Speech-and-Debate vs. The Agon of Authenticity: How Least Badly To Fight, in Philosophy?

OMG you know what would be so awesome! Let’s get into a huge argument! I kind of…agree with your claims though. How dispiriting. I will hoist my agreement from below, with some appropriate modifications [re norm-changing]:

It will be very difficult to say, “hey, why not stop being such an asshole, then” to sexist men who are convinced that what they are doing is not pointless dick-swinging but rather, very important truth-finding-outing. Because they will choose to hear that as “stop evaluating the truth or falsehood of claims because you’re giving girls a sad.” [Here I must note that precisely this is the content of the odious Stephenson quote. -10,000 points, Stephenson-quoter-kun!] However, they are about 30% right, so you can’t dismiss them altogether [On a final re-reading it appears Stephenson-quoter-kun should get +3,000 argumentative points back. Hmph.]. If we’re in a formal logic seminar and I think I’ve proven something successfully, then you’ve got to be free to say, “what about this fatal counter-example?” or “sorry, but there’s sort of something missing between these two sections.” And then I’ll be like…think think think… ‘nah, that’s a fatal counter-example. Fuck.’ But provided you’re not being a smug asshole about it, it’s fine. And obviously if various professors of philosophy are giving talks/asking questions, they need to be free to say, “what about this fatal counter-example.” It would be kind of cool of them not to be smug assholes, but sometimes you go to war with the philosophers you have, etc.

So, yes, arguments in philosophy seminars are already plenty decorous, they just may unfortunately chance to be mean-spirited when assholes are involved. There is not much more decorous for them to get, all things considered (although the ties might be an improvement. In some cases.) There isn’t any amount of norm-changing that will stop people from being mean-spirited assholes.

Hey John, maybe we could get into an argument about Russell’s theory of descriptions! No, prolly not, I guess you’re writing. Well, someone else could disagree with both of us then?! She said cheerfully, in a pleasant way ^_^ OK, fine, let’s have a non-agonistic friendly-type discussion, everyone.

I didn’t even know Pat Benatar had anti-natalist songs of any kind! More seriously I confess I am genuinely unconvinced that one team of high-schoolers could in any meaningful sense ‘beat’ another, nearly equally excellent [I’m even dubious about the quality metric but I am ignorant and I will accede to the judgment of judges] team of high-schoolers in a debate about Lacan. What are the positions going to be like?

ETA: I commented rather hastily as I see now the very concept of winning the debate has been problematized. OK Stephenson-quoter, if I start calling you “sempai” will you not troll me with such astounding and instantaneous effectiveness, such that I am pitched up on team Stephenson halfway through comment two? The “-kun” thing was overly familiar, huh. I’ve been reading too much shojo manga, because that’s how me and mcmanus roll.

Open season on that abortive first sentence, people!

8: can’t google up the garden-tools joke, and I am a lawyer, so allow me to entice you into quoting yourself.

… Not meaning to call out Sophist, sorry. I judged at best school in Miss. (faint praise), which I thought went to major competitions, and Judith Butler was inconspicuously absent from mention.

That got busy fast… some answers, then off to bed for me.

#3: I’m actually not the Stephenson-quoter from the previous thread, so I’ll claim neither + nor – points for that. The way debaters use Lacan borrows from Stavrakakis and Ticklish Subject-era Zizek usually – nobody actually reads Lacan himself.

#4, 7: You and I are of the same generation, Prof. Holbo, and it’s definitely changed since then. I do agree that what I commented on was not the main thrust of the OP, I was just jumping to the defense of an activity that I coached for many years, and that I believe holds great intellectual value when done right.

#6: TX: Greenhill, St. Marks
IL: Glenbrooks North, Glenbrooks South, New Trier
GA: Pace, Woodward
NV: The Meadows, Sage Ridge
AZ: Brophy College Prep, Phoenix Country Day School (sometimes)
CA: Damien, Notre Dame, Long Beach Jordan (the LBJ team was very successful a few years ago critiquing the way that debate as an activity is classist and racist – it isn’t a coincidence that most teams on the list are private; it takes money to run a good program.) There is, however, an organisation called the Urban Debate League that attempts to start programs in inner-city schools in (eg) Atlanta and LA.

#8: Is there a word or two missing after “another…”?
Good teams can, and often do, take a long hard look at the assumptions behind others’ args. The Tetlock stuff about experts being no more accurate than dart-throwing monkeys, for example, was used a lot when it first came out. Many debates also end up as some form of “your args only make sense if you assume util is true/good, but it ain’t…”

If we start talking about the role of speed in debate, it’s going too be a really long discussion, so let me say both that it serves a purpose, and that it is problematic in many ways, and leave it there.

Belle #12: I’m quite happy to answer your questions, but agree that it would be going to far afield from the OP to do so here. Is the email address for you in the sidebar still valid?

TheSophist: I think you need to email me at firstname.lastname@gmail.com. But truthfully you have answered my questions already, so thank you. I know that you are not Stephenson-quoter-sempai from the thread below; I was merely joking that it would be a masterpiece of argument/trollery to pose as someone else and hit me so hard from the “maybe there are no winning or losing arguments, man–maybe there is no logic” side that I was pitched over onto Stephenson rock, where I was forced to stay with my fellow logic geeks, embarrassed by my company and irritated by my previous poor self-knowledge.

And actually this is a point relevant to the OP. I think that the kind of women who end up doing academic philosophy often tend to have a distinct ‘one of the guys’ self-image. When you are a girl with many or mostly male friends, this can be important to you. When I was in HS in D.C., where my friends and I had the keys to all the door in the National Cathedral (a huge ring of masters from which we would make selective copies as needed–sextant with inappropriate…um…relationship with both student body generally and students’ bodies in particular. There was a secret clubhouse/Batcave in the sub-sub crypt!), we once went up into the crane that was doing work…on the apse I think. It was the bleak mid-winter and frosty wind was making moan all over the damn place. I think it goes without saying we were totally wasted. Now, I am afraid of heights. This has naturally led me to do lots of things like…rock climbing. And bungee jumping. It’s, um, thrilling!

I climbed up into that fucking freezing tower of metal, hand over hand, about three stories worth of ice-cold ladder, and into the little cockpit where an operator could be. My two male friends then climbed out onto the section parallel to the ground, sat on it with their legs dangling off either side, and scooted all the way out to the end of the arm. I could not make myself do it. Could. Not. Do it. It was wide enough, damn! It was 20 stories down, too. While we climbed down afterwards I cried, actual hot tears, but silently, I was so angry at myself, that I wasn’t brave enough to do it. They weren’t supposed to be able to do things I couldn’t do. (In retrospect, obviously, it was the WORST IDEA ERVER, so.)

I could drink anyone under the table, damn, they did not want to have gotten into that fucking bet at all. I’m an excellent shot. All these things were important to me and my stupid self-image as a badass. But, one-of-the-boys-wise, so was going to math meets as a high-school student, probably the single most Nerdlinger Q. McDorkington activity of all time. Or playing RPGs. Collecting comics? Rare ska LPs? Check, check, geeky 87% boy activitaayyy aaand…check. So, remaining dispassionate when someone tipped my argument over, and then pulling all the Jenga blocks out from his the next day, was part and parcel of that. This can be positive for girls in school because it helps you do well in subjects that suffer from stereotype threat, like computer science (ooh, I could write tiny programs! There is no end to the amount of nerdy Belle activities. Of course, I did an equal number of anti-nerdy activities, which is not typical for my former fellow mathletes or whatever…) I went to an all-girl’s school, and it is an excellent model for girl’s education.

But as you get older you realize it’s just a way to get along in a sexist environment while pretending things are OK and maybe other girls don’t like this stuff because they’re lame. If you’re one of the women not put off by the people who are putting off all the other women, you can pat yourself on the back about it for quite a while and say it’s because you’re very smart. Unfortunately, it’s because you’re essentially a black Republican.”See? Look we’ve got Belle right here, we can’t be as sexist as all that, right? She’s a foxy geek–it’s win-win!” But when something shitty goes down and you need people to have your back…not so much with the back-having. And it’s a bit late to start going around expecting people to behave any differently than they have the whole 4 years you’ve known them.

I couldn’t find a webmaster address so I’m putting this in a comment thread, although it has nothing to do with the topic:

There appears to be a problem with Crooked Timber’s DNS entries or the web server’s redirection. “www.crookedtimber.org” now takes me to a blank page every time. It took a while to figure out that “crookedtimber.org” still works.

As the much-aforementioned Stephenson quoter, I feel I should probably apologise for the quote, especially since I could have snipped it about a third of the way through and kept everything much more on-topic.

The purpose of the quote was supposed to be refer to the supposed difference in discursive style between Randy, who is presented as believing that bullshit is bullshit and can be identified as such by anyone with a detailed grasp of the subject matter at hand, and Charlene’s friends who are presented as believing something different, viz. that there’s no such thing as bullshit, every opinion can contain some truth, and that anyone who wishes to arbitrate on the validity of opinions is likely doing so in an effort to protect a privileged position.

I quoted it because I felt it was relevant to the particular point in the comment thread where people were discussing the difference between “hard” subjects where there’s [supposedly] an objective right and wrong, and “soft” subjects where there isn’t, the notion being that argumentative behaviour is more acceptable when correctness can be objectively judged (“Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit… No one took it personally”).

The scene asks us to judge who is being unfair – is Randy being unfair by dismissing a perspective that makes him uncomfortable, that comes from someone that he and his peer group regard as irrelevant? Is Dr. Kivistick being unfair by dismissing Randy’s claims to objective knowledge as a self-interested delusion? I think the overall conclusion is that they’re both wrong to some extent (Randy is being an over-assertive jerk, and Dr. Kivistick is playing to the crowd in an effort to win by acclamation), but neither wants to admit it, and the scene thus serves as a metaphor for Randy and Charlene’s marriage. When I first read that scene, in my early 20s, I strongly identified with Randy. Now in my early 30s, I find it much more ambiguous. I think to characterise it as an “odious” quote is to miss the point of it somewhat, but perhaps it is something that was written to be a meaningful lesson to someone like me and not to everyone.

The relevance to the original post still stands, I think: there is a difference in discursive styles between people who work in fields that have a self-image as being grounded in objective fact, where being right is about having the right knowledge of the facts, and those where the field has a self-image of subjectivity, where being right (to the extent that one can) is about having the right interpretation of the facts. In the former field, a disagreement carries the meaning “I think there is a fact that you are not aware of” and in the latter it carries the meaning “I think you are wrong about the meaning of these facts”, which is a much harsher thing to say, thus requiring much more etiquette in order to avoid causing genuine offence. People schooled in the latter might thus regard people schooled in the former as lacking in etiquette, but what they don’t realise is that that the etiquette just isn’t needed, as nobody “took it personally”.

My suspicion is that there are fairly few fields where such objectivity is non-illusory. I think that software engineering is an interesting example because there is a clear trend towards greater subjectivity as the physical constraints on computer technology have receded. Back in the age of the Randy Waterhouse-style hacker, computing power was a very scarce resource and if your code ran more efficiently that the other person’s, you were right and they were wrong. Nowadays, not so – we’ve gone from operating at a level of abstraction more like physics to something more akin to literature or architecture. Outside of a few limited domains, the fastest or most efficient code no longer wins automatically, and the awkward genius hacker is no longer automatically right. It makes people uncomfortable (including me!) but one would have to be quite thoughtless to remain in the belief that Randy Waterhouse was entirely right about everything.

p.s. I genuinely do appreciate getting the 3,000 points back! Disagreement doesn’t have to be about totally destroying the other person’s argument, so I’m glad to have not been totally wrong.

It’s a meme to me, given that I see the idea spread from place to place without anyone really reflecting on whether it’s applied appropriately. Typically people who use it are obscuring some more fundamental problem. Of the class of persons I study, I find it come up frequently. Maybe it’s a meme/cliche hybrid.

My point is that the few bad apples have a large supporting cast, male and female, that makes philosophy departments (among other places) difficult environments for women to be participate as equals. If that supporting cast dries up, then you have recipe for change. I’m skeptical that the simple introduction of women is going to change how people battle in philosophy settings or whether women and men feel comfortable taking part. I’m also skeptical that the supporting cast is going anywhere, given the insularity and hierarchy of academic departments. My guess is that it’ll take some overt acts of policing, which perhaps is best done by the chair/head of the department, who can act from above to create a genial environment. S/he can try, anyway.

The first steps have already been taken, albeit in staggers, namely the recognition of the problem.

“This is relevant to the gender issue in the following way: what makes life hard for women in philosophy is a few assholes, plus the fact that a few assholes is all its takes.”

Really? Large numbers of women who dream of becoming philosophers are booted from the career of their dreams by “a few assholes”? Perhaps the ladies of philosophy are weaker than I had previously assumed. Perhaps those dainty ladies need to adopt the Tina Fey philosophy of life: bitches get stuff done…

“If the culture stayed the same, but the mix got closer to 50/50 overnight, the bad effect of the cultural mismatch would be reduced.”

50/50 won’t do it. I’d go for 80/20. Maybe (especially during a war time) even for 85/15.

Not sure if this would do anything for the gender imbalance, but it is possible to generate a norm against “debate” as such, in favor of “conversation” or even “dialectic.” As someone interested in Book I of the Republic, would you say that conversation takes place in “combat” mode? I think Thrasymachus *thinks* it’s combat, but his combative posture is depicted as an obstacle to real inquiry.

also – OT but kinda funny. regarding ‘HS debaters and Lacan’ – a lot of the larger teams would have a person or two who got really deep into post-structuralist thinker X or Y (the HS debate room will have just as much postmodernist literature lurking about as a 1990’s English department). their role is to teach the rest of the team enough about that thinker to deploy them in an argument, counting on the other side to not understand what is going and just get trumped by the sheer obscurantism of the prose. and ‘Lacan’ in debate is really just a generic critique of utopian thinking with some cool french words thrown in.

Back in the age of the Randy Waterhouse-style hacker

The what of the what? I thought everyone realized Randy’s supposed to be a poseur. The self-image as the awesome hacker based on a few scripts he wrote for a telescope? You didn’t catch that? But he recognizes that he’s a dwarf. Not an elf.

And I didn’t even notice that all of the people at the table were women.

I do find the Stephenson somewhat odious because it’s the perfect ever geek sexism thing to say. Jock sexists who think that women aren’t as smart as men but value a certain sort of physical robustness over intelligence in any case are relatively easy to ignore. Setting aside the part where they control the world, I guess. Geek sexists are in an impenetrable globe of toxic white flakes, convinced that everything around them is ringing with cold logic.

I’m with you on the disagreeability of geek sexists*, but I don’t get this from the quote in quite the same way that you do. I don’t think Randy’s geek-supremacy is sexist, except insofar as we might say that his technocratic mindset is a masculine one and imposing it on others is therefore sexist, though this does raise the “but what about the female technocrats?” question. I’ve encountered that kind of idea before – that arguing forcefully about ‘facts’ and ‘right and wrong’ and trying to assert the primacy of technical knowledge is a ‘masculine’ mode of interaction, and openness to the validity of multiple perspectives is a ‘feminine’ mode, but I’ve never been convinced that it’s true, irrespective of the virtues of either approach. I might be totally misinterpreting you here by assuming that this is what you’re referring to! If it’s not that, what is it?

* I agree that it’s a thing, cf. “sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists”, from Snow Crash

Interesting, interesting…

SoU#38: You’re very much right about the round itself being the designated space for aggression, after which all are friends, and frequently very fast friends. (Many years ago I used to smoke slightly illegal substances after rounds with a debater from a rival school who is now a very high-ranked Obama administration official.) Maybe this is one of the places at which the debate sub-thread here can inform the questions of the OP. I also agree about Lacan, although I think some of the folks who are really into the argument can give it more depth.

Belle #46: You pushed one of my buttons here – let me explain why. The phrase “debate club” implies to many a certain dilletantish lack of seriousness – puts us on a level with the French club, or the “vinyl appreciation club” that meets in my classroom weekly and spends a lunchtime listening to vinyl. My debaters work just as hard as any athlete (and with a much longer season) and deserve to be called a team, with the implications of dedication that come with that word.

I would also suggest that the conclusion of a debate round comes when the judge renders her decision. If I may be so bold as to offer an example – a real round involving the work of David Benatar (mentioned above): Argument: The federal government doing x will prevent a war/environmental catastrophe/ other impact in which mass death occurs. Team B responds that (here’s the Benatar stuff) these deaths would prevent countless generations from being born, and that therefore over (enough) time net utility is increased. Team A responds with (inter alia) Frankl, arguing that every human life must have value (I think there was some Levinas in there too, but I don’t recall for sure). Note, by the way, that this was the first time Benatar had been run, and so these answers weren’t prepped, but created on the fly. Team B then argues that Frankl doesn’t take into consideration Benatar’s claim that we all systematically overvalue and overestimate the happiness in our lives. The judge then concludes that (based upon the arguments presented) either Frankl adequately answers Benatar (and so therefore the original plan proposed by the affirmative is desirable and they win), or that he does not. Re these arguments being presented in a completely polished form? No, of course not, these are, after all, high school students, but they are grappling reasonably well (IMHO) with some pretty heady philosophical/ethical questions.

And, in general, if folks are interested in checking out the type of ideas that high school debaters are talking about, I would encourage you to take a peek at the open evidence project at http://www.debatecoaches.org/resources/open-evidence-project/ (sorry, I’m a Luddite and don’t know how to embed links). This is a vast array of files made available free of charge to the debate community as a way to address the disparity of resources within that community. Follow the linkage to “kritiks” and “kritik answers” to see the veritable plethora of thinkers that top competitors are expected to have at least a passing acquaintance with.

Lastly, one similarity between the debate community and phil departments is the sex disparity. While fully aware that anecdotes do not constitute data I’d like to use my own program to suggest that there is something of a tipping point that needs to be reached. For years I had a very tough time getting girls to stick. They’d join, look around, see all the top folks were guys, and then quit. I finally got a girl to stay because she was a younger sib and was encouraged by her brother. She persuaded a friend to join. These two made the program seem like not such a male preserve, and now, five years later, we’re almost exactly 50-50.

It’s highly amusing to see the cultural-liberal crowd chatter away about the terrible crisis of inadequate women in philosophy, without ever pausing to even consider the possibility that this is explainable by basic biological differences between men and women.

Would you people at least take a *moment* to consider all this cultural conditioning business might be missing the point, and that you just might be *wrong* that men and women are basically the same? Really, I’d strongly encourage you to open your minds, and learn something about biology.

It is pretty simple to me: philosophy departments should take a suggestion from the National Assembly of 1791,;and at the end of every class or argument in the lounge, someone should be appointed to say, remember, we are all brothers and sisters! after which all present should embrace each other – fraternally and sororally.

And we know how that ended up, don’t we?

On the other hand, guillotines would make seminars more exciting, speaking of high stakes…

Hector: Unlikely as this is to have any impact, I would counter-urge you to consider that we have thought about your point about biological differences. Your point is so well known, so well-trodden, that it is hard to imagine that your question has anything approaching good faith about it.

That, and the history of the point you are making is so shameful, that anyone wanting to push that line really does need to do so with some humility. Its not just that it has been used to justify appalling sexism, it is also that it has proved an absolutely awful predictor of the future gender balances that now seem perfectly natural.

If you really believe that women are incapable of rational thought, then you are hopelessly adrift from reality. If you don’t, then you really need to consider that this argument has been made historically, with about the same attention to detail, fact and argument that you demonstrate here. Being a man, surely the irony that your point is laughably inadequate on a rational level has not escaped you?

Armando,

Actually, your point is precisely the reverse of the truth. The idea that men and women are basically the same, and have similar distributions of cognitive abilities, talents, interests, etc., was quite popular in the 1960s and 1970s, before we knew as much about evolutionary biology and endocrinology than we do today. It’s no longer that popular, because we actually know, today, about how much sex-related hormones influence our thought processes and behaviours. For example, men generally have more testosterone than women, which influences things like competitiveness, aggression, interest in social dominance, inclination to take risks, etc.. Men also have a larger variance in IQ than women, and greater openness to ideas, so a field like philosophy (which prizes extreme openness, ‘aggressive’ combat in the field of ideas, high cognitive ability, *and* where success in the field is a more risky endeavor than in, say, the hard sciences) is one where you would *expect* to see an overwhelming preponderance of men.

MPA Victoria,

The facts are the facts, even if they happen to make you uncomfortable. I happen to be more interested in facts and truth than in humoring political fads and fashions.

MPA Victoria,

This isn’t a pointless game. I am trying to combat the propaganda that people on your side of the fence are trying to feed to women, and which could lead them to make bad decisions.

The thing with the Stephenson quote reminded me of another, earlier Stephenson quote, from Snow Crash (1992):

It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.

Oops.
I mean I apologize.

dbk – “I think undergrad philosophy instruction needs an overhaul if it is to attract a lot more women to the major”
^ this.
if J Holbo is correct above in stating that getting some amount of gender parity is important to combating stereotype threat, etc, that process begins with the undergrad curriculum. absent a prior increase in female undergrad philosophy majors, any sort of affirmative action or quota approach to phd admissions will have some bad effects that are probably avoidable.

You think eg Daniel Dennett doesn’t code as bitchy??

As a pedagogical question, which form of pretentiousness is more fruitful (or less toxic) to encourage among students: seeming to be “sharp”, or seeming to be “deep”?

“Sheep” is the obvious answer.

Belle@23 – you in high school, in the bleak midwinter, wasted, twenty floors up on a crane overhanging the National Cathedral, and you stop after one paragraph? Have pity. Enough of delivering your life story in these individual droplets of terror and astonishment. Write the memoir! Do it now! I mean this most sincerely.

Missed this earlier: There appears to be a problem with Crooked Timber’s DNS entries or the web server’s redirection. “www.crookedtimber.org” now takes me to a blank page every time. It took a while to figure out that “crookedtimber.org” still works.

Seconding this, at least partially. For the last few days or maybe a week, sometimes I get nothing but a blank page. This hasn’t happened with the main page, just pages for specific threads or comments.

Re: Oh well. I don’t know about Hector, but most women in my life have been innate philosophers, in the colloquial sense.

Yes. But, being a philosopher in a colloquial sense and the discipline of professional philosophy are two distinct things. (John Holbo, I believe this is a novel contribution, if not then feel free to let me know).

TheSophist: I didn’t intend to cast aspersions on the practice of HS debate in general, or your students and judgment in particular. I apologize, and I was genuinely interested by your contributions to the thread. I hate Lacan way more than I hate HS debate. Eh do I even actively hate him? I think he’s pointless. No, I probably hate him. I don’t hate Derrida, for example, but fuck a bunch of Lacan, for real. More specifically, I find it extremely difficult to imagine a) a large pool of HS students profitably reading Lacan and b) various teams constructing…valid arguments using elements of Lacanian thought as the building blocks. That the judges would then go so far as to problematize the very notion of winning the debate does seem like some 1991 Literary Theory icing on the cake of HS debate, which is actually a Hollywood Regency-style mirrored vanity, so great is its lack of resemblance to cake. There is none less cake.

Stephenson-quoter-kun! Everyone has misunderstood my objection to the quote. I think you have to read a lot more Stephenson than that to see why it’s objectionable. There is something 30% right enough about it that, when confronted with Lacan, I’m ready to defect to team Stephenson right away, as I said. Truly, as baldly stated, it’s more than 30% right; some things are true, and some false, and the world will become a bad place if everyone were to be by some mysterious means prohibited from assessing other people’s claims and saying, “true! False. False. Also, fuck you.”

Hey wait, where did the fuck you come from? Ah….see? Randy wants to call stuff “bullshit.” He wants to say to people “this is bullshit.” This is actually an impulse quite different from the desire to become…a difference engine or something. This is philosophy as will to power, no? And, again, that isn’t even the worst thing in the world! Do you know when white libertarian bloggers explain in a superior and tedious way how they got where they are now on pure merit? Do you know how you want to reach through the computer screen and stab them in the eye with a sharpened pencil? White libertarian lawyer-blogger guys are an adjacent clade of geek sexists. And Stephenson himself is a tedious, superior crypto-libertarian. So when I hear that quote, I don’t hear the thing with which I quite agree, and which I stated at the top, namely, the practice of philosophy is as decorous as it’s going to get from a certain angle. And that if someone says “the claim on which your whole article is based is false” they might be acting like a smug asshole but they very well also might not! If magically the split were made 50-50, but everyone just went on arguing in the same way…that would be fine!

What I hear when I read that quote is the totally wrong thing, namely: ‘getting into arguments of this kind is probably essentially masculine and women who would like philosophy to be a more welcoming discipline are trying to change the thing we are doing to a less useful thing, some kind of emotional sparkly cooperative thing where you get to braid ponies’ manes and tails, like they do in the English Department.’ No! It’s fine! Say my claims about Russell are false! We’re asking you to stop being sexist assholes, which is different, and attempts to muddy the waters by conflating modes of discourse with (for the most part, although you continue to claim it’s fine if there are 3 women) gender MAKES ME VERY ANGRY. The End.

Francis Spufford: See, I feel like that’s kind of a lame story because I didn’t go out to the end of the crane arm. Is that even definitely one of the top ten most harrowing things I’ve ever done? No, it has to be. That thing was tall as a motherfucker. Mmm (considers). Yes. I’m counting on John’s stolid Norwegian ancestry to keep our daughters alive. That and Singapore’s extraordinarily restrictive trespassing laws, I guess. Hey, do you guys know how steam comes out from underground in New York City randomly, from those huge orange temporary tubes? It’s an ancient central steam heat system linking various sections, like they have in cities in Siberia and stuff, that are now mostly empty but still all heated and lit, glowing in the waste. There’s a place sort of at the lower edge of Riverside Park where it goes eight stories down into the ground! With catwalks around the edges! And these big fucking…Cthulu-summoning engine-looking things in the middle, with dials and levers and…whatever you call the Frankenstein “monster-come-alive” switch. BUT LOTS. Yes, OK, well, me and my friends broke in the first time–not even, some lazy guy had left it propped with a brick so he could take smoke breaks. We reconnoitered, right? Then we a) took acid b) broke in again. It was connected to the IRT! And the reason I risked my life so often as a young person is that in the Environment of Early Adaptation, those of our proto-human ancestors who won arguments about Russell’s theory of descriptions…wait, what?

My ignorance shames me. I had no idea philosophy was such a blood sport. Might I suggest some cage bouts on cable TV? They would provide an alternative to mixed-martial arts and give the profession an needed infusion of money and attention.

Bring on the chessboxers!

Matt @90 – You don’t even have to thread jump. Hector, in the same thread where he’s talking about believing in miracles and the truth of the Bible:

“I would demonstrate that you were wrong by using evidence from biology. This is a fairly clear cut example of how facts are better than identity politics.”

Meritocratic competition actually reinforces various sorts of category discrimination (Tilly). Academia is meritocratic and competitive to the max, philosophy above all. Thus, academia and philosophy reinforce category discrimination. QED.

We are approaching the best possible solution in this world, however. Soon all philosophers will be white antiracist feminist males.

People really should think more about the problems with meritocratic competition, but there is no possible world in which they will actually do so.

Also, I am widely regarded as a joker and a troll, but I am usually right.

I say, even if it goes off in another direction, just make sure it stays interesting and relevant. Entertainment and instruction, said Dr Johnson.

1. A bit of learning about rhetoric might help sort-out the discussion. Philosophers should be aware of the following list. The ways to keep readers interested, or an audience listening, are actually very few. The short list is something like: Humor, storytelling (of course, suspense), playing games or competition or gambling, sex (of course), music, thrills (like an amusement park ride), or an immediate question/problem.

An interesting thing is that, although these all work (as screenwriters know), they are quite different and somewhat mutually exclusive, considered as audience drivers. Not always entirely mutually exclusive, but somewhat. It is as if, they all vie to occupy the same immediate mood-attention space, — and at any one given moment, well, as you know, there is not a lot of room in your head.

Screenwriting teachers always say, “Plot and character!” But they always add: “except if you are writing a comedy.” You are allowed to stop the plot, and tell a joke. If the audience laughs, it works. You are gold!

2. I asked the owner of a used book store at the Venice/Santa Monica border (Angel City Books and Records), “Why do people come in to buy books? What is the list of reasons?” (Because I am interested in audience reasons; institutional directions; in some instances called marketing.) Fascinating, when all put together: Why do people come in to buy books? “Curiosity, something different. Comfort, familiarity, something the same. Shopping experience, reward, change of pace. Need to communicate. Concern, alarm, political impulse, sense of mission. Requirement (for education). Recommended by friend or authority. Spiritual quest, self-help. Aesthetic search. Replace something they don’t have any more. Feel guilty they are not improving themselves, getting soft, not developing their brain, be better in conversation. Need to be different, wear a badge, intellectual status symbol.”

3. The reason I don’t like trolley cases is Trolley cases follow the same logic as consumer choice.

Thus, some of this philosophical discussion is mirrored in the widespread sorry tale of microeconomic preferences.

As a remark out of order, I would expect to find that in times of economic plenty, people are generally are more mirthful. It would be interesting to find out, if utilitarianism spikes upward in public opinion, in the fat years.

But what I really want to point out is: Trolley choice = consumer choice. And they, in turn, are one with heated arguments in philosophical seminars. I want to say, Choice and competition are formally the same kind of thing, though at different systems-levels. “Choice” is a competition within your perception, as if your attention has split momentarily, and now two objects are in view, to choose from. This is the same triangular form as the competition between two business suppliers, who are vying for a contract with a third business, and only one is finally accepted. Same is true of you arguing in a philosophy seminar, in front of an audience that beholds its own group choice, its laudation to be made. To be made, for fun! Anyway competition is diagrammatically similar to choice.

I might call this an “Husserlian epistemological gestalt,” for want of a better crossblabber.

Anyway I think that the trolley problem comes out of a certain psychological habit and nexus which ALSO founds the combined idea of “choice/competition/agon” as the current economic virtue which, it is often said, we should all follow.

Now here is where my own preference comes in. I am historically contingent. I distrust this agonistic and antagonistic impulse strongly, because in a new current way, it is anti-ecological.

I understand the employment of the virtue of “choice and competition” for developing good economic products, and for finally getting rid of duplicative economic efforts that waste natural resources. And all the rest of it.

But I always tend to think also, that “choice/competition/agon” is psychologically childish. It’s fine for athletic contests, but in economic rhetoric it is already feeling a little too cutesy, and I am beginning to find it offensive.

Our current consumer choice-making is being manufactured under the guise of a false scarcity. It made sense when resources were indeed scarce, back in the good old lousy days gone by. “Scarcity” is a contingent condition; it occurred historically, but not at the present time. This scarcity, now, is not justifiable in late modernism, which could be plenty and copious.

And could be plenty and copious within ecological means: by relying upon restyling, softer energy and waste reduction.

If it looks like that restyling may not happen fast enough, then consumer choice may not be enough. Can consumers can become adequately educated about the ecosystemic risks?

Well then, can choice sometimes be dangerous? Choice and competition require a sudden, perhaps momentary, epistemological focus and splitting, but so focused as to be a very, very small part of an N-compartment system. Unfortunately the biggest such system, the biosphere, is now sending very large-scale decision-messages, in other words it is sending general, statistical signals of a pervasive ecological failure, a crash, that lies ahead. But those signals are not getting fractionated quickly enough into the choice mechanism, into all the little epistemological splittings, that are focused within our local living.

What is the real scarcity being economized by a competition, an argument, in a philosophical seminar?

The best philosophy must remain vitally relevant. I love Philly trolley cars, I just saw one. I hate the phony choices, the ridiculous competitions.

Hi John Emerson-sensei! It’s true, you are usually right.

Hmm…first debate, now chess…seems like this thread was set up for me.

Fischer famously said that his favorite moment of the game was not when his opponent resigned, but rather the moment when “his ego cracked” – when the opponent knew he was beaten. In a similar vein Saviely Tartakower, one of the best players of the between-the-wars generation, called chess “the art of struggle”.

Belle at 98 has hit upon a really important point – former World Champion Anatoly Karpov replied to the question “how did you get so good?” with “I had to lose hundreds of games.” Not “play”, but “lose.” I once knew a very successful teacher of young chessplayers who taught his charges that the game could have three results – win, draw, or learn.

I think philosofatty is only partially right in his(?) claim about macho posturing. In my experience (and I was a good enough player to have numerous Grandmaster and International Master scalps before I quit playing seriously) most very top players are rather modest. There’s something about chess wherein the more you know and the better you are the more you realize that you don’t know. The Scottish GM Jonathan Rowson makes this point in “Chess for Zebras” when he points out that the stronger a player is, the less likely s/he is to make definitive judgements about a position. There are a few who come off as genuinely unpleasant people (Gata Kamsky used to be one – don’t know if he’s changed over the last decade or so) and of course Fischer was notorious for his poor behavior (but I’ll contend that Fischer was seriously mentally ill for much of his life, and so should be thought of as sui generis.)

There’s actually a very specific reason that GK was “psyched out” by Deep Blue. In one of the early games of the match it made a move which appeared rather pointless, but then in postgame analysis one of Kasparov’s assistants discovered a “point” to the move waaay off in the future. This caused Kasparov to think “OMG, the beast sees everything” – not a happy frame of mind in which to play. It turned out that Deep Blue hadn’t “seen” the many moves off in the future point at all, so GK’s fear of its omniscience were unjustified.

Perhaps (in response to JH#96) a part of the reason friendly chess is possible is because of the aesthetic aspect of the game. I can remember one game I lost to Igor Ivanov in which he sent his knight on a four-move maneuver that ended with it exactly where it started, so his position was completely unchanged. I, however, had been forced to make a fatal weakening in my pawn chain by the wandering knight, and he then invaded and finished me off pretty quickly. Losing that game cost me a major tournament victory and (by my standards) a lot of money, but I distinctly remember afterwards just being awestruck by the beauty of Igor’s conception, and not at all angry at him for beating me.

Wow, TheSophist, that is really impressive.

Sophist, that’s amazing! With Kasparov, I especially meant to point to how ambient psychological features apparently drove his play after the misjudgment about how far Deep Blue could drill into the decision tree. My admittedly amateurish understanding is that Kasparov was thereafter pretty much overwhelmed by ramifying fear and paranoia, resigning prematurely, perversely attempting to play Karpov’s game, and so on. I’m sure it’s not right to think of this kind of thing as completely normal of chess (or either Bobby Fischer’s macho sociopathy) but I do suspect it’s more normal of both chess and philosophy than the completely antiseptic or “kabuki violence” view of either admits.

Ha those philosophy wrestlers are radical!

I’m with the be-nice-to-Hector crowd, so in a spirit of honest discussion.

Really, I’d strongly encourage you to open your minds, and learn something about biology.

OK, assume I have, you know, a passable acquaintance with evolutionary theory. Even assume that I totally subscribe to all the tropes of evolutionary psychology. Where does that get me? Women are supposed to be better at communicating, sharing ideas and participating in group projects whereas men should have higher spatial capabilities and more propension to competition. As an outsider from the field of philosophy, it is not obvious to me that rotating things in your mind and competing relentlessly are more favorable traits for a career in philosophy than the ability to clearly articulate your thoughts and take into accounts those of your interlocutor. If they are, could that be an indication that there might a problem not with the biology, but with how philosophy s organized?

Yes, it couldn’t possibly be that most women are *happiest* with traditional or semitraditional gender roles.

But see, the problem as I see it is that I’m not sure what the traditional roles are supposed to be anymore. In my country, the typical traditional male jobs up to the 1980s were doctors and lawyers, to the point that there existed many jokes about which sons was to become which. Nowadays, about 60% to 70% of the graduates in these fields are women. So which is it: are law and medicine typically masculine because they are highly competitive (literally in both cases, as a career in these fields depends on success or failure in a very demanding national contest) and require rational thinking or are there typically feminine because they play on the natural abilities of women to negotiate and nurture? More generally, again in my country, there is a higher proportion of women working than of men working (a combination of higher academic success for women and lowest prevalence of disabilities of various kinds). What am I to conclude, especially as the very same country is in the top three of fertility rate in the developed world (so is among the country most preserving that particular traditional role of women) ?

Every once in a while a thread reminds me that some REALLY impressive people post comments here. It is a little humbling but also really cool at the same time.
/Sorry about your girlfriend Mao. They can’t all work out.

Belle @87:

Stephenson-quoter-kun! Everyone has misunderstood my objection to the quote. I think you have to read a lot more Stephenson than that to see why it’s objectionable.

Of the reasons for my misunderstanding, not having read enough Stephenson is not my main problem.

He wants to say to people “this is bullshit.” This is actually an impulse quite different from the desire to become…a difference engine or something. This is philosophy as will to power, no?

OK – as I said, I think Randy is being a jerk in that scene. I think he’s being a jerk not because he wants to assert something, but because he’s over-reaching – he wants to assert knowledge of the consequences of technology based merely on his knowledge of technology itself. He doesn’t recognise the limits of his own knowledge and loses sight of the point at which he starts employing very bad arguments. Even with the narrative voice being basically sympathetic to him, he still makes an ass of himself, and his only real defence is that he was trying to defend someone else and that Kivistik started it.

That said, if you’ve worked in software development for any length of time, the experience of wanting to bluntly correct someone – often your boss – about the basic realities of the technological world is a common occurrence. You really are confronted with an endless stream of other people’s bullshit ideas about how technology works, and accommodating these ideas is actively harmful to one’s own career (they’ll have no compunction in blaming you when things go wrong). So there’s nothing wrong with having a finely-tuned bullshit detector and a willingness to confront the person who sets it off. The consequences of being wrong about technology, viz. expensive things that do not work properly, are serious enough that we probably want people to feel more entitled to call bullshit than less, even though the world rarely rewards one for it. There’s a temptation to just agree with Randy out of sheer identification for that predicament.

In terms of what’s objectionable about the scene, I think you’re making a mistake that is similar to the mistake I used to make when reading it. On my first reading, I thought that it was about how Randy was right – being, after all, the one who actually knew about technology, and that being the topic of discussion – and that Charlene’s friends were idiots whose fuzzy, relativistic, ‘academic’way of thinking prevented them from realising how ignorant they are. Ha, what a bunch of pointless pomo time-wasters!

But then I spent another six or so years talking to people like that, and they’re not imbeciles (well, not all of them, anyway). So on my second reading, it was all much more ambiguous. It becomes much more apparent that Randy is over-reaching, and that he cares more about making a point and staking out his territory than he does about finding the truth, and really he’s just trying to get at Charlene anyway. Dr. Kivistik is actually asking some decent questions and could be engaged with. Most of the people at the table are just decent people with valid intellectual concerns, and Randy’s dismissal of them is a sign of his immaturity. Randy’s still an avatar of patriarchal discourse, but now he looks like he might be wrong. In fact, he ends the debate looking like a complete tit. If you started out identifying with Randy, this makes you quite uncomfortable.

Then I read it again, and it becomes apparent that Kivistik is every bit as much an asshole as Randy is. Nobody in that discussion is practicing a “feminine” mode of discourse at all – it’s all in Randy’s head[1]; if Kivistik is implicitly laying claim to a more broad-minded approach to the matter at hand, he’s doing so falsely and for entirely self-serving reasons. His disagreements with Randy are almost entirely ad-hominem attacks on Randy’s background, dismissing his genuine technical knowledge as mumbo-jumbo designed to protect technocratic privilege; he plays for laughs, he mocks, he insinuates bad faith at every opportunity, and other people around the table happily join in. This is an asshole mode of discourse. The notion of patriarchal vs. feminine modes of discourse is actually bullshit, which both sides are using as cover to deploy specious arguments against each other. I think you might be reading it in such a way that you accept the patriarchal vs. feminine thing as a thing that Stephenson really believes in, which is what I believed the first time round but now seriously doubt. I think the lesson is that the distinction doesn’t really exist.

Of course, one can only spot that Kivistik is being an asshole after learning that there are good ways of arguing the kind of positions that he takes. One can talk about privilege without using it as a means of silencing people one dislikes, and one can ask awkward questions about the consequences of technology without being a reactionary or a troll. If you didn’t know that, you might assume that the arguments themselves are bad, that Kivistik’s entire intellectual project is bullshit, and so on. Of course, a lot of people don’t know that, especially if they’re doing their learning on the internet, where Randy and Kivistik would be among the more reasonable participants. Seriously, this explains a lot about online debates about sexism; the next time you read someone complaining about how feminism is just a project to undermine their perfectly rational ways of doing things, remember that their main experience of anti-male-supremacism is of the Dr. Kivistik variety. (Not that I’m pleading sympathy for them, really, but a non-trivial portion of these people just don’t know any better).

Here’s the thing, for me. From a distance, the libertarian lawyer guys all look the same, and look pretty damn similar to the geek sexists (adjacent clades and all that). But from that distance I am pretty hard to distinguish from the geek sexists (after all, it seems that my most notable feature is that I quote Neal Stephenson!); I share a massive amount of cultural DNA with them, have many of the same formative experiences and am generally only distinguished from them at all by the fact that when it came time to decide whether one should care about being sexist, I decided to care[2]. That’s (via a long and convoluted chain of events) why I’m here having this conversation rather than, say, posting snarky comments on Hacker News (though I do my fair share of that). But when you’re starting in my position, Neal Stephenson is one of the good guys, because his novels do actually question the premise that being a technical genius automatically qualifies one for anything else, or that technical genius entitles you to a greater say in matters outside of technology. This might not mean much if your life and self-image were not built around a specific kind of technical mastery, but it’s a pretty important lesson for people whose lives are. To put it another way, identifying with Randy Waterhouse is probably an improvement over identifying with, I dunno, Raistlin Majere or something.

[1] Ah, but all that stuff about patriarchy is in the narrative, not in Randy’s head, right? That’s not his voice telling us about these things, it’s Stephenson informing us about them as if they’re meant to be true. Having read a lot of Stephenson, I’d disagree with anyone who argues this: his narratives often follow the perspective of whoever happens to be the lead character at a given point, to encourage the reader to see things from that character’s perspective. I don’t think Stephenson is arguing that Randy-the-ignorant-geek-sexist has a correct grasp on the world, I think he’s doing a very good job of demonstrating how those people think. In fact, it’s an excellent portrayal of exactly that, and how those people can end up saying the kinds of things they do without realising what this makes them look like to others, or what it really means when applied to the world outside of their immediate knowledge.

[2] I’m not sure why. I think it does come from having debated with a lot of pretty smart feminists online, to be honest. I have a bit of Hirschman’s propensity to self-subversion too, and maybe that’s necessary.

Thanks Victoria, but the personal anecdote was there just to illustrate the point. We all are affected by traditional gender roles; social being determines consciousness. If men are guilty of reenforcing stereotypes, women are just as guilty. Make sure nice guys don’t finish last, and you’ll see nicer guys.

Whatever behavior women (in general) encourage is the behavior they are likely to see more of (in general). One of those ‘freakonomics’ things.

Between an appearance by Emerson-sensai, Belle on a crane, and TheSophist revealing his chess bonafides, not to mention Holbo tossing buckets of cold water on HSC, this has got to be one of the most artistic CT discussions ever.

I hereby nominate it for the Artistic Thread of the Year Award and I appoint Michael Bérubé as competition judge. Why? Because no blog cranked out threads of beauty like ye olde American Airspace. Those were the days my friend, and dammit they came to an end!

Some thoughts about philosophy and chess:
One big difference is that in chess there are certain positions (and certain classes of positions) which are soluble, and the advent of computer analysis has greatly increased the size of that set. Imagine how philosophy would be impacted if (eg) Kantian deontology was proven irrefutably to be the best way to think about ethics. Chess is perhaps scientific in a way that philosophy isn’t, in that knowledge does actually advance.

I think that chess is currently going through a postmodern moment in that many of the claims that were being made about philosophy in the 60s (“there are no meta-narratives”) are being made about chess now; the best authors writing about chess today (the American John Watson and the Dutchman Willy Hendricks are two examples) have dedicated excellent books to essentially deconstructing the rules (not rules as in “this is how the knight moves”, but rules such as “make your king safe by castling early”) that we all grew up with. Instead they advocate a “rule-independent” way of thinking in which the concrete (and contingent) characteristics of a position far outweigh any “rules” that might apply to the position. A favorite example of this is a Shirov-Kramnik game (both are world-class Grandmasters) in which Kramnik made 13 of his first 14 moves with pawns (develop your pieces and avoid unnecessary pawn moves in the opening” is one of the very first rules a beginner learns) and won in less than 30 moves (a very quick win by GM standards.) I once played a game against Yasser Seirawan (the top US player of the mid-80s through mid-90s) in which I moved the same pawn twice in the first three moves. (1.c4 Nf6 2.Nc3 e6 3.e4 e5, if anyone is interested.) When we were analysing after the game (Yasser is a good example of what I said before about top players being kind and modest – he is always extraordinarily generous with his time and energy looking at games with lesser players) he didn’t condemn this at all – it would have been easy just to say “you shouldn’t move the same guy twice in the opening”, but instead he weighed the concrete plusses and minuses of the move (which, by the way, probably isn’t very good, but was tried by a few Grandmasters in later games.)

Also interesting, I think, is that both went through crises of a sort in the 1920s. At about the same time that Wittgenstein was declaring philosophy (kinda sorta) solved Capablanca (who once went nine years without losing a game) was saying the same thing about chess.

A great Capablanca anecdote, by the way: He was sitting in a cafe in Paris doing some analysis on a board. A patron of the cafe saw this and challenged him to a game. Capa accepted, set up the board and then removed his own queen (“odds-giving” was then an accepted way of equalizing the chances between mismatched opponents. Today time odds – I get 3 minutes on my clock, you get 7 – are used instead.) This perturbed his opponent. “Sir, you do not know who I am. Why, I might beat you.” “Sir”, responded the Cuban genius, “If you might beat me, I would know who you were.” :)

A problem that chess and philosophy share is the over-representation of men at the top. There is exactly one woman (Hungarian Judit Polgar) in the world’s top 100 players. Lots of ink has been spilled on why this is so, but definitely a part of the answer is that it’s hard (for many of the reasons stated about philosophy by Belle and others throughout this thread) for women to stay around. One solution to this (which I’ve never been comfortable with – it reeks of patriarchal condescension to me) has been the creation of women-only tournaments. Interestingly, the strongest female student I ever had back in the days when I was teaching chess absolutely refused to play in such things with the one exception of when she was representing the US at the world youth championships and got a free trip to Spain out of the deal. I’d be interested in feedback from folks about this – are women’s tournaments a justifiable attempt to create a safe space, or are they a little too “well, you’re not really good enough to compete with us, so here’s your own little sandbox to go play in”?

Thanks for giving me a chance to put out some thoughts that have been floating around my head for a while, and thanks for some of the kind words various folks have had for my contributions to the thread. ’tis appreciated.

I just re-read the scene in Cryptonomicon. I’m not as sure as Rob-sempei about whose point of view the scene is (ultimately) written from–it has to be written from a point of view, right? Otherwise why have novels? We could instead just have lyrical meditations on metaphysics and morals. Or you could just read the Bible. (Here. “The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.” That’s about this year’s undergraduate superstar, no?) Anyway, I’m sure we’re all agreed that Neal Stephenson isn’t writing Scripture, so . . .

So there’s Jon, “another faculty spouse.” Jon tries to have a conversation with Kivistik, and Randy (who thinks Kivistik is trying to steal his fiance) wakes up from a daydream to hear what he thinks is Kivistik pounding on Jon. Randy jumps in to defend Jon and attracts withering attention in his own right, which he can’t answer and doesn’t know how to deflect. This really doesn’t show Randy in a good light. First, he misunderstands what’s going on between Kivistik and Jon. Second, his comment–“It’s a metaphor, dammit!”–is as dismissive of Jon as it is to Kivistik, and Kivistik rightly argues that it is not a metaphor, and Randy has shown from the beginning that he’s not worth (in Kivistik’s opinion) Kivistik’s time to argue with. Finally, Randy is shown to be (1) privileged as the scion of an academic family, (2) born into a genealogical clan of scientists and mathematicians and with no right to talk about social questions except by pretending to be a technocrat, and (3) born into a declining</b clan of scientists (mathematician begets engineer begets untenured astronomer become hacker). Everything that happens shows reality trying to beat Randy down, or to beat some sense into him. But because this is a novel (not a tract for leading a monk or nun through the steps of repentance), the reader should feel some empathy for Randy and wonder whether this is all quite fair.

(My bit about Randy being a poser isn't quite fair. Stephenson is very clear that the character recognizes the existence of more accomplished people than himself and doesn't expect the reader to idealize Randy just because he's the main character. And he is also very careful, especially in later books, to try to be aware of gender issues, whether or not I agree with how he does it. If you're looking for squick in Cryptonomicon, the scenes with Randy's grandfather where he's kind of being led on by Alan Turing are a teeny bit hard to read, IMHO, for example.)

John,

“from our respective armchairs there isn’t much to do except report our personal impressions, which aren’t automatically representative of the profession.”

True, I can’t claim that my experience is representative, but you’re cheating a bit here by implying our respective positions are symmetrical. I made a weaker claim: I simply rejected your strong claim about what’s normal across the profession, while acknowledging that your experience may apply in some places and cases, not all. Personal experience is perfectly support for a counterexample to a generalization–it’s only in favor of such generalizations that it becomes inadequate.

“But – here we get to the conflation – you are crossing this issue with disciplinary policing and harsh criticism, which is something else…This happens in all disciplines and has nothing to do with the style of philosophy, per se.”

Okay, but I think my claim is precisely that philosophy often conflates or confuses the two: that philosophers seem to do more policing than others, and, more importantly, that they often claim they’re critiquing when they’re really boundary policing.

And while it happens in all disciplines, I think it happens more in philosophy. My interdisciplinary research means frequent contact with art, English and poli sci people, and I don’t find it comparable in other fields. Philosophical style seems harsher, seems to intend to be harsher and, more often seems to be received that way. More importantly, in other fields they seem to know better when they’re trying to be harsh and when they’re not, when they’re policing the boundaries of the game and when they’re playing the game within those boundaries.

Of course, I can’t argue for these generalizations on the grounds of my personal experience, I can only ask others to recheck their own and try to see it in a new light or notice what they may have overlooked. And, by speaking up for the alternate experience, encourage those who’ve had it to speak up too.

Brendan,
I should say that my first reading was a lot like yours and Rob’s (or would have been if I’d read the book ten years earlier), though my second and third thoughts moved in a slightly different definition than Rob’s did. (I hope there’s room for more than one interpretation, otherwise I’d find it as annoying as Belle does “white libertarian bloggers [who] explain in a superior and tedious way how they got where they are now on pure merit.”)

I meant that Kivistik does not see “information superhighway” as metaphor and that’s why he jumps on what Randy says (when Randy interrupts Jon to “help” him see that he didn’t want to make polite objections like “you don’t really believe there are onramps that are causing the destruction of slums where people live,” but what Jon really wanted was to see that Kivistik was using a metaphor–tho I could be persuaded that I need to read the passage again) and why the conversation then focuses on Randy’s beliefs about qualifications and Randy’s self-image.

I’m not sure what your point is wrt “technocrat.”

Mao

Are you implying she left you because of the chess loss?

“Are you implying she left you because of the chess loss?”

That was my understanding.

Someday I’ll read Snow Crash but right now all I know is what Richard Rorty wrote about it (together with Silko’s Almanac of the Dead):

In Achieving Rorty makes a distinction between an earlier generation of socialist novels–The Jungle, An American Tragedy, and The Grapes of Wrath–and a second generation, Snow Crash and Almanac of the Dead. The earlier generation represent hope based on the possibility of transformation “necessary because the rise of industrial capitalism had made the individualist rhetoric of America’s first century obsolete” (Achieving 8). The second generation are “descriptions of what America will be like in the twenty-first century… written in tones of either self-mockery or of self-disgust” (Achieving 4) and symptomatic of the critical immobility of the late-twentieth-century intellectual. In Snow Crash, Rorty’s example of “self-mockery,” government gives way to business in an America in which the market has become all-powerful. Rorty notes that this novel capitalizes on the belief that corporations and government “now make all the important decisions” (5). In Almanac of the Dead, a work of “self-disgust,” racial-ethnic identities become the focus rather than consumer society. The white race is seen as a plague whose destiny is to be squelched by the descendants of the America’s native peoples in the riotous chaos of the collapse of the US government.

In other words, Rorty complains, Stephenson isn’t writing from a Left perspective, because the Left doesn’t–or didn’t in the early 1990s–believe that corporations and government make all the important decisions.

Most humane, civilized people in the US spend a fair amount of attention on finding ways to ameliorate the ill effects of the competitiveness of American society, but this is nickel and dime stuff. Until the society is structured on a less competitive basis, these ill effects will always be there to some degree.

Complaining about how bloodthirsty competitors rise to the top in philosophy, few of them women, is only slightly less silly than complaining about how football players and boxers all seem to be brutes.

Women actually do far better in philosophy than they do in pro football! So it’s not as bad as people are saying. But nonetheless, the people who rise to the top will normally be brutes there too, albeit with less upper body strength. Mark Gastineaus of the mind (look him up). It’s still the law of the jungle, devil take the hindmost, root hog or die, just differently configured.

As a non-competitive or anti-competitive male I do pick up on that trait in others, and more than once I’ve sniffed out the same high-testosterone quality in academics that I have previously encountered among small businessmen, salesmen, athletes,petty criminals, and the like.

Would it be terrible of me to point out that Ukrainian women are by far the best female players in the world? (They won the women’s world team championships by a ridiculous margin a few months ago.)

I came here to post what Andrew did @112 but since he already did I won’t.

I am hostile and abusive when require, which is often, but not competitive. A close look at my resume will show neither success nor failure, just hostility and abuse.

Competition is zero-sum, and philosophy is competitive, and anything good anyone gets is something someone else doesn’t get.

I’m not a careerist.

There’s a joke in Zhuangzi. A phoenix, a legendarily pure bird, encounters a owl flying along with a decomposing rat in its claws. The owl hisses fiercely at the phoenix, who says “Don’t worry, I’m not trying to steal your dead rat.”

This isn’t really about niceness and personal character, but about a competitive zero-sum system where everyone wants the same thing. (“We both wanted the same thing — Paris”, from French history). Every winner creates losers. Women need to know that that’s the game their in, no matter how nice everyone seems to be. I am not claiming niceness for myself.

Besides ruthless aggression and conniving, of course, careful networking and stroking are required.

If not Nozick, who is the Gastineau of professional philosophy? I am, of course, porrly informed on the topic.

Hey John, you lured Emerson-sensei back onto our blog. Don’t fuck this up, man! Stephenson-Quoter-kun: my original exclamation point there was merely one of happiness and joy that you had changed your nym because that’s killer, and also it made my children happy. Usually they just come in the room and look at me somewhat dubiously and say, “mommy, why are you arguing with someone on the internet?” Unfortunately, the times when I am able to say, “silly child, I’m not arguing with anyone!” are few. I am aware that you must, of course, have read loads of Stephenson, because otherwise your handle would be ridiculous, and anyway you wouldn’t have a favorite Stephenson quote. The “you have to have read more Stephenson was directed at other people who seemed to be thinking the wrong thing about braiding ponies’ manes in the English Department. I am…willing to consider your interpretation of the scene. Truthfully, I read the book quite a while ago, so maybe I have a wrong impression of Randy generally. I can also well believe that Stephenson is, relatively speaking, one of the good guys, while still seeming to me like an annoying crypto-libertarian. And, as I say, I largely agree with Randy sensu stricto, it’s just that my view of both Stephenson and (sorry dudes, I still love y’all) programmers that talk smack about how they’re the only ones making the world work colors my interpretation of the quote.

In short, what is required is carefully calibrated niceness and not-niceness as the situation demands, disciplined by the ultimate goal of tenure. And you are correct that I have adequate not-niceness but am deficient in the niceness component. But my point is institutional, structural, and sociological, and not about personal character.

And my general point, that it isn’t just philosophy but the whole goddamn way of life, stands. I’m just saying that philosophy doesn’t affirm the way of life, but it damn well is part of it and not at all without its dark side.

Competitive careerism is damn near the law of life in these parts. Do women in philosophy think “we’re all in this together”, seeking truth or whatever.,. Because that’s not true. People care who gets the A and who gets the recommendation and who gets into the #1 school and who gets tenure. And every philosophy student is competing with every other philosophy student. And if you can eliminate a competitor by bullying, or ridicule, or subtle intimidation, or not listening, or condescension, or “psych”, you will. It’s not even calculated, it’s just how that kind of thing works. Zero-sum. It’s not specifically about philosophy, or academia. It’s just about success. Few in grad school went there in order to become “that intersting street person with a PhD”, or that interesting middle management guy with a PhD.

Rob@27 – “I think that software engineering is an interesting example because there is a clear trend towards greater subjectivity as the physical constraints on computer technology have receded. Back in the age of the Randy Waterhouse-style hacker, computing power was a very scarce resource and if your code ran more efficiently that the other person’s, you were right and they were wrong.”

I truly doubt the existence of any such golden age of programming except in people’s memories given the evidence of terabytes of unuseable legacy code that needs rescue – the authors were resource constrained, but so what ? One thing that’s conspicuous in all this talk of Randy Waterhouse style prowess is the absence of an actual example to substantiate it and instead this appeal to mystical abilities of objectivity that were apparently prevalent in the old days. In fact, it reminds of the Asimov quip – “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”

John Emerson-sensei, and indeed everyone: it’s obvious I like academic philosophy precisely because I like getting in fights with people. It cuts against the “non-personal, un-attatched to the argument, purely a game” point a little, I think?

Stephenson-Quoter-kun: the funny thing is that I love The Diamond Age the best in the world, it’s seriously one of my like top 20 favorite SF books, although it has one of the most FAIL endings ever. But everything else…meh. I liked Zodiac more than Snow Crash. I read the first two of his billion-page trilogy and then I was just like, whatever this pirate dude, I have literally zero fucks to give. Also, dude, don’t write about either childbirth or breastfeeding. Especially breastfeeding. I mean I guess a guy could, theoretically, and there’s one part he gets right so it’s touching but then he also gets things wrong and you’re like, “why don’t you stick to irrational markets in cowrie shells or something, and in return I’ll read the next quadrillion pages. Deal?”

“there would be a lot of delusional PhD candidates around”

Sounds about right.

I think it’s pretty easy to detect if someone makes an argument driven by competitiveness, vanity or job prospects and such motivators generally are detrimental to the quality of discourse. I’m not saying that people who argue a point motivated by a genuine interest in the subject matter have to be ego-less saints, but they will display a different way of communicating with others and the discourse will be helped by that.

I don’t know how one can expect to motivate undergraduates to study philosophy if the assumption underlying academic discourse is that it is driven by secondary factors wholly unrelated to the actual subject matter – how can they trust their teachers and their field?

I don’t think genuine interest is, by itself, a motive to argue points. I think any argument is ego-driven; some of the ego-driven debaters have more intelligence and genuine interest, others less. That makes a difference. But the humble ones, they don’t argue. They read, they listen.

I’m sure she’s too old and/or not good-looking enough.

“I’m sure she’s too old and/or not good-looking enough.”

How can we be sure until we try?

This is coming a bit late but in reply to John Emerson (welcome back!) and echoing John Holbo, I think that relatively few people who enter PhD programs are canny enough to be very careerist about it at first. We tend to be just very into a particular subject and also attracted by an idealized and mostly nonexistent picture of what academic life is like.

In my own case, for instance, the cutthroat devil take the hindmost nature of the profession sort of snuck up on me while I was busy running simulations and doing experiments. By the time you find yourself in the thunderdome style competition for TT positions, grants & etc., sunk costs (and a good dose of either determination or stupidity, depending on how you look at it) keep you going. And of course (speaking as someone who recently got tenure) the job of tenured professor is a nice gig indeed if you can get it.

I did my PhD back in the 90s. Given that the high stakes hunger games type competitiveness in every aspect of life has increased since then, maybe current PhD students are more realistic/cynical about things.

@John Holbo: “… most philosophers aren’t careerists. They’re happy to get any job and, mostly, stick it out wherever they can stick. The profession isn’t very fluid, when it comes to changing jobs, except for a few high fliers. And most people in the profession know they aren’t going to be those.”

I’m guessing that’s pretty much true of most academics. Getting “any” job can be brutal, and I really don’t know what life is like for PhD’s stuck in permatemp positions. Trying to get to the bottom of the tenure-track pole is brutal for those who are still trying (I don’t know how many are simply resigned to permatemping), and getting tenure may be brutal for those who make it to the bottom of some pole somewhere. Once you’ve got tenure, things can change. Unless you’ve been anointed a high flier or aspire to such.

That’s a brutal cut-throat game. Which is why you keep hearing about this or that person at a good place (e.g. Mark Hauser at Harvard, a real high-flier) fudging and faking data) and any number of folks publishing more or less the same paper three or four times a year for several years running. And now that there’s such a thing as experiment philosophy, I guess philosophical high-fliers can get in on the data faking action.

That is to say, under what circumstances, if any, is the pursuit of knowledge in an academic institution merely a means to the end of racking up career points? When a researcher fakes data, is that what they’ve done? Or could it be that they really believe the idea that is being advanced with the fake data? That is, it’s one thing to fake the data without giving a crap, it’s another thing to fake data in favor of an idea you really believe. I have no idea how many data fakers fall into those two bins. And, it’s not obviously the case that not faking data is a sure index of pure intent.

And then we have those of us in fields where there’s really no data to fake. But there’s always plagiarism.

Hey, my connection was lost last night.

Gastineau was a red herring, actually. Shouldn’t have mentioned him, though I think that Nozick was a pretty good comparison (ask Brad DeLong). He was an outlier even in football.

Imagine, then that David Brooks endows a chair in Niceness and Consideration at Harvard which pays whatever is a good salary at that level. There would be many seeking the position. Some would be lifelong nice considerate people with a deep commitment to niceness and consideration. Others would be less nice or not nice people who though that they’d be able to work up the topic in a hurry (after all, this would be a pioneering field).

But then suppose that the application was put in tournament form, with say 64 applicants competing one on one in ingeniously-designed niceness contests (written test and driving test) and going through the rounds to 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and then finally the niceness champion.

My guess is that whoever won would be someone who had enough non-niceness to stick the knife in when necessary, and that some of the losers would be whining that the winner was not really very nice at all.*

So anyway, however nice the philosophers-to-be in the pool originally were, the competitive process tends to reward all kinds of things, and competitive people are capable of sabotaging competitors with all kinds of little tricks even if they don’t do it quite consciously.

* Or maybe a round-robin tournament, this is all just in the early planning stages. And probably the chair should be at the University of South Carolina, where ante-bellum courtesy sill reigns. Or maybe Iowa.

And i was going to say: Leiter Report. Looks like it’s for career planning.

“Everyone look to your left and then to your right. By the end of the program, one of you will be run over by a trolley car.”

“Main Street Muse: have you ever considered becoming a professional blogger? They have this sort of “I am Andrew Brietbart” template you can use to set up one of the blogs even if you are not particularly computer-literate. I think it’s likely you have a lot to offer. However, if I had it all to do over again, I would change to a more gender-neutral “handle” or “online nick-name” as they are often called. Naturally women are every bit as capable of blogging as men are, but because of all the activism feminism has pushed down our throats in recent years, many readers are likely to think of you as an “affirmative action hire” to the net if you stick with this one. Just my two cents.”

To Belle Waring – wow – you are one self-satisfied woman! I am indeed computer literate, though you assume otherwise (gender-bias is ugly when women trash other women.)

And if I, as “Main Street Muse” is an “affirmative action hire” – what does that make you? Wife of man who thinks women need affirmative action to be philosophers? Spare me the bullshit, please…

Re: I’m sure she’s too old and/or not good-looking enough.

Confidence is important in improving your success in the dating market, Mao.

Lord Chesterfield, Guicciardini, Machiavelli, Francis Bacon. Seriously. How to survive in a snake pit. How to end up on the island.

I could have said this 20 years ago. I welcome Chris’s support. It happens to be true, and a lot of people are in denial.

Chris Hayes has an unfortunate physical resemblance to a Nazi movie villain, specifically the poetry-quoting SS man.

“I do not think that philosophers as a group are more awful than other successful, entitled meritocrats”

But successful entitled meritocrats have an unfortunate propensity to awfulness.

Well, time is expiring. Later. I am actually planning a more systematic development, using Tilly and others.

Main Street Muse: I was only being sarcastic and semi-literate in jest because I so strongly disagreed with you that my initial instinct was to say something very angry when I wrote that last bit there. I aver complete faith in your ability to set up a blog without any stupid right-wing assistance at all.

Hector: I actually like Singapore quite well, saving that it is so far from my family. And this is a huge thing because I love my family a lot and hate not seeing them all the time. I’m certain it would drive John crazy (because my family is crazy, also, how not?) but I would be perfectly happy to buy the house next to my mom’s in Takoma Park, MD and live there permanently, stipulating that we had the money. (Although, if we’re going to stipulate we have the money we might as well live next to my Uncle Jon and Aunt Candy in both NYC and East Hampton and then just have my mom and sister come live with us. If we’re getting hypothetical about our house-purchasing abilities.) Needless to say, I have already broken into, defaced, etc. quite a sufficiency of buildings, likewise broken (does not bother to count but I never killed anybody you guys. I might of thought about it but that was totally. Legit.) a sufficient number of laws to last me a good while, and I have no desire or need to form a political party that Singapore’s government might feel exacerbated racial or religious tensions in any way, and I am able to vote in U.S. elections, so Singapore’s relatively restrictive laws are not having any impact on me that is negative. In fact, I get all the upsides: it’s perfectly clean, there’s almost no street crime, there’s amazing public transit–I live in Sim City, basically, but a Sim City in which there is the best South Indian cooking in the world. BECAUSE in South India there is the tiny problem that many or all of the raw things (like in raitas or chopped salads or whatever) are likely to make you very ill indeed but by contrast, in Singapore, even the smallest food stall has a government food safety inspector coming around at random to say–“hey, when did you last clean that chopping block!?” and then slapping a rating on the front. And certainly there are many South Indian immigrants in Europe or the US who have lovely inspected restaurants, but they don’t have instant access to every fresh ingredient that is called for. “Are you sure your neighbor, who serves meat, has never borrowed that thing ever?” “Is that reeally halal, really? We’re calling our inspector-imam right now to check, you know.*” *actual thing.

Belle Waring,

I’m South Indian by ethnicity (minus about 3% Scottish heritage). what are your favourite dishes?

You might be surprised, what with the influx of subcontinentals one has access to most Indian spices and such nowadays in the US. though not fresh fruits and vegetables of course.

What was your dissertation going to be on, before you moved to Singapore?

Well, I was more referring to the late Soviet Union (like 1980s) where it was possible in theory to be a non-communist, though you would pay a social and professional price for doing so.

Stephenson-quoter-kun@186 – “Back when I was starting out, the people I looked up to were those like Michael Abrash, who wrote books like this about how to write code that is objectively faster/more efficient than the next person’s. Nowadays, I think such knowledge is becoming less relevant”

I’d say it’s still as relevant as ever, it’s just that the Abrash/Henry Warren stuff represents a corpus of solved problems – nowadays one expects the VM or the compiler or the firmware, utility library, the cloud, whatever to do all (ok, not all) that sort of optimisation and that’s not even taking into account improved processor speeds, memory, graphics cards, dedicated asic’s and on and on. It does not mean that “more efficient” is irrelevant or subjective because people worry less about word boundary alignment and all that. It’s a very objectively measurable state of affairs when the Obamacare website crashes. It’s not just noumenal when the VP engineering demands to know why the ATM network is running slow.
Anyhoo, i’d better stop now before a thread derail.

Belle @208,
Pardon my OT quibbling, but am I right to assume that you meant that *historically* “John could in principle be a famous commenter on the Torah, but not me”? As an across-the-board statement about contemporary Judaism this is inaccurate. This untrue of Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements certainly, but even to a (admittedly much lesser) degree of *some* Orthodox communities, where women have become recognized scholars despite being barred from formal Rabbinic training.

BBloom, I meant historically, yes. Like in Poland in the 1800s or something.

I want to partly retract my earlier concession that philosophers are not especially prone to careerist meritocratic misbehavior. The argumentative nature of philosophy tends to make it more tournament-like. Other specialties do argue, among other things, but argument isn’t the very core of the discipline. (Rorty called analytic philosophers “technicians of argument” or something like that). And philosophy has a very high sense of its own worth, and a very strong commitment to a kind of purism, and I think that its exclusionary tendencies might make the field somewhat more vicious than most. However, I still concede that not all philosophers are Mark Gastineaus, and not even most.

@S-q-kun: “…and I think we’re just starting to learn about how to build effective communities around shared software. ” I’m mostly doing this to fix it in my mind. But the idea of building communities around shared software is something I find intrinsically interesting.

This thread reminds me of another fun story about a family member I shall call Philosopher Dude.
As a non philosopher, I had sat in on a few of Philosopher Dude’s lectures, which was all very fine and unremarkable. One day he was giving a seminar in a little room at Trades Hall of all places, which was advertised, and I thought it would be fun to come along and listen.
After Philosopher Dude had made his introductory remarks a middle-aged man with a European accent piped up with “That’s really such a load of horseshit!” or something similar.
As someone employed in an IT department where big egos often went head to head, this seemed a little extreme even by my standards. Afterwards I said “wasn’t that guy a little OTT?” “Oh,” he said sunnily, “Not unusual in philosophy seminars.”

Re: Yes I was sort of wondering about Bengali but didn’t check…but what are the other non-IE Dravidian languages?

Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam in that order, are the main ones (the four that are big enough to have official status at the state level). Tulu along the Mangalore coast, and the languages of the Gonds in central India have a couple million speakers each, and then there are a lot of small tribal languages scattered mostly through southern and eastern India. Brahui in Pakistan is a Dravidian exclave, with another two million or so speakers.

About 2-3% of the Indian population, mostly tribal peoples in the east or northeast, speaks neither IE nor Dravidian languages, they speak either languages related to Vietnamese and Cambodian (e.g. Khasi, in the northeast) or to Tibetan (e.g. Tripuri in the northeast).

Or to put it differently, people in grad school should be thinking of the extinction die-off from the beginning, and some of them probably are.

Actually, medical students are famously competitive in a bad way, things like sabotaging research projects and cutting key sections out of library books. I doubt that philosophers are that bad. College Republicans are famous for ratfucking one another, and I feel confident that philsophers are not as bad as College Republicans. Nonetheless, zero sum.

Please, John. I’m donating my time. I’m like a lifer intern. That’s not a career.

And it’s a zero-sum competition with stakes, with winners and losers, and in our society people understand competition and they compete. I had a friend in graduate phil at Texas (which was a top ten school at the time), a guy. He said people in his program could tell pretty much from the beginning who the winners and losers would be, just by watching interactions with faculty, and the winners tended to be well-connected (i.e., undergrad students of people with connections).

One of the problems with trying to get any kind of equality (gender, racial, any kind) in employment is that people compete for the good jobs, and if one person gets a job, everyone else doesn’t get it. So while every single male philosophy grad student might be 100% in favor of gender equality in principle, when it comes down to him personally vs. some “her” he’s unlikely to fold up and let her have the job.

I sort of agree that I am not able to predict/explain the sore thumb question: why does a strongly feminist discipline have so few women working in it? But I think I’m in the ball park, and I think that competitive “psyche” (intimidation) is a part of it.

To Belle – I find it difficult to understand how you could be become “very angry” at the idea that it really should take more than “a few assholes” to drive women out of a field. I myself have not worked with ladies so laden with fear of “a few assholes” that they stopped pursuing their dream. The rules of academia remain a mystery to me…

I’m at a loss what’s offended you so much John Emerson

“You’re at a loss to why someone might be offended by bullshit about how sissy women in philosophy must be if they’re being repelled by aggressive practices?”

Well, from my reading, MSM was simply saying that the idea women would be put of ‘that easily’ doesn’t really match his/her experience of women in the workplace, and to argue they would comes quite close to reinforcing sexist tropes. (? I might be reading to much into that ?)
That would have been my experience as well, I have to say, from any workplace I’ve been in. I mean, a lot of *people* don’t like aggressive workplaces (I could do without them) so has there been any evidence that this falls overwhelmingly along gender lines?
If not then what’s the problem with MSM’s point?

And it’s not just Alcibiades, in two different places he makes military service his criterion. Manly young men are good soldiers and really attractive, sissies are terrible soldiers and only attractive to decadents. Manly couples make the best soldiers of all (The Theban Band).