remember it! Maybe not so well as its hat-themed sister show, Lidsville, or The Houndcats, which I absolutely loved for its elaborate plots (I’d never seen an actual episode of Mission Impossible and had no idea that this was what The Houndcats was ripping off), but that theme song . . . I’m still humming it in my head, at least when my brain’s not being occupied by the even more memorable Banana Splits theme song, which has the extra benefit of being associated with that unforgettable water slide image.

I looked up Pufnstuf on the internet . . . The internet has lots of issues, but one thing it’s good at is providing detail on classic and not-so-classic TV shows. I really have no need at all for my yellowed copy of “Total Television: A Comprehensive Guide to Programming from 1948 to the Present.”

Anyway, this internet search led me to the album, Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits, which appeared in 1996 and features various somewhat-gritty boomer and x-er rockers such as Liz Phair, Butthole Surfers, Violent Femmes, etc., covering cartoon classics—and also the theme from H. R. Pufnstuf, even though it’s not actually a cartoon. Truth in labeling, people! None of the tracks are by R.E.M., which is too bad cos their covers are great, but of course I respect them more for not being on this kind of crappy concept album that I love so much.

I recently learned that all the music you could ever want to hear is available for free on the internet, so I went over to Youtube and found the album! I kinda wanted to hear it, but maybe I just wanted to “own it” (as the oldies would say about recorded music); to actually listen to all 19 songs sounds like a bit much. Fortunately, I can listen to music in the background while I work or whatever.

Now it’s time for bed, but tomorrow, or when I next have a chance, I’ll listen to all 19 songs in order and report it all to you. I’ve also heard that music criticism is dead, so you can be glad to hear that I’m being paid $0 for this particular post.

OK, tomorrow has come. I just listened to the first song: the Banana Splits theme performed by Liz Phair. It was terrible. “Tra la la” over and over and over and over again. With guitar feedback in the background. I want those three minutes back. Now I’m on the second one: Sponge performing Speed Racer. We have a Speed Racer principle here at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science—but I don’t like this song either. I’m starting to think that theme songs for kids’ TV shows don’t have enough going on to support three-minute songs.

The third track is Mary Lou Lord performing Sugar Sugar. It’s pretty boring too but at least it sounds good. I don’t really feel listening to the end of this one, but at least it’s not actively unpleasant.

Now it’s been 2:19 out of 3:54 (almost 4 minutes—what were they thinking??) and I’m jumping to the next track, Matthew Sweet singing the Scooby Doo theme. Hey! This one isn’t half bad. OK, maybe it’s half bad, but that’s still better than anything that’s come along so far. . . . OK, 1:28 gone and it’s repeating itself. Couldn’t they just have made each of these tracks a minute long? No way the themes were so long on the actual TV shows. I get that these long-form covers would be fun as anything in a live performance by a band, but, on record . . . forget it! On the plus side, hey! Matthew Sweet’s band is jammin! Why not, I guess. Next up, Juliana Hatfield and Tanya Donelly perform Josie and The Pussycats. Not bad, it’s got a beat. But no way am I gonna listen to every song on this album. I’m jumping a few tracks to the Ramones performing Spider Man. Sounds like every other Ramones song I’ve ever heard. . . . Time to quickly go through a few more, and now we’re a Dig performing the Fat Albert Theme. With the whole Cosby thing, Fat Albert now has this dangerous vibe which makes the song kinda fascinating in retrospect. Boring and unmusical, but fascinating. And now I’ll skip a few more to get to the Murmurs’ take on H. R. Pufnstuf. In classic TV-theme style, it tells the story of the show. Not bad—actually this is my favorite song on the album! Still kinda boring to hear 3:20 worth, but I’ll take it. My quick summary: they should redo this collection, doing each song in 1 minute instead of 3 or 4. Or maybe the solution is at the other end of the equation: the listener should get drunk or stoned before putting this record on.

OK, my job here is done.

P.S. On that webpage for Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits is a link to the record’s producer, Ralph Sall. Following that link leads to a page on his album, “The Art of McCartney,” described as follows by Wikipedia: “The 42-song set, which covers McCartney’s solo work and work with the Beatles and Wings, features a wide range of artists such as Barry Gibb, Brian Wilson, Jeff Lynne, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Alice Cooper, Smokey Robinson, and Kiss.” Barry Gibb covering “When I’m Sixty-Four”—how fun is that? And another quick search reveals there’s a copy at the local library! So I can check it out, save it on the ipod, and listen to it on my bike while dodging the cars. That’s much better than listening to the songs on youtube. But I won’t review it for you, as I don’t think anything interesting is left to be said regarding classic Paul McCartney songs.

P.P.S. If you want to read an unlimited number of music reviews, all by the same guy, check this out. Dude hits the rock-criticism jackpot by writing interestingly with opinions that are occasionally unexpected enough that you’ll want to keep reading, and of course the air of 100% super-certainty that we’ve come to expect from the genre. It’s never, “I like this album” or “I hate this album”; it’s always “This album rules” or “This album sucks.” Like all rock critics, he doesn’t have tastes, he has absolute knowledge.

Axios II: Attack of the Clones

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This story, along with the above picture, is pretty funny. I guess the previous man in the sequence is sitting in a rocking chair somewhere and the next one is at Little League practice. What really makes the photo work, beyond these guys all looking pretty similar, is (a) they’re dressed the same way, kinda like adorable twins whose parents buy them identical outfits, and (b) the monotonic pattern of hair loss, which reinforces the sequential look.

Really, though, those Axios dudes should stick to sports (background here).

A couple weeks ago we discussed this thing that used to happen, but we don’t see so much of anymore, which is writers being treated as all-purpose pundits, even though they had zero qualifications other than writing skills. An example would be Norman Mailer. This Axios thing is kind of the reverse: some bad writers offering writing tips. I’d say “selling” writing tips, but it really doesn’t count as selling if you’re actually paying people to buy your book.

Not that I’m one to talk, giving out all my prose for free here . . .

The “You’re only allowed to publish 2 or 3 journal articles per year” rule

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Yesterday we discussed a news article on science journals being overwhelmed by fake research. Here was one quote from that article:

International biotechnology consultant Glenn Begley, who has been campaigning for more meaningful links between academia and industry, said research fraud was a story of perverse incentives. He wants researchers to be banned from producing more than two or three papers per year, to ensure the focus remained on quality rather than quantity.

At first I thought that was a horrible idea. Some of us have more than two or three things to say in a year! Is Begley trying to silence us??

But then I thought, sure, it all just depends on how you define “journal articles.” Instead of publishing 20 journal articles in a year, I could put 20 articles on Arxiv and just choose 3 of them to publish in journals. That would be kinda cool, actually, as it would save my collaborators and me huge amounts of effort in dealing with review reports, paperwork from journals, and so forth. My collaborators and I could write as much as we always do, just much more efficiently.

So I’m on board with Begley’s proposal. I’m not sure how it would be enforced, and I’m not planning to do it unilaterally but I’m starting to warm to it it as a general policy.

So, again, you’d be able to continue to publish 20 or more articles per year, but there’s a logic to saying that only 2 or 3 can be in “journals.” There are still a couple of details that need to be worked out, such as how to count coauthored articles and how to think about non-journal publications such as arxiv. The next step would be to replace journals by recommender systems, an idea I’ve proposed before (see also here). This would move us toward an equilibrium in which we publish 0 journal articles per year. Or a system where journals continue to exist but have no special status, in the same way that private schools such as Columbia continue to have some value but are not considered intrinsically better than public schools.

Why do Dickens novels have all those coincidences?

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Regular readers will know that I have an answer to the above question. My resolution is based on the statistics of sampling from networks.

I like my theory, but it’s not the only one.

Here’s what Gareth Rees had to say. I don’t disagree with Rees—and I appreciate that he links to TV Tropes!—I guess I’d say that my resolution (that coincidence is one way to resolve an inherent impossibility of conveying a complex social structure in a book with a small number of characters) and his resolution (that, in the period when Dickens was writing, coincidence was viewed as a plus, not an unfortunate byproduct of necessity, in the same way that nowadays we consider contrivances such as plot and climax to be a plus in storytelling) are complementary.

Any theories you have, feel free to share in the comments.

Geoff Dyer Kazuo Ishiguro Owen Sheers David Leavitt Veronica Geng

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I guess the first of this series was George Orwell.

I’m talking about writers who lay down the prose with a clear directness, a crystal-clear declarative style. Gay Talese not quite, as he has a bit of a knowingly courtly style. Not Hemingway either, as he seems too mannered.

Veronica Geng doesn’t quite fit here but I think that’s how she would’ve written, had she written extended nonfiction.

Of the authors listed above, Ishiguro is the most famous for having a style that’s ostentatiously plain (as Dyer might put it), but I’d say the others have it too. Reading their books can make me uncomfortable, in the same way as if I’m talking with someone who I realize is staring into my eyes, and I’m not interested in a staring contest.

P.S. I just finished the latest Dyer book and, when placing it on the shelf, I flipped through his two books of essays—it seems appropriate to flip through a book by Dyer and not read it cover to cover—and then, when replacing those, came across a book of essays by John Gregory Dunne which was next to them on the shelf. This was another one not to read all the way through again, but I did come across this great line about movie critic Pauline Kael: “Reading her on film is like reading Lysenko on genetics—fascinating, unless you know something about genetics.”

P.P.S. Just to be clear, I don’t think there’s any obligation for authors to write in this plain style. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Martin Amis, lot of writers have distinctive, even flashy, styles that work well. It’s good that we can encounter a range of writing styles.

“If you could invite 5 authors (dead or alive) to a dinner party – who would they be and why?”

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Someone named Phil Treagus sent me a bunch of questions for a website that he maintains with reading lists and interviews about books. Here’s his email interview with me:

When did you first become interested in statistics?

I ran out of math courses in high school so I took classes at the local college. I took probability and stochastic processes because they were offered at 5 pm and didn’t conflict with my schedule. Then in college, I took a class in applied statistics and it was so amazing: using math to solve real problems, not just prove theorems. For more background see here.

Talk us through a typical day for you…

Skipping all the family stuff; when I’m working I will jump between projects, trying to stay amused. Sometimes I’m coding and that takes focus: to find bugs and make sure your program is working the way it’s supposed to, you’ll typically have to write additional programs just to test your code. In statistics and programming, it’s not enough to get the right answer; you also need to know it’s right; you need to build a web of trust.

What are you reading at the moment and what made you want to read it?

I’m on sabbatical in Paris this year and am trying to work on my French by reading bandes dessinées (comic books): the pictures help me understand while I read the words. I recently read L’Éntreinte by Jim and Laurent Bonneau. I picked it out at the library because the style of the drawings appealed to me, also I’d read previous BD’s by Jim.

But, to be honest, I do almost all my reading in English, and I recently finished The Committed, the gangster-novel sequel to the spy novel The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Both books have so much over-the-top praise in their blurbs that I was prepared to be contrarian and hate them, but they’re excellent. The main character has such a great voice, also I liked some of the larger themes.

Are you a page folder or a bookmarker?

Neither! If I can’t remember where I stopped in the middle of a book, then I’ll just dive in and figure out where I was.

Which two books would you recommend to a complete novice who is interested in exploring the topics of statistics and political science?

Start from what you’re interested in. If you like baseball, read one of the classic Bill James Baseball Abstracts from the 1980s. If urban politics is your thing, Fire on the Prairie by Gary Rivlin is a great book about Harold Washington’s moves as mayor of Chicago. The appeal of both the fields of political science and statistics is how broadly they apply.

If you could invite 5 authors (dead or alive) to a dinner party – who would they be and why?

Meg Wolitzer, Sam Lipsyte, David Byrne, Colson Whitehead, Lucy Sante. I choose them, among so many authors whose books I love, because I think they all live in New York or nearby, at least some of the time, so maybe we actually could have all of them over for dinner sometime.

What was the last book you purchased, and why did you buy it?

Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart. Preparing for our trip to France and I wanted a fun book to read, just for relaxation.

What is your proudest achievement from your impressive academic career?

There’s this longstanding challenge in statistics of monitoring the convergence of the stochastic algorithm. A stochastic algorithm is a kind of random walk that solves a problem by traversing the space of possible solutions, and there’s always this question of whether you’ve run the algorithm long enough to have seen enough.

Back when I was a graduate student, a friend of mine was using one of these algorithms and he was trying to figure out when it would be ok for him to stop. I read through the literature and found this paper from 1959 that had a method that worked for one particular problem, and I figured out a way to extend the method so it could be applied more generally. Sounds kinda dry and technical, and I guess it is, but once I worked it out, I realized then and there that this would be the most important thing I’d ever do in my career.

What’s the best book you’ve read in the last 6 months?

I guess I’d have to say The Committed, which I mentioned above, but that’s kind of a boring choice so instead I’ll say All the Devils are Here, by David Seabrook, which I picked up at a bookstore because there was something intriguing about it—it’s a kind of outsider-art nonfiction book where this guy muses over some historical episodes from some towns in the south of England. There’s something compelling about it, partly the stories and partly the mysterious way it’s written.

If you could insert yourself into any book, which would you pick and why?

Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick, because it seems so real!

What are you working on at the moment that you’re most excited about?

I taught a course on applied statistics last year to political science students, and I tried to make this the most active course ever: there were two classes a week, and for every class, we had a story, a class-participation activity, a computer demonstration, and problems for the students to work on.

I wrote it all up while it was happening, and now I’m putting it all together as a book, which at first I was going to call How to Teach Statistics, but I think a better title is How to Learn Statistics. I’m really excited about having all these stories and activities in one place.

What is the book that you feel has had the single biggest impact on your life? What impact did it have?

In my late teens, I read Orwell’s collected essays, letters, and journalism, four volumes where he works through his literary and political ideas. Orwell is a model as a writer, and as a thinker, there’s something appealing about how straightforward he is. Some writers leave you impressed by their brilliance, but Orwell leaves me with the impression that you—anyone—could do what he does if you could just keep your eye on the ball.

And, of course, the political insight, as in the sweeping final paragraphs of Homage to Catalonia. Professionally, though, I guess the books that had the most impact on my thinking are the aforementioned Bill James Baseball Abstracts, which don’t use any statistical methods I would use today but which are amazing examples of analytical work, even more, impressive because he works out everything from scratch.

Which book sat on your shelf are you most excited about reading next and why?

I have an old collection of essays and book reviews by Kingsley Amis and another by Anthony Burgess. I love this sort of thing, just reading these cranky guys go on about obscure topics. It’s the literary equivalent of junk food for me.

The end of the pure writer/pundit

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Clive James died a few years ago, which made me sad even though it was no surprise, as he’d had a terminal illness for years. I love his essays and his poems, and it struck me that he’s the last of the pure writer/pundits. In the tradition of Orwell, or Shaw, or Wells, he had no expertise in anything but writing, but he had lots of life experiences, the ability to write well, broad interests, and lots of opportunities to write about what he wanted. Other examples would be Janet Malcolm and Joan Didion.

I’m distinguishing these people from other categories such as writers who have opinions but don’t ever become all-purpose pundits (for example, Lionel Trilling or Jonathan Franzen or Lorrie Moore) or reporters who, even when they do offer opinions, pretty much do it by telling the stories of others (for example, Malcolm Gladwell or A. J. Liebling) or people with relevant subject-matter expertise (Krugman, Mankiw, Steven J. Gould, Scott Alexander, etc.: you might disagree with some of these people and feel that they’re misrepresenting their fields or overstepping their bounds of knowledge, but ultimately they do have some home base where they have some knowledge).

What are things like now? We have lots of all-purpose pundits who offer hot and cold takes (newspaper op-ed columnists, political bloggers, etc.) but that’s not quite the same—these people are opinion-havers, not literary artists. In some sense, literary merit and literary ambition should be irrelevant to all this, but somehow it’s not. I read Clive James because he’s entertaining and has interesting things to say, and this leads me to be interested in what he has to say, if you know what I mean.

I was thinking about all this after coming across this climate denial article by an elderly Clive James. It’s like a parody of a Clive James article in that he uses his writing skills to misrepresent reality: you can see all his skills right there, and it’s very sad. At some points he loses control over his syntax (“But for now – and it could be a long now – the advocates of drastic action are still armed with a theory that no fact doesn’t fit”), and the essay doesn’t line up well with physical reality, but most of the time he’s got the rhetoric machine under control, and the article reads in a similar way as his old-time eviscerations of 1970s-vintage books and TV.

It’s hard to be angry at James for writing this silly thing during his last years, but I can be annoyed at whoever it is who flattered and conned him into doing it, taking advantage of an old man like that. I guess we can remember James in his prime, just as he would have us remember Johnny Weissmuller.

What rule did Louis Menand use to select what went into book on U.S. “cold war” culture of 1945-1965?

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I’m a big fan of Louis Menand (see also here), so when his new book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, came out, I immediately bought and read it. It had lots of interesting stories and thought-provoking ideas.

For example, on page 334:

On page 450:

That whole quote is great, especially the “surprising to outsiders” bit. Everyone thinks we’re poofs, but we’re not! Really!! A bunch of lumberjacks, they are.

On pages 466-467, Menand refers to a theory of poetry promulgated in the 1940s:

. . . the idea that all poems worth studying display certain formal features, specifically, paradox, irony, and ambiguity—devices that multiply and complicate meaning.

Oooohh, I hate that attitude! OK, don’t get me wrong: I have no problem with paradox, irony, and ambiguity—they’re great. But the idea that a poem has to be confusing, some sort of puzzle that needs to be decoded . . . that’s this crap they fed us in high school, where the literary heroes were T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner. Did they ever give us poems by, say, Frost or Auden—poems with art and ambiguity but also some clarity? No! I guess if we want some poetry that isn’t a pure puzzle, we can just listen to pop songs. Anyway, I’m not blaming Menand for this—he’s describing a real cultural trend—it’s just a trend that annoys me.

Wow. That cookbook story is great. This story alone justifies the price of the book. I mean it! I’m gonna assign this exercise to my students next year. Not with a cookbook, I guess, but otherwise the same.

Then there’s this quote from pages 617-618. It comes from culture hero William Faulkner in 1956:

“But I [Faulkner] don’t like enforced integration any more than I like enforced segregation. If I had to choose between the United States government and Mississippi, then I’ll choose Mississippi . . . As long as there’s a middle road, all right, I’ll be on it. But if it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the Unites States even if it meant going out on the streets and shooting Negroes. After all, I’m not going to shoot Mississippians.”

I have no idea how he’d be able to tell whether the “Negroes” he’s shooting are themselves Mississippians. It’s not like people go around wearing uniforms telling you what state they’re from! Menand continues, “Faulkner tried to retract [these words], hinting that he had been drunk.” But that’s even worse, no, to have a drunk guy going around shooting people?

From page 680, on movie critic Pauline Kael:

Kael’s contention that serious movies should meet the same standard as pulp—that they should be entertaining—turned out to be an extremely useful and widely adopted critical principle. . . .

This sounds reasonable, and I don’t exactly disagree, but it reminds me of the discussion we had last year on the norm of entertainment:

It seems that we demand entertainment in some media but not others. We expect movies to be entertaining, and if they’re not, we’re annoyed. Even documentaries are supposed to be well paced. If not, they’ll be criticized as being boring, or “preachy,” or whatever. Most TV is expected to entertain also, except for certain special events such as official speeches, rocket launches, and Super Bowls, which it’s considered ok to watch out of ritual obligation.

Novels and plays, we usually expect to entertain us, with some exceptions. I might read Moby Dick because it’s thought provoking and has brilliant passages. It’s not entertaining, exactly, but reading it can be satisfying. We don’t always expect dinner to be entertaining either, but we do what it takes to fill us up.

What about textbooks and nonfiction books? Some of these are entertaining. In Regression and Other Stories, we try to amuse. The classic textbook Numerical Methods That Work is a flat-out fun read. Some scholarly works for the general public are highly readable. I’m thinking of The Origins of the Second World War. Hey, here’s a whole list of entertaining nonfiction books I’ve read. Entertaining is great, if you can have it. But I’ve read lots of completely unentertaining books that were great because they had important information. That would describe most of my textbooks, as well as various nonfiction books. If a textbooks entertaining, that’s lagniappe.

And then there are research articles. There are entertaining research papers out there—I’ve written a few, myself!—but most of the time we don’t expect journal articles to be entertaining. Indeed, there are times when we would feel that any effort made by an author to be entertaining is effort wasted, if it could be spent on content itself.

Menand’s book is pretty entertaining. I usually like it when a nonfiction book is entertaining.

What’s entertaining for one person can be boring for another. My impression is that the usual pattern for nonfiction “trade books” is to just have one idea and bang on it over and over. But I like my books to be more overstuffed. One thing I enjoyed about Freakonomics was that it had lots of ideas, and lots of ideas per page. Menand’s book is nothing like Freakonomics, but it also is just bursting with interesting, immutable stories and thought-provoking ideas.

Who’s in?

Menand’s book is structured as a series of mini-histories and mini-biographies. The topics are not the usual historical subjects of war, politics, and big business; instead he focuses on culture.

The question I want to ask is, how did he decide what to put in and what to leave out?

Here’s the list of cultural figures who Menand writes about. I’ve put an asterisk next to the people who get particularly long descriptions:

George Kennan*
Hans Morgenthau
George Orwell
James Burnham
C. Wright Mills
Jean-Paul Sartre*
Simone de Beauvoir
Maurice-Edgar Coindreau
Hannah Arendt*
David Riesman
Clement Greenberg
Peggy Guggenheim
Jackson Pollock
Harold Rosenberg
Lionel Trilling*
Allen Ginsberg
Claude Levi-Strauss*
Roland Barthes
Robert Rauschenberg
Josef Albers
John Cage*
Merce Cunningham
Jasper Johns
Leo Castelli
Elvis Presley
The Beatles*
Jann Wenner
Isaiah Berlin*
Barney Rosset
James Baldwin*
Aime Cesaire
Frantz Fanon
Richard Wright
Eduardo Paolozzi
Richard Hamilton
T. S. Eliot
Cleanth Brooks
Northrop Frye
Jack Kerouac
Charles Olson
Paul de Man
Jacques Derrida
Andy Warhol*
Marcel Duchamp
Fredric Wertham
Betty Friedan
Susan Sontag*
Jack Smith
Charlotte Moorman
Norman Mailer
Martin Luther King
Ralph Ellison
Francois Truffaut
Jean-Luc Godard
Pauline Kael
Tom Hayden
Mario Savio

Who’s out?

And here’s a (partial) list of people and topics who are mentioned in passing or not at all:

John Maynard Keynes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman
Shirley Jackson, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick
James Thurber, A. J. Liebling, Tom Wolfe, John Cheever, John O’Hara, John Updike, Saul Bellow
Malcolm Muggeridge, Anthony West, Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy
Alfred Hitchcock
W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien
Comic books and children’s books
Religion as culture (Reinhold Neibuhr, Billy Graham, Cardinal Spellman, etc.)
Military culture
Sports as culture (Jackie Robinson, Pete Rozelle, Bear Bryant, etc.)
Science, medicine, psychiatry (B. F. Skinner, the Salk/Sabin story, Linus Pauling, etc.)
Radio, TV, pop culture (Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, TV and movie Westerns, etc.)
Herman Kahn (the low-rent John von Neumann), actual von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Teller
Dr. Strangelove, Catch 22
Daniel Bell, Raymond Aron
Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand
Ian Fleming, John Le Carre, Alger Hiss, Whitaker Chambers, Rosenbergs

In compiling this mini-list, I’m purposely excluding straight-up political news figures (JFK, Truman, Eisenhower, McCarthy, Nixon, etc.) as well as social and business stories without direct cultural connections (department stores, shopping malls, the rise of the suburbs, the postwar boom in factory production followed by decades of decline, etc.).

I’m not saying my list is better than Menand’s or worse. It’s just different. Menand is a literature professor so he includes some now-obscure literature professors such as Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, and Paul de Man. If I was going to talk about critics, I’d be more interested in hearing about some on the more journalistic side, such as Malcolm Muggeridge, Anthony West, and Gore Vidal. Or take Mary McCarthy if you want someone with more of an intellectual bent. I find these authors to be much more interesting today than Trilling or the rest of that gang. When it comes to literature, rather than literary criticism, Menand focuses on some politically engaged writers such as Sontag, Baldwin, Mailer, and Wright—I guess that’s a choice on his part to not talk about social novelists and storytellers such as Bellow, Updike, Cheever, and O’Hara, or postwar literary journalists such as Thurber, Liebling, and Wolfe. I have my own biases, as I find the authors on my list to be more readable and interesting than those on Menand’s list. He’s choosing them based on social importance, though, or, more precisely, something about how they illustrate some point about the postwar intellectual climate, and I get that—but, to me, so much of the postwar intellectual climate is characterized by literary journalism and, ummm, I guess I’d call it upper-middlebrow literature, that I’m surprised he doesn’t get to any of that. Norman Mailer, sure, he was in the news magazines a lot, but as literature he’s no James Jones and for social relevance he’s no Joseph Heller. And then there’s genre literature. I’d argue that science fiction was an important component of Cold War culture, with authors such as Shirley Jackson (horror), Robert Heinlein (techno-optimism), and Philip K. Dick (paranoia) representing three poles of this discourse. You could start with the biographies by Ruth Franklin and Alec Nevala-Lee. Again, Menand is free to write about what interests him. To me, Shirley Jackson and Robert Heinlein are about a million times more interesting than John Cage and Lionel Trilling, but, sure, tastes differ. Beyond any personal preferences in what we like to read or look at or talk about, I just feel there’s something parochial and narrow about Menand’s focus. Menand is such a clear thinker and such a great writer that he kinda makes it work, but I’m left wishing he’d placed his focus on some more interesting subjects.

Which reminds me that there’s this whole huge chunk of Cold War culture that doesn’t come up in Menand’s book at all, which is the nexus of military culture, anti-communism, and the whole duck-and-cover fear of an impending World War 3. A chapter or more could’ve been devoted to influential and creative cold war artifacts such as Dr. Strangelove and Catch 22; cold war intellectuals and scientists such as Neumann, Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and that figure of fun Herman Kahn; along with Cold War intellectuals such as Daniel Bell and Raymond Aron and emigre novelists such as Nabokov and Rand. If you’re gonna do Art and Thought in the Cold War, all these fit right in. At a more headlines-and-pop-culture level, you have famous spies and communists such as Hiss, Chambers, Rosenbergs, along with culturally significant spy novelists Fleming and Le Carre. Or you can just go to pop culture more generally. Why have Elvis, The Beatles, and a mini-history of the recording industry, but not the birth of commercial TV, the popularity of the Western in TV and movies, Bugs Bunny cartoons, etc.? Why give so much detail about the changing obscenity laws in book publishing and not, for example, an in-depth story about the use of the laugh track in sitcoms?

To go in a slightly different direction, consider some other major aspects of Cold War culture that Menand didn’t mention at all: science, religion, economics, and sports. I’m thinking here not just of various inspiring and scary stories (amazing scientific and technological breakthroughs such as vaccines, moon landings, and nuclear power; the spread and change of various religious denominations; decades of full employment and economic growth; and athletic feats such as the four-minute-mile), but also about the characters in these stories (Salk and Sabin, Cardinal Spellman and Billy Graham, Galbraith and Friedman, Jackie Robinson, etc.), all of whom to my mind are more interesting than Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, and the like, in their accomplishments and also their relevance to art and thought in the Cold War. The Apollo program, the Gross National Product, the NFL: these were part of the American identity that developed after the war.

Again, I’m not saying Menand did anything wrong by including what he did in his book; I assume he’s genuinely more interested in Jasper Johns than in Philip K. Dick. Let me just say that I think his book, even while being filled with great stuff, is missing the bigger picture.

Maybe it’s just a packaging thing; if instead of being presented as a single coherent work, the book had been structured as a set of essays, I think I’d’ve had no problem. When a critic releases a collection of essays and reviews, we don’t expect anything comprehensive, we just to read some good stuff. The only truly comprehensive book of essays and reviews I can think of is the collected essays of V. S. Pritchett. Anthony West had a good range too, and I remain annoyed that there is no book of his collected essays, but I’m sure there are some gaps. I guess I would’ve been happier had Menand gone the collection-of-reviews route, but that kind of book may be close to unpublishable today. I’m happy with what he did produce, and I wonder if he has any response to the question at the top of this post, other than that he wrote about a bunch of people who happened to interest him.

Recursive plagiarism!

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Paul Alper points us to this news article by Daniel Victor with an amusing story:

A writer’s personal essay explaining why she plagiarized portions of what was to have been her debut novel was removed from a literary website on Monday after the essay itself was also found to have included plagiarized material.

The next step, of course, would be a plagiarized apology for plagiarizing the apology.

More here from Tarpley Hitt.

It would’ve been more impressive if the author had stolen every sentence. As I wrote in the context of a similar story a few years ago, quilting may be less technically impressive than weaving but it’s a skill all its own

How Music Works by David Byrne, and Sweet Anticipation by David Huron

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1. Byrne

The other day I shared a passage from the book, How Music Works, by David Byrne, which motivated a long discussion about why we prefer familiarity in music and surprise in stories. I enjoyed Byrne’s book a lot—actually, it was much better than I’d anticipated, partly because I’d read other books on how music works and I’d been disappointed, partly because Byrne is a celebrity and his book had all these glowing endorsements, which gets me suspicious. It’s published by McSweeney’s, for chrissake, and even though McSweeney’s is wonderful—as far as I’m concerned, their entire existence through the end of time is justified by publishing Jim Stallard’s article, “No justice, no foul”—but, still, they’re so insufferably smug . . . so I didn’t want to like this book by Byrne, but I did.

Here’s one bit:

I [Byrne] was beginning to see that theatricality wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was part of life in much of the world, and not necessarily phony either. I guess I was primed to receive this new way of looking at performance, but I quickly absorbed that it was all right to make a show that didn’t pretend to be “natural.” . . . I decided that maybe it was OK to wear costumes and put on a show. It didn’t imply insincerity at all; in fact, this kind of practice performance was all around, if one only looked at it.

And another:

That sounds really cool! I want to figure out how to adapt this to create a student-participation activity for a statistics class.

And:

Academic talks are like that!

And here are some thought-provoking lines:

Making music is like constructing a machine whose function is to dredge up emotions in performer and listener alike. Some people . . . would prefer to see music as an expression of emotion rather than a generator of it, to believe in the artist as someone with something to say. I’m beginning to think of the artist as someone who is adept at making devices that tap into our shared psychological makeup and that trigger the deeply moving parts we have in common. . . .

The online magazine Pitchfork once wrote that I would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos. This wasn’t intended as a complement—though, to be honest, it’s not that far from the truth. Contrary to their insinuation, I am fairly picky about who I collaborate with, but I am also willing to work with people you might not expect me to. . . .

The unwritten rule in these remote collaborations [here, he’s talking about a project he did with Brian Eno] is, for me, “Leave the other person’s stuff alone as much as you possibly can.” You work with what you’re given . . . Accepting that half of the creative decision making has already been done has the effect of bypassing a lot of endless branching . . . I didn’t ever have to think about what direction to take musically—that train had already left the station, and my job was to see where it wanted to go . . .

[In another project] I was partly helped by a “rule” in theater that the author (or songwriter) has absolute say—his or her words can’t be changed. The text is considered sacred. So I knew that if I tried a suggestion and hated it, I could always demand, in the nicest possible way, that the song be returned to its original condition. This implicit power gave me a kind of freedom. I could be flexible and accommodating to all the suggestions, and I could try things I wasn’t sure of, that I maybe even had doubts about, knowing that they weren’t going to be set in stone. Instead of making me conservative, my hidden power encouraged me to take risks.

Byrne writes about creativity and how he tries to “turn off the internal censor”:

Sometimes sitting at a desk trying to do this doesn’t work. I never have writer’s block, but sometimes things do slow down. My conscious mind might be thinking too much—and at this point, one wants surprises and weirdness from the depths. Some techniques help in that regard. For instance, I’ll carry a small micro recorder and go jogging on the West Side, recording phrases that match the song’s meter as they occur to me. On the rare occasions when I’m driving a car, I can do the same thing . . . Basically anything that occupies part of the conscious mind and distracts it works. The idea is to allow the chthonic material freedom it needs to gurgle up. To distract the gatekeepers.

I know what he means! I can get all stuck but then I hope on the bike to go somewhere and I fill up with thoughts, so much so that I need to stop and scrawl them in my boekje before I forget them all. The hard part is to go back later and work things out more systematically. Also, I like Byrne in part because he rides a bike and has lines like, “Hoving did ride a bike, so he can’t have been all about fancy art.”

And this:

Canadian composer and music teacher R. Murray Schafer originated the concept of the soundscape. . . . Schafer’s pedagogy begins with trying to create awareness, to help students hear their sonic environment:

What was the last sound you heard before I clapped my hands?
What was the highest sound you heard in the past ten minutes? What was the loudest? How many airplanes have you heard today?
What was the most interesting sound you heard this morning?
Make a collection of disappearing or lost sounds, sounds that formed part of the sonic environment but can no longer be heard today.

I like this. It reminds me of statistics diaries. The specificity of these questions could help get the ball rolling.

Byrne writes:

[Marshall McLuhan] claims that in a visual universe one begins to think in a linear fashion, one thing following another along a timeline, rather than everything existing right now, everywhere, in the moment. . . .

Hmmmm . . . that seems like the opposite of what’s happening! It’s sound that comes in a time sequence. A visual image is all there at once.

Byrne asks:

Why is it that Satie’s compositions, Brian Eno’s ambient music, or the minimal spaced-out work of Morton Feldman all seem fairly cool, while Muzak is deemed abhorrent? Is it simply because Muzak alters songs that are already familiar to everyone? I think it’s something else. The problem is that this music is intended to dull your awareness, like being force-fed tranquilizers.

Actually, I think Muzak’s use of very familiar songs is of the things that makes it so annoying; see discussion in my post from a couple years ago, “The revelation came while hearing a background music version of Iron Butterfly’s ‘In A Gadda Da Vida’ at a Mr. Steak restaurant in Colorado.”

2. Huron

My post motivated by Byrne got lots of interesting comments, including this one from RulerFrank:

I have exactly the book for you! It’s called “Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation” by David Huron. To quote the Goodreads blurb:

Huron proposes that emotions evoked by expectation involve five functionally distinct response systems: reaction responses (which engage defensive reflexes); tension responses (where uncertainty leads to stress); prediction responses (which reward accurate prediction); imagination responses (which facilitate deferred gratification); and appraisal responses (which occur after conscious thought is engaged). For real-world events, these five response systems typically produce a complex mixture of feelings.

Or in other words, the key to resolving your paradox is that there are different types of “expectation”.

I have read the book in its entirety and couldn’t recommend it enough. One of the best books that I’ve ever read.

I was motivated by this recommendation to get a copy of Huron’s book from the same source that supplied Byrne’s: that’s right, the local public library.

Sweet Anticipation is excellent, lots of amazing (to me) and sensible ideas. Like many nonfiction books I’ve read nowadays, though, about 1/3 of the way through it starts to get boring and repetitive. Ironic, huh? given the subject of the book. In contrast, David Byrne’s book, though much more shallow, is more readable and interesting all the way through. I wish Huron had an editor. Every time I encountered the phrase, “Notice that,” I wanted to scream. Overall, though, it’s a wonderful book, and I really admire how he kept all that technical musical detail while still making it followable by someone like me who can’t read music and doesn’t know the chords etc.

A professional writing coach gets GPT-3 to write an entire five-paragraph essay, complete with fake references!

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It’s a careful process, as Basbøll explains:

For those who are playing along at home (i.e., those who have their own OpenAI account), you can access my presets here. (Model: text-davinci-002; Temperature: .77; Maximum length: 208; Top P: .9; Frequency penalty: .95; Presence penalty: .95; Best of: 18. . . .

My approach is to, first, prompt the model with a title and a key sentence, and from there with the edited result and a new key sentences in five or six iterations, until I have a five-paragraph essay. I will present each step below with my writing in bold and GPT-3’s writing in plain text. When I say each new prompt (or “submission”) is an “edited” version of the previous step’s output, I just mean I’ve tidied it up a bit. Usually removing line breaks to produce a visually neat paragraph. . . . GPT-3 actually catches on to this and begins to structure its new output to match my guidelines.

The details are at the linked post. Below are the inputs Basbøll used, in order. He did not present them all at once. He gradually introduced them in producing the essay.

The Significance of Sleep

Matthew Walker is a prominent sleep researcher.

(2017) [inserted to encourage GPT-3 to use APA-style referencing]

Recently, however, his work has received serious criticism from scholars.

Walker continues to make bold claims about the importance of sleep in the media.

Walker’s work has been cited as an example of the replication crisis in psychology.

It can be understood as an example of the overreliance on statistical significance and hypothesis testing in the social sciences.

In conclusion,

This does not mean that Walker’s work is completely false. It does, however, raise some concerns about his research practices. Future studies and criticism will

References

Walker, M.

References

Basbøll writes, “Here’s the text as it appears in the final version. It consists of 1024 tokens. The bolded text is my contribution. The rest is GPT-3”:

The Significance of Sleep

Matthew Walker is a prominent sleep researcher. In his book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Walker (2017) explains why sleep is so important. Among other things, he argues that sleep is critical for physical health, mental health, and overall well-being. Walker argues that sleep is essential for physical health. He points to research showing that sleep deprivation can lead to a host of problems, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. He also notes that sleep is important for immunity and healing. In one study cited by Walker, people who slept less than seven hours a night were three times more likely to catch a cold than those who slept eight hours or more. Walker also argues that sleep is essential for mental health. He cites research showing that people who don’t get enough sleep are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. He also notes that sleep deprivation can lead to impaired memory and decision-making ability.

Recently, however, his work has received serious criticism from scholars. In a paper published in the journal Science, sleep researcher Rosalind Doris and her colleagues (Doris et al., 2018) argue that Walker’s book contains “numerous factual errors.” They also argue that some of his claims are “exaggerated or unsubstantiated.” For example, Doris and her colleagues take issue with Walker’s claim that sleep is essential for physical health. They point to research showing that people who sleep less than seven hours a night are not necessarily at greater risk for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. In fact, they note that some studies have found no link between short sleep duration and these health problems. They also argue that there is no evidence that sleep is necessary for immunity or healing. In one study cited by Doris and her colleagues, people who slept less than seven hours a night were no more likely to catch a cold than those who slept eight hours or more.

Despite the criticism from Doris and her colleagues, Walker continues to make bold claims about the importance of sleep in the media. In an interview with The Guardian, for example, Walker (2018) claimed that sleep is “the single most important thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day.” He also claimed that sleep deprivation is a “public health epidemic.”

Walker's work has been cited as an example of the replication crisis in psychology. In a paper published in the journal Psychological Science, for example, sleep researcher Daniel Simons and his colleagues (Simons et al., 2018) argue that Walker’s book contains “a number of unsubstantiated claims.” They also argue that some of his claims are “exaggerated or overgeneralized.” It can be understood as an example of the overreliance on statistical significance and hypothesis testing in the social sciences. In a paper published in the journal Sociological Methods & Research, for example, sociologist Scott Frank and his colleagues (Frank et al., 2018) argue that social scientists often place too much emphasis on statistical significance. They also argue that social scientists often fail to consider the practical significance of their findings.

This does not mean that Walker's work is completely false. It does, however, raise some concerns about his research practices. Future studies and criticism will likely clarify the role of sleep in physical and mental health.

References

Doris, R. M., et al. (2018). Science communication in the social sciences: A review of Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Science, 361(6398), eaao5447. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao5447

Frank, S., et al. (2018). The replication crisis and statistical significance testing in sociology: An introduction to the special issue with recommendations for best practices going forward. Sociological Methods & Research, 47(2), 305-327. https://doi.org/10/1177%2F0049124116676024

Simons, D., et al. (2018). Psychological science in the spotlight: Unsubstantiated claims about sleep in Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker [Target article]. Psychological Science, 29(1), 15-19. https://doi-org./10/1177%2F0956797617741337

Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. New York, NY: Scribner.

Walker, M. (2018, February 2). ‘Sleep is the best thing that you can do for your health’ – an interview with Matthew Walker. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/feb/02/sleep-best-thing-you-can-do-for-your-health

This is absolutely hilarious, all the way down to the made-up but somehow convincing references by R. M. Doris, D. Simons, etc. There’s also a fun little follow-up dialogue which you can find near the end of the linked post.

Basbøll concludes:

The experiment cost about 4.00 USD.

All in all, GPT-3 seems to be able to produce very plausible prose. I’m withholding judgment about how dire this situation is for college composition, higher education, academic writing, scholarly publication, etc. until I think some more about it, and do some more experiments. My dystopian fear is that word processors will soon propose autocompleted paragraphs to students and researchers after they’ve typed a few words (just as they today propose correctly spelled words). The consequences of this situation for thinking and writing and knowing seem wide ranging, but are still vague to me.

I agree that auto-complete for paragraphs sounds like a real possibility, and the striking thing here is now similar the above essay looks to something like a real student would write, or something that might be published in a real social science journal. Who would think of checking the details of these references, etc., if they didn’t know to check? GPT-3 (with some help from Basbøll) might win a Turing test if pitted against the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.

I also appreciate the direct openness of Basbøll’s description of his experiment, which is much better than when that Google dude hyped his chatbot without sharing any details, documentation, etc.

However, as with any AI system, there are also potential risks and limitations associated with ChatGPT. For example, the model may sometimes generate essays or inaccurate responses, particularly when it is exposed to biased or incomplete data. Additionally, there is a risk that the model may be used to spread misinformation or disinformation, particularly in the context of social media and online communities.

Also, recall that Basbøll is a professional writing coach, which perhaps explains in part how he was able to put in so little input and coach GPT-3 to writing such a plausible (yet horrifying) essay. That’s a skill of a writing coach: to stimulate good work using a minimum of input. Perhaps the ability of doing this for a chatbot is similar to the ability of doing this for a student.

Where did the expression “six-sided number cube” come from?

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As part of the preparation for some teaching materials, I was looking something up on the AP Statistics webpage, and I came across the phrase “six-sided number cube,” which is a kind of person-from-Mars description of what in English is called a die. Kinda like if you referred to a cigarette as a “tobacco-filled paper cylinder” or something like that.

I was curious what was going on, as I’d never in my life heard the term “six-sided number cube,” so I googled it and it’s all over, lots of websites where it seems that students are looking for help on their homework. It seems to be something they say in high school statistics classes?

Where did this expression come from? Is it something that some committee put into the AP statistics curriculum and then it just spread from there? I have nothing against the phrase—it’s descriptive and kinda charming, kinda like calling a car a “four-wheeled motorized vehicle”—I’d just never seen it before.

P.S. In comments, Raghu points out that you can just call it a “number cube,” which sounds a lot less science-fictiony. All cubes have six sides (or faces, if you want to use math jargon).

J. Robert Lennon on working with your closest collaborator

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From Broken River:

The problem she was grappling with now, though, was this: the Irina who started writing this novel was the old one. The Irina who was trying to finish it was the new. Was such a collaboration even possible? Did new Irina even want to share a .doc with old Irina? The situation felt hopeless.

This reminds me of the principle that your closest collaborator is you, six months ago—and she doesn’t answer emails. Interesting to see this idea in a fictional context. Then again, fiction is just a form of simulated-data experimentation.

P.S. Lennon reviews Sedaris, which reminds me of my idea from many years ago that Sedaris, having run out of good material from his own life, should start interviewing other people and telling their stories. Sedaris is a great storyteller, and I don’t see why he needs to restrict himself to basing them on things that happened to him personally. Seems like a real missed opportunity.

Scientific communication: over the wine-dark sea to the rose-fingered dawn

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On the topic of the Homeric epics, Thomas Jones writes:

The illiterate performers who recited or sang epic poems in Ancient Greece did not learn them by rote. (Boris Johnson’s botched renditions of the Iliad are a double failure: failing to learn it by rote and trying to learn it in the first place.) Rather, a poet would improvise his song using formulaic words and phrases. Every performance was in some sense a new composition, but also a seamless continuation of the tradition. . . .

[Athena] is variously ‘Pallas Athena’, ‘grey-eyed Athena’, ‘the goddess grey-eyed Athena’ and so on according to the demands of grammar and metre: as Parry points out, ‘Homer had to hand a particular word for each of ten metrical exigencies that might arise.’ These didn’t always conform to logic. Ships are described as ‘hollow’, ‘swift’, ‘black’, ‘well-decked’, ‘seafaring’, ‘trim’, ‘many-tholed’, ‘curved’, ‘huge’, ‘famed’, ‘well-built’, ‘many-benched’, ‘vermilion-cheeked’, ‘prowed’ or ‘straight-horned’, according to where they appear in the line of verse rather than where, or if, they appear on the ‘wine dark’, ‘grey’ or ‘loud-roaring’ sea: the Greeks’ ‘swift’ and ‘seafaring’ ships are beached throughout the Iliad. ‘Early rose-fingered dawn’ is mentioned so often in Homer for much the same reason a blues singer might tell you he ‘woke up this morning’: in part to buy time while composing the next line.

This reminds me of a discussion we had the other day about improvisation in academic talks, when commenter Gec wrote:

Good improvisers spend a great deal of time preparing! It’s just that their prep time is not spent rehearsing a set performance.

I don’t know anything about acting, but I have a lot of personal experience playing jazz badly. Better players prepare by practicing riffs (roughly, snippets that form a kind of combinatorial repertoire or, at least, something to fall back on when you don’t have any better ideas), technique (boring stuff like scales, chord progressions, etc.), and building up a web of knowledge and references they can rely on to construct a long-form performance and build on what others are doing.

That jibes with my speaking style. I have lots of riffs (examples and ideas that I’m familiar with), technique (statistical methods), and a web of knowledge (decades of experience), and all that allows me to improvise a talk.

When planning a talk I often prepare some written text that I read word for word. Perhaps surprisingly, reading a well-written set of paragraphs word for word can work well in a live talk. I don’t think it would go so well for me to read two pages straight, but a few clean sentences can do wonders.

Most of the time, though, I’m working from a rough outline or sketched set of points, I’m doing a lot of riffing and transitioning, which I guess is like those Homeric bards and blues singers, that I have some phrases that sound good, and I use these as building blocks.

It’s slightly different in that an academic talk is made up not of words and music but of ideas, so it’s not so much that I stick in various phrases as that I stick in various ideas. I have a few hundred examples bouncing around my head at any given time, and when I speak, I can let them spill out, Tetris-style, to fill in the space.

More generally, it’s not just about giving talks; it’s about communication, laying out ideas and seeing how they fit as they come to mind.

It’s not just about me; you can do that too.

The local bookstore is trolling me

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Outside they had a display with a bunch of nonfiction books, including one by Sapolsky, one by Gladwell, and . . . “Noise”!

I was trying to figure out what bugged me so much about all this, and I think the problem is not just that these books make misleading or false claims, but that by representing popular science, they displace more interesting/serious/accurate popular science that could be out there.

I think my reaction is similar to that of academic historians who get annoyed by popular history books of the Band of Brothers / Greatest Generation variety. It’s not that they mind popular history—I’m guessing that pop history is what got many of them interested in the topic as kids—it’s just frustrating when bad pop history is taking the place of the good stuff.

On the other hand, maybe bad pop history and bad pop science are the gateway drug that leads people to the good stuff. Start with Gladwell, then move to pop science that’s actually interesting, not just interesting-if-true.

Also, to be fair, even the bad stuff has lots of good stuff in it. Simplified WW2 books still have lots of information on WW2, and even Gladwell, who gets so much deserved criticism, has lots of interesting ideas and tells lots of good stories.

P.S. The bookstore isn’t really trolling me. I know this because they’re not displaying a copy of Why We Sleep.

Pizzagate and “Nudge”: An opportunity lost

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We all make mistakes. What’s important is to engage with our mistakes and learn from them. When we don’t, we’re missing an opportunity to learn.

Here’s an example. A few years ago there was a Harvard study that notoriously claimed that North Carolina was less democratic than North Korea. When this came out, the directors of the study accepted that the North Korea estimate was problematic and they removed it from their dataset. But I don’t think they fully engaged with the error. They lost an opportunity to learn, even though they were admirably open about their process.

Here’s a more recent example. The authors of the influential policy book Nudge came out with a new edition. In the past, they, like many others, had been fooled by junk science on eating behavior, most notably that of Cornell business school professor Brian Wansink. I was curious whassup with that so I searched this press release news article and found some stuff:

They began the [first edition of their] book with the modest example of a school administrator rearranging the display of food at the cafeteria, increasing the likelihood that kids choose a healthier lunch. . . .

In addition to new things in the new version of the book, there are old things from the original version that are gone. That includes the research of former Cornell University professor Brian Wansink, a behavioral scientist who got caught producing shoddy research that fudged numbers and misled the public about his empirical findings. . . . Thaler is cheering on the social scientists probing academic literature to suss out what can be proved and what can’t. “That’s healthy science,” he says.

That’s cool. I like that the author has this attitude: instead of attacking critics as Stasi, he accepts the value of outside criticism.

Just one thing, though. Removing Wansink’s research from the book—that’s a start, but to really do it right you should engage with the error. I don’t have a copy of either edition of the book (and, hey, before you commenters start slamming me about writing a book I haven’t read: first, this is not a book review nor does it purport to be; second, a policy book is supposed to have influence among people who don’t read it. There’s no rule, nor should there be a rule, that I can’t write skeptical things about a book if I haven’t managed to get a copy of it into my hands), but I was able to go on Amazon and take a look at the index.

Here’s the last page of the index of the first edition:

And now the new edition:

Lots of interesting stuff here! But what I want to focus on here are two things:

1. Wansink doesn’t play a large role even in the first edition. He’s only mentioned once, on page 43—that’s it! So let’s not overstate the importance of this story.

2. Wansink doesn’t appear at all in the second edition! That’s the lost opportunity, a chance for the authors to say, “Hey, nudge isn’t perfect; indeed the ideas of nudging have empowered sleazeballs like Wansink, and we got fooled too. Also, beyond this, the core idea of nudging—that small inputs can have large, predictable, and persistent effects—has some deep problems.” Even if they don’t have the space in their book to go into those problems, they could still discuss how they got conned. It’s a great story and fits in well with the larger themes of their book.

Not a gotcha

Connecting Nudge to pizzagate is not a “gotcha.” As I wrote last year after someone pointed out one of my published articles: It’s not that mistakes are a risk of doing science; mistakes are a necessary part of the process.

P.S. The first edition of Nudge mentioned the now-discredited argument that there is no hot hand. Good news is that the Lords realized this was a problem and they excised all mention of the hot hand from their second edition. Bad news is that they did not mention this excision—they just memory-holed the sucker. Another opportunity for learning from mistakes was lost! On the plus side, you’ll probably be hearing these guys on NPR very soon for something or another.

“Debarkle: The epic saga of how a culture war came to consume science fiction’s most famous literary award”

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Following a series of links, I came upon The Complete Debarkle: The epic saga of how a culture war came to consume science fiction’s most famous literary award, by the pseudonymous Camestros Felapton. The book is 440 pages, which maybe is the longest document I’ve ever read from beginning to end online, and it’s pretty readable, really impressively so given that before reading it I’d heard of none of the main players in the story and had only heard of one or two of the minor characters. It’s all about battles within science fiction around 2015 or so, and yes I’ve read lots of science fiction but almost nothing written since 1990. (This doesn’t represent a literary judgment on my part; it’s just not stuff I’m in the habit of reading.) So I’m far from the target audience here. Or maybe I’m right in the sweet spot, as the story is all about politics, blogs, and beefs. And I did watch a few episodes of Game of Thrones a few years ago, so it’s not like I’m completely out of the loop.

Debarkle—the “bark” in the title is a punning reference to a group of fans and authors who called themselves the Sad Puppies or Rabid Puppies—tells the story of how this group tried, ultimately without much success, to either disrupt or take over the Hugo Award and win more prizes for authors associated with conservative political views and certain aspects of traditional science fiction. I don’t really care about those details, but I can see how they’re important to people within the field (just as, for example, I remain angry that Ed Wegman received a major award from the American Statistical Association, or that the journal Public Choice chose to publish a paper that is “riddled with errors” but comes to a political conclusion that they want to support). As in those examples from my own fields of research, it can be necessary to get into the nitty gritty of the examples to understand the bigger picture.

The bigger picture of Debarkle is the political radicalization of some of the participants in the dispute, who started by talking about problems with politicization of fan communities and different tastes in science fiction but ended up at the political extremes, writing about pushing journalists out of helicopters, “Satanic evil,” election denial, and literal stab-in-the-back political rhetoric. It’s all pretty scary.

The starting point—an argument from some conservative or traditionalist fans that something was amiss in the science fiction establishment—was itself controversial. From one standpoint, socially liberal views represented a mainstream in much of the science fiction and fan communities, to the extent that conservatives could feel excluded, in the same way that conservatives might feel they don’t fit in with the audience in a typical theater production in New York, or liberals might feel outnumbered in the stands of a college football game in the South. So you can see how conservatives could have the impression that politics was biasing what was published, what was promoted, and what won awards, and they’d want to right the balance. From the liberal point of view, biases in these areas were not new, as evidenced by decades of white male dominance of publishing and awards, sexual assault at science fiction conventions, etc. All of this is a familiar argument in the context of U.S. politics; this particular example is interesting in that it was happening in this small environment, with much of the discussion happening on a few blogs and bulletin boards, hence Felapton was able to track down the sequence of events and form a clear narrative.

The biggest plot twist in Debarkle is not what happens with the science fiction awards—unsurprisingly, given the socially liberal views of the author and fan communities, they ultimately shrugged the whole thing aside—but rather the gradual political radicalization of the Puppy groups, paralleling right-wing radicalization in this country more generally. There’s also a connection to the Gamergate campaign and various political controversies that arose during this period.

I enjoyed Felapton’s writing style. It reminded me a lot of the style of Alexey Guzey, author of the classic post, “Matthew Walker’s ‘Why We Sleep’ Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors'”—really, I think this is one of the hundred greatest blog posts of all time—in how direct and clear he is. It’s not so easy to write with this sort of precision, especially when writing about a cast of characters who are prone to exaggeration. Politically, Felapton and Guzey appear to be in much different places, but they both write with a kind of purity that’s entertaining in its naivety. Or, what appears to be naivety. I’m not saying that either of these authors is naive or pretends to be so; rather, they each write with a charming-to-me person-from-Mars perspective which seems appropriate both when writing about science (as with Guzey) or science fiction (Felapton).

So, yeah, for all these reasons I found Debarkle to be a fun read despite its unusual length (in proportion to its topic) and despite the underlying story being horrifying. And that’s pretty much the same way I felt about “Matthew Walker’s ‘Why We Sleep’ Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors'”!

New Yorker : Spy :: Kieran Healy : Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

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Back in the day, the New Yorker magazine had an Olympian attitude and did not run letters. Spy magazine rectified this with a column, Letters to the Editor of the New Yorker. The New Yorker now runs letters, but Kieran Healy doesn’t have a comment section on his blog. Whassup with that?? I wanted to leave a comment saying this was funny. But there was no place for the comment. So I have to do it here.