I must admit that I enjoyed Quinton “Rampage” Jackson on Jimmy Kimmel Live:
Quinton’s just a fun character. Kimbo might make a better B.A. Baracus though.
Quinton "Rampage" Jackson on Jimmy Kimmel Live
Thursday, June 5th, 2008The Mismatch Problem
Thursday, June 5th, 2008In his speech at the recent New Yorker conference, Malcolm Gladwell explains the mismatch between the metrics we use to assess potential new hires and new hires’ actual performance on the job. (This is the subject of his upcoming book, Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t.)
If we look at professional-sport combines, teacher credentials, and law-school applications, they have zero predictive capacity. The best quarterbacks score the worst on the IQ test given to quarterbacks, teachers with additional training and credentials teach no better than other teachers, and lawyers who get into a prestigious law school via affirmative action do just as well in their career as higher-scoring lawyers.
But I think he misses — or skirts — the issue of why these predictive metrics aren’t very predictive. It’s not simply that hard, objective criteria are bad. If you have a set of physical metrics that predict athletic performance in the population at large — height, weight, vertical leap, etc. — they won’t predict performance in a tiny sample of athletes who have already been selected for a particular level of performance. In the case of athletes at a combine, of course, these are athletes in the top fraction of a percent of players, but the same thing would presumably happen if we looked only at players between the 50th and 51st percentile.
In the case of teachers, the issue is that the training and credentialing have never been intended to improve teaching performance. The credentials are there to keep out competition. It is a highly unionized profession, after all.
A bigger issue in Gladwell’s analysis though — at least as far as I can tell from his short speech, which is just a summary — is how he defines good and bad teachers. Apparently he defines good teachers as those whose students improved the most in percentile rank over the school year and bad teachers as those whose students dropped the most in percentile rank over the school year, which seems like it would grossly exaggerate the performance difference between good and bad teachers, because the teacher is just one tiny variable in a system with a lot of noise — and because percentile scores aren’t z-scores. (A jump of one standard deviation can take you from 31st percentile to 69th, a 38-rank jump, or from 97.7th to 99.9th, a 2-rank jump.) I suppose I’ll have to see the study he’s referencing.
Gladwell’s last example seems particularly odd, given that we know that affirmative action backfires when law schools admit less-qualified black applicants:
Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: [UCLA law professor Richard] Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions — about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been “matched” to the wrong school.
[...]
While some students will outperform their entering academic credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs, most students will perform in the range that their academic credentials predict. As a result, in elite law schools, 51.6% of black students had first-year grade point averages in the bottom 10% of their class as opposed to only 5.6% of white students. Nearly identical performance gaps existed at law schools at all levels. This much is uncontroversial.
[...]
The Sander study argued that the most plausible explanation is that, as a result of affirmative action, black and white students with similar credentials are not attending the same schools. The white students are more likely to be attending a school that takes things a little more slowly and spends more time on matters that are covered on the bar exam. They are learning, while their minority peers are struggling at more elite schools.Mr. Sander calculated that if law schools were to use color-blind admissions policies, fewer black law students would be admitted to law schools (3,182 students instead of 3,706), but since those who were admitted would be attending schools where they have a substantial likelihood of doing well, fewer would fail or drop out (403 vs. 670). In the end, more would pass the bar on their first try (1,859 vs. 1,567) and more would eventually pass the bar (2,150 vs. 1,981) than under the current system of race preferences. Obviously, these figures are just approximations, but they are troubling nonetheless.
On the other hand, “success” — unlike bar-exam pass rates — can be hard to measure, and potential lawyers may vary dramatically in how much “success” they achieve, because such success means great sacrifice, a point Gladwell has made elsewhere:
But what did Hunter achieve with that best-students model? In the nineteen-eighties, a handful of educational researchers surveyed the students who attended the elementary school between 1948 and 1960. [The results were published in 1993 as “Genius Revisited: High IQ Children Grown Up,” by Rena Subotnik, Lee Kassan, Ellen Summers, and Alan Wasser.] This was a group with an average I.Q. of 157 — three and a half standard deviations above the mean—who had been given what, by any measure, was one of the finest classroom experiences in the world. As graduates, though, they weren’t nearly as distinguished as they were expected to be. “Although most of our study participants are successful and fairly content with their lives and accomplishments,” the authors conclude, “there are no superstars . . . and only one or two familiar names.” The researchers spend a great deal of time trying to figure out why Hunter graduates are so disappointing, and end up sounding very much like Wilbur Bender. Being a smart child isn’t a terribly good predictor of success in later life, they conclude. “Non-intellective” factors — like motivation and social skills — probably matter more. Perhaps, the study suggests, “after noting the sacrifices involved in trying for national or world-class leadership in a field, H.C.E.S. graduates decided that the intelligent thing to do was to choose relatively happy and successful lives.” It is a wonderful thing, of course, for a school to turn out lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. But Harvard didn’t want lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. It wanted superstars, and Bender and his colleagues recognized that if this is your goal a best-students model isn’t enough.
Who Will Watch the Watchmen on DVD?
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
Domestic DVD sales fell 3.2 percent last year to $15.9 billion, the first such drop in the medium’s history, and this is a big deal, because DVDs can account for 70 percent of the revenue for a new movie.
So Warner is going to try a new tactic to revive it DVD sales. After Watchmen — based on Alan Moore‘s graphic novel — hits theaters in March, 2009, Warner will then release Tales of the Black Freighter — which is based on a comic within the Watchmen comic — five days later as a separate direct-to-DVD piece.
My first thought was Cool!, because I would have enjoyed, say, a “scouring of the Shire” bonus feature, so we could get the real ending of The Return of the King.
My second thought was Wait, this doesn’t make any sense, because Moore’s comic-within-a-comic exists purely to play with the comic medium. It provides a separate, parallel line of narration to events in the main storyline — it exists to provide subtext.
At least that’s what I remembered from two decades ago. So I decided to re-read Moore’s magnum opus and see it through fresh eyes — and I found that it’s very much a product of its time. More accurately, it’s very much a product of a progressive — well, left-anarchist, in Moore’s case — view of the Reagan-Thatcher years, with the following features:
- A sense of malaise, and a sense that we deserve this terrible situation — not because we’ve turned away from traditional virtues, but because we’ve devoted ourselves to violence, rather than caring for the poor, the old, etc.
- Sex as violence, with characters emotionally scarred by rape, child abuse, and uncaring lovers. Violent images in the media, within the comic, are closely tied to sexuality, and vice versa.
- Criminal gangs composed of white men and women with silly “punk” haircuts and outrageous sunglasses — and an occasional swastika. Crime is a right-wing phenomenon.
- A fear of all things nuclear and a clear distrust of all things military. Nuclear power exists to destroy the world.
In a video interview, Moore makes it clear that no one before him had applied a political or sexual interpretation to the genre, and his work on superheroes is a meditation on power.
How all this will translate to the movie — or movies — is an open question, but Moore and his fans have seen his previous works dumbed down terribly. Moore no longer wants anything to do with Hollywood:
I don’t see how adapting it [Lost Girls, another graphic novel of his] to another medium makes any sense at all. But that’s me. [...] My position is, I don’t want my name on it and I don’t want the money. [...] But I really doubt that any of my comics can be [successfully] made into films, because that’s not how I write them.
[...]
I met Terry Gilliam, and he asked me, “How would you make a film of ‘Watchmen’?” And I said, “Don’t.” I think he eventually came to agree with me that it was a film better unmade. In Hollywood you’re going to have the producers and the backers putting in their … well, I don’t want to dignify them by calling them ideas, but … having their input, shall we say.
[...]
I don’t have any interest in directing films of my work. If something worked perfectly in one genre, why is there any reason to assume it’s going to work as well or better in another genre that it wasn’t designed for?
Judging from the early preview images, Hollywood didn’t “get” some key elements of what Moore was going for. Nite Owl, for instance, is supposed to be middle-aged, retired from crime-fighting, and decidedly chubby.
Drawing a Sword
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008Lloyd explains a few myths about drawing a sword:
Rivers of Blood
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008In his recent piece on the ugly truth about government, Mencius Moldbug prominently mentions conservative British politician Enoch Powell — about whom I knew nothing, I must admit — and recommends a recent BBC documentary about him, named after his famous Rivers of Blood speech, so-called because it quotes Virgil’s prophesy — “I see the Tiber foaming with much blood” — in predicting that mass immigration will lead to violence in the streets of Britain.
(It took me a while to catch the Clockwork Orange soundtrack playing in the background. It comes to the fore in part 3.)
You Already Hate Democracy
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008You already hate democracy — at least if you’re progressive — you just don’t realize it. Mencius Moldbug explains:
What one word, dear progressives, best describes the modern Western system of government?You probably said “democracy.” If you got two words, you might say “representative democracy.” [...] Words mean whatever we want them to. But if we interpret the phrase representative democracy to mean a political system in which power is held by the representatives of the people as chosen in democratic elections, the United States is a representative democracy in just the same sense that the Roman Empire was a republic, the United Kingdom is a kingdom, and the Chinese Communist Party is communist.
In fact, dear progressive, you fear and loathe democracy. Moreover, you are right to do so. Representative democracy is a thoroughly despicable system of government. It is dangerous and impractical at best, criminal at worst. And you hate it like the poison it is.
But you don’t hate it under this name. You hate it under the name of politics. Think of the associations that the words political, partisan, politician, and so on, produce in your mind. You say: George W. Bush politicized the Justice Department. And this is a brutal indictment. If you hated black people the way you hate politics, you might say George W. Bush negroized the Justice Department, and the phrase would carry the same payload of contempt.
Similarly, when you hear antonyms such as apolitical, nonpartisan, bipartisan, or even the new and truly ludicrous post-partisan, your heart thrills with warmth and affection, just as it would if you were a racist and you heard the words Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, or amelanistic. And as it does when you hear the word democracy. You certainly would never say that George W. Bush democratized the Justice Department.
[...]
Let’s probe a little deeper into this mystery. If the actions of our democratic governments are not to be ascribed to the venal machinations of politicians, who is responsible for them? Who, in the ideal apolitical, nonpartisan, or post-partisan state, calls the shots? We are back to the basic question of power, which Lenin once summarized as “Who? Whom?” (This made more sense in English when we still used the word “whom.” What Lenin meant was: who rules whom?)So if politicians should not rule, who — dear progressive — should? If we continue our pattern of two-word answers, the answer is: public policy.
To the progressive — rather ironically, considering the history — Lenin’s question is completely inappropriate. You reject the idea that government means that “who” must “rule” “whom.” Rather, you believe that government, when conducted properly in the public interest, is an objective discipline — like physics, or geology, or mathematics.
It does not matter “who” the physicists, geologists, or mathematicians are. There is no German physics, liberal geology, or Catholic mathematics. There is only correct physics, correct geology, and correct mathematics. The process and criteria by which physicists separate correct from incorrect physics is quite different from that for geology or mathematics, and none of these processes is perfect or works instantaneously. But all have an obvious tendency to progress from error and ignorance to truth and knowledge.
Needless to say, if the United States were blessed with a Department of Mathematics — honestly I’m not sure why it isn’t, but we can rest assured that if this wrong is ever righted, it will stay righted — it would be thoroughly inappropriate and irresponsible for George W. Bush to “politicize” the Department’s deliberations on topology, computability, game theory, etc.
Public policy, of course, must not contradict physics, geology or mathematics. But these are not its main linchpins. When we look inside the magic box of public policy, we see fields such as law and economics and ethics and sociology and psychology and public health and foreign policy and journalism and education and…
And when we look at the history of these fields, we tend to see one of two things. Either (a) the field was more or less invented in the 20th century (sociology, psychology), or (b) its 20th-century principles bear very little relation to those of its 19th-century predecessor (law, economics). We saw this two weeks ago, for example, with international law. But again, I am getting ahead of myself.
As a progressive, you regard the fields of public policy as more or less scientific. The 20th century is the century of scientific public policy. And just as there is no German physics or Catholic mathematics, there is no German public policy or Catholic public policy. There is only public policy. There is no “who.” There is no rule. There is no world domination. There is only global governance.
So we see why it’s inappropriate for George W. Bush to “politicize” the Justice Department. It is because the Justice Department is staffed with legal scholars. Is George W. Bush a legal scholar? Is a boar hog an F-16? When politics intrudes on the realm of science, it’s more than just a violation. It’s a kind of rape. One is instantly reminded of the Nazi stormtroopers, dancing around their flaming piles of books. One, if one is an American, is also reminded of the mindless jockery that ruled one’s high-school years. Do you, dear progressive, have any hesitation about picking a side in this dispute? Of course not.
Thus we see the fate of representative, political democracy, which survives as a sort of vestigial reptile brain or fetal gill-slit in the era of scientific government. In classic Machiavellian style, the form democracy has been redefined. It no longer means that the public’s elected representatives control the government. It means that the government implements scientific public policy in the public interest. (Public policy is in the public interest by definition.)
Birdbrain
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008Birdbrain looks back at Alex — the gray parrot subject of the Avian Learning Experiment — and what Irene Pepperberg was able to teach him:
As everyone knows, parrots are remarkably good at mimicking human speech, but they tend to repeat randomly picked-up phrases: obscenities, election slogans, “Hey, sailor.” Many parrots kept as pets also imitate familiar sounds, like the family dog barking or an alarm clock beeping. But Pepperberg taught Alex referential speech — labels for objects, and phrases like “Wanna go back.” By the end, he knew about fifty words for objects. Pepperberg was never particularly interested in teaching Alex language for its own sake; rather, she was interested in what language could reveal about the workings of his mind. In learning to speak, Alex showed Pepperberg that he understood categories like same and different, bigger and smaller. He could count and recognize Arabic numerals up to six. He could identify objects by their color, shape (“three-corner,” “four-corner,” and so on, up to “six-corner”), and material: when Pepperberg held up, say, a pompom or a wooden block, he could answer “Wool” or “Wood,” correctly, about eighty per cent of the time. Holding up a yellow key and a green key of the same size, Pepperberg might ask Alex to identify a difference between them, and he’d say, “Color.” When she held up two keys and asked, “Which is bigger?,” he could identify the larger one by naming its color. Looking at a collection of objects that he hadn’t seen before, Alex could reliably answer a two-tiered question like “How many blue blocks?” — a tricky task for toddlers. He even seemed to develop an understanding of absence, something akin to the concept of zero. If asked what the difference was between two identical blue keys, Alex learned to reply, “None.” (He pronounced it “nuh.”)Pepperberg also reported that, outside training sessions, Alex sometimes played with the sounds he had learned, venturing new words. After he learned “gray,” he came up with “grain” on his own, and after learning “talk” he tried out “chalk.” His trainers then gave him the item that he had inadvertently named, and it eventually entered his vocabulary. (When Alex devised nonsense words — like “cheenut” — Pepperberg and his other trainers did not respond, and he quickly stopped saying them.) In linguistic terms, Alex was recombining phonemes, the building blocks of speech. Stephen Anderson, a Yale linguist who has written about animal communication, considers this behavior “apparent evidence that Alex did actually regard at least some of his words as made up of individual recombinable pieces, though it’s hard to say without more evidence. This is something that seems well beyond any ape-language experiments, or anything we see in nature.”
Pepperberg told me that Alex also made spontaneous remarks that were oddly appropriate. Once, when she rushed in the lab door, obviously harried, Alex said, “Calm down” — a phrase she had sometimes used with him. “What’s your problem?” he sometimes demanded of a flustered trainer. When training sessions dragged on, Alex would say, “Wanna go back” — to his cage. More creatively, he’d sometimes announce, “I’m gonna go away now,” and either turn his back to the person working with him or sidle as far away as he could get on his perch. “Say better,” he chided the younger parrots that Pepperberg began training along with him. “You be good, see you tomorrow, I love you,” he’d say when she left the lab each evening. This was endearing — and the Times’ obituary made much of the fact that these were the bird’s last words — although, as Anderson points out, it was during such moments that Alex was, most likely, merely “parroting.” It helped Alex’s charisma quotient that he made all his remarks in an intonation that was part two-year-old, part Rain Man, part pull-string toy. His voice, at once tinny and sweet, was easy to understand. Pepperberg tended to speak to Alex in the singsong “motherese” that doting parents use with young children, and he replied in a voice that seemed to convey a toddlerish pride.
Irene Pepperberg got an unusual start as an animal-language researcher in the early 1970s, since she was already in a chemistry grad program:
When Irene Pepperberg went to New York for the Clever Hans conference, she was thirty-one, and had owned Alex for three years. She had arrived in the world of animal communication from “out of left field,” as Diana Reiss puts it. Pepperberg has a Ph.D. from Harvard in theoretical chemistry, not psychology or zoology. But in the midst of her thesis work, which involved modelling chemical-reaction rates, it suddenly hit her, she recalls, that “(a) we don’t know enough at this point to do this exactly right and (b) in the future, what it’s taking me seven years to do with a mathematical model is going to take a computer hours, or seconds.” She decided to pursue something different. In any case, the prospects for women in her field hadn’t been encouraging. Speaking of her class at Harvard, she recalled, “My year was the first year that graduate-school draft deferrals for men were cut way back. So they let in a lot of women for a change. But the women were asked in their job interviews things like ‘What kind of birth control are you using?’”
[...]
Despite her graduate-school epiphany at Harvard, she continued with her Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry, receiving her degree in 1976; but she also started attending courses in departments relevant to the bird research she now hoped to do. “I was spending forty hours a week learning psychology and biology and forty hours finishing my doctorate,” she recalls.
The key to teaching parrots was eschewing Behaviorist methods — you don’t put a toddler in a Skinner Box, after all — and playing to the gray parrot’s social nature:
Pepperberg needed a method for teaching a parrot that played to its particular strengths. She came across something called the model/rival technique, which a German ethologist named Dietmar Todt had tried in a 1975 study of parrots. Todt had reasoned that, since parrots learn to squawk by watching each other vocalize, they might be able to learn German by observing people talk. So he developed a system in which one person was the trainer and one was the model for the bird — and its rival for the trainer’s attention. Pepperberg tweaked the protocol: in her version, the model/rival and the trainer periodically exchanged roles, so the bird could see that one person wasn’t always in charge. Parrots started the process by learning referential labels for things they wanted, rather than dialogues of the “Hello, how are you? I am fine” variety, which, Pepperberg figured, didn’t mean much to a parrot. There were no extrinsic rewards. If the parrot named an object, he’d get to play with that object, and, if he didn’t want it, he got the right to ask for something else. Pepperberg explained, “Let’s say you’re the model/rival and I’m the trainer. I have this object that the bird wants, and I show it to you and I say” — she adopted a singsong voice — “ ‘What’s this?,’ and you say, ‘Cork.’ I say, ‘That’s right,’ and you say, ‘Cork, cork, cork,’ while you’re holding it and the bird is practically falling off the perch because he wants it. And he hears that this weird noise is what mediated the transfer of this object. So we change roles, and then, instead of saying ‘Cork,’ I go, ‘Raaaawkk,’” — an uncannily accurate screech — “and you go, ‘No, no, you’re wrong,’ so the bird sees that not just any weird noise transfers the cork.”The system worked. At first, a parrot might make a sound more like “erk” than “cork.” He’d need practice. Certain sounds are nearly impossible to produce without lips — Alex was never able to say “purple,” for instance, even after he nailed all his other colors. Still, as Reiss says, “Irene really found the appropriate method based on what we know about these birds. If you can tap into what these birds do in their own environment — in this case, the way these birds pair-bond — then you can set up a powerful learning paradigm.”
One of the odd things about watching a gray parrot talk, as this video demonstrates, is the contrast between its face — “goggle-eyed and masklike, and much less expressive than a dog’s” — and its ability to make its wishes clear:
Ultra-Small Bacteria Survive 120,000 Years in Greenland Glacier
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008A team of Penn State scientists has discovered a new ultra-small species of bacteria that has survived for more than 120,000 years within the ice of a Greenland glacier at a depth of nearly two miles:
The microorganism’s ability to persist in this low-temperature, high-pressure, reduced-oxygen and nutrient-poor habitat makes it particularly useful for studying how life, in general, can survive in a variety of extreme environments on Earth and possibly elsewhere in the solar system.
I expect the bacteria to grow into a shape-shifting colony that will kill the entire scientific team in their snow-bound base in the tundra. Definitely double-check the sled dogs for…things.
The Sabre
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
Lloyd shares what he has learned about the sabre after wielding his Moghul Indian tulwar — namely that curved one-handed swords are not equivalent to straight ones:
Sabres are next to useless for fencing. The curve of the blade makes the whole thing amazingly unwieldy. To hack, and then get the blade back into position for parrying is very difficult and slow. The curve does not make thrusts impossible, but thrusting with a straight sword is much easier.Remember that these curved weapons were used by cavalrymen. If a cavalryman rides up to an infantryman and stops, and then fences with him, he loses almost all his advantage. Horses are very large and very scary, and the momentum which a moving horse adds to a blow makes a slash from a passing horseman terrible indeed. But if a horseman were to sit and fence, then his horse’s head would be in his way, and his horse would offer a huge fleshy target which he could not protect with his parries, and which might buck or bolt at any moment. The rider would only have one angle of attack: downwards. He would find it difficult to fight opponents behind him or to his left, and would find it difficult to attack the lower halves of his foes. The infantrymen could get round him, and attack his immobile legs, his horse’s legs, and (especially if he had no shield and used reins, as Napoleonic cavalrymen did) his left arm. He would be in big trouble.
Cavalrymen would ride at infantry, take a hack at them as they passed, and then use their speed to get past and away. Cavalry were good at attacking disordered and routing footmen, but much less good at attacking well-ordered troops, especially if those troops had long weapons such as spears or muskets with long bayonets on them. Against a formed body of infantry, they would rush at them and attack the ends of lines, gaps and weak points, hoping to get round a flank. If the infantry held, the cavalry would ride away and regroup and try again. Often the infantry would break formation, and then the cavalry had a good chance. A mass of cavalry thundering across the battlefield takes a lot of nerve to face. What cavalry did not do, was ride up to the infantry head-on, halt, then try to whittle away the numbers of the enemy by fencing on the spot.
The Ugly Truth About Government
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008Mencius Moldbug explains the ugly truth about government, starting with a quote from Machiavelli:
He who desires or attempts to reform the government of a state, and wishes to have it accepted and capable of maintaining itself to the satisfaction of everybody, must at least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in fact they are entirely different from the old ones. For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often even more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.
Mencius continues in his own words:
So, for example, the Roman Principate, and even to some extent the Dominate, preserved the forms of the old Republic. If Rome under Augustus had had a New York Times, it would have been full of the doings of the Senate and the consuls. The Senators said this. The consuls did that. When in reality, everything that mattered went through Augustus. If the entire Senate had fallen through a manhole in the Forum, nothing would have changed — except, of course, that the illusion of the Republic could no longer be maintained.(The Romans even had a word for a monarch — the good old Latin Rex. No Roman emperor, however dissolute, autocratic or hubristic, ever adopted the title of king. “Emperor” is simply an anglicization of Imperator, meaning “Commander” — ie, a general.)
Often when the illusion ceases to delude anyone, it persists as a linguistic convention — especially on the tongues of officials. So in British official language one still may speak as if the Queen were the absolute personal ruler of the UK, when in fact she has no power at all. No one is confused by this. It is just a quaint turn of speech. Still, it has its effect.
Power is a shy beast. She flees the sound of her name. When we ask who rules the UK, we are not looking for the answer, “the Queen.” The Queen may rock, but everyone knows she doesn’t rule. Parting this thin outer peel, we come on the word “Parliament,” with which most of us are satisfied. This is your official answer. The Queen holds nominal power. Parliament holds formal power. But does this tell us where the actual power is? Why should we expect it to? Since when has it ever?
Power has all the usual reasons to hide. Power is delicious, and everyone wants it. To bite into its crisp, sweet flesh, to lick its juices off your lips — this is more than pleasure. It is satisfaction. It is fulfillment. It is meaning. The love of a bird for a caterpillar is a tenuous and passing attachment next to the bond between man and power. Of course power, like the caterpillar, may have other defenses — poison-filled spines, and the like — but why not start with camouflage? Why look like anything more than a stick or a leaf?
Of course, as a progressive, you have all sorts of ideas about where power is hiding. It is in the hands of the corporations, the crooked politicians, the bankers, the military, the television preachers, and so on. It would be unfair to denigrate all of these perspectives as “conspiracy theories,” and it is also unfair to denigrate all conspiracy theories as false. Lenin, for instance, was a conspirator. So were Alger Hiss, Benedict Arnold, even Machiavelli himself.
Nonetheless, the best place to hide is usually in plain sight. For example, Noam Chomsky once wrote a book called Manufacturing Consent, which argues that corporations exercise power by controlling the mass media. The phrase is borrowed from Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion — a book which every progressive will do well to read. La Wik has a fine summary:
When properly utilized, the manufacture of consent, Lippmann argues, is useful and necessary for modern society because “the common interests” — the general concerns of all people — are not obvious in many cases and only become clear upon careful data collection and analysis, which most of the people are either uninterested in or incapable of doing. Most people, therefore, must have the world summarized for them by those who are well-informed.Since Lippmann includes much of the political elite within the set of those incapable of properly understanding by themselves the complex “unseen environment” in which the affairs of the modern state take place, he proposes having professionals (a “specialized class”) collect and analyze data and present the conclusions to the decision makers. The decision makers then take decisions and use the “art of persuasion” to inform the public about the decisions and the circumstances surrounding them.
Who is Lippmann’s “specialized class?” Is it Chomsky’s corporate CEOs? Rupert Murdoch, perhaps? Au contraire. It is folks like Lippmann himself — journalists. (Lippmann described his analysis and persuasion agency, somewhat infelicitously, as an “Intelligence Bureau.”)
Thus we have two candidates for who is “manufacturing consent.” It could be the corporate executives to whom the journalists report. Or it could be the journalists themselves, in plain sight. Or, of course, both — in the true Agatha Christie style. As political detectives, we may ask: which of these parties has the means, motive, and opportunity?
Closing the Collapse Gap
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
In Closing the Collapse Gap, Dmitry Orlov argues that the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US — and he expects the US to collapse soon. This is also the theme of his new book, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects.
While I don’t think a US collapse is unthinkable, and I do think such a scenario is a fascinating thought experiment, I can’t place my faith in someone who sees obvious parallels between the US and USSR because they both were military and industrial superpowers, both tried to spread their ideologies around the world, both competed in the space race, etc.
Orlov saw what happened when Russia collapsed — when he visited family; he no longer lived there — and expects to see the same in the US:
We should certainly expect shortages of fuel, food, medicine, and countless consumer items, outages of electricity, gas, and water, breakdowns in transportation systems and other infrastructure, hyperinflation, widespread shutdowns and mass layoffs, along with a lot of despair, confusion, violence, and lawlessness. We definitely should not expect any grand rescue plans, innovative technology programs, or miracles of social cohesion.
Even before its collapse, the USSR was prone to shortages. The US is more likely to face high prices, without shortages — at least until the politicians institute price controls.
The collapse of the government left the Soviet command economy without direction:
When faced with such developments, some people are quick to realize what it is they have to do to survive, and start doing these things, generally without anyone’s permission. A sort of economy emerges, completely informal, and often semi-criminal. It revolves around liquidating, and recycling, the remains of the old economy. It is based on direct access to resources, and the threat of force, rather than ownership or legal authority. People who have a problem with this way of doing things, quickly find themselves out of the game.
I have little doubt that Americans would skirt the law to make a buck, but I’m not sure it would play out the same as in the USSR, where everyone tried to sell off state property for their own gain.
Two of the “strengths” of the Russian system were its lack of home ownership and lack of private cars:
In the Soviet Union, all housing belonged to the government, which made it available directly to the people. Since all housing was also built by the government, it was only built in places that the government could service using public transportation. After the collapse, almost everyone managed to keep their place.In the United States, very few people own their place of residence free and clear, and even they need an income to pay real estate taxes. People without an income face homelessness. When the economy collapses, very few people will continue to have an income, so homelessness will become rampant. Add to that the car-dependent nature of most suburbs, and what you will get is mass migrations of homeless people toward city centers.
When you build a system that doesn’t take advantage of cheap oil, naturally you survive an oil shock much better.
Orlov also sees lumbering Soviet bureaucracy as a “strength”:
Economic collapse affects public sector employment almost as much as private sector employment, eventually. Because government bureaucracies tend to be slow to act, they collapse more slowly. Also, because state-owned enterprises tend to be inefficient, and stockpile inventory, there is plenty of it left over, for the employees to take home, and use in barter. Most Soviet employment was in the public sector, and this gave people some time to think of what to do next.Private enterprises tend to be much more efficient at many things. Such laying off their people, shutting their doors, and liquidating their assets. Since most employment in the United States is in the private sector, we should expect the transition to permanent unemployment to be quite abrupt for most people.
I don’t think he appreciates the upside of creative destruction. Shutting doors and liquidating assets means reallocating resources to where they’re more useful.
Anyway, you can see that a society that expected regular failure was better prepared for large-scale failure.
So what does Orlov recommend? Well, he assumes that no political party could get into power on a platform of preparing for collapse — a good bet — but recommends that a hypothetical Collapse Party take care of some things that the Soviets did not take care of:
I am particularly concerned about all the radioactive and toxic installations, stockpiles, and dumps. Future generations are unlikely to able to control them, especially if global warming puts them underwater. There is enough of this muck sitting around to kill off most of us. I am also worried about soldiers getting stranded overseas – abandoning one’s soldiers is among the most shameful things a country can do. Overseas military bases should be dismantled, and the troops repatriated. I’d like to see the huge prison population whittled away in a controlled manner, ahead of time, instead of in a chaotic general amnesty. Lastly, I think that this farce with debts that will never be repaid, has gone on long enough. Wiping the slate clean will give society time to readjust. So, you see, I am not asking for any miracles. Although, if any of these things do get done, I would consider it a miracle.
I’m inclined to worry about the opposite nuclear problem: I’d make sure that nuclear power plants had enough fuel on-site to continue operations.
Orlov is also a nihilist on a personal level:
Certain types of mainstream economic behavior are not prudent on a personal level, and are also counterproductive to bridging the Collapse Gap. Any behavior that might result in continued economic growth and prosperity is counterproductive: the higher you jump, the harder you land. It is traumatic to go from having a big retirement fund to having no retirement fund because of a market crash. It is also traumatic to go from a high income to little or no income. If, on top of that, you have kept yourself incredibly busy, and suddenly have nothing to do, then you will really be in rough shape.
Guerrilla gardener movement takes root in L.A. area
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
Guerrilla gardener movement takes root in L.A. area:
Brimming with lime-hued succulents and a lush collection of agaves, one shooting spiky leaves 10 feet into the air, it’s a head-turning garden smack in the middle of Long Beach’s asphalt jungle. But the gardener who designed it doesn’t want you to know his last name, since his handiwork isn’t exactly legit. It’s on a traffic island he commandeered.“The city wasn’t doing anything with it, and I had a bunch of extra plants,” says Scott, as we tour the garden, cars whooshing by on both sides of Loynes Drive.
Scott is a guerrilla gardener, a member of a burgeoning movement of green enthusiasts who plant without approval on land that’s not theirs. In London, Berlin, Miami, San Francisco and Southern California, these free-range tillers are sowing a new kind of flower power. In nighttime planting parties or solo “seed bombing” runs, they aim to turn neglected public space and vacant lots into floral or food outposts.
Part beautification, part eco-activism, part social outlet, the activity has been fueled by Internet gardening blogs and sites such as GuerrillaGardening.org, where before-and-after photos of the latest “troop digs” inspire 45,000 visitors a month to make derelict soil bloom.
“We can make much more out of the land than how it’s being used, whether it’s about creating food or beautifying it,” says the movement’s ringleader and GuerrillaGardening.org founder, Richard Reynolds, by phone from his London home. His tribe includes freelance landscapers like Scott, urban farmers, floral fans and artists.
“I want to encourage more people to think about land in this way and just get out there and do it,” says Reynolds, whose new handbook for insurgent planters, “On Guerrilla Gardening,” is out this week.
The activists see themselves as 21st century Johnny Appleseeds, harvesting a natural bounty of daffodils or organic green beans from forgotten dirt. It’s a step into more self-reliant living in the city,” says Erik Knutzen, coauthor with his wife, Kelly Coyne, of “The Urban Homestead” to be released in June. The Echo Park couple have chronicled “pirate farming” on their blog, Homegrown Evolution. Guerrilla gardening, Knutzen says, is a reaction to the wasteful use of land, such as vacant lots and sidewalk parkways. He’s turned the parkway in front of his home into a vegetable garden.
One of a slew of DIY gardening currents, such as permaculture (design of highly sustainable ecosystems), urban homesteading, composting and free fruit movement, guerrilla gardening is a response to dwindling green space, limited land and suspicions about food sources, say experts. It’s also part of a time-honored American tradition of gardening public spaces.
“It reminds me of the Vacant Lot Cultivation societies,” says Rose Hayden-Smith, a Food and Society Policy Fellow with UC Cooperative Extension. In the wake of the economic meltdown of the 1890s, many American cities, from Detroit to Philadelphia and Boston, formed Vacant Lot Cultivation associations to encourage residents to grow food on public land. The Liberty and Victory garden campaigns of World Wars I and II, respectively, also exhorted Americans to raise food on untended public land.
Mixed martial arts show with Kimbo Slice scores big in Los Angeles
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
The Los Angeles Times reports that the recent mixed martial arts show with Kimbo Slice scored big in Los Angeles:
The first mixed martial arts event shown in prime time on a major network was a big hit for KCBS-TV Channel 2.The Saturday night tape-delayed Elite Extreme Combat event from Newark, N.J., came in with a local overnight rating of 4.7 and a 9 share. The rating peaked at 7.2 the final 15 minutes.
By comparison, a Stanley Cup final hockey game shown earlier in the evening on KNBC-TV Channel 4 averaged just a 1.3 local rating and a 3 share.
The MMA national overnight rating, which is an average for the nation’s 54 largest markets, was a 2.7 with a 5 share.
The main event for the five-card night featured Kimbo Slice, a former street brawler from Miami whose real name is Kevin Ferguson, against James “The Colossus” Thompson of England. Slice won by technical knockout. The fight was stopped 38 seconds into the third round with a dazed Thompson bleeding from the ear after taking a few explosive punches to the head.
Jared Shaw, vice president of fighter relations for EliteXC, said he was extremely pleased with the overnight viewership numbers in L.A. Three other fights are scheduled to be shown on CBS later this year.
Yes, MMA is going mainstream.
A freelance lifestyle in a corporate workplace
Sunday, June 1st, 2008Workers at Best Buy found out that you can have a freelance lifestyle in a corporate workplace:
Picture an office where no meeting is mandatory and employees can come and go as they please as long as they get the job done.“Too good to be true,” most cubicle occupants would probably say, but an upcoming book about this results-only work environment is not fiction. In fact, authors Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson pioneered the concept while working at consumer electronics chain Best Buy Co Inc, which now makes the option available to about 3,000 of its 4,000 corporate staffers.
In Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (Portfolio, $23.95), Ressler and Thompson maintain that time — or control over it — heals many corporate wounds.
Too often, they say, a company will treat employees like children incapable of working without supervision, while promoting mediocre performers simply because they put in a lot of time at their desks. Meanwhile, the traditional work week of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday no longer serves the needs of many customers.
In a results-oriented work environment (ROWE), however, a company focuses exclusively on job performance, rather than work schedules or office politics. At Best Buy, productivity has increased, and fewer of the employees that the company wanted to retain have left, although “involuntary” turnover rates have increased as unsatisfactory workers were exposed.
Employees can do their jobs at home or in Starbucks, first thing in the morning or in the middle of the night. One of the hallmarks of a ROWE is that a person who goes home at 2 p.m. is not leaving early, while someone who arrives at that time is not late.
The book, which is set for publication on Monday, includes the story of an e-learning specialist who typically wakes up without an alarm and does at least some of his work at home in front of the television set. Meanwhile, a dot-com employee has been able to spend more time with her son.
The authors have gone on to apply the ROWE concept at a small financial services company in Wisconsin through CultureRx, the consulting firm they have founded.
Why we should love logarithms
Sunday, June 1st, 2008Philip Ball explains why we should love logarithms — including the surprising reason that it may be more natural to think logarithmically:
Stanislas Dehaene of the Federative Institute of Research in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, and his co-workers report in Science that both adults and children of an Amazonian tribe called the Mundurucu, who have had almost no exposure to the linear counting scale of the industrialized world, judge magnitudes on a logarithmic basis.The researchers presented their subjects with a computerized task in which they were asked to locate on a line the points that best signified the number of various stimuli (dots, sequences of tones or spoken words) in the ranges from 1 to 10 and from 10 to 100. One end of the line corresponded to 1, say, and the other to 10; where on this line should 6 sit? The results showed that the Amazonians had a clear tendency to apportion the divisions logarithmically, which means that successive numbers get progressively closer together as they get bigger.
The same behaviour has previously been seen in young children from the West. But adults instead use a linear scaling, in which the distance between each number is the same irrespective of their magnitude. This could be because adults are taught that is how numbers are ‘really’ distributed, or it could be that some intrinsic aspect of brain development creates a greater predisposition to linear scaling as we mature. To distinguish between these possibilities, Dehaene and his colleagues tested an adult population that was ‘uncontaminated’ by schooling.
The implication of their finding, they say, is that “the concept of a linear number line seems to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education”.