There’s “a nice little piece in today’s Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2004/05/05/ecfgorilla05.xml&pos=portal_puff1&_requestid=347199 about the psychology of visual perception and how we fail to notice all kinds of things because our attention is directed in particular ways (of course conjurors have always exploited this). The article refers to the striking gorilla-suit experiment:

bq. Working with Christopher Chabris at Harvard University, Simons came up with another demonstration that has now become a classic, based on a videotape of a handful of people playing basketball. They played the tape to subjects and asked them to count the passes made by one of the teams.

bq. Around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though this hairy interloper had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera and thump her chest.

bq. However, if people were simply asked to view the tape, they noticed the gorilla easily. The effect is so striking that some of them refused to accept they were looking at the same tape and thought that it was a different version of the video, one edited to include the ape.

There’s also a link to a “page where you can watch the gorilla video”:http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/dailytelegraph.html . (For that video on its own go “here”:http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html .)

I shouldn’t, but what the heck.

Steven Den Beste has a long post in which he articulates his view that:

we are actually engaged in a three-way war. It’s something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important consequence of it is simply the recognition and acknowledgement that it is a three-way struggle.

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While all the epistemologists were “safely tucked away in Moscow”:http://www.class.uidaho.edu/inpc/7th-2004/, Massachusetts tried to slip some unreasonable provisions into its draft death penalty statutes.

bq. One of the major recommendations is raising the bar for a death penalty sentence from the normal legal standard of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” to a finding of “no doubt about the defendant’s guilt.” (“New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/03/national/03DEAT.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1083769665-5fdOsijTKGYxWSfW2htAmw)

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This is a more personal note although certainly related to topics discussed on CT and I’ll add some stats to give it some context. Congrats to my Mom for being elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences this week! The Academy has been around since 1825 and in all that time has had a total of eighteen women elected to its membership. The three women elected this week boosted the number up from fifteen. My Mom is only the second female chemist ever to become a member. The Academy altogether has no more than 200 members younger than 70 years old at any one time. (Members 70 or older do not count toward the 200 so there are just less than 300 current living members.)

Apparently the gender ratio is similarly abysmal in the science academies of other countries. Tabulations have shown that although in a few countries (e.g. Norway, Finland) the percentages are a bit higher around a whopping ten percent, among many other countries such as the UK, Germany, Israel, Denmark, France the figure is around four percent.[1] The state of things is especially striking given that nowadays women often make up more than fifty percent of those getting college degrees (although that’s distributed quite unevenly across fields). Sure, it takes time for people to go through the ranks, but a significant number of women have been getting degrees in science for a while yet the pipeline narrows for women at every step of the way from college degrees to graduate degrees to post-docs to assistant professorships to full professorships to membership in science academies.. all the way to the Nobel Prize.

fn1. Joan Mason: “Not much room at the top for women”, Forum, Journal of the Association for Women in Science and Engineering, No.8, Autumn/Winter, 1999/2000, p.3.

So Bristol was great up to the point where the hotel phoned me at 7:30 this morning saying that my car had been broken into. Back window knocked out and crap everywhere. They didn’t steal the “Ligeti CD”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001804.html.

John Sutherland in the Guardian looks back over “40 years in British higher education”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/columnist/story/0,9826,1209332,00.html and tells us what has changed for better and for worse. The goods include the breakthrough of women and the provision of decent coffee; the bads are salary erosion, the PhD as a sine qua non for appointment, overspecialization and worsening staff-student ratios. And in between? Surprisingly, the RAE is on that list.

“Max Sawicky”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/000395.html is right – Ted Rall sucks. And he sucks even more than usual in this “hysterical diatribe”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=127&ncid=742&e=7&u=/uclicktext/20040504/cm_ucru/anarmyofscum, charmingly entitled “An Army of Scum (Or, We’re Looking For a Few Good Homosexual Rapists).”

According to Rall, the US army is equivalent to the SS.

bq. Now it’s official: American troops occupying Iraq (news – web sites) have become virtually indistinguishable from the SS. Like the Germans during World War II, they cordon off and bomb civilian villages to retaliate for guerilla attacks on their convoys. Like the blackshirts who terrorized Europe, America’s victims disappear into hellish prisons ruled by sadists and murderers. The U.S. military is short just one item to achieve moral parity with the Nazis: gas chambers.

You don’t have to be an apologist for Abu Ghraib to recognize this as nonsense. Even if it turns out that there are systematic abuses in US interrogation of prisoners, there’s no comparison between the US army and Hussein’s crowd, let alone the SS. I imagine that the shrill and obnoxious tone of Rall’s recent writing is not entirely unconnected to the fact that he has a book coming out this week. He’s the Ann Coulter of the left – a shameless self-publicist trying to build a career out of moral superiority, cheap shots and relentless, vicious stereotyping. To be avoided at all costs, in other words.

Just back from a very pleasant evening drinking and chatting with Kieran in the “Seven Stars”:http://www.englandpast.net/education/campaigns5.html , a Bristol pub where Thomas Clarkson stayed whilst investigating the slave trade in 1787. Meeting Kieran brings my person-to-person encounters with other CTers up to three. No doubt I’ll collect the full set eventually! In testimony to the power of the blogosphere I can reveal that when he picked me up this evening Kieran’s car CD player seemed to me to be defective, but he soon put me right: reading “Michael Brooke”:http://www.michaelbrooke.com/archive/2004_03_28_index.html#108050871652994237 had inspired him to buy a disc of music by Ligeti.

Still working my way through Robert Skidelsky’s _John Maynard Keynes_. “Frank Ramsey”:http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/~dhm11/RamseyLect.html appears only in passing, but the book manages to suggest what a terrible loss it was when Ramsey died, just short of his 27th birthday. His contributions to “mathematics”:http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Ramsey.html, “philosophy”:http://www.library.pitt.edu/libraries/special/asp/ramsey.html and “economics”:http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/ramsey.htm bring to mind Tom Lehrer’s line, “It’s sobering to reflect that by the time Mozart was my age, he’d already been dead for two years.”

There’s no telling what he’d have done, had he lived. But it seems to me that, sociologically, he would have had a decisive and positive effect on the philosophical community. Although right at the center of Cambridge intellectual life, a member of the “apostles”:http://titles.cambridge.org/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521572134, and the translator of the _Tractatus_, Ramsey never showed any sign of falling under the spell of Wittgenstein. He thought the _Tractatus_ was terribly important, of course, and that Wittgenstein was worth taking a lot of trouble to understand. But he seems to have been immune to the hold Wittgenstein tended to have over other philosophers. Ramsey seems to have been, along with “Sraffa”:http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/sraffa.htm, one of the very few people at Cambridge who felt able to tackle Wittgenstein head on and whom Wittgenstein respected. But where Sraffa was withdrawn and a bit solitary, Ramsey was outgoing, likeable and in the thick of things. His character was in sharp contrast also to Wittgenstein, who — when he wasn’t directing monologues at people — was rude and insensitive to an amazing degree. I think it would have done twentieth century philosophy a power of good to have someone like Ramsey around the Cambridge colleges as a counterweight to Wittgenstein, both because he had a mind of the same magnitude but quite different cast, and because he provided an appealing alternative model of what genius can be. It might have saved a lot of people a lot of trouble.

I was in the middle of preparing my lecture on the gendered division of the labour when I saw Laura’s post on the decline of marriage. Laura says

bq. I’m convinced that one of the reasons behind the dual income family is the fear of divorce and not greed. You never know for sure that your partner will be around to support you in the future.
It is also one of the reasons that mothers are starting to demand pay and benefits for the unpaid work of raising kids. There is just no guarantee that your spouse will take care of you. Taking time out to raise kids is very risky

And the facts bear her out. Divorce courts typically recognise material assets accumulated during a marriage as jointly belonging to the couple. But the earning capacity accumulated is regarded as belonging individually to the person who has it. I just worked out that a teacher working in our school district who took a 1-year leave to look after a first kid at age 28 would lose $57,000 in future earnings (assuming a retirement age of 64, and not counting the year of earnings she loses by taking the year off, and also not counting the foregone pension contributions and SS contributions on that $57,000).

Warning: this is a long post which takes a long while to get to the point…

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Those who still maintain that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were an isolated and atypical incident should consider this paragraph from a “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A37943-2002Dec25&notFound=true article of December 26, 2002.

bq. According to Americans with direct knowledge and others who have witnessed the treatment, captives are often “softened up” by MPs and U.S. Army Special Forces troops who beat them up and confine them in tiny rooms. The alleged terrorists are commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep. The tone of intimidation and fear is the beginning, they said, of a process of piercing a prisoner’s resistance. … Bush administration appointees and career national security officials acknowledged that, as one of them put it, “our guys may kick them around a little bit in the adrenaline of the immediate aftermath.” Another said U.S. personnel are scrupulous in providing medical care to captives, adding in a deadpan voice, that “pain control [in wounded patients] is a very subjective thing.”

It sounds as though the kinds of ‘cooperation’ between soldiers and interrogators that were discovered at Abu Ghraib have been going on for a long time, and have received some sanction from either administration appointees or senior security officials, or both. It may – or may not – be that the soldiers in Abu Ghraib went further than they were supposed to in using specifically sexual forms of humiliation. But the pattern of using non-specialized army personnel to ‘soften up’ people for interrogation through physical abuse and terror seems to have been established a long, long time before Abu Ghraib.

“Jacob Levy”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=scholar&s=levy043004 has a very good column in TNR, about politics and responsibility. Levy refers to Clinton’s persistent habit of making apologies that weren’t really apologies, because they weren’t accompanied by any real consequences for the people involved (as Jacob notes, this is preferable to not making apologies at all). There’s something similar going on in the current breastbeating over Abu Ghraib. Many of the condemnations, including George W. Bush’s statement, seem to me to be either complete disclaimers of responsibility, or non-apology apologies. By implying or stating that these are the actions of a small group of individuals, who will be duly punished, they’re saying that there isn’t any wider problem, nor any need for those who weren’t directly involved, or supervising those directly involved to take responsibility. They’re not so much apologies as apologias – speeches for the defence.

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John just “pipped me to a post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001797.html on torture in Iraq. I had been thinking how, just last week, even “quite sensible people”:http://volokh.com/2004_04_25_volokh_archive.html#108325807713464654 were endorsing the idea that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be giving interviews in the Arab media because — in Eugene Volokh’s words — “the very likely effect of statements such as this is to magnify the resolve of those who are trying to defeat us”. This was watery stuff when it first appeared, and seems a bit beside the point in the light of the images we’ve seen this week.

More generally, it seems to me that American war hawks continue to show little ability to put themselves in the position of the occupied Iraqis and ask how they might respond themselves in such circumstances. I find this odd because you’d think that a strong tradition of personal liberty and local autonomy backed in part by private gun ownership would predispose you to have that sort of sympathy. But, with “some exceptions”:http://www.highclearing.com/ these sentiments are getting overridden by others.

It is hard to overestimate the damage that has been done, not only to the US occupation of Iraq but to the cause of democracy and civilisation as a whole by the exposure of torture and sexual humilation of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, formerly used for the same purposes, though of course on a much more brutal and extensive scale, by Saddam Hussein[1]. If these pictures had been staged by the Al Qaeda propaganda department they could scarcely have been better selected to inflame Arab and Muslim opinion against the West, combining as they do the standard images of torture with scenes specially designed to show the determination of the West to humiliate Muslim men in every way possible.

Update 05/04. There is more on this, and on the symbolism of US occupiers living in Saddam’s palace over at Whiskey Bar, where Billmon notes a similar proposal by Hisham Melhem, a Lebanese journalist. See also Eccentricity

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