Look Like Flies

While we all wonder what is going to happen in Iran, a trivial question: what are single quotes for?

I just got my Plato book [yes, you can read the whole thing!] ms. back from Pearson for final-final-final corrections and it’s clear the proofreader is not a philosopher. That’s actually not a bad thing, since it means fresh eyes about some things. One thing I’m not sure about: I’m being told not to use single-quotes. Since there are a number of places where I definitely need them for use-mention purposes, I’m going to have to put my foot down. This probably means I should announce to the reader what the convention is. But then I have to state it and, the truth is, I also use ‘scare quotes’ – single-quotes to indicate that there’s something questionable or problematic about a term or phrase. There are a few bits where I briefly conjure a bit of hypothetical dialogue and use single quotes to make it look more speech-like. Looking at all these red marks, I gotta clean up my act. Maybe the proper thing to do is restrict myself to necessary use-mention uses and don’t use the things for anything else. What is your preference, if any? (I don’t mean just about my book. In general. What are single-quotes for?)

Have you seen this piece in the Boston Review? “Anti-semitism and the financial crisis”. I honestly don’t know what to make of it and would like your sober opinion. Kindly keep non-sober opinions to yourself, however. The internet already has more of those than it can consume locally.

Basically, a weirdly high number of responses to “How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?” were in the ‘moderate’ to ‘a great deal’ range. 32% of Democrats and 18% of Republicans ‘blame the Jews’ at least moderately for the financial crisis. I realize there is such a thing as the crazification factor. But that’s still pretty high. (I’m guessing the Republican numbers are lower in part because high numbers of them don’t actually admit there’s a crisis. They might be more willing to blame the Jews if it were made clear that they weren’t thereby committed to conceding the existence of the thing the blame is for. But that’s just an unscientific guess.)

The weird thing, of course, is that people are willing to go with ‘the Jews’ as a cohesive, mass-noun sort of designation. In part, people must be responding the way they do on the basis of a vague awareness that there are lots of Jewish names in the stories about the financial crisis. Bernie Madoff, for example. That is, they are saying: among those responsible (if we assume those at the top of the financial world are responsible) there were a number of Jews. Yes. But suppose you asked people whether to blame ‘the Jews’ for all the bad movies Hollywood keeps making. All the vaguely unfunny romantic comedies that keep being inflicted on innocent Americans – on Mainstreet, if you will. Look at the lists of producer and executive names on these productions. See any Jewish names? I’ll bet you see a couple. I like my Blame The Jews For Unfunny Romantic Comedies as premise for a Mel Brooks movie. Kind of a cross between “The Producers” and “Good Night, and Good Luck”. Some sort of hysterical anti-semitic, McCarthyite rumbling across America. Innocent Jewish producers of unfunny comedies having to go into hiding. And Jewish producers of perfectly funny comedies suffering guilt by association.

Suppose you ask who gets credit for America’s first class higher education system. Would people be willing to say ‘the Jews are somewhat or mostly responsible’, just because lots of professors are Jewish. Suppose you asked people whether ‘people whose names start with ‘M’ are somewhat responsible for the financial crisis’. Literally, that’s probably true, in some analytically vastly uninteresting sense. Madoff. I’m sure I could find other bad actors with names that start with M in the financial sector.

Probably you don’t need me to tell you that ‘blaming the Jews’ for the financial crisis is a bad idea. But I’m really at a loss as to what the hell so many respondents thought they were saying. Did 30% think they should answer ‘somewhat’ if they merely believed there were a number of Jewish individuals in the financial sector in positions of authority? Or do substantial numbers of Americans seriously suspect that there might be Jewish conspiracies afoot?

UPDATE: Malhotra and Margalit respond to critics. See this newer post.

First: why aren’t you reading more Squid and Owl? Last week we had assassination by siege engine and undersea regicide. Now we are off on a thrilling mock-Kipling romp. You are a fool not to click.

Next: even more of those psychedelic biology scans up. This one for example: [click to continue…]

So I clicked over to Pharyngula to see whether PZ had blown his top about the Fish thing (see previous post). Yes! In a manner of speaking.

I feel the need to cheer poor PZ up. So: the coolest thing on Flickr is this set of scans from a 1972 biology textbook that so desperately wanted to be a prog rock concept album. You should also read the tart commentary by the guy who posted it.

I thought about posting a few of the images here but I think, for full effect, you just need to view the whole set. (Just like you can’t really explain to someone why a particular Yes album is great by playing only 10 seconds of it.)

Oh, I suppose Stanley Fish’s latest, “God Talk”, can do with its own CT comment thread.

There’s this bit, for example: [click to continue…]

Kevin Drum gives The Black Swan a fairly thumbs-downish review. I had a slightly more favorable reaction myself when I read it recently. I’ll add a comment and a question. Drum is right about the crankishness of the book’s tone. It’s impressive, isn’t it? How well ivory towers work as insanity field-generators? Everyone knows they make their inhabitants go crazy. But it’s also true that they drive everyone outside insane, who comes anywhere near.Those the gods would destroy, they first make really, really annoyed. To live just outside an ivory tower without going all cranky. That’s the trick.

Now, a question. Taleb claims in passing at various points that the modern world is Extremistan, and getting more so all the time. By constrast, our primitive ancestors lived in Mediocristan. As Drum summarizes: “[Taleb] writes about how humans are hardwired to be bad at estimating risks in the modern world.” Extremistan breeds more ‘black swans’: events that are, if I remember rightly, highly unpredictable; highly consequential; retroactively explicable. But it strikes me that animals – our ancestors in particular – probably never lived in Mediocristan. The Pleistocene wasn’t Mediocristan. Our ancestors were just as bad at estimating risks in their environments as we are in ours. Their black swans, the stuff that gave them fairly short lives, were just different. Mediocristan isn’t a time or a place, or a primitive development stage, it’s a projection of a confused form of cognition. It’s a place everyone acts as if they live in, but no one has lived there. Mediocristan is only a state of mind. This is the important thing, for Taleb, so I expect he would respond by saying – yeah, whatever. I didn’t write a history of the Pleistocene. But he does repeatedly imply that it’s a state of mind because, once upon a time, we really lived there. He talks as though it’s an adaptive trait that has become mal-adaptive. But that’s wrong, right?

I’m on this private list (a thing consisting of a set of private tubes or private trucks) on which the question arose: occult detectives? History of? I suppose it starts with Poe (where else?) Some interesting names were suggested. This site was linked.

But, tragically – sinisterly, even – no mention was made of possibly the greatest occult detective of all. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you …

He appeared in a 1940 issue of Jungle Stories, available in this volume [ amazon].

Not to give away the ending, but …

Fero, Planet Detective:

Turn-offs:
Long walks on the beach
Women

Turn-ons:
Detecting planets
Stamping out vampires of Pluto that have invaded the earth.

Great posts today. Welcome to our guests. But here’s something light, in case you need a break. Found photo, found on Flickr:

Larger version here.

You’ve met The Girls From Planet 5. Now meet … [click to continue…]

I learned a new word today: periplum! From wikipedia: [click to continue…]

When a man gets to be around 40 – maybe a bit older – he starts to look back on life and wonder: what thing have I done for which I will be remembered? The next thing he does is start a webcomic. Maybe sell a few t-shirts, other Cafe Press-type stuff. Which brings us to:

No, really. I honestly don’t know whether it’s a comic or not. It’s an illustrated childrens book for adults, maybe. I’m planning to serialize it on Flickr. Here’s the set. Subscribe to the RSS feed! I decided to start things out by posting the first 21 pages. I’ll be adding a page a day, weekdays. (Not like there’s a story or anything, but it rhymes.)

Then it will become wildly popular. (Step 3: Profit!) Maybe I’ll be able to find a publisher, eh?

The only other really good idea I’ve had lately is … Bob, can we just show them the picture? [click to continue…]

Jonah Goldberg responding to a paragraph by Will Wilkinson:

As it happens, American drug prohibition and sentencing policies hit poor black men the hardest, devastating already disadvantaged black families and communities—a tragic, mocking contrast to the achievement of Obama’s election. Militarized police departments across the nation month after month kick down the wrong doors, terrify innocent families, shoot lawful citizens, and often kill the family dog.

I’m not casting doubt on the statistics they cite or the sincerity of the arguments (I’ve argued with too many liberatarians and legalizers about drugs to doubt their sincerity on the issue, statistics are another matter). But something has always bothered me about the drug war is racist argument which, in fairness, Will only suggests above.

It seems so, well, unlibertarian — at least in one respect. Sure, as an argument against the unintended consequences of what they consider to be a bad policy, the disproportionate affect on blacks works just fine.

But as an argument from proud individualists it seems a bit off. It seems to me that the classical liberal is supposed to see people as autonomous and sovereign moral actors, not identity politics groups.

[click to continue…]

“Gideon Rachman”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2009/03/the-department-of-sensitive-words/ identifies a hitherto unknown apparatus of Britain’s bureaucracy.

However, I have now discovered a genuine government department with a title straight out of Dickens – it is the Department of Sensitive Words. This excellent institution has been brought to my attention by a man who is trying to establish a think-tank and to use the word “Institute” in its title. Since my friend is still involved in sensitive negotiations with the Department of Sensitive Words, I have promised not to reveal his identity. The problem is that Companies House deems certain words as “sensitive” because they are thought to convey an impression of authority or trustworthiness. Institute is one such word; British is another. If you want to use a word like this you have to get special permission from a sub-unit of Companies House – the Department of Sensitive Words, which is based in Swansea. In true Dickensian style, this is not an easy process. Companies House does provide a few guidelines on sensitivity on its web-site (its chapter three). But there is no form you can fill in and no obvious criteria to fulfill. But this is probably for the best. You don’t want any old person calling themselves “British” or “Institute”.

This is an _excellent_ idea, and one which should have been implemented in the US decades ago. From Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book, _Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan_ (Amazon, Powells)

In 1962,the executive committee of the board of trustees recommended that [the American Enterprise Association] change its name to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, so that it would no longer be confused with a “trade association” lobbying on behalf of business: the new name would “more accurately describe the nature and legal status of the organization.” An “association” sounded like the Chamber of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers – an institute, on the other hand, was austere, noble and pure.

Heaven forfend that the American Enterprise Institute would _ever_ be confused with a group of people shilling on behalf of business.

More generally, there is a real problem in a political system where an organization with a grand title such as Americans for Fairness, Liberty and Free Choice in the Workplace (this is an invented organization using some of the usual buzzwords – I imagine that lobbyists automate the process of name creation with a sekrit perl script) typically consists of nothing more than a few reams of letterhead and a time-share arrangement over some law office’s fax machine. Not only will consumers will end up confused by the profusion of astroturf groups, but the generation of such confusion is precisely the purpose. It is just this kind of market failure that governments are supposed to address.

Hence my modest proposal – that the Obama administration set up a similar office, with sweeping authority and immediate effect. I can see that libertarians might possibly get upset, but they really shouldn’t. After all, they suffer more than most from the market failure in question. The term ‘libertarian’ has been heavily debased over the last few years by groups and individuals who describe themselves as libertarians, but are committed to state torture of suspected bad guys, semi-ubiquitous surveillance of electronic communications and the like. One of the first tasks that the US Inter-Agency Task Force on Sensitive Words might set itself would be to institute a proper set of standards to police self-described libertarians, clearly distinguishing between libertarians themselves (the real thing), schmibertarians (those tacitly in favour of torture and surveillance), glibertarians (those who prefer not to think about political commitments that extend beyond a cheery embrace of Econ 101 as teh awesome) and Gibletarians (I _WANT_ SLOW THROTTLING!!! AND I WANT IT NOOWWWW!!!!!!). I can’t see how this wouldn’t improve our public discourse.

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I realize that beaver management jokes are so a fortnight ago. Nevertheless, my wife – because she loves me – bought me a book on the subject. [click to continue…]