by Brian on November 2, 2003
Language Hat objects to the sentence “Stephenson, who is sixty, is tall and deprecating.” by Field Malony appearing in the New Yorker. He says it should have been “self-deprecating”. But this seems excessive, since it’s clear from the context that the thing Stephenson deprecates is himself. If an author had written that Stephenson is “tall and charming” we wouldn’t be calling them out because the things Stephenson habitually charms are other people, rather than his pot plants, or his own temporal parts. I don’t see why deprecating should be any different.
(Bonus question for philosophers and linguists. If context is as clear as clear as I say it is, but Stephenson is a pot-plant-deprecator rather than a self-deprecator, is the proposition expressed by Maloney’s utterance true or false?)
by Brian on November 2, 2003
Over on Volokh, Cori Dauber writes:
bq. THE ECHO CHAMBER IN PLAY … Study and after study has shown that Americans accept casualties if they believe they were in support of a necessary mission. The idea, promulgated again here, that public opinion is linked causally to the number of casualties and falls in predictable algorithms based on casualties taken is a canard, based on interpretations of the data from Vietnam detached from all context.
If you actually click through that link, you’ll see three things. First, all that is being claimed is that for a given war, higher casualties result in less support, so the need for context (i.e. cross-war comparisons) is not ever so clear. Second, the evidence for this is not just from Vietnam, but also from Korea. Third, the source isn’t just the echo chamber repeating itself (like Dauber’s unsourced ‘studies after studies’) but is credited to Dr William Hammond, from the US Army’s Center for Military History. The liberal media conspiracy has really long tentacles if it’s reached into the Army’s own historical division. (Why does the US Army hate America so much?)
by Harry on November 2, 2003
by Kieran Healy on November 1, 2003
Kevin Drum is annoyed at the fun-loving DJs of Clear Channel, who recently encouraged drivers to assault cyclists in various humorous ways. But really, Kevin — DJs don’t kill people, you know. Bicycles do. In fact, along the same lines as David Bernstein recently argued, one of the many little-known benefits of Lochner vs New York was the major reduction it brought about in deaths due to bicycles under the control of reckless 12-year-olds who were not working 14 hour days in Manhattan garment factories.
Update: Eric Muller defends Bernstein from further criticism from an angry Nathan Newman.
by Chris Bertram on November 1, 2003
I very much hope that the US (and British) occupation of Iraq is a success, that peace will soon prevail, that a stable civilian administration is soon installed, that democratic institutions take root and that the Iraqi people enjoy a prosperous and uneventful future. That said, I’ve long thought that when people in or supportive of the Bush administration point to the experience of postwar Germany as suggestive of what can be achieved, there is some rather desperate flailing around for historical parallels going on. Good then to see some reflections on this from someone with a degree of historical, political and sociological insight who actually experienced the allied occupation of Germany: namely, “Ralf Dahrendorf”:http://www.project-syndicate.cz/commentaries/commentary_text.php4?id=1353&m=commentary .
by Chris Bertram on November 1, 2003
Here’s a nice puzzle, which I was told about over dinner last night. I’m not sure who devised it, though there’s “a reference in a paper by Roy Sorensen”:http://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Erasoren/papers/Infinitedecisiontheory.pdf :
bq. You are in hell and facing an eternity of torment, but the devil offers you a way out, which you can take _once and only once_ at any time from now on. Today, if you ask him to, the devil will toss a fair coin once and if it comes up heads you are free (but if tails then you face eternal torment with no possibility of reprieve). You don’t have to play today, though, because tomorrow the devil will make the deal slightly more favourable to you (and you know this): he’ll toss the coin twice but just one head will free you. The day after, the offer will improve further: 3 tosses with just one head needed. And so on (4 tosses, 5 tosses, ….1000 tosses …) for the rest of time if needed. So, given that the devil will give you better odds on every day after this one, but that you want to escape from hell some time, when should accept his offer?
by Kieran Healy on November 1, 2003
This is really Brian’s department, but a report that the world’s oldest person has passed away at the age of 116 leads me to ask whether it is, in fact, analytically possible for the world’s oldest person to die.
This in turn reminds me of a story that the late Dick Jeffrey once told me. While sitting on a bus in London in the early ’70s, he overheard two pensioners complaining about the newfangled decimal currency. They both agreed that change and progress were good things. But they thought it would have been better if instead of rushing to introduce the new money right away the Government had waited until all the old people had died.
by Chris Bertram on November 1, 2003
I “promised”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000696.html to come back to the new urbanism and crime issue. But as it happens, David Sucher — more knowledgeable than I — “has done a pretty good job”:http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/cities/2003/10/centerfield_cri.html of responding to the alarmist and misleading “Operation Scorpion report”:http://www.operationscorpion.org.uk/design_out_crime/policing_urbanism.htm . And don’t miss the comments to his post, especially from Matthew Hardy of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (“INTBAU”:http://www.intbau.org/ ).
by Kieran Healy on November 1, 2003
The Economist reports that Google is planning to go public next spring. “All told, 75% of referrals to websites now originate from Google’s algorithms. That,” the story says, “is power.” But how to make money from it? Meanwhile, The New York Times says that Microsoft might like to buy Google, or alternatively bump it out of the way. As the story in the _Economist_ notes, “Microsoft smells blood. It is currently working on its own search algorithm, which it hopes to make public early next year, around the probable time of Google’s share listing.”
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by Micah on October 31, 2003
Continuing on the lighter side of things, this “program”:http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.html claims to predict an author’s gender based on a writing sample. I tried it with a sample of my own over 500 words long and it succeeded. But it failed for some entries on this blog. Only slightly more surprising, it also failed when I tested the last page of Susan Moller Okin’s “Justice, Gender, and the Family”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465037038/qid=1067612573/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-4232913-8425456?v=glance&s=books and the first two pages or so of Catherine MacKinnon’s “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0674896467/qid=1067613684/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/103-4232913-8425456?v=glance&n=507846. It might be interesting to test some longer samples, but my hunch is that this algorithim will usually predict male for samples in the genre of philosophical writing.
by Eszter Hargittai on October 31, 2003
There are lots of serious issues to ponder these days, but we shouldn’t forget about Halloween, which comes with its own set of challenges. One such challenge is finding a fun yet easy costume.
One year I cut up some cereal boxes, colored parts of them red with a marker, made some paper knives and plastered these all over the clothes I was wearing. I forget whom to credit with that but I thought it worked well. Nothing like a cereal killer on the loose.
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by Chris Bertram on October 31, 2003
Below the fold are some reactions to chapter 3 of Michael Otsuka’s “Libertarianism without Inequality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199243956/junius-20 (previous installments “1”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000687.html and “2”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000722.html ). Mike is giving a paper — “Skepticsm about saving the greater number” — “in my department this afternoon”:http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Philosophy/Events/deptsems03.html , so I wanted to get some thoughts down independently before they became contaminated by conversation with him. As always, comments are welcome from anyone who is either reading or has read the book.
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by Chris Bertram on October 31, 2003
Michael Howard, the soon-to-be-leader of the British Conservative Party is clearly a man who is trying to reinvent himself. Chris Brooke of the excellent “Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html reminds us of “one of the key paradoxes about the man”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2003_10_01_archive.html#106759949225059957 : that the child of an asylum seeker has promoted policies under which his own father would have been denied entry to the UK. Tom Watson MP “lists some of the reasons why Howard was once so reviled”:http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/archives/001071.html.
by Kieran Healy on October 31, 2003
That would be the fifth Rugby World Cup of course, which is being played down here in Australia and has, I’ve noticed, generally escaped commentary in the blogosphere. But any game where France walk all over the U.S. can’t expect much love in the strongholds of blogging. Here at CT we have a strong representation from the Six Nations, though I don’t know how many of them (if any) are rugby fans. Here’s an update on what’s happening, including details of how the left-wing solidarity of Crooked Timber might be overwhelmed by the false gods of Nationalism.
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by Chris Bertram on October 31, 2003
There’s much to amuse in David Cohen’s “survey of education journalism”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/columnist/story/0,9826,1074093,00.html in today’s Guardian. Those of us who are fed up with league tables evaluating and ranking university departmant can take heart from one published by Canada’s Globe and Mail which awarded high marks to some nonexistent institutions: York’s medical school and the medical and law schools at Waterloo. The methodology does seem somewhat suspect:
bq. According to the market research firm responsible for the rankings, the results had been based entirely on student responses to an online survey on issues such as the quality of teaching assistants, class size, availability of courses and the library services at their colleges.