G.A. Cohen’s paper, A Truth in Conservatism: rescuing conservatism from the conservatives, is well worth a read, both for the substance and the humour. I heartily endorse the basic message of the paper, and recommend it to you for Thanksgiving table discussion (I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t made the tabloids actually: “Marxist philosopher endorses conservatism without abandoning socialism”). But there is one thing he says, as a preliminary, that I partly disagree with (pp 4-5):

Please do not expect me to say to what extent our practice should honour the truth I hope to expose, in comparison with other truths the honouring of which may sometimes conflict with honouring this particular conservative truth. Philosophers like me are not primarily, as philosophers, interested in what should be done in practice, all things considered. We are interested, instead, in what distinct things are worth considering. We care more about what ingredients should go into the cake than about the proportions in which they are to be combined.

Cohen is right that, qua philosophers, we are not concerned with what is what should be done in practice all things considered. People concerned with that must draw on philosophical claims, but must draw also on much that philosophy cannot supply. But I think he’s wrong that we are not concerned with the “proportions in which [relevant value considerations] are to be combined”. Surely it is a philosophical question how valuable one value is relative to another both in the abstract and in contingent circumstances — this is exactly the kind of philosophical result on which agents will want to draw when determining how to act.

“Ross Douthat”:http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/11/stem_cells_race_and_the_future.php, meet William Saletan’s “brave summary of the emerging scientific consensus”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/541.html. I recommend that people click through Cosma’s links – the ‘scientists’ whom Saletan praises are demonstrable charlatans and cranks. As an aside – one of the most _aggravating_ things about Saletan, Sullivan, Douthat etc’s embrace of the scientiness of race and IQ is that they seem to have convinced themselves that they are bold truthsayers fearlessly committed to challenging commonly accepted falsehoods etc etc etc. Instead they’re new-style advocates for a long-established and intellectually discredited pseudo-science – people have been trying to use bogus statistics to prove that yer black/Jewish/Irish minority of choice is irredeemably stupid since at least the beginning of the last century. And this pseudo-science has hardened into its own orthodoxy¹ in certain corners of the right – witness, for example, the “barracking”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/07/iq-and-the-weal.html that Tyler Cowen took in his comments section when he had the impertinence to suggest that Mexican villagers of his acquaintance who probably wouldn’t do that well on a standard IQ test were actually incredibly smart. Urgh.

Update: “Ross Douthat”:http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/11/more_bold_truthsaying.php, while not rowing back completely (as best as I can make out), acknowledges that his original characterization of the debate was “stupid” and “lazy” and retracts it. Fair enough.

¹ It’s a popular sect of the secular religion that John Sladek aptly dubbed “Reformed Darwinism” 20-odd years ago.

My most recent research article looks at predictors of social network site (SNS) usage among a group of first-year college students. First, I look at whether respondents use any social network sites and then examine predictors by specific site usage (focusing on Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster based on popularity). Before asking about usage, I asked about having heard of these sites and all but one person reported knowledge of at least one SNS so lack of familiarity of these services does not explain non-adoption. The analyses are based on a representative sample of 1,060 first-year students at the University of Illinois, Chicago surveyed earlier this year. This is an especially diverse campus concerning ethnic diversity. (See the paper for more details about the data and methods.)

Methodologically speaking, I find that it is worth disaggregating the general concept of social network site usage, because analyses looking at usage on the aggregate mask predictors of specific site use.

Of particular interest seem to be Facebook and MySpace since they are the most popular with this group. About three quarters of students use the former and over half use the latter in the sample.

I find statistically significant differences by race, ethnicity, parental education (a proxy for socioeconomic status) and living situation (whether a student lives with his or her parents or not) concerning the adoption of Facebook and MySpace. [click to continue…]

I’ve another “bloggingheads”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=464 with Dan Drezner. One of the topics that we talk about is the weirdness of the norms that govern regular op-ed page writers. In the _NYT_ at least, they seem to be discouraged from mentioning each other by name when they disagree/attack each other, this has become increasingly artificial seeming as they’ve become a bit bloggier, and started to engage each other more directly than in the past. The key example that Dan and I talk about is the recent back-and-forth over Reagan’s legacy and the Republican Southern strategy between David Brooks, Bob Herbert, and Paul Krugman (with other non-regular op-ed writers andbloggers piping up too). But as we suggest in the dialogue these norms are beginning to break down – this rather nasty “piece”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/20/AR2007112001651_pf.html by Ruth Marcus claiming that Paul Krugman is dishonest, has merited a pretty vigorous response on Krugman’s “blog”:http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/they-hate-me-they-really-hate-me/ (see also “Mark Thoma”:http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/11/ruth-marcus-tri.html) which shows pretty convincingly that Marcus has taken some of the quotes that she uses out of context, so as to suggest that Krugman was making claims that he wasn’t in fact making (another quote that she uses is more accurate – but Krugman claims convincingly that he was writing at a time when the long term economic outlook for Social Security looked far more dire than it does today). Marcus’s attack is itself a response to Krugman’s previous criticisms of an unsigned _Washington Post_ editorial that she (Marcus) strongly hints that she wrote herself.

In general, this is all to the good. I can see the justification for the previous policy, I think – that you don’t want your op-ed pages to break down into bickering between a small group of elites, and that you want to preserve the ideal of the op-ed writer as a disinterested and magisterial figure taking the pulse of the American polity, etc, etc, etc. But this also allows op-ed writers to get away with a lot of self-serving bullshit while never being called on it. A more vigorous back-and-forth of the kind we’ve being seeing is a highly imperfect corrective to that problem – but it’s certainly better than the current system where regular op-ed writers are simultaneously put on a pedestal and never subjected to the processes of fact-checking that restrain traditional journalists.

Sometimes I try to deny my nature, but then Chris goes and posts about a conversation in which someone says something silly. And it turns out I used the silly bit as a major premise myself just last week. Oy.

In today’s Guardian, Christopher Hitchens defends Martin Amis from Ronan Bennett’s attack. Inter alia, he has this to say:

bq. I am writing as a friend who also took issue with what he said, in unscripted conversation with a Times reporter, a short while after the ghastly assault by Muslim fanatics on our public transport system. (By the way, yes, I do think that the word “fanatic” requires that prefix in this case.) I wrote my article last autumn and it was published in the Manhattan City Journal last January, so Mr Bennett need not congratulate himself so warmly on being the only one apart from Eagleton with the nerve to raise the issue.

Here’s a link to Hitchens’s _City Journal_ piece. Commenters will notice the characteristically robust way in which Hitchens condemns Amis. Or perhaps not.

Usage Statistics for Conservapedia.

_Update_: As emerges in the discussion below, this Top 10 is a little too good to be true, and probably reflects efforts to game the system either by critics or other participants in the Conservapedia world rather than the true degree of readership for these particular pages on the site.

Over at Brainiac, Josh Glenn discusses the theme of “the intellectual, slightly mysterious rock-and-roll woman,” as a recent book calls it, running throughout songs from the Boston scene over the years. All those smart but fragile girls that Jonathan Richman sang about with the Modern Lovers, for example.

Josh suggests that there is a strain of hipster misogyny in this: the revenge of the sophomore spurned, no doubt. And he reads Mission of Burma’s “Academy Fight Song” as a response to that kind of thing –its lyrics “written from the point of view of a cool, educated young woman who was sick and tired of the obsessive attention paid to her by a would-be boyfriend….”

This seems plausible. But it would not be the first song from the Boston scene to approach this archetype (or whatever it is) from the inside. I’m thinking here, of course, of “Ballad of the Hip Death Goddess” by Ultimate Spinach.
[click to continue…]

A real conversation among analytical philosophers:

A: You know Hitchens’s _God is Not Great_ — doesn’t that title convey an existential commitment?

B: Not necessarily, “God” might be the name of a fictional character.

A: Well, the name of several different fiction characters actually.

B: Yes, but some of those fictional characters _are_ great ….

I’m just back from Arizona (big thanks to Kieran and Laurie btw), where I had a great time. My purpose in going there was to deliver a paper on “public reason and immigration” and a couple of conversations I had on the trip concerned how some Americans see the European issue. In both of them (one with a grad student, one with the guy next to me on a plane) my interlocutor referred, in almost identical terms, to Europe’s problem with immigration by “fundamentalist Muslims”, and seemed to believe that this was an accurate depiction of the Islamic population of Europe. Meanwhile, back home, my partner had arranged for a Muslim colleague to accompany her to watch Bristol thump Stade Francais in the Heineken cup. Needless to say, the woman in question is about as distant as it is possible to be from the Muslims who feature in the imagination of my two conversation partners. At Heathrow, I bought a copy of the Guardian to read on the bus, and was reminded by Ronan Bennett’s excellent article, that such blanket stereotyping is also practised by many people here in the UK, who don’t have the excuse of lack of familiarity. When the stereotyping is done by a major British cultural and literary figure and is mixed with a strong dose of sadistic revenge fantasty, it is all the more deplorable. But as Bennett points out, Martin Amis has largely got away with it and a lot of the commentary has been more critical of Terry Eagleton for calling him the bigot that he is. (Chris Brooke at the Virtual Stoa also linked the other day to some more on-the-money kicking of Amis, in which the great writer’s grasp of the history of technology is examined.)

The NY Times has an interesting piece on statistical studies of the deterrent effect (if any) of the death penalty. For those who want to get straight into fact-free debate, the bottom line is that the evidence is too weak to allow a firm conclusion one way or the other. What’s interesting to me, though is the way in which debates within different disciplines proceed, and the lags in transmission between them. Here I think the NYT story, while excellent in many respects, is quite misleading, presenting a story of deterrence-hypothesis economists facing off against legal critics.

That was pretty much the way things stood in the 1970s, after the publication of Isaac Ehrlich’s study in the American Economic Review claiming that one execution deterred 7 or 8 homicides. Ehrlich used multiple regression analysis (quite difficult and computationally demanding in those days, and correspondingly highly regarded) in an attempt to control for other factors affecting homicide rates and isolate the effect of the death penalty.

Over the next decade, economists learned a lot about the limitations of regression analysis. With limited amounts of data, it’s impossible to avoid mining the data for patterns which are then used to fit the model. And if you try enough specifications on weak data, you can get just about any result you want. A classic exposition of this point was Ed Leamer’s 1983 article “Let’s take the con out of econometrics” which pointed out the fragility of regression analysis on time-series data and picked, as an example, the deterrent effect of the death penalty.
[click to continue…]

“Andrew Sullivan today”:http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/11/race-and-iq-1.html on race and IQ, yet again.

In the end, the data demand addressing.

Yes, “they do”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/21/missing-the-g-spot/, Andrew. “They”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html “do”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html.

Slate has a helpful article by legal scholar Tim Wu (among other things, an expert on Internet-related policy issues) about what’s at stake concerning Google’s recent announcement about the development of Android, a “truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices”.

A few months ago, Nina at Infinite Thought offered an appreciation of the difference between the playfulness of vintage European porn films (from roughly 1905 to 1930) and the more industrialized contemporary product:

The first thing you notice is the sheer level of silliness on show: sex isn’t just a succession of grim orgasms and the parading of physical prowess, but something closer to slapstick and vaudeville. Men pretend to be statues of fauns for curious women to tickle; two seamstresses fall into a fit of giggles as their over-excited boss falls off the bed; a bawdy waitress serves a series of sexually-inspired meals to a man dressed as a musketeer before joining him for ‘dessert’. This kind of theatrical role-play pre-empts many of the clichés of contemporary pornography, of course: nuns, school-mistresses, the ‘peeping tom’ motif, and so on. But the beauty of these early short films lies in the details, the laughter of its participants and the sheer variety of the bodies on parade: the unconventionally attractive mingle with the genuinely pretty; large posteriors squish overjoyed little men. The fact that the rules of pornographic film-making haven’t yet been formally established, as well as the rudimentary nature of the film equipment, means that often the filming cuts off before any sort of climax, which only adds to the amateurish, unstructured, anarchic charm of it all.

At Quick Study, I’ve posted a short response to another recent Infinite Thought item developing this line of reflection.

It has prompted a discussion touching — so far — on Sade, Steven Marcus, and the days when everybody in a pornographic novel would recharge their orgy batteries by stopping to listen to a lecture on Enlightenment philosophy.

If this sounds like it might float your boat, stop by. Quick Study is my personal blog, and I’ve been averse to pushing here at Crooked Timber, but what the hell….Diffidence gets you no traffic. (But the start of the semester sure did; it seems that freshmen Google the words “quick study” in an effort to increase the amount of time they can spend getting wasted.)