Three-Toed Sloth

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, February 2008

Norman Geras, Discourses of Extremity: Radical Ethics and Post-Marxist Extravagances

Four essays in two parts. The first half is about the need for Marxists to be explicit about their moral commitments, and a call to work out what constitutes justice in the conduct of a violent revolution, by explicit analogy with just war theory. The second is an extended controversy with Laclau and Mouffe, denouncing them for their manner of leaving Marxism, misrepresentations of the Marxist tradition, idealism, etc., etc. (The analogy of the chain is very good, but not good enough to save historical materialism.)

Jack Campbell, Dauntless, Fearless, Courageous

Mind-candy. Covers unusually horrible and not actually indicative of contents. Fairly grim military science fiction, mixing a take on the Anabasis, the disasters-of-total-war (parts of which seem intended as comments on current events, but not especially heavy-handedly so), and many well-thought-out relativistic battle scenes. Not my usual thing but oddly compelling. Third volume ends with a huge cliff-hanger; more are forthcoming.

Wiktor Stoczkowski, Explaining Human Origins: Myth, Imagination, and Conjecture

If you read the fifth book of Lucretius's De rerum natura, you will find (starting around line 925) an account of the development of the human race from a primitive condition like that of the other animals to the civilization of the last century BC. It sounds startlingly modern --- obviously wrong in some details, but not that different from what one would get from a synoptic over-view of human evolution today. Stoczkowski's thesis is that this is not because Lucretius was very smart and/or very lucky, but that the "hominisation scenarios" one finds in such works of paleoanthropology are really exercises in speculative or conjectural history, part of a continuous tradition which descends from antiquity through the Enlightenment, of which Lucretius was very much a part, and that this tradition has very rarely had all that much contact with archaeological findings or proper scientific procedures more generally. His book is an analysis of the tradition, especially as found in a few dozen prominent scholarly texts, accompanied with arguments that the recurrence of its themes cannot be explained on the grounds that they are empirically well-supported, or even the only conceivable alternatives. They just sound plausible. The argument that cooperative hunting on the savannah requires spoken language would seem to entail that lions can, in fact, speak, only we've failed to understand them; this is absurd, but remarkably popular. (Stoczkowski is especially good on the subject of teeth, but would take too long to summarize.)

As Stoczkowski is at pains to state, none of this means these recurring ideas are wrong, but they are weak, and it's distressing to see them recycled from generation to generation, at most reshuffled and occasionally inverted. (He has obviously been influenced by Levi-Strauss, but no familiarity with structuralism is needed, or even helpful.) He concludes with a plea to abandon conjectural history in favor of seeking truth from facts, accompanied by a reminder that it simply may not be possible to learn the answer to many questions about the evolutionary history of our species.

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; The Progressive Forces; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Writing for Antiquity; The Natural Science of the Human Species; Philosophy

The Caveman's Valentine

Wiktor Stoczkowski, Explaining Human Origins: Myth, Imagination and Conjecture, p. 110:

Since society is [thought of as] the fruit of necessary cooperation, it is believed that this necessity did not exist previously, and that man's ancestors led individual, presocial lives. It is easy to recognise the ancient view of a period of paradisal abundance, when "each one went his own way in search of fruit and herbs", all then being capable of obtaining food without the help of others. Lucretius and Diodorus Siculus were already painting a similar picture of the primordial existence, and in the eighteenth century the idea of the solitary life of the earliest humans became more firmly embedded in popular imagery. In the twentieth century, colorful speculations concerning that grave event, the first encounter between two humans, still persist. Here is how E. Haraucourt imagined it in a "prehistoric novel" which portrays the first tête-à-tête between a male and a female:

A punch on the forehead stunned but did not defeat her and she returned to attack. She buried her teeth in the shoulder of the male who had grabbed her round the waist; it was his turn to scream; picking up a stone, he dealt her such a vicious blow on the top of her head that she collapsed: circles of light were whirling in front of her and she was vaguely aware of a violent mass hurling its weight on her back... When she reopened her eyes, the conqueror was still clasping her but was not devouring her.

This is a good illustration of the firm belief that existence was originally solitary and that the first meeting was not without some difficulties.

The novel, incidentally, was entitled Dâah, le premier homme, and was first published in 1914 and apparently reprinted as recently as 1996. Whether this work is the actual origin of the drag-her-back-to-the-cave meme (and so of its variants), or itself merely another iteration, I couldn't say.

(More on Stoczkowski's book under recommendations for February.)

Writing for Antiquity

First International Causal Prediction Contest: Your Ticket to Perdition

In his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell claimed that a special section of Hell was reserved for those who claimed to have refuted David Hume on the impossibility of establishing causality. Here (via Isabelle Guyon in e-mail) is your chance to risk damnation in exchange for valuable cash prizes, and a paper in JMLR.

Causality Challenge #1: Causation and Prediction

Deadline April 30, 2008

This challenge bridges the gap between data mining/machine learning and causal discovery. Several datasets drawn from real data, or emulating real data, are provided, with the goal of making predictions under "manipulations".

The setting is similar to a usual predictive modeling setting: We have a training set and a test set; a target variable, whose values are concealed in test data, must be predicted. But, the test data are not distributed like the training data: some variables in test data are "manipulated" by an external agent, i.e. set to given values instead of being drawn from the "natural" distribution. Such problems are encountered in many application domains: In medicine to predict the effect of a new treatment, in economy or ecology to predict the consequences of new issued policies, in marketing to predict customer response to marketing campaigns. We anticipate that the tasks of the challenge should require the knowledge of causal relationships between variables since acting on causes of the target may result in a response change while acting on consequences should not. However, we encourage participants to enter the challenge with any approach to the problem.

Despite being nearly synonymous with causality among machine-learners, the use of graphical models is not required — they're serious about the "any approach" bit. (Parochial boosterism, however, leads me to guess that the winner will use graphical models extensively.) If you're interested, do check out the contest homepage, especially the FAQ.

Mr. Hume and Lord Russell could not be reached for comment.

Enigmas of Chance

Clothes Make Working for the Man Easier

Attention conservation notice: 700 words on a stupid op-ed about how academics dress. Contains ludicrous over-generalizations about the rhetoric of cultural criticism. Don't you have paint to watch dry?

I have just had one Prof. Erik M. Jensen's op-ed "A Call for Professional Attire" referred to me by multiple sources (none especially pointedly, thanks), and I find myself greatly irritated. Jensen says that contemporary American academics generally fail to dress up, in the modes that are supposed to reflect seriousness and status, and spends about 2000 words bemoaning this; longing for a lost "golden age" (his phrase); and trying to ridicule, brow-beat, and shame his audience into complying with his wishes. The closest he comes, in all of this, to present an actual reason for doing so is saying this: "People generally act better when they're dressed right. If a professor is sending a signal of seriousness, of civility, students will pick it up." This is backed up by a casual, second-hand reflection on how "in DiMaggio's day ... [t]he men wore white shirts and ties under coats and hats, the proper attire in public, even at a ball game."

This is a style of cultural commentary which drives me up the wall, so I try to avoid it. It is not that hard to think of an actual rationale for what Jensen wants; it would go something like this. (These are, of course, my words, not his.)

Academics are supposed to impart knowledge and skills to their students, to critique their work, to direct their intellectual and to some extent their moral development; in all these tasks they are supposed to exercise authority over students. They may also be called upon to supervise student or other employees, which is another exercise of authority. They will do so more effectively if they display the recognized external markers of high status and of seriousness, which includes dressing in certain ways and adopting certain demeanors. In fact, if they do this, their authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate, leading to fewer occasions on which it must be explicitly insisted upon and made into naked acts of domination. Furthermore, academics are often called upon to represent their schools and/or their scholarly communities to the outside world, and this, too, will be done more effectively if they dress in ways which their audiences take to convey seriousness.

This is a reasonable argument for what Jensen says he wants. It refers to consequences, rather than insinuating some mythical intrinsic desirability; it is also an argument with empirical premises, and one susceptible to balancing — how much extra effectiveness is the extra expense, hassle, restriction of personal choice, etc., of this mode of dress worth? Supposing that, at the margin, I would be a slightly more effective teacher if I wore a tie, is that worth enough (to me? to my students? to my university?) to make up for wearing something so utterly ridiculous, an arbitrary self-sustaining convention made silk? One could imagine a reasonable essay which went into these points, backed them up, thought through the trade-offs.

Jensen, on the other hand, just wants to take his internalized norms, however transparently parochial ("faculty members shall dress in a way that would not embarrass my mother"), and pretend that they are the maxims of universal laws, as well as purporting to tell us what various cultural changes mean or signify. This is by far the more common rhetorical mode when people try to criticize manners and customs, and it strikes me as deeply stupid. Or at least deeply stupid to be moved by, since it gives you no reason to believe that acting as the author wants will make things better. However, I must confess that it relies on the strengths of East African Plains Apes (emotionally manipulating conspecifics, devising intentional explanations) and not their weaknesses (establishing quantitative cause-effect relationships, balancing diverse objectives). I have no idea whether this mode of argumentation (if it can be called that) achieves its object, supposing that to be persuasion, and not, e.g., making the like-minded feel better about their shared views.

John Dewey once wrote that, so far from their being no point arguing over tastes, there are actually few things so worth arguing about; but I don't think Jensen's essay was the kind of thing he had in mind.

Update, next day: I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Jensen could also have tried to persuade us that the way academics dress is just plain ugly, and the world would be at least a bit more beautiful if they adopted his dress code. But I think it's fair to say he doesn't attempt that, either.

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Learned Folly

Pedagogical Value

Would it be wrong to make the topic of my April 1st lecture the implementation of butterfly mode in R?

Modest Proposals Complexity Corrupting the Young

Friday Cat Blogging (Seasonal Affective Disorder from the Souls of Artists and Writers Issues of Non-Science-Geek Edition)

Because it is rainy and gloomy and February. With Futurist art!

States of Mind: Those Who Go

Best of Craigslist (Seattle), To my Ex-GF's Cat:

I don't miss her, but I miss you. You are the only cat I ever liked...and I think you liked me as I'm the only person you let pick up and walk around with. Sure, you were crabby, sounded like a rusty can when you were meowing, would ignore the laser pointer and got pissed at me when I needed to work and not pet you. Oh sure, you'd complain and make me feel bad for feeding you the same thing and at the same time as her other 2 cats, but did you notice I'd always slip you a piece of meat from my dinner plate? I know you were old and stairs were not as easy as they used to be, so I was always secretly glad and flattered to hear your voice by the bedroom door when I'd stay over. I know her kids liked the other animals in the house more then you, and I'm sorry, but I liked you better then her kids anyway. And yes, I know you watched me walk away that last time I left; I knew I wouldn't be coming back so I hope you found that catnip mouse I left in your secret hiding spot...you deserved 1 last rush in your old age.

I'm not sure if you are even still alive as I haven't been by the house since March of 05, but I hope that you are happy, warm and still catching the beam of sunlight in your favorite spot.

Anyway, just wanted you to know that you were the only cool cat I've ever known and that I miss you.

States of Mind: Those Who Stay

Wislawa Szymborska, "A Cat in an Empty Apartment"

Dying--you wouldn't do that to a cat.
For what is a cat to do
in an empty apartment?
Climb up the walls?
Brush up against the furniture?
Nothing here seems changed,
and yet something has changed.
Nothing has been moved,
and yet there's more room.
And in the evenings the lamp is not on.

One hears footsteps on the stairs,
but they're not the same.
Neither is the hand
that puts a fish on the plate.

Something here isn't starting
at its usual time.
Something here isn't happening
as it should.
Somebody has been here and has been,
and then has suddenly disappeared
and now is stubbornly absent.

All the closets have been scanned
and all the shelves run through.
Slipping under the carpet and checking came to nothing.
The rule has even been broken and all the papers scattered.
What else is there to do?
Sleep and wait.

Just let him come back,
let him show up.
Then he'll find out
that you don't do that to a cat.
Going toward him
faking reluctance,
slowly,
on very offended paws.
And no jumping, purring at first.

(Note: My cat is fine, I'm fine, etc.)

Friday Cat Blogging