How about a bit of hot pink and green?

Hierarchy and Equality: The Essential Tension in Human Nature

I've bumped this to the top of the queue in recognition of AOC's advocacy of a 70% tax rate on income above $10M. Tyler Cowen thinks this is a mistake. He's got a point. But what if Christopher Boehm is correct about the underlying (biological) psychology on the issue of egalitarianism vs. hierarchy, that we've inherited proclivities for both? What determines the balance between the two? I'd say it's culture, and that the balance is inherently unstable.

* * * * *

I'd originally published a longer version of this essay on The Valve in 2010, where it accumulated various comments and addenda. I first republshed it here specifically in connection with my work on The Greatest Man in Siam. It's the section, Egalitarianism and Hierarchy, that's directly relevant, but you may want to read the sections on Shakespeare and Greene as well. I'm now bumping it to top top of the cue as I'm thinking about literary morphology.

The purpose of this essay is to consider some recent developments in, shall we evolutionary psychology, as it's called, and to argue that these developments indicate that human nature contains within it an essential tension that may well be one of the drivers of history. I begin with the psychology and then move to literature, first Much Ado About Nothing, and then a comparison between Greene’s Pandosto and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. I conclude with a modest gesture toward Marx.

Egalitarianism and Hierarchy

Let us consider Christopher Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (1999), which speaks to issues of class and equality. Boehm is interested in accounting for the apparent egalitarian behavior of hunter-gatherer bands, the most basic form of human social organization. While individuals can assume a leadership role for specific occasions, e.g. a hunt, there are no permanent leaders in such bands. Boehm does not argue that such bands are egalitarian utopias; on the contrary, primitive egalitarianism is uneasy and fraught with tension. But it is real.

Boehm finds this puzzling because, in all likelihood, our immediate primate ancestors had well-developed status hierarchies. Boehm ends up adopting the notion that the hierarchical behavioral patterns of our primate heritage are overlain, but not eradicated or replaced, by a more recent egalitarian social regime. Other than suggesting that this more recent regime is genetic Boehm has little to say about it.

Independently, Alan Fiske has been arguing that that humans have four different modes of social behavior (The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified Theory of Social Relations. Psychological Review, 99, 689-723, 1992, PDF; here’s a briefer online presentation). In communal sharing, all members of a social group are treated as being equivalent. For example, if one member of a family is honored, the honor accrues to the whole family. Authority ranking is what the name implies; individual with different ranks in a hierarchy have different rights and obligations. In equality matching people work to maintain some kind of balance among them. Finally, there is market pricing, in which interactions are mediated by quantitative market mechanisms (p. 692) and which, on that account does not seem as basic as the other three (cf. Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 2008, p. 409) and which will, accordingly, play no role in my analysis. In Fiske’s analysis not only are relationships between different people mediated by different modes, but different aspects of a relationship between two individuals can be mediated by different modes.

It is not entirely clear to me just how these two conceptions are aligned. Boehm’s phylogenetically older system seems to be Fiske’s authority ranking mode, while his newer system seems to encompass communal sharing and equality matching as well. Market pricing has no obvious place in Boehm’s analysis. In any event, this is not the place to examine the relationship between these two conceptions. What is important for our purposes is that both Boehm and Fiske argue that human social interaction is mediated by distinctly different behavioral systems and that there is at least an approximate alignment between their conceptions.

Much Ado about Hierarchy and Equality

Let’s look at Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, which weaves two intertwined comic stories into a single, if a bit loose, complex plot (on the interlinking, see Richard Levin, Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama, 1971, pp. 90-93). The play gets its overall dramatic shape from the Claudio-Hero plot, in which Claudio wrongly suspects Hero of being unfaithful to him just as Leontes wrongly suspected Hermione. I have argued elsewhere that Claudio’s ambivalence stems from his difficulty in assimilating Hero to both to a behavioral system for attachment and one for sexuality (see my “At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation?” for a complete argument).

The play’s other story, however, is quite different in texture. It involves Beatrice and Benedick and their virtuoso wit combats. Their relationship is quite different from that between Claudio and Hero. It is clear that, as the play opens, they have already established a relationship; they know one another and talk freely. In contrast Claudio and Hero barely interact, and when they do Claudio does all the talking. He has more lines in the play than Hero does, and most of hers are spoken to someone other than Claudio, such as her father, Leonato, or her attendants, Margaret and Ursula. Claudio initiates the relationship and she responds. But he does not initiate the relationship directly with her. Rather he calls on the authority relationships of aristocratic hierarchy and has his feudal lord and military commander, Don Pedro, make contact with her father, who is Don Pedro’s peer.

That is all we need to argue that the Claudio-Hero relationship embodies one mode of social interaction, a phylogenetically older (Boehm) authority ranking (Fiske) system while the Beatrice-Benedick relationship embodies a phylogenetically newer and uniquely human (Boehm) equality-matching (Fiske) system. Just as the Claudio-Hero relationship founders on the problem of establishing both an attachment and a sexual relationship with the same person, so does the Beatrice-Benedick relationship. Benedick regards cuckoldry as the inevitable fruit of marriage (Act I, scene 1, ll. 229-236 in the 1964 Signet edition):

That a woman conceived me, I thank her; that she brought me up, I likewise giver her most humble thanks. But that I will have a rechate winded in my forehead, or hand my bugle in an invisible baldrick, all women shall pardon me. Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none; and the fine is (for the which I may go the finer), I will live a bachelor.

Beatrice is of a similar mind, as is clear from her exchange with Antonio and Leonato at the beginning of Act 2.

Thus, we have two parallel plots in which sexual ambivalence stands in the way of marriage. The two relationships are organized according to two different principles, one hierarchical, the other egalitarian. The play ends with the full expectation that both couples will be married. Shakespeare has intertwined the two plots in such a way that each one plays a significant causal role in advancing the other. The double plot thus insists that both modes of organization are important, that they support and complement one another. Yet neither relationship embodies both.

But, the theater-goer, or the reader, follows and imaginatively re-enacts both of these relationships, intertwined as Shakespeare has presented them. From that it follows that the reader’s experience brings, not only hierarchy and equality together, but sexuality and attachment as well. Four for the price of one! And all within the relatively brief compass of a few hours in the library or at the theater. Could the theater-goer use this experience as a tool for psychological integration? (Cf. my remarks on Kenneth Burke)

From Greene to Shakespeare

Now let us consider two other texts, one by Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, and the other by one of his immediate predecessors, Richard Greene, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time. Shakespeare’s play follows Greene’s novella quite closely. there are, however, some critical differences, which I have detailed in a recent longish post (second section, “Family Problems”). These differences involve a father’s incestuous desire for his daughter, which is present in Greene, but not Shakespeare. Why did Shakespeare change that element of the story, and only that element?

Both stories are set in a world where there is a strong class difference between the nobility and the peasantry. One consequence of this difference is that marriage between the two classes is all but forbidden. Let us postulate that this class difference is a cultural expression of the older hierarchical system of primate social interaction. If that is so, then, it would seem that the attraction between the young adults, Perdita and Florizel in Shakespeare, Fawnia and Dorastus in Greene, is not being governed by that older system or that it is not being governed only by that system. Those young adults believe themselves to be of different classes and are prepared to leave their local society rather than give up their relationship. The fact that they are, in fact, social equals puts theater-goers readers at ease (otherwise known as defense) and authorizes their relationship when their identities become known, but has no bearing on how they originated their relationship or on why they want to maintain it. Theirs is a relationship that fuses the egalitarian mutuality of phylogenetically newer system with the sexual desire of the phylogenetically older system.

Or perhaps it uses the newer system to stabilize the relationship between the two phylogenetically older systems, attachment and sexuality. There’s no obvious way to tell from the text what the underlying neuro-physiological configuration might be. Nor is it clear that it makes much difference.

When Pandosto is sexually attracted to Fawnia and, in consequence, proposes to her, his relationship to her is obviously regulated by the phylogenetically older sexual system, a fact the Greene fixes in our minds by devoting six paragraphs to it (see my earlier post). That he drops his pursuit when he learns the truth does not erase that association in reader’s minds. In contrast, Leontes hardly attends to Perdita’s sexual beauty, thus leaving us the option of interpreting his interaction with her, and her companion, as being regulated, not by any of the phylogenetically old (Boehm) authority ranking (Fiske) systems, but by the newer and more egalitarian (Boehm) equality-matching (Fiske) system. I further suggest that Leontes’ relationship to his wife, once she is revealed to be alive, is now under the auspices of this newer system as well. When he had believed her to be dead, he mourned her, and thus extirpated his old bond with her, a bond that required her strict subordination to his authority. Now that she is alive, he can forge a new bond with her, on a new psychological basis, one that no longer requires wifely subordination.

My argument about the difference between these two narratives, then, is that Shakespeare’s Leontes has become comfortable with the phylogenetically newer social system while Greene’s Pandosto has not. That is why, in terms of drama-craft, of how Shakespeare crafts his plot, Leontes doesn’t make any sexual overture to Perdita and that is why he can joyfully accept the emergence of his wife. Had Leontes made such an overture, the anxiety it would have created in his audience would have interfered with the particular happy ending that Shakespeare wanted for this play.

* * * * *

Do I really believe this argument? Frankly, I do not know. I fully acknowledge its speculative and tentative character. The question is whether or not such a speculative argument is worth making. I believe it is and I offer it in the hope that others will construct other arguments speaking to the strategic differences between Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale and that we can then examine the various proposals and learn something about how these texts work.

Given that these two modes of social organization are inherent in human nature—as both Boehm and Fiske argue — it is not surprising that we find both in these two Shakespeare plays, Much Ado About Nothing and The Winter’s Tale. One would expect to find them in many stories, if not all. It is thus heartening that a large-scale study of 19th Century British novels concludes that a tension between these two modes is central to those novels (Johnson et al., Hierarchy in the library: Egalitarian dynamics in Victorian novels, Evolutionary Psychology 2008 6(4): 715-738, PDF). What’s important for close textual analysis is how, specifically, the two modes are deployed, relationship by relationship. Shakespeare has deployed them in these two plays in such a way that the final resolution of each play depends on the complementary interaction of the two modes.

A digital edition of Jean Toomer's "Cane"

Hi folks, I put together a bare-bones digital edition of Jean Toomer's "Cane" (1923). https://t.co/4YwJm8oYWA

I hope to improve it soon with more annotations, an introduction, etc. In the meanwhile, I welcome any feedback or edits.

— amardeep singh (@Electrostani) January 8, 2019

Video clip of young child drawing cats(?)

🤗 pic.twitter.com/EVcrAipBab

— Köksal Akın (@Koksalakn) January 7, 2019

This is fascinating. Look how the child grips the pen with the whole hand. Drawing motion is controlled by forearm for short strokes and by whole arm for larger strokes.

Orange net in a gray city-scape

Further thoughts on mind and corpus in digital criticism [DH]

There is my recent working paper:

William Benzon, Toward a Theory of the Corpus, Working Paper, December 31, 2018, 46 pp. Academia, https://www.academia.edu/38066424/Toward_a_Theory_of_the_Corpus_Toward_a_Theory_of_the_Corpus_-by;
SSRN, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3308601.

Calling my topic “theory of the corpus” has always seemed a bit strange to me, but I couldn’t quite think of anything better. Still can’t.

But I’m not interested in corpus linguistics in general, though some of my thoughts may germane, but in the context of literary analysis and description (aka literary criticism). In that context I’ve got three concerns:

1.) The relationship between digital criticism on the one hand and standard “close reading” for meaning on the other.

2.) The lack of interest in old-school computational linguistics based on symbolic computation rather than statistical techniques.

3.) The failure – though “failure” is probably not the right word – to realize just might be possible through analysis based on a corpus.

It seems to me that knowledge of #2 would help with #1 and #3.

Caveat: This is one of those posts where I’m basically thinking out loud.

The problem of meaning

More traditional literary critics see a real mismatch between digital or computational criticism and literary subject matter. In one form it’s mostly a desire to see how meaning fits into the general program (I’m thinking here of Alan Liu). In a somewhat less sympathetic form issue is akin to the objection Geoffrey Hartman registered against linguistics and “technical structuralism” in The Fate of Reading (1975). For many, though, I fear it is just flat-out antipathy toward anything the looks like math and science.

The digital critics see no problem, except that they are constantly facing this objection. They’re not interested in supplanting or replacing interpretive criticism. They’re just doing something different. That’s find, as far as it goes.

To some extent they see themselves as sociologists and their use of technical analytic machinery is much like sociologists use. Sociologists are interested in human social behavior at a variety of scales. They make observations, many of which can be quantified. And they uses statistics to analyze the data. Just tools. The tools are in one conceptual world while the phenomena under examination are in a different conceptual world. No problem. Boundaries and relationships are clear.

But texts as an object domain are somewhat different from social behavior as an object domain. When corpus techniques like topic analysis and vector semantics are being used they are, in some way, of a piece with the object domain. They are not so thoroughly outside that object domain. That becomes more apparent though knowledge of old-school computational linguistics (#2 above).

So, convention critics see computational criticism as being in an alien world, and that’s a problem. Computational critics don’t see a problem because the see literary texts as an object domain for the use of statistical tools, just like sociologists see social behavior. I’m saying something like: Not only is it NOT an alien domain (because language itself is a computational phenomenon), it’s the same domain; and because of that we can do even more.

That last paragraph is poorly put and I don’t know how to fix it. But the direction is good. Digital critics fail to see language itself as a computational phenomenon and that hampers the “depth” to which they’re able to employ their tools. It truncates their field of potential inference.

Closure (on mind)?

From my post of 4 January 2018, What is the mind (and what can we know of it)?

As for minds and brains, well, there we have my metaphor of the mind as neural weather. That harks back to Walter Freeman’s work on the complex dynamics of the nervous system. And, of course, Freeman talks the brain’s high-dimensional state space, which is some kind of relative of the high-dimensional semantic space that I talk about above. Just how close a relative, that’s hard to say. Each point in Freeman’s space is a state of the brain. Each point in a corpus model is a word meaning. Those are very different things. Though we might bring them together by thinking of each point in a corpus model as the target of focal attention.

That’s what I wrote when I first posted. But then I got to thinking about the work I’d done 15 years ago on attractor nets [1, 2], which I thought of as networks in which the nodes were basis of attraction in an assemblage of dynamical systems, such as the human brain.

In THAT context – which, alas, defies easy summary – it seemed to me that we could think of each word meaning (signified in Saussure’s terminology) as a basin of attraction. That would provide a way of linking a fundamentally dynamic account of the brain with a basically static model of semantic relationships. The network of relationships among the attractor basins is relatively stable and THAT’s what we can recover/approximate through statistical analysis of word distribution in texts. Words that co-occur do so because their meanings a coupled in a local attractor net.

More later.

References

[1] William Benzon, Attractor Nets, Series I: Notes Toward a New Theory of Mind, Logic and Dynamics in Relational Networks, Working Paper, 2011, 52 pp., Academia, https://www.academia.edu/9012847/Attractor_Nets_Series_I_Notes_Toward_a_New_Theory_of_Mind_Logic_and_Dynamics_in_Relational_Networks.

[2] William Benzon, Attractor Nets 2011: Diagrams for a New Theory of Mind, Working Paper, 55 pp., Academia, https://www.academia.edu/9012810/Attractor_Nets_2011_Diagrams_for_a_New_Theory_of_Mind.

FDR Skatepark at 3QD

I’ve gathered some of my recent FDR material together and crafted a post for 3 Quarks Daily, Is FDR the capital of the SK8board nation?

What are we to make of this?

It’s crudely rendered, which is neither here nor there, but should be noted as there is some superb work at FDR. What do we make of the imagery? At the center we have a skull and partial skeleton topped by a crown and bordered a black-edged pattern in red and yellow. Feathers, flames? What of the flames at the bottom and the upper corners? The black birds? There’s a caption at the top: “RIDE INTO THE HOLY LAND”. What’s that about? What of the red, yellow, and blue color scheme?

Maybe it wasn't an asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs

Bianca Bosker, The Nastiest Feud in Science, The Atlantic, September 2018:

But [Prof. Gerta] Keller doesn’t buy any of it. “It’s like a fairy tale: ‘Big rock from sky hits the dinosaurs, and boom they go.’ And it has all the aspects of a really nice story,” she said. “It’s just not true.”

While the majority of her peers embraced the Chicxulub asteroid as the cause of the extinction, Keller remained a maligned and, until recently, lonely voice contesting it. She argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978 and then abandoned by all but a small number of scientists. Her research, undertaken with specialists around the world and featured in leading scientific journals, has forced other scientists to take a second look at their data. “Gerta uncovered many things through the years that just don’t sit with the nice, simple impact story that Alvarez put together,” Andrew Kerr, a geochemist at Cardiff University, told me. “She’s made people think about a previously near-uniformly accepted model.”

Keller’s resistance has put her at the core of one of the most rancorous and longest-running controversies in science. “It’s like the Thirty Years’ War,” says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Impacters’ case-closed confidence belies decades of vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander, sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and attempts to torpedo careers. “I’ve never come across anything that’s been so acrimonious,” Kerr says. “I’m almost speechless because of it.” Keller keeps a running list of insults that other scientists have hurled at her, either behind her back or to her face. She says she’s been called a “bitch” and “the most dangerous woman in the world,” who “should be stoned and burned at the stake.”

The now more or less standard account of the the extinction, an asteroid impacting the Yucatan Peninsular 65 million years ago, was proposed by a "rock star" physicist, Luis Alvarez:

His numerous scientific exploits—winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, flying alongside the crew that bombed Hiroshima, “X-raying” Egypt’s pyramids in search of secret chambers—had earned him renown far beyond academia, and he had wielded his star power to mock, malign, and discredit opponents who dared to contradict him. In The New York Times, Alvarez branded one skeptic “not a very good scientist,” chided dissenters for “publishing scientific nonsense,” suggested ignoring another scientist’s work because of his “general incompetence,” and wrote off the entire discipline of paleontology when specialists protested that the fossil record contradicted his theory. “I don’t like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they’re really not very good scientists,” Alvarez told The Times. “They’re more like stamp collectors.”

Do we have a case of physicists cashing on their general intellectual prestige (see my recent post, The rise of condensed matter physics [Is particle physics over?]:

That the dinosaur wars drew in scientists from multiple disciplines only added to the bad blood. Paleontologists resented arriviste physicists, like Alvarez, for ignoring their data; physicists figured the stamp collectors were just bitter because they hadn’t cracked the mystery themselves. Differing methods and standards of proof failed to translate across fields. Where the physicists trusted models, for example, geologists demanded observations from fieldwork.

Hmmm... There is certainly an interesting history of researchers trained as physicists doing important work in other fields – Francis Crick in biology, Christof Koch in neuroscience, and, in another direction, any number of 'quants' in finance. But this is a digression from the main flow of the article.

A grim lesson?

The asteroid theory has ingrained in the public’s imagination the idea that mass extinction will be quick and sensational—that we will go out in a great, momentous ball of fire. Big rock from sky hits the humans, and boom they go. But Keller’s vision of the sixth extinction, given what she sees as its parallels with Deccan volcanism, suggests that the end will be drawn out and difficult to recognize as such within humans’ brief conception of time. “We are living in the middle of a mass extinction today,” Keller told me. “But none of us feel that urgency, or that it really is so.”

It's time for a splash of red, no?

Feynman on physics (and more generally, intellectual exploration): Maybe it's not wheels within wheels, but clouds

From an interview in Omni Magazine back in 1979:

OMNI
To someone looking at high-energy physics from the outside, its goal seems to be to find the ultimate constituents of matter. It seems a quest we can trace back to the Greeks’ atom, the “indivisible” particle. But with the big accelerators, you get fragments that are more massive than the particles you started with and maybe quarks that can never be separated. What does that do to the quest?

Feynman
I don’t think that ever was the quest. Physicists are trying to find out how nature behaves; they may talk carelessly about some “ultimate particle” because that’s the way nature looks at a given moment, but…Suppose people are exploring a new continent, okay? They see water coming along the ground — they’ve seen that before — and they call it river. So they say they’re exploring to find the headwaters, they go upriver, and sure enough, there they are, it’s all going very well. But lo and behold, when they get up far enough they find the whole system’s different: There’s a great big lake, or springs, or the rivers run in a circle. You might say, “Aha! They’ve failed!” but not at all! The real reason they were doing it was to explore the land. If it turned out not to be headwaters, they might be slightly embarrassed at their carelessness in explaining themselves, but no more than that. As long as it looks like the way things are built is wheels within wheels, then you’re looking for the innermost wheel — but it might not be that way, in which case you’re looking for whatever the hell it is that you find!

OMNI
But surely you must have some guess about what you’ll find; there are bound to be ridges and valleys and so on?

Feynman
Yeah. But what if when you get there it’s all clouds? You can expect certain things, you can work out theorems about the topology of watersheds, but what if you find a kind of mist, maybe, with things coagulating out of it, with no way to distinguish the land from the air? The whole idea you started with is gone! That’s the kind of exciting thing that happens from time to time. One is presumptuous if one says, “We’re going to find the ultimate particle or the unified field laws” or the anything. If it turns out surprising, the scientist is even more delighted. You think he’s going to say, “Oh, it’s not like I expected, there’s no ultimate particle, I don’t want to explore it”? No, he’s going to say, “What the hell is it, then?”

OMNI
You’d rather see that happen?

Feynman
Rather doesn’t make any difference: I get what I get. You can’t say it’s always going to be surprising, either...

I’ve learned how to live without knowing. I don’t have to be sure I’m succeeding, and as I said before about science, I think my life is fuller because I realize that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m delighted with the width of the world!

On math:

I don’t believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math and the rest of the world is normal. Math is a human discovery, and it’s no more complicated than humans can understand. I had a calculus book once that said, “What one fool can do, another fool can.” What we’ve been able to work out about nature may look abstract and threatening to someone who hasn’t studied it, but it was fools who did it.

On philosophy:

It isn’t the philosophy that gets me, it’s the pomposity. If they’d just laugh at themselves! If they’d just say, “I think it’s like this, but Von Leipzig thought it was like that, and he had a good shot at it too.” If they’d explain that this is their best guess . . . But so few of them do; instead, they seize on the possibility that there may not be any ultimate fundamental particle and say that you should stop work and ponder with great profundity. “You haven’t thought deeply enough; first let me define the world for you.” Well, I’m going to investigate it without defining it!

And then there's this, which followed immediately:

OMNI
How do you know which problem is the right size to attack?

Feynman
When I was in high school, I had this notion that you could take the importance of the problem and multiply by your chance of solving it. You know how a technically minded kid is; he likes the idea of optimizing everything. Anyway, if you can get the right combination of those factors, you don’t spend your life getting nowhere with a profound problem or solving lots of small problems that others could do just as well.

I suppose in a way I've done a bit of "getting nowhere with a profound problem", though I'm managed to avoid messing around with small problems. That is to say, figuring our the mechanisms behind "Kubla Khan" is a profound problem, one I set for myself back in the early 1970s, and one that is, as far as I can tell, still substantially beyond reach. Yet, once it became clear that it would take awhile, I busied myself with various other things, while every once in awhile taking a look at "Kubla Khan." And last year I more or less declared KK solved. More or less. Let's say I've narrowed the search space considerably. I've reached a decision about the kind of problem it is and have decided on at least some of the terms of the answer. (Of course, I could be wrong....)

On preconceptions:

Earlier, you didn’t ask whether I thought that there’s a fundamental particle, or whether it’s all mist; I would have told you that I haven’t the slightest idea. Now, in order to work hard on something, you have to get yourself believing that the answer’s over there, so you’ll dig hard there, right? So you temporarily prejudice or predispose yourself — but all the time, in the back of your mind, you’re laughing. Forget what you hear about science without prejudice. Here, in an interview, talking about the big bang, I have no prejudices — but when I’m working, I have a lot of them.

OMNI
Prejudices in favor of…what? Symmetry, simplicity…?

Feynman
In favor of my mood of the day. One day I’ll be convinced there’s a certain type of symmetry that everybody believes in, the next day I’ll try to figure out the consequences if it’s not, and everybody’s crazy but me. But the thing that’s unusual about good scientists is that while they’re doing whatever they’re doing, they’re not so sure of themselves as others usually are. They can live with steady doubt, think “maybe it’s so” and act on that, all the time knowing it’s only “maybe.” Many people find that difficult; they think it means detachment or coldness. It’s not coldness! It’s a much deeper and warmer understanding, and it means you can be digging somewhere where you’re temporarily convinced you’ll find the answer, and somebody comes up and says, “Have you seen what they’re coming up with over there?” and you look up and say “Jeez! I’m in the wrong place!” It happens all the time.

Different realms?

OMNI
One more question from your lectures: You say there that “the next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations.” What do you mean by that?

Feynman
In that passage I was talking about the Schrödinger equation. Now, you can get from that equation to atoms bonding in molecules, chemical valences — but when you look at the equation, you can see nothing of the wealth of phenomena that the chemists know about. Or the idea that quarks are permanently bound so you can’t get a free quark — maybe you can and maybe you can’t, but the point is that when you look at the equations that supposedly describe quark behavior, you can’t see why it should be so. Look at the equations for the atomic and molecular forces in water, and you can’t see the way water behaves; you can’t see turbulence.

Sun Ra: Space is the place

The Largest Sun Ra Retrospective Yet is Hidden on the Top Floor of the Portland Art Musuem https://t.co/1qwZLucDwK

— Phil Jones (@Phil_Warsaw) January 6, 2019

Tree, sky, and clouds

Freedom and equality

Nathan Heller, The Philosopher Redefining Equality, The New Yorker, Jan 7, 2019:

At fifty-nine, Anderson is the chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent, enmeshed in changing conditions through time. Working at the intersection of moral and political philosophy, social science, and economics, she has become a leading theorist of democracy and social justice. She has built a case, elaborated across decades, that equality is the basis for a free society. Her work, drawing on real-world problems and information, has helped to redefine the way contemporary philosophy is done, leading what might be called the Michigan school of thought. Because she brings together ideas from both the left and the right to battle increasing inequality, Anderson may be the philosopher best suited to this awkward moment in American life. She builds a democratic frame for a society in which people come from different places and are predisposed to disagree.

A bit later:

In general, Anderson is outgoing when conversation turns to ideas and shy about other things. (“If you want to make her totally uncomfortable, tell her she has to go to a fancy function in a cocktail dress,” her husband says.) Now she cleared her throat noisily. “If you look back at the origins of liberalism, it starts first with a certain settlement about religious difference,” she said. “Catholics, Protestants—they’re killing each other! Finally, Germany, England, all these places say, We’re tired of these people killing each other, so we’re going to make a peace settlement: religious toleration, live and let live.”

She spread her hands wider. “Then something remarkable happens,” she said. “People now have the freedom to have crosscutting identities in different domains. At church, I’m one thing. At work, I’m something else. I’m something else at home, or with my friends. The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains?” She paused. “That is what it is to be free.”

Freedom:

To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest). Egalitarians should focus policy attention on areas where that order had broken down. Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences. A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,” Anderson wrote.

And so on. Read the rest for yourself.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

The Japanese Take Manhattan, Protest Nukes

Another bump, just as a reminder: Give Peace a Chance!

As it's the season for peace I thought I'd bump this one to the top of the queue.

Yesterday (May 2010) I marched in my umpteenth protest march. This one was organized by United for Peace and Justice and took place in mid-town Manhattan, starting in Times Square and ending up near the United Nations building. As things would have it, this march turned out to be my first Japanese anti-nuke demonstration. It wasn't planned by the Japanese, nor was it planned to be Japanese, though Japanese organizations were intimately involved, e.g. the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (RENGO), and Mayors for Peace, an international organization started by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I expected this demonstration be like every other protest march I've been in these past few years – though, not, for example, on the scale of the March 2003 anti-war protest, the one that didn’t prevent the invasion of Iraq under the pretext that it harbored nukes. That is, I expected to be marching with mostly North American descendants of European immigrants, but with the visible presence of the Japanese and Koreans, among others.

But the North American Euros didn't show up, maybe because to do so would have been to repudiate the 8-year rolling disaster that was the Bush presidency. Or maybe they thought that we didn’t have to hold Obama’s feet to the fire on all this hope he’s been offering us. Whatever. The upshot is that Japanese out-numbered everyone else by three or four to one.

And they were insistent about Article 9 of their constitution, the constitution we gave them after WWII. Article 9 forbids the Japanese state from engaging in warfare. There was an exhibit about the article in the meeting area near the United Nations building and many Japanese were giving out decals and packages of facial tissue (a common promotional item in Japan) promoting Article 9. As you might have expected, there was also at least one Japanese in a Doraemon costume. Pop culture is pop culture, it’s everyone, and certainly at anti-nuke protests.

Article 9 Decal

I was there with The New York Path to Peace performing "Peace Now", a band of guerilla musicians dedicated to making music for good causes.

At one point a block’s worth of marchers were singing "Peace Now!" along with us. Of course we didn’t know it – we were told by one of the dozen or so people who hooked up with us along the way – because we were in the middle of the crowd playing our keesters off. The most gratifying moment, however, came when a Japanese group passed us (we were playing from the sidewalk at that point) singing “We Shall Overcome.”

We joined them. Of course.

That’s music.

* * * * *

See Jamming for Peace!
More Peace Posts

Blockchain and trust

Arnold Kling responds to Andreesen and Horowitz on a variety of issues. Here's his comments on blockchain and trust:

Andreessen and Horowitz are bullish on blockchain. Horowitz sees blockchain as a general-purpose technology for providing trust.

I disagree. In the context of business, trust means that you believe that the other party will do what it has promised. For that belief to be justified, you need credible evidence that the other party has kept similar promises in the past and has the incentive to continue to do so in the future.

I think that trust is too subtle and nuance to be “solved” by blockchain. Instead, we need an intricate interlocking arrangement of institutions to provide trust. We need a government in which officials who don’t take bribes are generally better off than those who do. We need businesses with valuable reputations that they do not want to lose. We need low-cost mechanisms by which people can reward cooperators and punish defectors, so that the trustworthy survive and the untrustworthy get weeded out.

There is always an incentive for people to signal that they are trustworthy when in fact they are not. This means that we need institutions to develop that make it costly to signal trustworthiness unless you really deserve it. No single institution can solve this problem. It requires layers of institutions, including governmental institutions.

There are many, many ways to cheat in a transaction. I can sell you property where I do not actually have a title recognized by the authorities. I can sell you a property that has environmental hazards that I did not disclose. I can sell you a property that is not zoned for the type of improvement you want to put on it.

Recording the transaction by blockchain does not by itself prevent me from doing any of these things. Of course, if the government recognizes a blockchain as its official title record, then the blockchain technology would be involved in the transaction. But without government sanction, a blockchain title record would be of little or no use in a dispute.

As far as I can tell, blockchain can only help to prevent one type of cheating: digital forgery. If blockchain is going to have a killer app, then it has to enable a transaction to take place where the only impediment to undertaking such a transaction currently is the threat of digital forgery. I cannot think of such transactions.