In Pursuit of Prey, Carrying Philosophy

03book_CA0-articleInlineDwight Garner reviews Paul Berman's Flight of the Intellectuals in the NYT:

Paul Berman’s new book, “The Flight of the Intellectuals,” plural, might as easily have been titled “The Flight of the Intellectual,” singular. It is essentially a booklong polemic against one magazine article: a profile of the Islamic philosopher Tariq Ramadan, written by Ian Buruma, the Dutch academic and journalist, and published in The New York Times Magazine in 2007.

Mr. Berman’s book has already made some noise. Writing in Slate, Ron Rosenbaum compared its stinging ambience, nostalgic to some, to one of “those old Partisan Review smackdowns,” in which Dwight Macdonald or Mary McCarthy cracked some unsuspecting frenemy over the head with a bookcase and a tinkling highball glass. And for sure, everything about “The Flight of the Intellectuals” feels old school, from Mr. Berman’s tone (controlled, almost tantric, high dudgeon) to the spectacle of one respected man of the left pummeling another while the blood flows freely, and no one calls the police.

Those Partisan Review fights got serious, and so does this book. Mr. Berman accuses Mr. Buruma, in his Times Magazine profile, of not scrutinizing Mr. Ramadan’s family, associations or writings closely enough, of presenting him in a respectful light. Presenting him, that is, as the kind of moderate and charismatic Islamic thinker in whom the West might find a useful intermediary.

Mr. Berman’s book, portions of which first appeared in The New Republic, is a patient overturning of the rocks that, he argues, Mr. Buruma failed to look under. He writes about historical figures Mr. Ramadan professes to admire and notes the tiny degrees of separation that link them to Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. He points out Mr. Ramadan’s ambiguous comments about things like 9/11, the stoning of women in Muslim countries and violence against Jews. Mr. Berman detects a kind of seventh-century barbarism lurking behind Mr. Ramadan’s genial smile.

Mr. Berman branches out in his book’s final third to condemn liberal intellectuals (nearly all of them but especially Mr. Buruma and the British historian Timothy Garton Ash) and their house organs, including The New York Review of Books, on another, related, account. He writes that while they have admired Mr. Ramadan, they have been inexplicably critical of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch intellectual who has become a major critic of Islam and, as a consequence, will probably have a large security detail for the rest of her life.

Toward a Science of Morality

Sam_Harris_01 Sam Harris in the Huffington Post:

[T]he response to my TED talk proves that many smart people believe that something in the last few centuries of intellectual progress prevents us from making cross-cultural moral judgments — or moral judgments at all. Thousands of highly educated men and women have now written to inform me that morality is a myth, that statements about human values are without truth conditions and, therefore, nonsensical, and that concepts like “well-being” and “misery” are so poorly defined, or so susceptible to personal whim and cultural influence, that it is impossible to know anything about them. Many people also claim that a scientific foundation for morality would serve no purpose, because we can combat human evil while knowing that our notions of “good” and “evil” are unwarranted. It is always amusing when these same people then hesitate to condemn specific instances of patently abominable behavior. I don't think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until one has seen a celebrated scholar defend the “contextual” legitimacy of the burqa, or a practice like female genital excision, a mere thirty seconds after announcing that his moral relativism does nothing to diminish his commitment to making the world a better place. Given my experience as a critic of religion, I must say that it has been disconcerting to see the caricature of the over-educated, atheistic moral nihilist regularly appearing in my inbox and on the blogs. I sincerely hope that people like Rick Warren have not been paying attention.

First, a disclaimer and non-apology: Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven't done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this literature, I did not arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “anti-realism,” “emotivism,” and the like, directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe. My goal, both in speaking at conferences like TED and in writing my book, is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful. Few things would make this goal harder to achieve than for me to speak and write like an academic philosopher. Of course, some discussion of philosophy is unavoidable, but my approach is to generally make an end run around many of the views and conceptual distinctions that make academic discussions of human values so inaccessible. While this is guaranteed to annoy a few people, the prominent philosophers I've consulted seem to understand and support what I am doing.

Many people believe that the problem with talking about moral truth, or with asserting that there is a necessary connection between morality and well-being, is that concepts like “morality” and “well-being” must be defined with reference to specific goals and other criteria — and nothing prevents people from disagreeing about these definitions.

Gang Starr’s “Just to Get a Rep”

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

ScreenHunter_01 May. 11 13.46 I remember hearing Gang Starr for the first time. I was in my friend's garage, the one at his mom's house in South Central L.A. that he'd converted into a hangout spot, which was the fashion at the time. The neighborhood dogs were barking pointlessly in all the yards and the LAPD helicopters chop-chop-chopped the sky, ever present. It was a warm day, as I recall, and the sound coming out of the garage was damn smooth. I liked the raspy voice of the MC. He was rapping about the streets, which was also the fashion. He wasn't just bragging, rhyming about how hard he and his crew were. But he wasn't wagging a finger in condemnation, either. There was a balance to the song, something real from the standpoint of someone who knows. Like something Johnny Cash would have understood.

The song was “Just to Get a Rep” and the MC went by the name of Guru. Guru dropped into a coma two weeks ago after a heart attack related to his fight with cancer. On April 19, he died.

“Just to Get a Rep” might not be the best Gang Starr song, but it is the one I'll always listen to with a special fondness. One of the difficult things about doing hip-hop in the late ’80s/early ’90s was navigating the whole gangster rap thing. Did you try to out-gangsta the other guys? Did you go off in a completely different direction like the post-hippie sound of De La Soul? The gangsta rap persona was a bit overwhelming for any young MC trying to create a sound and an identity. Guru understood all that. “Just to Get a Rep” had a streety edge to it; Guru was down. Still, it was clear that he saw the tragedy and ugliness of the gangster life. Plus he wore that Black Muslim cap and he'd throw out fancy words, complicated diction. Guru once rhymed “mic” with “teletype.” I heard someone refer to him once as the “wise uncle.” I like to think of Guru that way. Just like your wise uncle, Guru was dangerously close to being full of shit, getting a little too self-righteous. But he always reined it back in the nick of time. “Jazz Thing,” the song made famous by Mo' Better Blues, is preachy and didactic but redeemed, nevertheless, by the delightful phrase, “Theolonious Monk, a melodious thunk.”

More here.

Tuesday Poem

The Waters

Poet, oracle and wit
like unsuccessful anglers by
the ponds of apperception sit,
Baiting with the wrong request
The vectors of their interest;
At nightfall tell the anglers lie.

With time in tempest everywhere,
To rafts of frail assumption cling
the saintly and the insincere;
Enraged phenomena bear down
In overwhelming waves to drown
Both sufferer and suffering.

The waters long to hear our question put
Which would release their longed-for answer, but.

by W.H. Auden
from Selected Poems,
Vintage Books, 1972

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

From The Washington Post:

Book Fear not, for, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy: Philip Pullman's novel about Jesus is not quite as shrill as his public statements on religion would suggest. Choosing a vocal atheist and best-selling British fantasy writer to retell the story of the Gospels was clearly an answer to some publicist's prayer, but for all its satanic fanfare and heretical rejiggering, “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” is — God forbid — kind of inspiring. It even manages to convey a message that's always been central to Christian thought.

So what does Pullman do with the greatest story ever told? Essentially, he condenses the four Gospels, following the basic outline they provide of Jesus's life. Indeed, some of the text here — such as his simple, beautifully rendered Sermon on the Mount — will strike Christians as very familiar. Again and again, he displays a marvelous sense of the elemental power of Jesus's instructions and parables. Even when he transforms the canonical stories to match his atheist perspective, he emphasizes the basic Christian theme of universal love.

More here.

The Science of a Happy Marriage

From The New York Times:

Marriage Why do some men and women cheat on their partners while others resist the temptation? To find the answer, a growing body of research is focusing on the science of commitment. Scientists are studying everything from the biological factors that seem to influence marital stability to a person’s psychological response after flirting with a stranger. Their findings suggest that while some people may be naturally more resistant to temptation, men and women can also train themselves to protect their relationships and raise their feelings of commitment. Recent studies have raised questions about whether genetic factors may influence commitment and marital stability. Hasse Walum, a biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, studied 552 sets of twins to learn more about a gene related to the body’s regulation of the brain chemical vasopressin, a bonding hormone.

Over all, men who carried a variation in the gene were less likely to be married, and those who had wed were more likely to have had serious marital problems and unhappy wives. Among men who carried two copies of the gene variant, about a third had experienced a serious relationship crisis in the past year, double the number seen in the men who did not carry the variant. Although the trait is often called the “fidelity gene,” Mr. Walum called that a misnomer: his research focused on marital stability, not faithfulness. “It’s difficult to use this information to predict any future behavior in men,” he told me. Now he and his colleagues are working to replicate the findings and conducting similar research in women.

More here.

A new book applies rigorous research to the modern marriage

Margaret Eby in Salon:

Md_horiz As it turns out, much of what you think about the state of the American marriage is wrong: Half of marriages don’t end in divorce; married people don’t have less sex than their single counterparts and — surprise! — fighting can actually be beneficial to your relationship. That is what Tara Parker-Pope, a health journalist and the woman behind the New York Times' Well blog, discovered while researching her new book, “For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage.” In the book, Parker-Pope argues that the marital bond isn't nearly as mysterious as you might believe, and unlike the vast majority of authors on the subject, she uses credible scientific research to back up her claims about everything from sex to housework.

As “For Better” points out, researchers found that couples in lasting marriages have at least five small positive interactions (touching, smiling, paying a compliment) for every negative one (sneering, eye rolling, withdrawal). When the ratio drops, the risk of divorce increases. Snoring and other sleep problems can contribute enormously to marital unhappiness. How you treat your partner during the first three minutes of a fight determines whether the argument will be good or bad for your marriage — launching a volley of personal criticisms is worse than opening up a discussion with a complaint. It’s these small but recognizable actions, claims Parker-Pope, that distinguish a marriage bound for splitsville from couples who stay together.

More here.

Dying Most Securely

Top In the middle of last month, a colleague of mine, a writer, was run over by a five-ton military truck on a public street in Washington, D.C. Patrons at a restaurant nearby—it was dinner time, about 6 p.m., a nice day to dine outside—said the sound of her getting crushed beneath the wheels was stomach-sickening. She was sixty-eight years old and riding a bicycle, less a block from work. She wrote about lots of hard-core science and had been at the magazine since 1970, and so was well known; Francis Collins commented on her death. She also edited a breezier news section called Short Cuts, and I think she would have enjoyed and appreciated 3QD—she painted seriously on the side, and played music.

I admit I knew her (I’ll call her T.) less well as other people where we used to work together. And yet the news still stunned me. Stunned me in that way when everything gets very quiet and your focus narrows severely and you can suddenly concentrate very, very hard. Or rather, everything else seems to fall away, because what you’re concentrating on just doesn’t make sense, doesn’t jive with what was, until just then, real. D.C. has a pretty abysmal record of bikers and pedestrians getting run over by careless buses and trucks—the number of ghost bikes around town (memorials, painted white, one for each victim at the site of an accident) gets eerie. But T. died because people took far too much care, in the empty name of security.

Middle You see, her workplace had the misfortune of being a half mile from the Washington Convention Center, where dozens of world leaders held a profoundly unproductive nuclear security summit in April. The big outcome, as you undoubtedly heard, was that all parties present denounced terrorism as “one of the most challenging threats to international security” and decided that it would be idea to make sure terrorists cannot get nuclear materials, starting in four years. Of course, they agreed to this in a non-binding resolution, so even that milquetoast agreement means little. Maybe, just maybe, a lot of the real work of international disarmament did get done those two days behind the scenes, and perhaps the summit sowed the seeds of future accords. But from all appearances, it achieved even less than the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference last year.

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Monday Poem

The Algonquin tribes knew this moon as the
time to gather ripening strawberries
……………………………………Old Farmer's Almanac

Strawberry Moon

I read you Strawberry Moon
you pull the sea in the summer
more than two-hundred-thousand miles
I see your reach is so long
your arm of gravity
your face of sunlight at midnight
they hold me too

But in the moon when the deer shed their horns
and the top of the world has leaned a little away
from the sun, the colder night
who has an edge on his voice
who cares so little for growing things
will make it seem like you'll break
unless you remember the heat
of the Strawberry Moon

I'm with you Strawberry Moon
I'm dark here down in your shadows
which move their edges like steel
when you're full and spilling silver on me
your arm of gravity your face
of sunlight at midnight
the hold me too

by Jim Culleny. 1971

Trying To Understand The Tea Party People: What White Folks Are Upset About Now (Prepare To Be Surprised)

By Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash)

ScreenHunter_04 May. 10 12.46 Tea Partiers: angry independents? extreme conservatives? regular Republicans? racist crackers? none of the above?

Before I get down to telling you who and what the Tea Party movement is — because nobody seems to know, least of all the people IN the movement — allow me to lay a little philosophy on you.

All philosophies are about putting the world in a nutshell. “Class struggle.” “The invisible hand.” “Existence precedes essence.”

Myself, I like nutshell statements. They help thin the thickets of reality. No human can face unmediated reality and not want to die from the onslaught. It takes a Beckett to be brave enough to look at our bleak world bleakly; the rest of us need our simplifying generalizations and consoling constructions to fool ourselves into getting on with going on.

Just to be semi-functional and make some sense of it all, we absolutely NEED to stuff the actual mess of the Real into neat boxes of the Construct.

We're so small, us humans: we use the only thing we have, our minds, to simplify the vastness around us; we think in order to fit the big everything out there into our little heads.

That's why something as rich and sprawling as language is wont to collapse into well-worn cliches. We can't think without banal summations, dumb generalizations, blind ideologies, the cutting down of the everything-around forest to a few simple stripped-down tree statements. “Jesus died for my sins.” “The free market is the end of history.” “Obama is a socialist.” The very falseness of our thought constructs is what makes them useful; their effortlessly bogus effronteries allow us to continue on our not-so-merry way. It may be the reason why Zizek can review a movie without seeing it: he doesn't need the movie to interfere with what he thinks about it.

I've been trying to understand the Tea Party movement, and found it tough and confusing, a vexing bafflement. Tea Party people appear to have no core, no leader, no central anything to latch on to. No simple cliche to sum up the movement. Hence, impossible to think about or understand. Where's the Construct box to stuff them in? So I've invented a personal nutshell, which not only explains the Tea Party, but all American politics. Yep. I am here to verify, instruct, inform curiosity and carry report. Read on.

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Let’s Keep God out of Ethics

ScreenHunter_03 May. 10 12.24 When a television network has a porn channel in the pipe-lines voices of outrage sound. When a television-series mocks a dead religious figure, knives are being sharpened and fingers are being shaken. Picketing outside abortion clinics, fighting against end-of-life alleviation, marching against free expression (do they never see the irony?) – we can usually count on the faithful to raise an outcry, on our behalf apparently, for things they consider to be sinful and, therefore, immoral. But what is sinful is not necessarily immoral. They appear to have some insight we do not about morality and ethical deliberation. But upon critical scrutiny, we soon discover that all the noise is a mask for shallow deliberation.

When did we hand over our moral autonomy – that is our ability to look critically for ourselves at moral dilemmas – to the lecherous hands and myopic vision of religious leaders? When did we say that we wanted guardians stationed in moral outposts, peering into the world with outrage-telescopes and hysterical megaphones? I certainly did not and I hope, regardless of your belief in god, you didn’t either. Ethical deliberation is something we all must face as part of our epistemic duty in this world, filled as it is with problems and a continuum of moral actions. To ask simply whether something is good or evil is often to trivialise ethical dilemmas: they are often not simply about choosing between right and wrong, but between two conflicting attitudes which are both apparently the right thing to do. Do we kill the fat man to save the lives of five others? Are we obligated to each sacrifice one kidney, which we don’t need, to save others who do? Do we give up eating meat, which we do not need for survival, to end the suffering of other animals?

These dilemmas are secular, in that anyone can come to them regardless of religious belief, and find in them a moral problem. However, with the blurring between morality and religion in today’s world, some “moral” problems become problems merely because of the arrogant bullying by religious groups who claim to “know”, better than the rest of us, what is moral. Homosexuality, women’s rights and abortion would most likely not be such hysterical moral dilemmas if not for tawdry metaphysical beliefs on the part of the believer. A good case can be made for any of these being moral dilemmas in purely secular terms, but it is unlikely that death or violence would ensue because of disagreement. The ferocity and vernacular of the dilemma would not be one spurred on by self-righteous believers who are defending god’s laws; or defending “babies” from evil, pincer-wielding doctors; or trying to maintain “family values” because of the “moral decline” in society. A lot of these dilemmas could be carefully deliberated upon in a safe, public platform, using the weapons of words and the shield of a podium, rather than bullets and knives to make one’s point felt. We have given into the worst reasoning to justify moral decisions, that is: raising your voice and making the loudest noise. And best of all if you can use god as a backing – since this still has moral force today, though it should not. Just because so many people are outraged by gay-marriage does not make it immoral anymore than everyone believing the earth flat would alter our planet’s shape. Turning something immoral merely because the majority view it as such is part of John Stuart Mill’s notion of 'tyranny of the majority'.
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Virtually my BFF

Bianca Hello, my name is Sarah Firisen and I am a software developer and a writer. But wait, my name is also Bianca Zanetti and I used to be a fashion designer with a string of stores. No, I am not schizophrenic, I am Sarah in my real life and Bianca in my Second Life. My Second Life has not been so active in recent months, but in my virtual heyday I went to parties, art gallery openings and weddings. My husband, in real and virtual life, was very active in the “ROMA (SPQR)” world, owned a beautiful Roman villa that I built for him, and was even a Roman Senator for one term. During our virtual travels we made many friends and a few enemies. We met some really crazy people and some really great ones. Some of those friendships even carried over into our real lives and in one case we spent a lovely evening in the real Rome with the real life representation of one of our avatar friends.

People had a lot to say about our virtual social lives; many of them just didn’t understand how we could waste our time in this way and one person said, “I want to have real friendships with real people.” But here’s the thing, they were real people. Behind each cartoon avatar was a real person with a real story, real heartbreak, real issues, real insanity, real needs. It turned out that virtual friendships are much like real friendships, with perhaps a few unique twists; people lie, they exaggerate, they boast, on occasion you can believe you are friends with a twenty-five year woman, only to find out that she is actually a fifty-five year old man and, of course, they hook up and a few weeks later have a nasty, acrimonious break up. There is no doubt that for some people Second Life usage does seem to tread a fine line between entertainment and avoidance of real life problems and issues, but for most it is a chance to play out some (mostly harmless) fantasies and to connect with new people across the globe.

I raise the subject of my foray into virtual worlds because of a recent article in the New York Times discussing whether young people’s use of the social web and text messaging is eroding their ability to form and sustain “normal” friendships, “The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.”

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Dissolving forms and genres, breaking apart illusions and reading self-help for the very smart: Colin Marshall talks to David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

David Shields is a professor of English at the University of Washington and author of fiction, nonfiction and various hybrids thereof about sports, autobiography, celebrity and death. His new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, uses collage writing to challenge preconceived ideas about form and genre in art, especially as they pertain to literature. Shields advocates disregarding these hardened constraints, a move which will allow art to use more of and become more like life itself. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

Shields1 In reading the book, which I really enjoyed, I try to picture what it would be like if I was reading in a complete vacuum, absent all the talk that's been going on around it — and there's been a whole lot of it, as you know. This is probably the 1,000th interview you've done about the book.

I think, okay, here's a book: 618 numbered sections, a lot of collage writing, a lot of remixing of writing from other sources, it advocates the spaces between genres, the spaces between forms, between truth and falsity. All this cool stuff that I like and think is important, but it would seem to me that it's going to be a niche book, it's going to be an academic book, maybe. Maybe it's not going to get a wide readership. But now, in the real world, this book is one of the most talked-about in recent memory. What do you think is going on here?

That's a good question. I totally agree with you! I was shocked that it was published by a commercial publisher. I got a tiny advance for it; I blush to mention how low it was, a virtually nominal advance. I think the publisher never expected it to have a great amount of attention either. I was, of course, hoping for it; every writer does with every book.

But what happened? I'm not sure. I couldn't point to a single review. Obviously it's gotten hundreds, even thousands, of reviews and blog mentions and things like that, but I can't point to a single review that was the catalyzing review. The only thing I would say is, I think to a certain degree, the book's arguments got cartoonized as two points: one, the novel is dead, and two, it's okay to steal stuff. Those are part of what I'm arguing — not even what I'm arguing in either case — but I think what happened is, those hot-button topics got grooved into the cultural discussion.

It's not like I don't partially agree with those statements, but those are far more nuanced in my book. That's not even the ultimate target of the book. Frankly, the book just came at a time when it is talking about stuff that people are concerned about. The book probably came along at a time when these topics were really crucial. What's my point? My point is that the book got cartoonized and the book came along at a time that these things had to be talked about: what is the fate of writing now? How do we want to think about copyright in a digital age? How do we want to think about the blurring of genres? Do people still read conventional novels? The book articulates all that.

I do think the killer app of the book was the disclaimer and the citations in the back, in which I refuse to provide citations, but then, with a gun to my head, I provide citations. Somehow that became, without any planning on my part, the book's killer app.

You mean the pages at the end where you mark down, if you can remember, who the writing that you remix, revise and put together from other sources came from?

Yeah, and I also preface it with a disclaimer. That was the book's killer app, almost, where I say, “I didn't want to provide these citations. The citations are in microscopic type. Many of the citations are misleading. The publisher made me do it. Please, for the love of god, don't read the citations. Stop, read no farther.”

I think that somehow became a door that a lot of readers and critics and bloggers could enter, like, “Oh, okay. I can talk about all these issues of copyright which have been swirling around us for the last ten years, the last five years especially.” We're very confused about appropriation and copyright in literature, and that one-page disclaimer of mine became almost a Trojan Horse for people to enter the gates of the city.

The reason that's there, of course, is the writing you used from other sources, used for your own arguments. I like how that was done, and I like the arguments you use those in service of making. But here's the reaction I have, and maybe you, as the author of the book, think the same thing. What you say about how the novel as we know it isn't so relevant, about how genres aren't so relevant, about how they might hinder art, about how plots and stories may be hindering art — and the type of collage writing you use: should any of this stuff be controversial in 2010?

I agree with you. The book has received a lot of reactions, somewhat contradictory. Some, “My god, this is the most radical thing I've ever read. I can't believe you're talking about this stuff.” On the other hand, people like you, who are more forward-thinking, it's almost like, yawn, it's all self-evident. If the book hadn't had all those citation issues, the book might not have entered the jetstream the way it had.
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Theory, Literature, Hoax

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in the New York Times:

Goldstein-t_CA0-popup We love stories as much as we need them, but a funny thing has happened to departments of literature. The study of literature as an art form, of its techniques for delighting and instructing, has been replaced by an amalgam of bad epistemology and worse prose that goes by many names but can be summed up as Theory. The situation seems to call for a story, and one written in the style of Jorge Luis Borges, the grand chronicler of the tragicomic struggle between humans and logic.

Rumors had reached us of a doctrine called Theory emanating from distant corners of the university. We in the Department of Philosophy understood it immediately as a grand hoax. I will not dwell on my particular amusement, in which I was so tragically at odds with my collaborator, Theo Rhee. This is the story not of my particular emotions but rather of Theory. Suffice it to say that the self-parody of the appellation, singular and majuscule as if affixed in Plato’s firmament, appeared to rule out all interpretations competing with that of shenanigan. So, too, did the buffoonery of the language, phraseology bloated past the point of grotesqueness. Above all, what convinced us that we had an advanced absurdist on our hands was the localization of Theory to departments of literature, the very experts steeped in the collective genius of expression, whom we judged to be as likely to embrace violations of the laws of sense and felicity as physicists to make merry with violations of the laws of nature. We looked to these colleagues to explain a poem to us, not to tell us our epistemology.

More here.

Benford’s Law And A Theory of Everything

From the physics arXiv blog at Technology Review:

Benford's-law In 1938, the physicist Frank Benford made an extraordinary discovery about numbers. He found that in many lists of numbers drawn from real data, the leading digit is far more likely to be a 1 than a 9. In fact, the distribution of first digits follows a logarithmic law. So the first digit is likely to be 1 about 30 per cent of time while the number 9 appears only five per cent of the time.

That's an unsettling and counterintuitive discovery. Why aren't numbers evenly distributed in such lists? One answer is that if numbers have this type of distribution then it must be scale invariant. So switching a data set measured in inches to one measured in centimetres should not change the distribution. If that's the case, then the only form such a distribution can take is logarithmic.

But while this is a powerful argument, it does nothing to explan the existence of the distribution in the first place.

Then there is the fact that Benford Law seems to apply only to certain types of data. Physicists have found that it crops up in an amazing variety of data sets. Here are just a few: the areas of lakes, the lengths of rivers, the physical constants, stock market indices, file sizes in a personal computer and so on.

However, there are many data sets that do not follow Benford's law, such as lottery and telephone numbers.

What's the difference between these data sets that makes Benford's law apply or not? It's hard to escape the feeling that something deeper must be going on.

Today, Lijing Shao and Bo-Qiang Ma at Peking University in China provide a new insight into the nature of Benford's law. They examine how Benford's law applies to three kinds of statistical distributions widely used in physics.

More here.

Civilian casualties in drone strikes?

Cyril Almeida in Dawn:

Predator_firing_hellfire The intensification of the American air campaign in Pakistan — 32 drone strikes this year alone — has sharpened debate in Pakistan and the US over the incidence of civilian casualties.

Paradoxically, however, near the locus of the attacks, the Waziristan agencies, where 95 per cent of the strikes have occurred, there has been little sign of protest, and anecdotal evidence suggests locals may actually be in favour of the strikes.

No reporter or official was willing to talk on the record about the strikes; however, the various accounts offered were strikingly similar and were corroborated by Pakistani and American analysts.

Referring to the lack of protests, a reporter claimed: “Imran Khan and the (Jamaat-i-Islami) are always talking about mass civilian casualties. But in Peshawar, Charsadda, Tank, Bannu, nowhere in the areas adjacent to the tribal agencies where attacks have been common have there been protests. They simply don’t exist.”

A senior journalist averred that many politicians protesting the drone strikes were guilty of dissembling: “Privately all the Fata members of parliament support the strikes. They can’t say it publicly because of the politics involved, but off the record they claim the strikes are great.”

More here.

The Moral Life of Babies

09babies-t_CA0-articleLargePaul Bloom in The NYT Magazine:

Why would anyone even entertain the thought of babies as moral beings? From Sigmund Freud to Jean Piaget to Lawrence Kohlberg, psychologists have long argued that we begin life as amoral animals. One important task of society, particularly of parents, is to turn babies into civilized beings — social creatures who can experience empathy, guilt and shame; who can override selfish impulses in the name of higher principles; and who will respond with outrage to unfairness and injustice. Many parents and educators would endorse a view of infants and toddlers close to that of a recent Onion headline: “New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths.” If children enter the world already equipped with moral notions, why is it that we have to work so hard to humanize them?

A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.